Yunoïa helps game developers find media, publishers, and investors

There are 600 games uploaded to the app stores every day. Yunoïa wants to help game developers get noticed in that crowd through a website that makes it easier to get in touch with media, publishers, and investors.

Prague, Czech Republic-based Yunoïa asks developers to fill out a profile that has a mixture of both public and restricted information. For the media, you can upload videos, screenshots, and press releases for your game. But you can also add information to the profile that only people with permission can access. Certified publishers and investors can access the data about how much money you need to raise or other proprietary information. For the media, you can privately provide Steam keys.

Yunoïa is operating a business-to-business platform with tools and services for game industry professionals. And it already has a database of 5,000 contacts for publishers and media. You can also use Yunoïa as a way to advertise your services or find freelancers with particular skills.

“What makes it unique is that the project pages are designed to highlight the pertinent information for media, publishers, and investors, information that would require, in other circumstances, a lot of back and forth discussions,” said Sebastien Pacetti, the CEO of Yunoïa, in an email to GamesBeat. “Developers can fill project pages with information such unique selling points, distribution needs, funding needs, and the type of partnerships they are looking for.”

Yunoïa is also an open platform, where any professional can present and evaluate business opportunities and follow up with much more fruitful face-to-face meetings. The service is free to game developers. The self-funded company was founded this year, and it has 15 people working on the project.

After spending many years in games working for small and big companies like Ubisoft, Pacetti joined Amazon as the head of EU digital games and software. He enjoyed the work but decided to move back to the gaming industry, taking a job as chief creative officer at Warhorse Studios on the game Kingdom Come: Deliverance. He had to work with a lot of other publishers and game studios.

“I was struck by the sheer amount of friction and problems all the actors in the industry still faced,” he wrote. “It is hard to access even basic information on how to fund, produce, source services, publish, and distribute games.”

He left Warhorse Studios in April to create Yunoïa. After two months of soft launch, there is information on 350 studios on the platform, and a business directory with 150 companies and freelancers advertising their services.

Over time, Yunoïa will add more premium services. Its vision is to improve discoverability for game developers, and it will add a search service over time.

“When people review games on Yunoïa, they can either dismiss them by clicking ‘Hide,’ or they can ‘Follow’ them,” Pacetti said. “Following a project will add it to your dashboard to help you find it easily later on. This is why we spent a lot of effort in creating a very snappy experience where people can really go through a lot of projects with almost no loading time.”

He added, “When you start browsing games with our viewer, a review queue is built based on how each project ranks in our algorithm. All games freshly published on the platform get on top of the queue at the beginning, but then it is their ranking in the algorithm that takes over their position in the review queue.

“This algorithm is influenced by multiple factors. The goal is to incentivize users to improve the quality of their project page by providing ranking boosts for complete pages, for instance, but it is the interest that projects get by certified users (media, publishers, and investors) that provides the most influence on our ranking. [These are] just a few examples of what we use in our algorithm. We believe that this system can help surface games from all over the world that would never get the attention in other circumstances.”