“Our portfolio includes several dozen studios earning over €1m in monthly revenue”: Magify’s Evgeniy Kurenkov on scaling smarter live ops

• The platform helps studios optimise user acquisition and boost LTV through live ops tools, segmentation, and AI-driven insights.
• Founder Evgeniy Kurenkov says AI will be central to studio decision-making, cutting costs, accelerating workflows, and unlocking smarter growth.

As mobile free-to-play game studios continue to battle against the likes of rising acquisition costs, changing player demographics, and keeping up to date with the latest trends and monetisation models, there is all the more need to have an effective live ops strategy. 

Magify is a startup aiming to help turn data into revenue, founded by Evgeniy Kurenkov. The analytics and live ops platform has spent the last year scaling with various studios.

Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, Kurenkov tells us that Magify is solving two key problems for studios: “First, user acquisition optimisation, helping teams identify which campaigns bring profit, which creatives perform, and which need to be shut down.

"Second, increasing LTV to surpass VAV through live ops features that allow teams to personalise content, run segmented monetisation strategies and manage in-game events.”

A year of growth

Over the past 12 months, Magify has been evolving its product through direct feedback and hands-on iteration.

“We’ve gone through multiple product tracks and encountered a number of serious challenges, each of which helped make us stronger and our product more attuned to the real needs of game studios,” Kurenkov explains. “As a result, the product itself has matured significantly and become more unique.” 

Kurenkov tells us that today, its portfolio "includes several dozen studios earning over €1 million in monthly revenue each". He expects to announce new partnerships soon.

“In Q2 alone, we onboarded a wave of new clients after our team actively incorporated market feedback into an intensive R&D sprint,” he says. “While we’ve attracted mid-sized and large studios, we continue to support teams of all sizes.” 

Kurenkov notes that a few large studios account for most of the company’s ARR but that the majority of user volume comes from smaller teams. 

“Interestingly, it’s from those smaller studios that we expect the next breakout hits to emerge. With the right tools and meditation, they can scale quickly and sustainably.”

Strategic investment

In September 2024, Magify raised €1m in funding in a round led by SteamPower Investments. The money was said to go toward expanding Magify’s AI capabilities and reaching new markets. 

Kurenkov tells us that the funding was critical in helping to scale development efforts and deepen the platform’s capabilities.

“We streamlined onboarding, made the platform flexible enough to integrate with any company’s legacy systems, and have begun expanding beyond Unity, with development already underway for SDKs supporting Godot, React and Cocos,” Kurenkov explains. 

The investment also supported the rollout of in-demand utility tools, including in-app revenue validation, subscription income tracking and revenue cleansing. The latter ensures that only net income, after store commissions and taxes, is used for forecasting and reporting, which Kurenkov says helps teams trust their data as a more accurate reflection of business performance.

One aspect that Magify has been expanding upon is its AI assistant, currently in beta testing which is being designed to speed up decision making for studios. 

“AI will fundamentally reshape how studios make decisions, not just in game development but across the entire lifecycle from UA to monetisation and game design,” says Kurenkov.

“The core value of our AI assistant is acceleration. Faster insights, faster decisions, fewer human bottlenecks.” 

The assistant is being trained to interpret large datasets and deliver contextual recommendations, Kurenkov notes, which could include determining the optimal configuration to scale, identifying which creative to pause, or determining the best-performing product variation in an A/B test.

As for the long-term vision, Kurenkov states that “AI will be central to how studios engage with data in the future”. He also notes that for Magify, the current goal is to use AI to bridge the gap between complex datasets and actionable insights. 

Building around the market

Looking ahead, Kurenkov points to two clear industry shifts that have shaped the company’s product roadmap: “Rising user acquisition costs have made predictive modelling essential. Studios need to understand their chances of ROI before committing to production, so we focused on simulation tools that help forecast outcomes early.

“Second, monetisation pressure is growing. With acquisition costs rising and monetisation models shifting, it’s more important than ever to maximise average revenue per user. That’s where our liveops constructor comes in, helping studios boost LTV, segmented audiences and test monetisation strategies in a data-driven way.”

Kurenkov also offers a word of caution to studios considering building their own internal analytics systems. “In a market like this, product teams need to double down on what actually drives growth and builds long-term value, instead of sinking time into building their own analytics stacks.”

He also adds that from the investors' side, “you want to see teams focused on product and traction, not reinventing tools that don’t move the valuation and only dilute focus”.

The company’s future mission is to become an all-in-one solution for building workflows within game studios with Kurenkov telling us to expect to see continuous innovation across analytics, live ops and AI-assisted decision making.