We continue summarizing the year 2024 with gaming teams and experts (or those related to the gaming industry). Up next, an interview with Alexander Ivanov, CEO and head of Duckside Games studio.
How was this year for the studio? What achievements would you like to highlight?
“We were building and building, and finally built it” — this phrase best describes our 2024.
After a year and a half of active development and testing, we released our flagship project — Pocket Tales. It’s a story-driven tycoon about character survival in a mobile game world.
It's always satisfying when a small idea grows into a complete game. A release marks a new phase and is a great joy for the team. So, taking this opportunity, I want to congratulate and thank everyone involved in the product — the colleagues at Duckside Games and Azur Games.
Pocket Tales
How do you view the changes in the gaming market?
The gaming industry is currently going through tough times; the "free ride" is over. Competing in the market is becoming harder, and creating a relevant product and getting it off the ground is increasingly challenging.
Now more than ever, it’s crucial to pay great attention to every aspect of a game. Nothing can be secondary. Everything matters: graphics, game design, storytelling, technical execution (especially optimization), and marketing. If one of these aspects fails, it can doom the entire project.
You can have stunning graphics, but if the game itself offers nothing new, it will flop. You might perfect the gameplay down to the smallest detail, but if the device gets so hot that you could fry an egg after just 10 minutes of playing, that's also a failure.
And that’s not even mentioning that clones barely survive in the market anymore.
All these factors collectively lead to the development of the industry and contribute to the emergence of higher quality games.
Pocket Tales
How was the year for the genre you work in?
This year, the top five leaders haven't changed, but new promising projects have emerged. Watching their fate, their development, and how their developers handle live ops is already intriguing. We'll continue observing them into 2025.
Speaking in dry numbers, the amount of installs in the idle tycoon genre has dropped significantly — by about 20%. However, there is no such decline in the genre's total revenue; it remains almost the same level, but spread over a larger number of projects.
What strengthening or new trends in your niche do you expect in 2025?
It is increasingly apparent that our niche (and the industry as a whole) is becoming more demanding of the final product. Higher quality games are being released both technologically, artistically, and design-wise — the next year will be no exception. Players are becoming more demanding in terms of game quality, making it harder to attract and retain them, so the surviving studios will actively fight for user attention.
I also expect that next year neural networks will be even more actively used in game production. Perhaps the interaction with AI will reach a new level, and we will see a simplification of entire layers of work, leading to even greater improvements in the quality of the released projects.
Pocket Tales
What are the company’s plans for next year?
As the saying goes, the first 90% of the project is not as hard as the second 90%.
We have a long but also very interesting journey ahead, with lots of revisions, improvements, and polishing. For 2025, we have grand plans: to fine-tune all the project’s mechanics, expand the content, add live ops features, and scale the project in order to secure a spot at the top of our genre and possibly bump one of the "mastodons" down a notch.