At the end of June, the seventh WN Games Conference on the development of mobile and social games was held in St. Petersburg. We talked with the organizer of the event – Business Development Director of Nevosoft Yulia Lebedeva – about the results of the event and its format.
You moved the conference to a new location this time. Three floors – and all were full of people. Were you expecting such an influx of guests?
Julia Lebedeva
We’ve been wanting to move to the center of St. Petersburg for a long time – it’s summer after all, and the romance of white nights feels better here.
This time we managed to find a suitable venue – the Baltic House Theater-festival. We counted on about 1200 people, and the expectations were met.
I am often asked where more people gather: in winter on Winter Nights or in summer on White Nights? The truth is that each of our next conferences is bigger than the previous one, on average, by 20%. This means that there were more visitors this summer than in winter, and next winter there will be more than this summer.
Although, perhaps, we will gather a record number of participants at Moscow Nights on October 13-14 at the Radisson Royal in Moscow.
There is an opinion that the conference was initially focused on marketing. However, only the fact that the exhibition area of White Nights 2015 consisted of about 50-60 games suggests the opposite. Why do you think WN was perceived as a “pro marketing” event?
I don’t know where it came from, but at some point there was an opinion among developers that “marketing is bad” and “development is cool”. It seems to me that the reason for this is sometimes too active sales managers from various companies offering traffic and monetization.
And WNC was and remains about business. Multifaceted, complex, interesting. It’s not enough to make a good game – you need to get access to the audience. It’s not enough to have a big advertising budget – you need a good product and the ability to buy traffic correctly. Everything works in the complex.
That’s why we have “marketing” master classes – for example, this time Facebook and Yandex analyzed the cases in detail. And there are presentations about game design, about in-game economics, about builds on different engines.
I repeat, White Nights is a conference about business for those who want not only to be creative, but also to make a profit. These are not advanced training courses – this is a place where developers can get feedback from professionals, find a publisher, an investor, discuss the possibility of receiving traffic from platforms or buying it from advertising grids.
Recently, I have been increasingly confronted with the statement that WN is the only remaining business-oriented event in Russia “about games”. How do you feel about such statements, do you agree with him?
With the departure of a couple of major gaming events from the CIS, WN really remains the only business conference in this region. Of course, there are other wonderful events, but we have different goals, so we do not compete, but cooperate.
When we started three years ago, we could not imagine that we would guess so accurately with the place and time. Foreign companies are very interested in the Russian market, many are interested in traditionally talented teams from the CIS. Moreover, this interest is only growing. It can be expensive and difficult for developers themselves to travel to conferences abroad. So it turns out that “the meeting place cannot be changed.”
Before the summer conference, the word social appeared in the title, and now WN is a conference about the development and promotion of mobile and social games. What is the reason for this?
Initially, we wanted to have a clear focus: a conference for mobile game developers. Now this is not so relevant, because mobile is closely intertwined with social networks, and I don’t want to discuss one without the other.
We also have developers of games for browsers or Steam, but still mobile and social games remain a priority.
The next event will be in Moscow this October. Are there any forecasts for it?
As I said, we are once again expecting a record number of participants – now 1,500 people. Moscow’s greater transport accessibility will help the growth of the conference – you can fly there without transfers from almost anywhere in the world, and it will be more convenient for developers from the middle part of Russia to get there.
The venue is already known – this is the newest congress park of the five-star Radisson Royal Hotel (former hotel “Ukraine”).
The program has already begun to be prepared – the first announcement will take place in early August. I can definitely say that there will be new stars!
I see, thanks for the interview!
All materials on White Nights 2015 published on our pages:
- Nevosoft company announced the Moscow Nights conferenceWooga talked about how to properly promote a mobile game before release
- Google: porting projects to Android TV requires a minimum of effort
- flaregames: Royal Revolt 2’s ARPDAU in South Korea turned out to be 3-4 times more than in the USA
- Playrix: the plot is a system of reference points for the player
- Facebook: Everyone can be successful today
- Playrix: A sample for a shareware game – a vertical series
- Vkontakte announced the relaunch of the mobile gaming platform
- Playkot: players should be divided according to how they pay, not how much
Also, we recall that in the framework of
White Nights 2015 hosted the first Indie Game Cup. And we covered every project that passed the second round.