LogInPavel Ignatov has told us about Balancy, a service that helps game developers run and analyze Live Operations, spoke about the service's newly-added features, and explained how they cooperate with developers.
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Introduction
Hi everyone, my name is Pavel Ignatov, the CEO of Balancy. Me and Balancy's Co-Founder Andrei Apanasik both have Master’s engineering degrees. We started our careers at big gaming companies Game Insight (Sunshine Bay and Airport City) and KamaGames (Pokerist). We’ve been working in the gaming industry since 2010. In 2015, Andrei and I founded a gaming startup called Unnyhog, where we developed and released five video games and got more than 10M downloads. Unnyhog raised $500k in 2016 from YCombinator and other investors.
Balancy
Balancy is a US/Cyprus-based company, born in January 2021. The company was founded thanks to the experience we got, working in the gamedev industry for more than a decade.
We are a team of four engineers. We also have three very experienced advisors with sales, marketing, and growth expertise. The team is international and distributed between the USA and Cyprus, as we hire talent worldwide.
Balancy is a platform that helps game developers run and analyze Live Operations, which, as a result, increases a game's LTV. LiveOps managers and Game Designers get convenient tools to work with Game Events, Personalized Offers, A/B Testing, and Segmentation completely remotely. Balancy requires minimum energy from engineers and helps them with many automated tools.
Game developers don’t have to hardcode game offers anymore, nor write a lot of code to work with inconvenient JSON configs. Balancy provides you with a convenient UI to plan and test your campaigns. After the initial setup, which takes two days tops, engineers are no longer involved in the LiveOps processes. Game designers obtain the power they need to fully operate the game remotely, which dramatically shortens the game iteration cycle and helps reach higher LTV much faster.
Also, to learn more about using Balancy, we created a short demo of creating Segmented Shop and Special Offers with dynamic discounts in 10 minutes in Balancy:
The Service's Newest Features
Back in November, it was a tool to manage game balance data, which is still in high demand, as many game studios are still hard-coding game parameters or using spreadsheets to adjust them. All our early adopters were using Balancy to create very complex conditional logic for different aspects of their games, but mostly for personalized offers. This is where Balancy is killing Spreadsheets.
Thinking of evolving our most-beloved features we created an out-of-the-box solution for LiveOps. Balancy includes a set of pre-created Templates and Documents, which come with the logic working out of the box.
1. A/B Testing allows you to find the best Campaign, pricing, onboarding, etc…
2. Segmentation helps you to treat your players differently and give them a personalized experience.
3. Scheduled or Triggered Game Events keep your players engaged.
4. Personalized Game Offers is a unique personalized proposition to your players, which dramatically affects LTV. The most popular template is Recency-Frequency-Monetary, but you can use your own. We prepared a few templates to start with
5. Visual Scripting – low code system, which empowers game designers to set the logic of when, whom, and what should be Offered. Imagine some players lost three times in a row and you are about to lose them, but instead, you send such players a SpecialOffer for a powerful sword at a huge discount. Players, looking for revenge, will purchase the Offer and successfully defeat the level afterward. Instead of losing a player, you got a very loyal one and earned some money. With Visual Scripting, you can script similar situations very easily and completely remotely.
Most of the clients we got were through a personal network or direct sales at conferences. We are working very closely with our clients, carefully listening to their feedback and requests. We also help our clients to set everything up and onboard faster, answering all the questions they may have.
The biggest challenge we face right now is that we are a startup, so it takes some time to build trust with some clients and not be afraid of the startup fact. We are creating Success Stories with our clients, which help us to promote the solution, but we need much more of those. The good news is that it's just a matter of time.
There are few game names that we can use publicly, but good examples are:
We're integrating a lot of games right now and very much looking forward to becoming the industry-standard solution.
Promoting the Company
We don’t have dedicated sales and marketing people for Balancy. Basically, the product grows organically by word-of-mouth, and we're trying hard to keep up with the growth. At this stage, we only do direct sales and get new clients through recommendations. We plan to structure a business department later this year, as I'm talking to clients most of my time now.
We charge a non-expensive flat subscription rate for basic features and an extra MAU-based fee for the Smart LiveOps which is our exclusive (and the most desired) feature so far.
Future Plans
We are constantly improving Balancy according to the feedback from our customers, along with adding new features. Introducing new UI/UX is one of the main focuses for us right now. After the success of the Smart LiveOps, segmentation and split-tests, having Analytics reports, smart insights and predictions is the next game changer in Live Operations and we are on top of providing those to the most advanced game designers soon!
Conclusion
Balancy is free to try, just go to our website and sign up. I would strongly recommend reading our documentation first, and if you need any assistance or want to see a personal Demo, you can find us in Discord.
If your game is live, we can help you to import your data to Balancy from your Spreadsheets or JSON files.