Slovak game studio Pixel Federation issues its 2022 Annual Report and announced €47.4 million revenue. The company, which celebrated its 15th anniversary last year, currently employs a team of almost 300 game enthusiasts in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
After two years of the pandemic, when it achieved record sales (47.6M EUR in 2020 and 50.9M EUR in 2021), the company recorded a 7% drop in sales.
The year 2022 also brought changes to the company’s board. Co-Founder Šimon Šicko decided to return to the top management after a two-year break while continuing to lead the R&D department. The post of Product Director (CPO) was taken by Filip Polášek, and the new position of Chief Gaming Officer (CGO) was filled by Martin Lučan. Co-Founder Marián Fridrich and COO Daniel Duranka remain in their positions and complete the board.
COO Daniel Duranka said “The year 2022 with revenues of €47.4M completed a successful 3-year period, during which we changed from a 30 million to a 50 million company. However, the second half of 2022 and also 2023 are already marked by a macro crisis (war, inflation, energy crisis) and it will be a great challenge to maintain our positions. However, blaming external factors or avoiding challenges has never been a part of our DNA. That is why we will work even harder towards our long-term goal: a €100 million company.”
Financial and gaming highlights
The company’s most successful games remain transport tycoon TrainStation 2 and puzzle maze Diggy’s Adventure.
Three years after its global launch, TrainStation 2 became the most substantial project of 2022 with sales of almost 19.5M EUR, a million more than last year, while its player base expanded by 40% to 1.4M MAU. Diggy’s Adventure is losing its leading position with sales of 17M EUR, while it recorded a yearly decrease of 3.6M EUR with a drop in MAU of 400 thousand.
The project, released in 2012, has been the main driver of the company’s income for the past five years and served as a main inspiration for the new title- Puzzle Adventure. The story-driven puzzle game with 3D graphics, based on the work of the R&D department, was released in the spring of 2022 and brought in sales of almost 1.2M EUR in 8 months of its existence.
Marketing Highlights
In 2022 the mobile gaming industry faced severe challenges in the field of user acquisition, caused by ongoing changes on the main platforms. Thanks to some radical decisions and profound digging through the systems, Pixel Federation succeeded in remaining profitable, and with an overall marketing spend of 20,7M EUR on user acquisition it gained over 25M of new players registrations.
Nevertheless, everything indicates that the field will undergo further changes and the marketing team is doing everything needed to ensure that the company is flexible and ready to react in time.
In 2023, Pixel Federation is launching a new mobile game – a tycoon simulation from the candy world Candy Inc. At the same time, the studio will continue developing a new project, inspired by the successful ancestors of the TrainStation line.
Pixel Federation was founded by game enthusiasts around Šimon Šicko in 2007 in Bratislava, Slovakia, and has been publishing and developing games under one roof for millions of players from all over the world for 15 years.
