What a challenging year for businesses all around the world. The global pandemic hit hard and nobody knew what exactly to expect.
Companies were suddenly uncertain about how they would be performing under such unusual circumstances
and Pixel Federation was no exception.
However, the 2020 results show that Pixel Federation was among the lucky few that navigated the crisis successfully.
Revenues and successful titles
The company has managed to fulfill the revenue plan for 2020 (39M) by 120% with overall revenues
of 47.6M EUR. Already, the Q1-Q2 2020 added up to a 53% revenue increase compared to Q1-Q2 2019
and the successful trend continued throughout the whole year. Overall, Pixel Federation has managed to reach
an almost 52% revenue growth in 2020 compared to 2019 (31.39M EUR).
The most successful titles were the all-time favorite puzzle game Diggy’s Adventure followed by the rising star TrainStation 2, quickly becoming comparable to Diggy’s Adventure. Thanks to a complete game rebalance
and interface rework, the TrainStation 2 team has managed to turn the title into a hit. The enormous success continued in May when the revenues reached 1M EUR for the first time.
In the end, the game made up to 12M EUR of revenue in 2020.
Diggy’s Adventure celebrated its 8th birthday and introduced the Event Pass feature which has brought
11 Event Passes with unique skin each throughout the year. This feature has generated revenues of 2.2M EUR alone out of the overall record revenue of 21.4M EUR. The game was also being prepared for entering the Chinese market in Q1 2021.
A new feature has been introduced to Seaport as well – Exploration which brought more than 600k EUR
to the overall 2020 revenue (9.2M).
The ancestor of TrainStation 2 – the original 2D title TrainStation celebrated in 2020 an incredible milestone –
10 years on the market and is still entertaining hundreds of thousands of loyal players worldwide.
Marketing highlights
In 2020, Pixel Federation’s total marketing spend reached over 19.6M EUR and brought over 24M new registrations. The highest marketing spend went to Diggy’s Adventure (8.1M EUR) followed by TrainStation2
(7.7M with a 126% return). The overall visibility of the apps was underlined by the great cooperation with Google Play Store and App Store resulting in regular features of Pixel Federation games.
Covid measures
Only a few days after the first covid patient was registered in Slovakia, CEO Simon Sicko teamed up with Slovak health experts, IT team, and volunteers and initiated a platform of direct financial and material help
to paramedics and healthcare facilities in the first line of the pandemics fight. A couple of Pixel employees managed to create the website Kto Pomôže Slovensku (Who Will Help Slovakia) within hours.
By now, the platform managed to fundraise over 1.4M EUR and delivered protective medical supplies to over 1800 subjects.
As for many employees, the vision of a long-term home office mode was challenging as they were used
to working from the Digital Park offices. However, the constant education and growth continued online
with over 140 online soft skill training, 50+ hard skill trainings. The average score of 5.36 out of 6 points
as a result of the company’s survey to the question: “How do we deal with COVID as an employer?” was truly heartwarming.
The highlight of the skill-sharing efforts stood out thanks to the already second edition of the Build2Last conference (this time, in the online version). Pixel Federation and Google managed to bring yet another event
full of industry experts in the game development field.
The company has also rented new office spaces in downtown Bratislava for those teams who needed to pair up and work together on new projects. These were given an opportunity to team up personally under strict rules and regular COVID testing. The so-called “Chateaux Pixel” was born.
Plans for 2021
Plans for 2021 are no less ambitious – the goal is to reach a revenue of 53M EUR. This goal will be strongly supported by the newly created R&D department, which is responsible for the acceleration of Pixel Federation’s innovative efforts with the mission of discovering “The next big thing”, the game with more than 20M revenue
a year.
Pixel Federation was also working hard on two brand new titles in 2020, which are going to be released in 2021 – the sequel of Diggy’s Adventure called Puzzle Adventure and one more title to be added to the existing strong portfolio of transportation-based mobile games.
Challenges are made to be overcome and 2020 was definitely a living example of it. Let’s wish Pixel Federation good luck and lots of strength in 2021!
