SayGames hits 4B downloads and has top mobile hit with My Perfect Hotel

28.09.2023 - 23:23 / venturebeat.com

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.

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.

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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