True story of
Pixel Duck Games

The Beginning

I am glad to welcome you, my name is Daniil Krok, I am the founder of the Pixel Duck Games game development studio. Let me introduce you to our studio and tell you what we have achieved over the past time.

INTRODUCTION

The studio was founded by me on February 9, 2021, on this day I finally decided to leave my main position as CTO in a large IT startup, fully devote myself to game development and assemble a small team for this purpose. Well, I've been dreaming about this all my life!

Having held the positions of CTO and Project Manager for 7 years, I have gained tremendous experience in team management, project management and creating IT products. Over the past 3 years, I have studied tons of information on the topic of Game Dev, interviewed people from this field and gained experience. I firmly decided: it's time to make my dream come true!

ORIGINS

In order for the studio to work, it was necessary to assemble a team, because it is impossible to create something really good alone. Because of my previous experience in American startups, I already understood that the people who will be in the team should be as eager as I am to create their own game studio and release dozens of great games.

But where can I find any supporters? This question did not leave me for several months, until by the will of fate I got to the three-day online game Jam, which took place on May 15. I decided to take part in it to test my abilities in game development and look at the other participants' level. And I wondered when I saw that a huge number of talented people were participating in this game jam, they were just as eager as I was to develop games and create. And I realized that these are the people with whom I want to create a game studio together. After the end of the game jam, I began to write messages to all the participants about my ideas for creating a studio and developing games. I was waiting impatiently for an answer from them… And finally, after some time, the answers began to come. Many people liked my studio development strategy, and the ideas for the first games were received positively. After some time, we gathered a group of interested people who, like me, dreamed of creating their own Game Studio, and our Pixel Duck Games studio was created.

Now there are 14 people working in the studio, which includes: developers, game and level designers, 3D artists, 2D artists, as well as I, who act as CEO and producer of games. Using the previous experience of creating and managing teams, we organized the remote work of each employee. Due to the fact that the studio did not have much capital for development, the organization of work required maximum efficiency, taking into account the fact that many employees had the main job.

THE FIRST STEPS

And so the work was boiling! We were happy to cooperate, and we were striving for one common goal. The whole team was involved in the development of our very first game, Drop Runner (https://bit.ly/droplyrunner), from the idea and discussion to the release itself and subsequent updates. This was done so that I, as an ideological leader, could understand and evaluate the level of each employee and find our strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, as it happens, the first game of our studio turned out to be a lump and completely lacked stars from the sky. When creating this game, the goal was not to release a " Cool and successful game”, our task was to get to know each other, understand our strengths, and learn how to work in a team. On June 25, 2021, we published the first game of our studio. Hurray! The goal was achieved! And now we clearly understood the current level of each employee, strengths, and weaknesses, which allowed us to effectively divide the responsibilities between each team member.

After several collective meetings and coordination of our actions, we started producing games, the ideas for which were born directly in our team. For each game, we made a plan and a Road Map on which we go from simple to complex, simultaneously gaining experience and developing the team.

FULL SPEED AHEAD!

The first commercial project for us was the game Doggy Haste (https://bit.ly/doggyhaste), released on July 14, 2021, which we created in collaboration with a popular TikTok blogger. In this game, we took into account the mistakes of the first project. We assumed that the game would be fun and would definitely find its audience. The bet was made on the already warmed-up audience of the TikTok blogger, which, according to our assumptions, was supposed to give the first impetus to our creation, as well as on the advertising company that we had prepared in advance before the release of the application. A week later, the game scored 5000 + installations, 200+ reviews with a rating of 5 stars, and got into the TOP 100 New Products on Google Play! We released a great game that was liked by a huge number of players, and we showed excellent results on a small advertising budget, then we just had to expand the coverage.

In addition to the players, we also attracted the attention of publishers and agents from other countries. So two publishers of mobile games, the company FUNORAMA, turned to our studio (https://funorama.games/) offered cooperation in the creation and promotion of games, as well as the publisher MOONE (https://moonee.io/) offered cooperation on favorable terms. But that's not all, we were also approached by the agency and publisher from China Bazhang Interactive Technology, who really liked our game Doggy Haste and they offered to promote our game on the Chinese markets as an agency and add the game to their own market http://en.7723.com/ which has 10 million active users.

Thanks to a well-chosen promotion strategy, we were able to beat the best indicators of major game studios in attracting and converting new users. On July 29, 2021, our company for attracting users.

it shows the following results: the conversion rate of the application page is 60%, the CPI is $0.03, the CTR ranges about 6% for the whole world, and for users from the USA the CPI is $0.40, and the CTR is 8.6%. These are just excellent indicators for such a game! After all, the largest studios and publishers tend to get into the advertising threshold, for Hyper-Casual games, lower than the CPI of $0.06 for the whole world and the CPI of $0.60 for the United States.

Now the game continues to gain popularity. When creating the game, we thought about monetization for a long time, and the solution was to embed advertising in the gameplay. To check the advertising indicators of the game, we added an unobtrusive advertisement that the user views at will, and for the first 4 days the game brought $0.20 per day, this is an excellent indicator! So if you optimize the application and advertising, plus give users bonuses, the indicators will grow! After all, the user is interested in improving their game progress and is ready to view ads in our application. We decided to further improve the gameplay, simultaneously applying various new, experimental, solutions for the monetization of the game. After small tests and minor changes to the visual parts of the game, we managed to increase revenue by 6 times! And this is just the beginning. We have already prepared a plan to increase the monetization of the application and we have already started implementing it.

After the successful launch of the game and the positive response of the players, we realized that we were going in the right direction, " Full speed ahead!" we said and continued moving.

A CLEVER PLAN

The success of one game is good, but it is not enough to create a large game development studio with the constant production of games. From the very beginning, we were well aware that to succeed and create a working game dev studio, we need to give our best and have a plan. Therefore, we have planned the release of not one game, but four at once! Which are also under development, in parallel with Doggy Haste, and will be released very soon.

After releasing Doggy Haste (just the second game of our studio), we studied and tested our ideas a lot, and received a huge amount of experience and expertise, both from our tests and experiments and from third-party consultants. Now we know from our personal experience how to launch games and how to attract players. Thanks to our team, and applying the new knowledge we have gained, we are sure that we will be able to make our dreams come true!

THIS IS NOT THE END

There is still a lot of work ahead for us as a Game Dev studio, and the release of one successful game does not determine the success of the company. After all, the global goal of each of our team members is to create a working, large Game Dev studio! And we are sure that we will succeed in this direction!

We are the creators of our own success, so we will make every effort to realize our common dream!