Yunoia: “We give an opportunity to find a publisher or an investor”
About a new service that seeks to become an intermediary between developers, publishers and journalists – Yunoïa, – App2Top.ru I talked to a Russian representative of a startup.
There is an opinion that it is not easy for young or small game developers today. The market is oversaturated with offers. Marketing budgets are calculated in numbers with six or more zeros. But at the same time, I want to stand out, there is hope that if they find out about you, everything will change.
Apparently, starting from this thought, the Yunoia service was launched. The latter offers developers to solve the problem by introducing publishers, investors and the media.
How does it work?
The developer registers his game on the Yunoïa service (fills out a traditional questionnaire, adds videos and screenshots). This is how the project questionnaire appears on the service’s website.
Yunoïa, in turn, attracts publishers, investors and journalists so coveted by developers to its website. It is assumed that the latter, flipping through the questionnaires of games on the site, will be able to find something interesting for themselves…
We talked about Yunoïa with the Russian representative of the service, Nikolai Korneev. The startup itself is Czech.
Nikolai Korneev
What USP (Unique Selling Points, unique properties of products – approx. editors) does the project have at the time of launch?
USP service – our services. There are two main ones at the moment.
The first is the opportunity to find a publisher, investor or coverage in the press for free by providing a game on the platform.
Publishers, investors and press representatives who subscribe to the platform can choose the one they like and contact the developer directly. The latter saves a lot of time this way: he doesn’t have to look for anything, throw something at someone – in general, do things that waste time that can be spent on developing a game. This is the first.
The second service is a business directory. It houses various service providers: gaming companies that outsource game development, designers, artists, musicians, programmers. Any services required for the production of the game can be found in our business directory. Let’s say someone from the team has left – in this case, you don’t need to search for anything somewhere on the Internet, all this can be found here.
An analogue of HeadHunter?
No, there is a similar functionality, but in general it is an independent highly specialized platform created specifically for the gaming industry.
And this functionality is fully implemented at the moment?
Yes, everything is fully functional. We have about 150 publishers who are constantly watching the resource. The business directory, of course, is far from full yet, but more than 100 companies and freelancers are already represented there.
Do you take a percentage for searching for vacancies in y?
No. We don’t charge anything, no money, no agency fees. We have a premium subscription planned, there will be various bonuses for it – additional visibility so that the game is higher on the list. The full list of paid subscription bonuses is still under discussion, I can’t name them exactly. At the moment, all the functionality of the platform is free, there is no subscription yet.
When I visit your site, I don’t see a showcase, I see only one project (the site demonstrates games not in a crowd, but in a questionnaire: one screen is one game). If I act as a developer, for me it is immediately a small minus, because I do not know how things are rotated, whether the right publisher will see me. How does this process happen?
There is a special algorithm – the algorithm of visibility, let’s call it that. He builds a queue of projects. New games that get on the platform always end up at the beginning of the queue, but then the algorithm determines how they will move through this queue. For example: our task is to encourage users to improve the quality of their game page by giving additional points in the algorithm that will raise the game up. But the biggest boost in the queue is given by publishers, investors who mark their favorite projects. The position of the project is influenced by many factors, and this is only a small part of them. We believe that such a system will help people see games that they would not even notice under other circumstances.
If we are talking, for example, about sharing, it opens up opportunities for cheating. I asked my friends to go to the service’s website, share information – and got more points.
We will monitor the cheating as much as possible. By itself, sharing will not give such a strong boost that it makes sense to do this. Plus, people who will have a premium subscription will have the opportunity to raise the game higher on their own.
And why was it impossible to make a classic showcase – with segregation by genre and so on, so that people would not sweat and search the way they are used to? So that if you’re looking for a certain genre, you wouldn’t have to scroll through everything every time?
Firstly, you can not scroll through everything every time, but follow the project. We have a tab News Feed, “news”. There all updates on the project will be issued. Plus, in the dashboard, the publisher will register all the games that he follows and that he liked.
Secondly, why did you take such a step? Because in order for everyone to see the games, you need to show them somehow. Accordingly, a publisher who is looking for something for himself, flipping through projects, can find not one but several games for himself. Perhaps some specific projects that are not interesting to a wide range could be left out. But with our structure, all publishers see all projects. well, for convenience, we have sorting by platform, and some more filters are planned in the future.
Good. And how do we stimulate the press? It is inconvenient for the press to turn over huge amounts of information. Or not?
We will add filters: journalists will be able to filter projects by genre, by giving/not giving interviews, and so on. This moment is still in the process of development.
At the moment, you don’t monitor who has what contracts, who wrote about whom, who published whom – these are all the moments?
We have an opportunity to find out if there was a contact between the developer and the publisher. We can’t find out the result of their interaction – it’s their business. Only if they want to announce it, then we will find out on an equal basis with everyone. Our task is to bring them together.
Are there any figures already? How large is the number of publishers who have used your service to reach developers?
There were a lot of contacts, I find it difficult to say the exact number.
You have already said that all this is free now, the only paid thing is a rating boost in the project queue.
It’s planned, but it’s not there yet.
What else is planned in terms of monetization? Let’s say I’m a developer, I launched a project on your service. What kind of monetization chips should I expect?
I can’t tell you this, there are a lot of ideas, but they are still in the process of discussion.
How big is the team working on the project right now?
15 people.
How many projects are there now?
The total number of projects at the moment is more than 300. There are still quite a few unpublished ones, that is, people create a game page, fill out a profile, but for some reason do not bring the publication to the end. Maybe they want to make a better video, or take better screenshots, or something else.
How satisfied are you with these results?
I am very pleased, even somewhat surprised.
In a conversation with us, Nikolai also noted that at the moment the editorial staff of the service is not very strict about the applications submitted. There is no strict selection, a wide range of projects can get on the platform.
Also note that this is not the first service that is launched in the hope of becoming an intermediary between developers and publishers, to simplify communication between them. Earlier, we had already talked with a representative of their competitor, the domestic Publisher Wanted website.
As you can see, this niche really seems to be a potential residential one for businessmen from the gaming industry, but whether such services are really able to solve the problems existing on the market is an open question.
