Burny Games CEO Anatolii Henis on building a repeatable mobile games business

• Burny Games restructured into smaller autonomous "mini-studios" to speed up development and decision-making.
• CEO Anatolii Henis says learning when to stop developing projects has been one of the company's biggest lessons.
• Henis believes stronger publishing infrastructure is one of the biggest opportunities for Ukraine's games industry.

Mobile game development is often associated with chasing the next big hit, but building a sustainable studio requires far more behind the scenes. 

For Ukrainian developer and publisher Burny Games, the past four years have been defined by learning how to make those successes repeatable through better decision-making, tighter development processes and knowing when to move on from ideas that no longer make sense. 

Since its launch four years ago, the studio has built a portfolio that includes Playdoku, Colorwood Sort, Colorwood Words, Colorwood Associations and Colorwood Blocks. Along the way, Burny has surpassed 65 million downloads and expanded beyond internal development into publishing.

Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, CEO Anatolii Henis reflects on the lessons behind that growth, from becoming more disciplined about when to stop developing a game to restructuring teams, expanding into publishing and building a studio designed to make long-term decisions rather than to simply chase the next opportunity. 

Building a repeatable studio model

For Henis, Burny Games’ growth has ultimately been about building systems that allow the company to consistently create and scale products.

“Four years of focused work. 140+ people, 65+ million downloads, a top-three employer in Ukrainian game dev according to DOU - the largest community of IT specialists in Ukraine and one of the country’s most well-known IT media outlets, and games charting across the US, Japan and a dozen other markets,” he says. 

“That’s the result of building systems that make a good product repeatable.”

However, the company’s approach to development has also significantly changed as it has grown over the years.

Henis explains that in Burny’s early years, the studio followed a more traditional approach. It concentrated significant resources around larger projects and pushed them forward. Over time, the company found that model was becoming less effective. 

“That approach has limits, and we hit them. We were spending more and getting less, while the market was only becoming less forgiving." 

In response to those conditions, Burny restructured in 2025 around smaller autonomous teams, with internal mini-studios taking greater ownership over their own products. 

“The underlying principle is doing more with less,” Henis explains. “A compact team with the right tools and technology can build, launch and scale a quality product faster than a studio twice its size.”

He says the company’s goal is not simply to reduce team size but to create a structure that allows teams to make decisions faster and test more ideas. 

“We proved that in 2025, and that’s the model going forward.” 

Learning when to stop

One of the biggest lessons from Burny’s growth hasn't just been about developing new games but about being able to recognise when a project no longer has the potential to succeed.

“One of the most valuable lessons was learning to say no - and to say it faster,” says Henis. 

He points to Colorwood Screw as one example. While the project had a strong team behind it and significant investment in its development, the company ultimately decided the market conditions were no longer favourable for the title. 

“The game had a passionate team, genuinely strong visuals and serious time invested in polish,” he says. “But by the time the product was ready, the market window had closed. CPI exceeded our limits and D1 retention didn't reach our target.”

For Henis, the experience highlighted that execution quality alone cannot guarantee success if the underlying market conditions are wrong. 

“Execution quality doesn't rescue a product when the timing is wrong and in that case, our thoroughness at the MVP stage was slowing us down rather than protecting us.” 

Other projects, including Super Cooker and Block Brush, reinforced the importance of making decisions based on data. Henis explains that Super Cooker ran for six months without dining its audience. Block Brush launched with 100,000 downloads but failed to sustain long-term retention. 

“Each of those taught us something concrete: when the data says stop, you stop,” he says. “Not one more update, not one more hypothesis, you close it, document what you learned and redirect the resources somewhere they can actually work.” 

Competing in a tough mobile market

Like much of the mobile games industry, Burny is operating in an incredibly competitive environment where acquiring and retaining players has become more challenging. Henis believes that while the market is difficult, those conditions favour studios that have built the right foundations. 

“The market is tough right now and precisely because of that, it's become the best environment for studios that are truly built to operate within it.” 

He points to consolidation in mobile gaming, with larger companies acquiring smaller studios, making it harder for new teams to compete on scale alone.

However, he also believes the biggest opportunities remain with companies that can build strong operational capabilities around their games. That includes things such as real-time analytics, fast creative iterations and live ops strategies that are designed to improve long-term player value. 

“Studios that have built those capabilities into how they work, not as tools they occasionally use, but as the actual rhythm of the organisation are the ones consistently capturing a disproportionate share of revenue in an otherwise shrinking pool of winners.”

Expanding from developer to publisher

Burny Games’ move into publishing came from recognising that the infrastructure it had built internally could also support other developers. 

The company had developed its own analytics systems, user acquisition capabilities, live ops processes and internal tools to support its games, which Henis says were producing real results for Burny’s products. 

“The decision to publish came from recognising that this infrastructure was itself the competitive asset, and putting it to work across a wider portfolio was the logical next step.” 

The company has since expanded into external publishing partnerships. Henis says the same standards applied internally are also applied to partner projects.

“Our first partnership, with Infinity Games, has crossed five million downloads and holds strong positions in genre charts on both iOS and Google Play,” he says. 

“One standard, regardless of who built the game.” 

However, Henis says Burny does not want to become a high-volume publisher and he notes that they turn down most pitches intentionally. 

“The way we work with partners isn't compatible with a high-volume portfolio - we go deep, and going deep requires being selective.” 

The company focuses on factors including prototype quality, retention, ARPU and long-term monetisation potential. 

“The energy in the pitch or how hot the genre looks right now are not criteria,” Henis says. “We've learned to distinguish between a compelling story and a viable product, and it's the latter we evaluate.” 

Henis notes that Burny shares its analytics, market data and operational knowledge with teams, while teams retain creative control and their own brand identity. 

Scaling teams and supporting Ukraine's games ecosystem 

Growth has also created new internal challenges for Burny. Henis explains that processes that worked at a smaller scale eventually become limitations as the company expanded. 

“When we were smaller, flexibility meant shifting people between projects as needed. As the portfolio grew, that model broke down. Coordination overhead was consuming the very efficiency we were chasing.” 

Moving to autonomous teams solved some of those issues, but it also created new challenges around accountability. Henis explains that they worked through this by giving teams "genuine decision-making authority" and that the team closest to the product has the decision power. 

Publishing also introduced new challenges, as working with external studios requires a different kind of relationship. 

“Working with an external studio means you don't control everything, which requires building trust gradually, structuring communication from day one, and ensuring the publisher's role adds real value to the partner team rather than simply adding process.” 

Beyond Burny’s own growth, Henis believes Ukraine’s games industry has undergone significant change in recent years. 

He says the country’s developers have always had strong technical talent, but are increasingly building complete product companies rather than operating only as development providers. 

“What's shifted is how seriously people are approaching the business side, building product companies with real infrastructure rather than development studios operating as vendors for hire.” 

The wider circumstances facing Ukrainian developers have also shaped how studios operate. 

“Our people work across Ukraine: Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv, Lviv. And the war touches the company in ways that go beyond operational disruption,” says Henis. 

However, he believes that challenges have also strengthened many teams, noting that this kind of pressure either “breaks a studio or sharpens it”. 

Henis also highlights a stronger sense of Ukrainian identity within the industry, with studios increasingly incorporating their background into their products. 

“Studios that had always worked in English, for global audiences, started localising their games into Ukrainian, weaving in cultural symbols, making where they came from part of the product rather than background noise.” 

Although he does note that one major gap still remains, which is publishing infrastructure. 

“Ukrainian developers have proven themselves in global markets, but publishers capable of managing the full post-launch cycle, UA, analytics, live ops, the complete picture are rare.”

Closing that gap, he says, represents an opportunity for Burny and the wider ecosystem. 

Building for the long term

Looking ahead, Henis believes AI will play a major role in shaping the future of game development, but he also says the industry needs to approach the technology realistically. 

“AI is real, but the narrative around it needs some grounding,” he says. 

For certain areas of development, AI is lowering costs and allowing more teams to enter the market, however, Henis believes the short-term effect is more competition and deeper saturation. 

Rather than simply adopting AI tools, he believes studios need to understand where the technology genuinely creates value. 

“The question isn't whether to use AI, but whether you actually know how to,” he says. “Bolting AI onto broken systems doesn't fix them.” 

Ultimately, Henis says Burny’s ambition is not just to create successful games, but to build an organisation where success can be repeated. 

“We're building a mobile game company where strong results are repeatable, grounded in the systems, teams and infrastructure we've built beneath everything else.” 

The company is focused on expanding its portfolio while continuing to invest in its existing products. 

“Longer term, the goal is clear: teams we've built producing games we haven't yet thought of, a publishing operation that gives partner studios a genuine path to global scale, and Ukrainian-made products that are recognised and respected in every major market.

“That’s where we’re going - and we’re already moving.”