Azur’s Partnership With SparkLabs Saved Them Time and Drove Higher Profits
by Claire Tak on Oct 28, 2020
“We like to take our time publishing games,” said no game studio, ever.
When we’re busy, we turn to outside help to make us more efficient and productive. Azur Games, a bustling studio, was faced with the challenge of launching a high volume of diverse games quickly on tight deadlines. Rather than having their in-house team be responsible for the time-consuming portion of coming up with compelling creatives and testing them, they turned to outside experts who could deliver timely results.
The studio is unique in that it makes more than just one genre of games—in fact, they cover a broad range of mobile games from mid-core all the way to hyper-casual. Mid-core titles include World War Heroes and Jurassic Monster World. Their hyper-casual games include Stack Ball and Worms Zone.
They also have a rapidly growing studio dedicated to developing puzzle games, including their new release Hidden Objects, and non-gaming apps as well.
Azur Games was juggling multiple workloads that were tied to these different genres, and their team needed help.
The challenge
Azur didn’t have enough time to make high-quality creatives that uniquely appeal to their various audiences. While the studio has an in-house team to make creatives, they did not have the bandwidth to make innovative playable and video ads and test multiple variations across all their games at a fast pace.
Azur knew they needed to move quickly to publish and effectively test their games, so they partnered with third-party resources to help them build creatives for their games.
One of those partners was AppLovin’s creative in-house studio.
Their goal was to utilize SparkLabs’ experienced and results-driven team of innovative thinkers to keep up with Azur’s demands of understanding which creatives were most impactful for their varied genre of games.
How Azur benefitted from SparkLabs
Azur used a number of different external creative teams to help with playables and videos. However, they quickly realized it was expensive and the output was not as high quality as SparkLabs. For example, SparkLabs created videos and playables for Hidden Objects and Azur’s team saw an immediate lift in downloads—a 613 percent increase, plus a 12 percent drop in CPI.
The reason? SparkLabs’ deep experience helping studios scale different types of games with a wide variety of audiences and genres.
The playables from SparkLabs outperformed playables that were made in-house by our own creative team. The ECPMs were really high and enabled us to spend profitably much faster,” explained Gulnaz Saitova, Head of UA at Azur Games.
“In addition, we worked with three to four different companies that only focused on making playables and videos, but SparkLabs performed the best. SparkLabs demonstrated an individual approach to creatives for each of our projects, reflecting all the features of a particular product. Thanks to our collaboration with them, we’ve revised our own creative strategy, which we successfully use in our new projects.”
Speed is important when you’re testing a new game almost every day
Azur regularly publishes and tests three to four new games every week, so timeliness is crucial. This incredibly tight schedule involves making new creatives, generating more iterations, and optimizing creatives that don’t perform well, among other time-consuming but impactful tasks.
The studio needed a partner to swiftly move in tandem with their business’ needs. SparkLabs was able to get creatives made in as little as a few hours and deliver at high volume. In fact, Azur was able to receive up to 90 creatives per month!
Dmitry Yaminskiy, CEO of Azur looks forward to strengthening the relationship with SparkLabs, saying, “We’re happy to have such a strong partner. We believe our business will continue to grow and this partnership will open new opportunities for both parties.”
Learn more about what SparkLabs can do for you.
Claire Tak is Marketing Manager, Content at AppLovin.
