Magify raises $1.1M for business intel and live ops for game studios

Magify has raised $1.1 million in funding for its business intelligence and live operations (LiveOps) for game studios.

The Cyprus-based company’s mission is to democratize access to high-level end-to-end business intelligence and LiveOps, making them available to small and mid-size gaming studios on a pay-as-you-go basis and fostering their growth.

The money from Steam Power Investments will be used to fuel further product development, enhance Magify’s AI functionality, and expand into new markets. This follows a recent investment by Narwhal Accelerator in June.

Demand for data-driven decisions

Many studios today are overwhelmed with a variety of tasks on top of game development itself, such as management, optimization, marketing and user engagement, the company said.

Typically, the studios rely on two types of tools: analytics (product & performance) and LiveOps. Using third-party services creates data silos: it becomes extremely difficult to compile all the data into a unified picture, since different teams use different analytic tools.

The alternative is to develop customized end-to-end game performance tools internally, however only large studios can afford to do this, and even these solutions are not always efficient. Smaller teams can’t afford to build such tools from scratch due to high costs. The lack of data can lead to poor decisions and financial losses—a critical issue in today’s market.

Magify’s approach

Magify addresses this challenge by uniting end-to-end business intelligence and LiveOps in a single platform for the first time ever, on a pay-as-you-go model. Through its platform, Magify provides the opportunity to understand the real potential of a particular game, and correctly use the resources of the game studio to maximize results.

Magify contains a robust set of tools for product, marketing, and monetization analytics, as well as user segmentation, remote monetization setup, LiveOps setup, A/B testing, in-app purchase validation, state-of-the-art predictive models, and integrated grabbers to collect data from more than thirty third-party APIs. For Magify’s clients, the toolset significantly improves financial planning, increases the average revenue per user, reduces UA costs and the time and cost of product development many times over, tracks the effectiveness of performance marketing, and performs in-game feature testing.

Magify was founded by Evgeniy Kurenkov, who previously built game studio Epic Star Games and mobile app company Rocket Science. The platform is being developed by Magify’s international team of over 30 employees, mainly developers, data engineers, and configuration managers.

Evgeny Kurenkov, CEO of Magify, said in a statement, “We want studios of all sizes to have equal opportunities to compete because, ultimately, we want more great games to thrive and succeed. With this investment, we’ll enhance our platform to deliver even more advanced analytics, user segmentation, and monetization tools. This will accelerate our expansion into global markets, allowing us to support a broader spectrum of game studios, from indie developers to industry giants. We’re not just building a tool; we’re creating the backbone of the next generation of gaming.”

He said Magify brings 10 times to 30 times cost savings on creating in-house BI and LiveOps platforms. The company manages this by eliminating the need for a dedicated team to create and maintain internal software or integrate siloed data from a broad range of third-party services. All data processed with Magify is displayed on convenient dashboards and custom reports, making it easy for everyone on the team to see all the relevant information.

Magify allows you to receive UA cohort forecasts from various media sources and marketing campaigns, while the LiveOps features allow for precise and instant management of various aspects of game design, including monetization and balance. Clients can remotely change the frequency of ad placement, the triggers for activation, and configure internal offers on the fly. Additionally, the security and privacy of data are ensured by AWS infrastructure and encryption.

This vision gained the support of Steam Power Investments co-founders Andrei Yarantsau and Alexander Shilyaev. Both are experts in the gaming industry, previously holding the roles of CEO and COO, respectively, at casual games studio Melsoft, which was acquired by Moon Active in 2020 during their tenure.

“Achieving success in gaming is hard, but maintaining it is even harder. The key to success lies in making informed decisions about your audience’s behavior,” said Steam Power Investments cofounder Andrei Yarantsau, in a statement. “Over the decade of developing our own games, we made many attempts to find ready-made game analytics, but we always ended up creating custom backend solutions. In Magify, we finally found an external tool that not only meets our requirements but far exceeds them. We see great opportunities for cooperation between our current and future portfolio companies that develop games and Magify, which will help them reduce costs and maximize efficiency.”