Interview with Maxim Slobodyanyuk, Founder and Board director - iLogos Game Studios

Maxim Slobodyanyuk  

Founder and Board director, iLogos Game Studios

Give us a quick overview on iLogos Game Studios. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

We started iLogos Game Studios back in 2006. The term “game outsourcing” did not exist at the time. All game studios preferred developing games only in-house. Live operations of the games as well as new content releases were also done strictly by internal teams. At first iLogos Game Studios developed and supported social games for the Facebook platform. Once we reached a point where we had a solid portfolio and large clients we began to scale up our expertise to other platforms. Nowadays most top game developers, consider iLogos Game Studios as “McKinsey in games” as it were since the experience and solutions iLogos Game Studios has accumulated over the course of 14 years allow us to solve absolutely any challenges our clients might have.

What is your role in the management and development of iLogos Game Studios?

I founded the company in 2006. And, now iLogos Game Studios has a Board of Directors and I’m Director and responsible for Global Operations and Marketing.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry

Nothing speaks better of achievements than numbers. If we look at this from the contribution to the game industry perspective, then iLogos Game Studios has contributed the following in the past 14 years:

1 000 000 000 + total installs (of games iLogos Game Studios has developed in cooperation with our partners, i.e other game companies)

400+ Completed projects

100+ Happy customers 

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

To my mind, nothing promises it better than the contract. We always provide transparency and premium support service during all phases of cooperation. We provide most of game development projects and solutions for live ops based on a “time and material” business model.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?

In most cases our clients are well aware about gaming platforms to release the game on. In terms of technology, we prefer Unity and Unreal Engine for cross platform development, but we are proficient in custom game engines and other technologies as well. We also have a lot ready-made game KITs.

Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

That’s a good question and there’s no one way to answer it. A lot depends on the game genre and on the existing materials. Many clients come to iLogos to port their existing successful games to other platforms. In some cases it is possible to port the game without changing the technology. In other cases it is necessary to develop the game from scratch to deploy it on the target platforms.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

We usually estimate our projects based on an hourly rate pricing model. The rate primarily depends on the length of cooperation and needed expertise and solutions.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

iLogos Game Studios has obtained the best expertise and practices from top gaming global companies to improve clients’ results. We have classified our solutions depending on challenges and goals which our clients are facing. The typical goals of our clients are the following:

New Hit

Bring my game ideas to life

Speed up time to market for my game

Create the right game for my IP

Game Enhancements

Produce more creative art content

Speed up updates production

Improve game metrics and performance

New Opportunities

Explore new platforms with porting my game

Breathe new life into my older game

Business Optimization

Outsource content based on my production pipeline

Extend and enforce the current team fast

Free up my internal team by outsourcing

Reduce ongoing costs for game operations

Team Improvements

Enhance my team with the necessary expertise

Add more creativity to my team

Improve in-house production processes

Effective remote work

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

In my opinion, these are:

Product Mindset

From the first day of its existence, iLogos Game Studios perceives each partner's product as its own, therefore, inside of our teams a product approach is being exclusively promoted. We also invest in our own R&D related to internal game products and advanced AI solutions for games.

Excellent Communication

The main pillar for each of our partners is an effective communication between teams in order to receive the best results without delays and misunderstandings. We have built up all communication processes from the customer’s point of view. Thanks to feedback from our partners we have achieved the main goal: communication with an external team is as easy as communication with the client's own internal team.

Full Transparency

Work transparency in all processes is the second pillar of great results. We always provide a transparent way of reporting and tracking each step of our collaboration with partners. Everyone on the client's team can review the result of each stage and understand the overall picture. To achieve the best results everyone should be focused on the final goal and see the progress of each team member.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

We have several global directions of how to be in pace with the technological advancements.

Partnership with all main tech providers. We attend all main conferences, receive access to the latest beta of new products.

Internal education system and workshops. All our employees work by a plan of self education that is based on company needs, market and interests of employees. Besides that we make workshops between different teams and projects to share the experience.

External knowledge sharing with our clients and partners. A lot of our partners use many different technological advancements and special tools, we’re always trying to share our own knowledge base for partners and learn more from them.

RnD activities that are focused on several perspective areas such as AI.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

We are not in this domain area and are focusing only on the game domain. We are eager to be TOP 1 global experts in game development and game live ops.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?

Everything is going to be simplified and tailored. It can be solved with using strong AI & ML approaches mostly on devices rather than on the backend.