We continue summarizing the year 2024 with teams from the gaming industry (or related to it). Up next is an interview with representatives from Beresnev Games, founder Oleg Beresnev and CEO Yulia Barteneva.
How did the year turn out for your company? What achievements would you like to highlight?
Oleg: An eventful and experimental year! We delved into testing projects in various genres, gathered a ton of analytical data, and most importantly — drew conclusions on what should be developed in each area. After lengthy discussions, we prioritized one of them and are now actively focusing on its development. However, we are not stopping the experiments: by the end of December, we plan a couple more tests.
We also created Gallery on Steam — our first experimental project for this platform. It's a new step for us, and we plan its release next year. This is an important experience as we enter a new environment for us and try to find our audience in PC gaming.
Gallery
Yulia: One of our main internal achievements is working on our analytical systems. It's a huge and ambitious project we've heavily invested in and are now in the acceptance phase. We can say one thing for sure: this will significantly change our approach to everything—from development to marketing.
We have significantly diversified our creative arsenal and established a stable playable production process. This has given us more tools to test hypotheses and optimize advertising campaigns, which is especially important in the current market conditions.
In your opinion, how has the situation changed in the gaming market?
Oleg: The competition in the mobile gaming market is incredibly fierce: now, only those who can offer both a quality product and strong marketing content can win. With an enormous number of new games released daily, marketing creatives have become the decisive factor in capturing the initial focus of the audience.
Today, companies operate under more unified conditions — monetization and ad purchasing are managed by algorithms on the mediation and purchasing channel sides. This makes creatives the main lever publishers can truly influence. To remain competitive, use custom store pages, refine creative creation processes, and implement new technologies.
Yulia: We are witnessing a deepening problem of a shortage of product managers ready to work in the new market realities. The approach familiar to many, "test everything at the company's expense, maybe something will hit," no longer works. With the market's maturation and heightened competition, the ability to efficiently execute projects is a must, requiring product managers to have serious comprehensive expertise. It's rare to find specialists who possess all the necessary qualities: creativity for creating gameplay, visual expertise, technical literacy for evaluating MVPs, and strong execution, meaning the ability to complete a project on schedule.
How was the year for the genre in which you work?
Oleg: We expanded our genre expertise, actively exploring various directions, including I.O., puzzles, survivor types, and voxel games. We observe a general trend toward more complex projects and increased content richness across all genres. Players want more variety, depth, and opportunities for exploration.
An exception was the voxel project Thug Life, where gameplay hypotheses were not initially well-developed. This experience showed us the importance of laying down strong mechanics and a clear audience vision even at the design stage.
Thug Life
Yulia: Thanks to the lessons learned from Thug Life, we have revised our entire pre-production process, which we will teach all our product specialists. In the future, we will approach this matter more carefully to avoid costly development of poorly conceptualized ideas both from a marketing and product standpoint.
What trends do you expect to emerge or strengthen in your niche in 2025?
Oleg: In the coloring genre, the key challenge is to learn how to monetize the core coloring mechanic itself. Whoever can gameplay-integrate monetization, supplement it with a strong meta-game, and quality live ops will certainly take the lead.
As for arcade racing, the niche is maturing: dozens of retention and monetization mechanics borrowed from other genres are emerging. This makes the games more complex and interesting for the player but demands increasingly more skill from developers.
Race Master 3D: Car Racing
Yulia: With the increase in the number of games on the market, live ops are becoming even more refined. In 2025, we expect a reinforcement of the trend toward live ops personalization based on player behavior data to retain their interest and improve LTV.
We also anticipate an increased focus on social interactions within casual games.
AI will be more deeply integrated into gaming processes, from content generation to creating adaptive gameplay, adapting to the player and helping developers create more varied content with less expense.
The industry is maturing, which is expected to lead to lower margins. To successfully operate in the new conditions, even more attention will be needed on internal processes and their optimization. We have observed this process in the market for a few years now, with cutbacks and the abandonment of entire lines of activity due to increased competition and rising production costs. In such conditions, the battle for talent will only grow, and the ability to see potential in people and train them will become a key factor for business success.
What are the company's plans for the coming year?
Oleg: The next year promises to be busy in terms of developing and managing our projects. We plan to actively develop new games as part of our R&D direction to strengthen our positions in various genres. Additionally, we have started managing the publishing of Race Master independently, which requires special attention to streamlining all processes after a problem transfer from the old publisher, new product development for the project, and crafting a more effective marketing strategy.
Race Master 3D: Car Racing
Yulia: Completing our work on our analytical systems is one of the key tasks for the next year. We are also actively seeking out top specialists. We need not just professionals but people with a creative approach, deep knowledge, and a desire to take on ambitious projects. Our goal is to build a highly effective team that shares our work principles and wants to create hit projects with us.