Soon there will be one more analytical service. Developers from the Polish Superhot Team have announced that they will soon open access to their IndieBI tool. It tracks and collects data on game sales on “big” platforms into one database. The studio received $3 million from investors to finalize the service.
The creators of IndieBI (their ranks also include Callum Underwood from Robot Teddy) told about this in an interview with the Game Developer portal.
The names of the investors were not disclosed.
IndieBI is an internal analytics service that collects statistics on the sales of a game (or any other product) on Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble Store, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Oculus in one place. The platform can detail data by specific regions, track information about the impact of discounts on sales and show the conversion rate.
For example, IndieBI can show how effective participation in the sale on Steam was, where the game sells better — on PlayStation or Xbox — and whether it is worth further promoting the title through Facebook advertising campaigns.
Formally, the service appeared back in 2018, but then it was exclusively an internal tool for the Polish studio. As Tom Kaczmarczyk, co—founder of both Superhot Team and IndieBI, explained, the developers had to create the service, in fact, out of desperation – they did not find a suitable analogue on the market.
“Our games were sold on dozens of different platforms, so it was extremely difficult for us to track their sales and make informed decisions. It was a big source of concern,” says Kaczmarczyk. “We really needed something that at least resembled modern business analytics, but none of the options found were to our taste.”
The idea to create IndieBI turned out to be successful. According to Kaczmarczyk, with his help, the studio was able to quickly increase sales of titles. By changing the discount strategy and regional prices alone, Superhot Team was able to increase revenue “by hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Thanks to this, the developers also paid for the development of the service.
Although IndieBI was created for the needs of the Superhot Team, now work on the service is completely independent.
While IndieBI is in closed beta. You can use the service only by invitation. At the moment, it has been tested by companies such as Vertigo Games, Innersloth, Raw Fury and Kowloon Nights, in total, sales for 1,700 projects worth $2 billion have been estimated on the platform.
At the beginning of next year, the IndieBI team intends to send out invitations to studios from the waiting list, and “in a few months” — to fully open access to the service.
The money received from investors should help IndieBI get out of beta. According to Kaczmarczyk, thanks to the financing, the service team will be able not to worry about aggressive pricing and calmly “polish” the platform. Moreover, she plans to make IndieBI free for small studios.
“The main task that we are facing now is to start increasing volumes and launch the service by the middle of next year. Until then, almost all of our efforts will be focused on improving the user experience. We want to calmly invite dozens of times more users to the platform, so that at the same time we suddenly do not have to individually advise a thousand new partners in Discord. This is not an easy task, but we hope to solve it within a few months,” Kaczmarczyk explained.
You can learn more about the service here.