Results of 2021: Ivan Fedyanin from Ducky about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Ivan Fedyanin, co-founder of the Ducky publishing house.

Ivan FedyaninHow did 2021 go for the company?

If in 2020 Ducky was rather a small group of experts and professionals, now we are a full—fledged company, a publisher with well-established processes. During this time, there have been many successes and failures.

Successful projects. In total, in 2021, we eliminated 2,000 projects that did not pass the entire “funnel”. 6 of them were launched into the scale. The total number of downloads of running games exceeded 120 million.

Team growth. Ducky now employs 25 people (there were 10 a year ago), who cover all the tasks of the publishing house (including marketing, producing, creating video creatives and, of course, the technical part). Towards the end of the year, we launched our dashboard for developers, with which they can send their projects to us for testing.

We started investing in studios. We have been testing the model of working with PPP developers for some time (prepayment of prototypes), spent a lot of time and money. As a result, we were convinced that it is not viable when scaling. Most of the developers, even initially motivated to release a hit, very quickly “change shoes” and begin to increase the staff for the sake of the number of projects for the test, losing the quality and growth of expertise from key people. Realizing this, we began to invest carefully in the studio. We invested in one of the new game studios, then helped the guys with the help of these resources to develop a hit. In just 5 months, Monsters: PvP Arena appeared, which in 3 months of operation is already close to the mark of 10 million installations.

In general, it was hot, sweaty and fun. Both me and Alish (my partner in Ducky) come from big companies, corporations. And this opportunity to grow up, risking a lot, making your own mistakes, is incredibly energizing.

What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?

I would highlight several aspects that are taking place now.

1. The coronavirus still strongly affects gaming behavior. People play a lot. Yes, we will not see the same growth in the audience and time spent in games as last year, according to the results of this year, but at the same time the hyper-casual niche feels very good.
2. The number of development teams (a team in this market can be considered a group of two people) has increased very much. The demand for them has grown even stronger. Publishers are trying to grow in every possible way. They attract all possible developers to their side, hoping for their further growth, that they will release hits.
3. The predicted strong shift of hyper-casual games towards “hybrids” did not occur. People still need simple games. Therefore, the original direction with a simple “one-finger” gameplay and monetization, built almost entirely on advertising, will occupy the tops of download stores for a long time.
4. Past and current niche investment deals involving publishers and developers show a strong shift in interest from gross revenue and its growth towards the actual marginality of the entire business. You can grow in income, but everyone is looking at your profitability.

All this can be reduced to a key conclusion: in 2021, the market has become “adult”.

Now it is important for all its participants to increase efficiency by improving marketing, making internal tools, and helping developers reach hits faster. Throwing money at the market, going to zero, is no longer an option. Everyone is looking for ways to earn more.

It is very good. If projects give a “profit”, then developers become richer. If successful developers become richer, more unsuccessful developers will want to become successful and leave the needle of “PPP development” in the direction of something more like a business, not a job for hire. This will lead to a greater variety of interesting ideas and directions.

What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?

As a publisher, we are still quite young. We still have to take a huge number of steps to become 20-30 times bigger. Among other things, we plan to open two new directions in 2022:

1. M&A developer studios. We see a huge number of new studios that have just been founded, are looking for funding and are ready to learn and make games. The reality is that 9 out of 10 of them will never reach the hits. We want to find and support that one tenth, help her with financing and expertise, help her earn money as quickly as possible. As part of the test of this direction, we have already invested in one of the developer studios. As a result, an excellent and well-earning project was made by joint efforts in just 5 months. So we will develop this direction, we will search, we will weed out developers, we will build an ecosystem of teams around ourselves.
2. Self Publishing Platform. In addition to the M&A direction, which is mainly aimed at young teams, there is another. The fact is that we understand that there are many studios on the market that want to take over some of the publishing functions. But it is not enough for the development team to simply hire a marketer to the team in order to successfully purchase traffic. You need to negotiate with all the grids (including credit lines), create a company and set up the entire flow of money, create your own BI tools, learn how to work with all of them, integrate them, and so on. In general, the setup of all this, to put it mildly, is complicated. We want to help such teams, to offer a solution for closing those tasks that they cannot or do not want to do themselves. We are developing a platform that will help developers independently publish their games as simply and conveniently as possible.

Both of these points are about fully focusing us, as a publisher, on the most important thing: the effectiveness of what we do.

Hyper-casual games are a hit-driven business, which is formed by a terrifying funnel of projects (60 projects before a hit for a developer). Our main task and mission is to simplify, optimize and make this path transparent.