Double the engines, double the power: Inside Beware of Bytes!

What was the catalyst or reason for launching Beware of Bytes?

The main catalyst was the need to stay competitive in an increasingly challenging market. For the last two years, we were essentially running in place - maintaining the same revenue levels but having to work much harder to achieve it. As the market contracted, we found ourselves in something of an Alice in Wonderland situation where you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same position.

Both Lunate and General Arcade were facing similar challenges. We needed to scale up to take on bigger projects that clients were requesting, but we were hesitant to hire aggressively given the industry's volatility. Nobody wants to hire people only to let them go six months later when market conditions shift.

The partnership allows us to double our engineering capacity without the risks associated with rapid hiring. We can now access each others’ expertise - our (Lunate Games) strength in Unreal Engine and CryEngine complements General Arcade's Unity and custom engine capabilities perfectly.

Tell us about your business - what it aims to achieve, who you work with, and how you reach customers

Beware of Bytes! combines the unique strengths of both companies. Lunate Games brings deep expertise in Unreal Engine and CryEngine to Lunate’s engineering background rooted in simulation and training systems for the aerospace industry. We've supported titles including Crysis Remastered, Remnant: From the Ashes, and Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Our business development approach has evolved significantly since forming the partnership. We've integrated our processes and now have representatives operating across different time zones and locations. We've developed joint proposals, a unified website, and shared client databases to eliminate duplication of effort.

For example, we now have a representative who was previously Lunate's contact in Japan, but now represents both companies, or to phrase it differently, the collective power of both companies, as Beware of Bytes! because he's the best fit for communicating with Japanese companies and expanding our capabilities in the Asian market. It's about optimising our reach while sharing resources efficiently.

We reach customers through a combination of conference attendance, direct outreach, and leveraging our existing relationships as well as word of mouth off the back of previous works. The partnership allows us to cover more events without dramatically increasing costs - we can split conference attendance between team members and share the marketing budget more effectively.

How has the business evolved since its launch?

Since establishing our joint venture, we've seen significantly more opportunities develop than either company achieved separately. We've established processes for exchanging information, clients, and technical expertise much more efficiently.

The key evolution is speed and capability. When we receive a request for Unity-based work, we know exactly where it goes and who will handle it best. When they get Unreal Engine projects, it gets transferred straight to “my” team. This happens fast because clients don't want to wait - publishers and developers want answers quickly, so we have built a system that empowers speed and reliability.

We've also started sharing hardware and resources. For example, if we need specific Mac configurations for testing that we don't have, but General Arcade does, we can access their equipment instead of purchasing our own. These might seem like small things, but they allow us to operate faster and more cost-effectively in a time-pressed, financially-tight (right now) industry.

Our teams are already in contact, with managers from both companies collaborating directly. We've had technical sharing sessions where engineers from both sides exchange knowledge and validate each other's approaches.

What's the working culture like at Beware of Bytes?

The working culture is built on transparency, which is essential since we operate as a fully remote partnership. Both companies were already heavily remote, and our collaboration is entirely “virtual” at the moment - I'm actually the only person from Lunate who has visited General Arcade's office in person, but that will change as we mature and grow as a team.

We're both companies created by software engineers, for software engineers. Before formalising the partnership, we spent considerable time last year discussing technical approaches, interviewing processes, onboarding procedures, and testing methodologies. We discovered remarkable similarities in how we approach engineering problems and company culture.

The culture is transparent, engineering-focused, and friendly. We both share the same technical language, which makes collaboration much easier than working with partners who have different mindsets or approaches to software development.

What's been the biggest challenge so far, and how have you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges has been introducing our operating model to clients. As two companies working in close partnership, we’ve had to reframe expectations and educate partners on how our structure enables us to deliver efficiently and with high technical quality. Once clients understand that this model was built intentionally for flexibility, speed, and excellence—not just convenience—the collaboration flows smoothly and the value becomes immediately clear.

How does Beware of Bytes! meet an unmet need?

While we're not doing something completely unique that nobody else can do, we're providing more value to the industry while keeping ourselves viable and growing. The challenge for smaller studios like ours is reaching the broader industry when we're competing against much larger companies.

By joining forces, we can take on more interesting and challenging projects. Our people are amazing, doing amazing things, and they deserve to work on AAA titles, Nintendo Switch 2, and next-generation PlayStation and Xbox projects. This collaboration means we're ready to take on the biggest projects in the industry, it also means that retention will be good, if we can compete with the biggest firms out there, on the most exciting titles, the team is getting what they deserve, that opportunity to be the big players.

It's about giving our talented teams the opportunities they deserve while providing clients with the combined expertise and capacity they need for major projects.

What's in store for the future?

We have several projects currently in review that will make the most of our joint structure - some transitioning from General Arcade to us, others going the opposite direction, and some we'll tackle together with combined teams.

We're in discussions with much larger companies who are interested in collaborating with our combined structure because they lack engineering resources. When we compare engineering capabilities, we're not as small as we might appear - companies like Virtuous or Keywords are much larger in QA, management, and art, but our combined engineering forces are quite competitive.

Long-term, we're considering inviting other technology providers and gaming industry teams to join our collaborative model. If we prove this joint venture works effectively, we could bring on board art outsourcers, QA studios, or localisation companies under the same partnership approach.

What advice would you give other founders or future founders?

Keep in mind that you always have to run to stay in the same place. Market conditions change - sometimes there's high demand for your services, sometimes you have to actively pursue customers. You need to go out, explain who you are, what you're doing, and be as transparent as possible.

Share responsibility with your customers. As service providers, we know that if we fail, our clients fail because we're doing work for them. We try to always share what challenges we face and what risks we see.

The market has different phases. Sometimes there's big demand, sometimes you have to run hard for your customers. Be transparent, share responsibility, and be prepared to adapt to changing conditions.

What is your daily routine and the rules you live by?

My daily routine is structured around our global team distribution. My morning starts with interacting with our Asian team members, particularly Japan, while I'm also managing my share of the family responsibilities like taking my kids to school and kindergarten.

The first half of my day involves mostly independent work that doesn't require heavy interaction, plus collaboration with General Arcade's team in Asia. In the second half of the day, typically by evening before I sleep, I'm interacting with our European team members.

This routine works well for managing a distributed team across multiple time zones while maintaining work-life balance. The key is being flexible and available when different parts of the team need interaction, while also protecting time for focused, independent work.

Andrei Morozov is the Co-CEO of Beware of Bytes!