SayGames: "Every sixth of our prototype goes into global release"
The publisher of hyper-casual games SayGames has achieved 2 billion downloads in 2 years of operation, releasing 47 games. At the same time, he works with developers according to a scheme that is not the most standard for a niche. Instead of focusing on CTR, the publisher is looking for strong teams.
About this in the framework of WN Winter’21 told Anton Volnykh, head of SayGames for interaction with developers. In general, his speech can be divided into three logical parts. Let’s go through each one.
Anton VolnykhThe concept of “Hyper-casual games — the new television”
Volnykh calls hyper-casual games the new television. In both cases, a person receives a full-fledged experience from interacting with content for free in exchange for viewing ads between sessions.
But in the USA, for example, people already spend more time on mobile games than watching television programs. A significant share of the time may be spent on hyper—casual projects (78% of all downloads are casual games, 73% of games in the American download top 10 are just hyper-casual games).
So it is quite fair today to call hypercausals an effective channel for advertising companies to gain access to a wider audience than television used to be.
And in this niche, SayGames has achieved great success. 2 billion downloads with 47 releases. And only in January 2021, of the four most downloaded games in the world, two were on SayGames, according to SensorTower: DOP 2 and Sushi Roll 3D.
3rd and 4th place in downloads in the global top — for SayGames productsCompany
According to Volny, all released SayGames games were made by 10 permanent partner teams. This is a purposeful strategy, which focuses on partnership and long—term relationships with developers. The publisher is not interested in working with studios of one hit.
The result of the approach is that every sixth prototype that SayGames works with receives a global release. Each released game of the company has more than ten million installations, and the box office is from $ 1 million.
Anton also emphasized that the publisher is not engaged in testing thousands of creatives in the hope of finding a blockbuster. Working with games is not limited solely to evaluating CTR. The task is to help each partner make a hit.
Initiative
SayGames plans to increase the number of partners by another ten teams. The SayHero program should help with this. There will be a lot of activities within its framework, but the central one is an investment of $ 10 million in promising developers who are ready to work with the publisher.
The first stage of the program is the start of receiving hyper—casual games. It is already happening at this link and will last a little more than 50 days — until March 31 inclusive. On it, $ 2 million will be invested in the winners ($ 200 thousand for each winning team as a pre—payment and a publication contract, where revenue share is 50%).
It is not enough to submit an application to participate in the competition. You also need to integrate the SDK of the SayHero Portal service into your game. This is an analytical solution of the publisher, which includes several advertising networks. Applicants will be tested on the service. By the way, the contest participants will be able to track how their colleagues are doing.
SayHero Portal
According to Anton, in the future, SayGames is going to transform the service from an exclusively competitive platform into a solution “for tests and launches for everyone.”
But, as he says, SayHero Portal is already seriously different from what competitors offer (other hyper-casual companies to their partners).
Its central advantage: the amount of data provided. The solution does not focus on CTR. His task is to give as much data about the project as possible, as deep a cross—section as possible on monetization and the product as a whole. It also reflects retention, the percentage of dumps, the activity of players, the number of people watching ads, the cost of creatives in various networks, and so on.
