The biggest Slovak game dev studio, Pixel Federation, has a team of 260, 6 mobile games on the market, and over 3 million monthly active players (MAU). Although 2023 was turbulent for everybody in the game business, with the Slovak company being no exception, it managed to remain profitable. The studio gained revenues of over €42 million and received the Forbes Digital Heroes award (category of Established Slovak IT companies generating stable revenues).
However, remaining profitable while maintaining the “Happy Profit” (a.k.a. high standard of team well-being) cost the company some tough decisions, resulting in the automatization of one project and closing a Brno branch. In April 2024 founders Simon Sicko and Marian Fridrich appointed new CEO, Daniel Duranka, who has been working in the company since 2014 in various key positions.
This step aims at moving the company forward and facilitating its decision-making processes
Simon Sicko, ex-CEO at Pixel Federation
Simon Sicko, ex-CEO at Pixel Federation, who, after 17 years in the company’s leading positions plans to return to his passion for game development, helping Pixel Federation’s new game projects with his experience and perspective.
As for the production plans for the upcoming year, the new CEO Daniel Duranka says:
We will narrow our focus on what we are historically best at – transport tycoon games. We have over 14 years of expertise in the genre and deep knowledge of the niche community of train & transportation aficionados. We plan to launch two new titles in this genre by the end of the year
Daniel Duranka, new CEO at Pixel Federation
At the same time, he stresses that the company’s core vision remains the same.
We believe that long-term corporate and employee success are communicating vessels. One cannot be achieved without the other. That’s why we definitely won’t pursue a short-sighted vision of success through grinding. Our goal is happy people working in a healthy company that makes great games and brings joy to our players. That is also why we will continue to build the local tech community, share our experience with the younger generation, and look for new talents.
Daniel Duranka, new CEO at Pixel Federation
Annual Report 2023 – brief financial and marketing overview
The company’s most successful games remain TrainStation 2 and Diggy’s Adventure.
Train tycoon TrainStation 2 is the strongest project for the second year in a row, with sales of almost 18.7M EUR. The title expanded its player base by 380,000 year-on-year to 1.78M MAU. At the same time, the production team managed to triple the monetization of new game content.
Diggy’s Adventure, the most profitable Slovak game ever made and the main driver of the company’s income until 2021, maintains its popularity thanks to long-term work with the community and elaborate live-ops reflecting player feedback. In the past year, the project earned EUR 14M.
Puzzle Adventure, a story-based puzzle game with 3D graphics, brought in 2.38M, a 113% increase over the previous year.
Train tycoon TrainStation Classic from 2010 is the studio’s first successful title. Nowadays mostly automatized, the game entertains over 40K train enthusiasts daily, bringing over 1.86M EUR to the budget. The 13-year history of the project allows the studio to gain detailed insight into the niche community of fans of the transport genre, and thus draw valuable information for the development of the new tycoons in the pipeline.
Marketing
Running profitable user acquisition campaigns has become even more challenging this year. Game marketing is marked by strong competition, high inflation rates in key markets, and tightening of personal data protection. Due to these circumstances, we had to reduce our marketing budget by 12% year-over-year to $18.4 million. Despite this, we managed to increase profitability by 2%. This success was anchored in two key strategies: adopting a new creative conceptual approach and our transition to a new mediation provider, which significantly improved our iOS activities.
Michal Prokop Grňo, current CMO at Pixel Federation
About the Pixel Federation
Studio Pixel Federation was founded by game enthusiasts around Šimon Šicko in 2007 and has been publishing and developing games under one roof for 17 years. Its greatest success lies in creating interactive community games that are designed to stand the test of time. It currently has 260 employees and 6 mobile games on the market, which have already been played by more than 140 million people.
Pixel Federation is actively involved in innovative education programs in Slovakia and is looking for ways to fight the climate crisis on a local and global scale.
We are excited to announce Gustav Pastucha, R&D Producer at Pixel Federation, will join us at the Mobidictum Conference 2024 in Istanbul! Gustav will share his expertise and insights on October 15-16.
