3 minutesAzur Games surpassed the 2.5 billion installations in 2021 and set a new record of 3,000,000,000 installations in July 2022. A fluke or a strategy?
Help for developers
In the beginning of the mobile game market, no one cared about developers the way it is today. Big publishers did not work on the development of studios and took a wait-and-see attitude – they received free ready-made prototypes, which they tested, and in case of negative results, the developer did not even get feedback.
This approach affected the mental and financial components of the team.
Azur Games became a company who didn’t look for a ready-made hit, and helped developers with development. We provided feedback, shared analytics, engaged our own professionals to improve the prototypes that other publishers gave up on.,
Dmitry Yaminsky, co-founder at Azur Games
For example, the game Chain Cube, the prototype by developer Ignat Bykov, was sent to Azur Games. Previously, Ignat sent the game to another publisher, who rejected the project because of unsatisfactory metrics.
I worked on prototypes at night and sent test builds to publishers, but without success. «The metrics aren’t good enough» — is what the bot answered me in my email. As a result, none of my games were purchased by the publisher.
Ignat Bykov, developer of Chain Cube
Azur Games saw the potential in Ignat’s product. Chain Cube hit the top and made $500,000 a month in profit.
Sometimes developers are faced with situations where a publisher accepts a partnership but makes changes that do not help the project in any way or are not to the liking of the creators. This leads to the end of the cooperation and a negative experience for the developers. For example, remember the game Sword Play, which went a similar way and took the top 1 in the United States on Google Play and the App Store for five days in three weeks.
The perspective of a long-term partnership
Azur Games has no goal of releasing a single hit and making quick money. Sometimes there are two, three, or even five failed tries behind a successful project, but practical experience and trusting partnerships guarantee success.
This vector is clearly visible in the example of the developers from Bazinga. They started with an idle’rs and a team of two people, but today the studio participates in the full cycle of HC-games production and has expanded its team to 10 professionals.
Based on the experience of working with developers, Azur Games publisher created its own model of cooperation: after receiving two or four prototypes, which are paid to the developer, a decision on further cooperation is taken, in which case the company assumes the financial expenses of the studio.
The statistics of using the PPP model show that only 1 out of 100 prototypes achieves success, but the common projects of studios that focus on quality due to Azur Games’ support are ten times more likely to be in the top ranks.
Development
Development is impossible without experiments. Azur Games started by working on midcore projects but then tried the HC segment and was pleasantly surprised because it was possible to achieve good metrics with the help of a couple of people.
Our first investment many years ago went bust. It’s a good experience — if the company hadn’t kept experimenting and watching the market and trends, it wouldn’t have worked out. The team is not chasing short-term profits.
Dmitry Yaminsky, co-founder at Azur Games
Today, Azur Games is passionate about a new prospect: a blockchain game experiment with partners Whitepalms Developments Ltd. called Axes Metaverse. The project has already proven itself in the early stages of launch. During the first presales of NFT character chests, the game raised $4 million.
Some statistics
Top 3 games from Azur Games by installations of all time:
- Stack Ball — 420 million installations;
- Worms Zone — 369 million installations;
- Bottle Jump — 125 million installations.
The most downloaded game by Azur Games in 2021 was Cookie Carver, which reached the number of 54 million installations. And at the end of last year, Azur Games was the 3rd in downloads among game publishers and the 7th among global mobile publishers.
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