Get to know Virede, the two-person game studio based in Ukraine and the developers behind Idle Law Firm. Hear directly from Serhiy Kozachuk and Alex Kozachuk and learn all about their game developer journey - from hyper-casual to idle - and how they teamed up with ironSource to boost app revenue 100%. Check out the Q&A below.
How and why did you first get started in gaming?
We're a small studio. It's only a two-person studio, me and my brother, and we’ve worked together for seven or eight years. We started as freelance developers, and eventually found the world of games. We just jumped into the hyper-casual space before moving to idle games and have worked with a lot of the biggest publishers out there on both the iOS and Android store.
How long does it take you to build a game from concept to production?
For our last game, it took us 3-4 months of development from ideation to going live. We then spent one month testing in Canada and Great Britain. It was pretty hard for us to scale the game and our ad spend because we were new to the space.
With ironSource, we used the tCPI optimizer and liked it a lot because it does the job automatically for us. We don't need to spend our hours and time manually managing all the campaigns and their performance.
What was the main challenge you faced in growing your game?
We worked with App Store and Google Play store algorithms for a while, but they are pretty tricky since you don't always know what’s the best strategy to implement. We don't have much experience in marketing, so it's pretty hard to know where to spend your budget, how to spend your budget, is it best to grow your game in the first few days or just to have a small incremental growth?
Why did you partner with ironSource?
We decided to just keep our studio small and instead spend our resources on marketing and monetization. We tried ironSource - and we were amazed because we worked with a lot of other mediation solutions and ad networks, but we got frustrated every time we’d try to implement something or add something new. With ironSource, we were able to make changes to our setup with just 2 clicks.
It was so hard for us to monitor everything and ironSource made it so easy for us. We don’t need to worry about anything. The support is awesome and our app revenue boosts were mindblowing. ironSource helped us boost our app revenue 100%.
We have a plan for our games for the next year or two and we want to continue working with ironSource - it’s a crazy good platform and we want to try everything it has to offer because it really works.
What advice would you give other indie developers trying to make it?
If you want to develop games - give it a try - even if you start by just reading and learning online. Keep trying, because the more you try, the better.
