Like many Eastern European companies, SayGames has had a tumultuous time with the war in Ukraine. But SayGames has achieved four billion downloads for its hypercasual games, and its My Perfect Hotel hybrid casual game has hit the top ranks of mobile gaming.
Add to that the challenges of creating mobile games and getting them noticed in an age when Apple has focused on user privacy over targeted advertising, and Unity has added to the uncertainty with its flip-flopping on a price increase in the last couple of weeks.
SayGames has a lot at stake, and it has managed to adapt to these changes quickly, said Anton Volnykh, chief publishing officer at SayGames, in an interview with GamesBeat. I also interviewed Andrei Sokal, CTO; Denis Vaikhanski, COO and Yegor Vaikhanski, CEO.
Origins
The company was started in Belarus in 2017 by CEO Yegor Vaikhanski and Andrei Sokal, CTO. They grew up as computer scientists and had both game development and enterprise software company before doing SayGames.
Their first and only internally developed game was Balls Control, which established SayGames as a player in the hypercasual games market, where free titles are monetized by ads and a gaming round can be completed in a minute.
Voodoo, the biggest hypercasual games company, almost published the title but then declined at the last moment. So SayGames published the title itself.
“The first important decision for SayGames game was to try to publish this project by ourselves because we thought that this project had potential,” said Yegor Vaikhanski, who described the initial team as two guys with no money. “This is how SayGames was born. So we started to learn how to produce video creatives, how to make user acquisition, launch campaigns and monetize users.”
They got good results and wanted to understand how to improve them. They went deeper into analyzing the user acquisition campaigns and looked into the quality of the audience. They built the tools they needed and used AI to automate campaign management.
“We started scaling and we started making money,” said Yegor Vaikhanski. “We start to talk to other networks trying to acquire users to monetize from them.”
Then SayGames started publishing games from other developers. They met the developers at Estoty, which was already a leading hypercasual developer at the time. They were unhappy with current publishers, and SayGames won some respect from developers thanks to a reputation for doing good marketing.
“If we combined our marketing superpower with the great developers, we felt we could make something,” said Yegor Vaikhanski.
The hyper-fast hypercasual games market
Hypercasual games grew very quickly in an environment where, thanks to a decade of mobile games growth, the game market could now be measured in billions of players. Many of these players were casual, playing for five minutes or less at a time. They didn’t consider themselves to be gamers, but they turned into a dominant part of the market thanks to the ease of play and short time sessions of hypercasual games.
SayGames’ first hit in this market was Drive and Park, a title developed by Estoty. After launching in late 2018, Drive and Park got more than 100 million downloads. That success convinced them they should focus on publishing, rather than internal game development.
Andrei Sokal, CTO of SayGames, said, “Almost all publishing tools we use are built by the SayGames team. We have our own analytics system, revenue prediction based on machine learning, a live-ops platform for in-app purchase optimization and much more. The key point here is we stay not only ahead of the competition, but we always try to predict what the market trends are going to be.”
The marketing expertise and intelligence on the market was a big selling point in the early days of hypercasual games.
But the company had to roll with the punches of the pandemic, which slowed down the production of new game prototypes. By this time, the company ramped up its activity to work with as many as 30 developers, many that were creating prototypes to see what could take off in a viral and organic way first.
As a result, the publishing staff grew. Quite often, the hypercasual developers had maybe half a dozen developers — this was the case with My Perfect Hotel.
SayGames also set up an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2020 and grew that to around 15 people. At the same time, they relocated the company’s headquarters to Limassol, Cyprus.
In February 2022, the Russians invaded Ukraine. The company had emergency protocols in place and relocated much of its team to Warsaw and Limassol. Warsaw is now the biggest office with more than 72 employees, said Yegor Vaikhanski, in an interview with GamesBeat.
As all of this was happening the company was hitting its stride with hypercasual games. Johnny Trigger, also developed by Estoty, became one of the biggest hypercasual games with more than 200 million downloads. SayGames also scored big with Sand Balls, developed by Hypercell Games — a physics puzzle game with 300 million downloads.
Race Master 3D, developed by Beresnev Games, is a racing game that garnered over 250 million downloads. By 2019, the company had its first billion downloads. But as things like Apple’s focus on user privacy settled in, the company got ready to shift again to hybrid casual games, which monetized through both advertising and in-app purchases and lasted much longer in the market.
Hybrid casual games
On the hybrid casual games front, Say Games has also had success. Squad Alpha by Estoty, was the company’s first major hybrid casual title launched in 2021, marking a shift for SayGames towards a new business model.
And Dreamdale by Hypernova Games, a top 100 grossing game, marked the successful transition to hybrid monetization model with both ads and in-app purchases.
“This was kind of the beginning of the end of the hypercasual era,” Volnykh said.
My Perfect Hotel by Redux.Games has been the latest game to take off. The appeal was it invited players to build and decorate their own hotels and be a kind of entrepreneur, starting out small and then going big. My Perfect Hotel has strong long-term retention metrics, and a substantial percentage of revenue comes from in-app purchases. The players also watch ads to get free things in the game.
It’s a global hybrid casual hit with over 70 million downloads to date. It was the top free game in the world for the last 30 days with over 20 million installs, Sensor Tower reported.
SayGames has seen a 450% revenue growth for in-app purchases in the year compared to last year, Volnykh said. The company consistently ranks in the top five app publishers by the number of downloads, and it has never raised money.
While the company hired some people in Ukraine, it is operating mainly from Warsaw, Limassol and Paphos. With hybrid monetization going well, the company aims to set a record for revenue this year. And the staff has hit 180 people.
How did the company survive?
I asked the company how it survived the changes.
“You just need to keep going and then do things,” Volnykh said.
It turns out that adapting is also a superpower.
“We certainly know how to adapt to various situations. One of our superpowers is marketing. Going into the hypercasual market, we started thinking about it beforehand. It was evident that the party was going to end. So we need to think about how we’re going to be changing the company’s business model and reacting to the changes that were going to happen. So we focused on live ops and in-app purchases, and long-term retention games.”
The success of My Perfect Hotel is a validation of that advanced preparation. Live ops metrics look good and have been improving over the past year. It has helped the company reach more than 100% revenue growth in August compared to last year.
The team is spread out through Eastern Europe and Cyprus. Lots of people moved to different places at the same time when there was a lot of industry disruption and change due to COVID.
“Everyone learned to work remote and relocate quickly and deal with the war,” Denis Vaikhanski said. “And now the market is changing again in terms of the business model. So, everyone is adapting to the new business model, and we’re working on it every day to react to these challenges.”
SayGames was also one of the first several companies to join the boycott against Unity Ads after Unity announced it would introduce a new fee a couple of weeks ago based on numbers of downloads. After an industry outcry and 1,000 development companies joining the boycott, Unity backed off on the aggressive parts of the price increase, but not before turning off user acquisition for the companies that joined the boycott.
A team could spend two weeks building a prototype. If the metrics were good, they could spend another week refining and then make a lot of levels of content and it could get tens of millions of downloads. Now those days are gone.
The hybrid casual games mean a renewed focus on live ops, or constantly updating a game and keeping the audience coming back weekly or daily. It’s harder to find these players than it is to find hypercasual players, but it pays off in the long run.
Hypercasual games depended on strong marketability, where you could acquire users for a cheap price. Apple put limits on that with the focus on user privacy over targeted ads. And so now SayGames isn’t focused on hypercasual anymore.
Hypercasual aren’t dead, but it’s definitely way harder to make a new hypercasual hit, said Yegor Vaikhanski. The shift to hybrid casual as a model happened quickly because the company had already had the ability to make and operate games with longer life cycle, strong in-app purchase revenue and live ops. It used its experience in marketing and ad monetization to create and launch global hits like My Perfect Hotel and Dreamdale.
“Hypercasual was not sustainable. You need to spend months or years in development to build a successful product,” Volnykh said. “Our goal is to help teams transition from one market to another by building the best publishing infrastructure, the best analytics, the best SDK and more. Our job is to continue building the best products and use our producers to help developers build a better game.”