Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
Stepico Games is a game development studio from Europe, specializing in helping our clients deliver full-cycle gaming experiences to end players and working as a reliable partner at every step of the production process. My job as a CEO is to make sure we are making correct decisions to continue providing top-notch services to our partners and a comfortable place to work for employees. My duty is to ensure a prosperous future for our company and the products we create.
What is the story behind starting this company?
The core team at Stepico Games are industry veterans with over 10 of experience. After releasing our first product in 2014, our team decided to scale our expertise to the service market and help others achieve their dream of publishing their own game. As so, we’ve started to gradually grow and constituted Stepico in the late 2010s.
What is your company’s business model–in-house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?
We believe in close cooperation and raising our talent, so we work primarily with in-house teams.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Stepico Games strongly emphasizes a proactive approach, delving deep into our partner's requirements and offering comprehensive consultation throughout our cooperation. We don't merely deliver contracted work but actively guide and meet our clients' needs.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
At Stepico, we are only working with video games, iGaming, or gaming/gamification infrastructure. This tight focus allows us to provide services on a top-notch level of delivery, leaving us to enjoy a healthy 35 to 50 percent of returning customers.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
The expertise of our specialists and the flexibility of our processes allow us to work with the development of games for a wide variety of platforms (mobile, PC, and console), as well as individual art projects (both 2D and 3D).
One of the most common requests we get is for custom/full-cycle game development: the idea of the service is to develop a game for a client from idea to soft launch and production. We receive requests on blockchain game development no less frequently because the portfolio of our company consists of TOP projects in this industry, such as Loaded Lions/Crypto.com, MetaPopit, Guild of Guardians, etc.
We also find LiveOps and game porting trends promising, as they are quickly gaining popularity in the world of game development.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
We always meticulously and carefully study clients’ requirements to make sure we understand not only the surface level of what needs to be delivered but also the reasons and aims that the project pursues so we can advise and consult our customers and ensure the successful delivery of the solution.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We have a multi-tier communication system for client support. On-going and recently closed projects are supported by our delivery and accounting office, as well as measuring NPS and syncing with top management, where we can record issues and provide support. Apart from that, we provide per-ticket/email support as a part of SLA obligations. We are also open to any informal help requests sent via other channels and try to ensure our clients always feel catered to and at the center of attention.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We are very flexible and ready for most kinds of payment structures, depending on the most comfortable way to pay for the client. Fixed Costs are the most common, but we have it all.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
We are ready to work with small clients, starting from 3k-5k USD for art projects and 15k – 20k USD for full-cycle projects. But we also work in rev-share models that can bring the actual price of the project we’re willing to take down.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2022?
An interesting question! During our work in the gamedev industry, we have taken on diverse projects in terms of their size and technological stack. The cost of a project is influenced by several factors: the client’s idea, the desired target audience, the genre, the overall concept, and the other requirements. If we are talking about the US segment of clients and their average project sizes, the price will vary between $10k and $1.5m.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We are actively working towards becoming a trusted international development partner for large IP holders, as well as owning our gaming IPs. We are actively branching out into new services such as publishing and LiveOps support and planning to be a pioneering company in those niches.