“Beholder did not change the company”: interview with Alawar

A year ago, in August 2016, Alawar started a closed beta test of its new premium Beholder game. Unlike previous projects of the company, which had previously specialized mainly in casual products, the game was focused on a completely different type of players. She talked about a totalitarian future in which the player acted as the manager of an apartment building, watching over the residents. The game was released in November 2016 on Steam. In May of this year, its mobile version was published by the Estonian Creative Mobile. Today, according to SteamSpy, the game has more than 400 thousand users on PC alone.

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru Beholder is perceived by many as an indie game. How did it happen that the publisher of casual games became an indie developer?

Andrey Postnikov

Andrey Postnikov, CEO of Alawar: The very definition of “indie” is still far from final. Indie developers are called both small teams and fairly large companies with a developed structure, and the debate about what “indie” is has not subsided for a long time.

For more than 15 years, Alawar has been developing and publishing casual games. We have collaborated with hundreds of external developers, established contacts with dozens of partners around the world, and created our own distribution network in Russia and CIS countries. We have managed to develop a successful direction that provides the company with stable profits and allows us to focus on new market segments.

During this time, the company has formed its own game studios. Moreover, these are not separate independent teams with their own legal entities. These experienced professionals are full-time employees of the company, united in full-cycle production slots. Now these studios are developing new projects, which, in our opinion, can be called “indie games”.

For us, an “indie game” is something original that the team independently came up with and made. At the same time, the size of the team, its experience and the budget of the project are not so important, and the “Alawar publisher” in this case becomes a kind of tool that immerses the slot in the state of an “indie studio”. Simply put, we try to use all the advantages of “indie development”, simultaneously leveling its main disadvantages.

Stargaze, which developed Beholder, has been part of Alawar since 2007. What did the studio do before Beholder was created, and why did you decide to introduce the Warm Lamp Games brand?

Andrey: Yes, indeed, Alawar Stargaze (Barnaul) has been part of the Alawar company for many years. Before starting work on Beholder, the team was engaged in various projects: reskin PC projects, porting to mobile platforms (in particular, Alawar collaborated with Big Fish Games, porting and publishing their PC hits in the genre of “hidden object” on Google Play). For some time, one of the Alawar Stargaze slots was engaged in supporting the Farm Frenzy Inc. frituplay project (Google Play, App Store).

As for the new brand: both “indie studio Warm Lamp Games” and “indie project Beholder” are Alawar’s marketing experiment. The experiment is controversial, ambiguous, but ultimately successful.

To begin with, we wanted to move away from the stereotype “Alawar is casual games”. The announcement of a new project from Alawar would inevitably cause exactly such associations. Therefore, we decided to focus not on the publisher, but on the project itself and the team. Development was going on at Alawar Stargaze, which clearly indicated Alawar, and we allocated the slot that dealt with the new game to a separate studio called Warm Lamp Games. At that time, the indie movement, indie culture and other indie things were extremely popular, so we positioned WLG as an independent team.

We managed not to advertise Alawar’s direct involvement in the project at the early stages of development, and, of course, no one knew anything about the Warm Lamp Games studio at all. This allowed us to focus the attention of the potential audience even more on the project itself, which – and here we can say without too much modesty – fully deserved this attention.

As a result, the game received several awards at various exhibitions and conferences and interested both the press and users of the Steam platform, on which we released the game in November 2016.

As I understand it, while everyone was trying to make fritupley, you are the only ones who went in the opposite direction. Didn’t you really want to take up the hidden in the spirit of Secret Society?

Andrey: All these years we have not only created and developed the direction of premium casual projects, but also constantly experimented with different market segments.

We ported our games to different platforms; we activated and brought them to the Russian market under the brand “Gang. Kings of the Streets” is a mobile project of Heroes War by the Korean company Com2uS; we experimented in the field of social games, and also developed about 15 fritupley projects of different genres (among which, of course, was hidden). Our projects TD “Goblin Defenders 2” and TM “Farm Frenzy Inc.” were regularly featured in the App Store and Google Play and collected several million installations worldwide.

However, all these projects were experimental; the main focus for us has always been development and publishing in the field of Premium Casual.

Was it hard for the team to move from hiddens to creating a fundamentally different product?

Andrey: The idea to make a new unusual product was not spontaneous.

Premium Casual direction is a huge mechanism that has been working – and earning – for years, which allowed us not only to conduct various experiments, but also to plan the further development of the company. Steam is becoming such a new round of development for us, or, more precisely, that segment of it that we call “midcore”: games are more complex, deep and smart compared to classic Casual, but not as large-scale as AAA projects.

Beholder is the first such project that Alawar came up with, developed and released independently. But this game was not an attempt to take and do something completely unusual for us in the hope that “suddenly it will shoot.” We planned this new round of development, and Beholder is the first project in our new capacity, as a developer and publisher of midcore projects on Steam.

If we look at the situation more pointwise, within the framework of one particular unusual product…

There are hundreds of articles on “How to come up with a hit,” and most of them claim that this success cannot be predicted. Therefore, it would be more correct to say that when we created Beholder, we were somewhat afraid. They were afraid that the project would be uninteresting and would not take off; they were afraid that it would be too niche; they were afraid that some stupid technical mistake would cancel out all the long months of hard work.

We were afraid of everything, including because this project was not conceived as a new series. From the very beginning of development, no one was going to put Beholder on the conveyor and after the release begin a long-term epic of reskins. It was and is a piece product. These will be all the new midcore projects of Alawar.

However, all these concerns did not affect the actual development in any way, since the decision to enter Steam with new products was conscious and thoughtful.

In terms of budget risks, what is more risky to do today – a fritupley or such a project?

Andrey: The question is too philosophical to give an unambiguous answer to it.

Each project, whether it is a free-duplex or premium product, has its own risks and its own difficulties. And they depend not only on the specifics of the game or genre itself, but also on the developer/ publisher, the resources at their disposal, budgets, deadlines and expertise. For us, taking into account the chosen development strategy of the company, fritupley is, of course, a risk, and, moreover, an unjustified risk.

But the most risky thing is not to do anything new, not to experiment.

Was there some major bump that was stuffed during the development of Beholder?

Andrey: Yes, we talked about this bump in the “Developer Diaries” almost a year ago.

We focused too much on the mechanics and details, having lost the holistic vision of the project, which is why almost in the middle of development we had to not even roll out, but make deep changes to the game. In the time we had left, we coped with this task perfectly. Despite the fact that after such a large-scale processing, a sufficient number of artifacts remained in the game, we managed to achieve the maximum possible organicity of the project.

Another very big problem that we faced after the release is the difficulty level. 90% of all the negative reviews that we received at the start of sales indicated an overestimated complexity. We promptly added the “Trainee Mode” to the game (that is, a lighter balance) and released an update, after which we managed to correct some of the negative reviews. If different difficulty modes had been present in the game from the very beginning, our rating (now, by the way, the game has 90% positive reviews) would have been much higher.

What were the expectations at all at the pre-launch stage? Were you counting on a certain number of copies sold?

Andrey: We have already said that the project was new and unusual. In addition, we did not have extensive experience of promotion specifically on Steam. Therefore, most of the activities at the pre-release stage were completely experimental. We planned to launch the PTA, and then work with the tutorial, because we were sure that our eyes were blurred, and it would be impossible for an outsider to understand the game. Again, despite the successful beta version of our QA, we expected bugs to pop up. But it was nerves, because by that time the team had been working 24/7 for months.

The very next day after the start of the PTA, we began to receive dozens, and then hundreds of questionnaires, from which it became clear that there were no global problems with the tutorial, and everything was fine with the technical side as a whole. Of course, we had to work on bugs, but not at all on the scale that we feared. After the PTA, we realized that the project would fly, and in our forecasts we were close to the number of copies that we received at the moment.

The project has more than 400 thousand users on Steam. It most likely paid off. Can you say in % positive ROI regarding development?

Andrey: The project has paid off and is profitable.

In Alawar, it is customary to consider payback taking into account all project costs. This is not only the working time of developers, but also the costs of any kind of marketing and PR, support, working time of management, localization, voice acting, and so on.

When did it become clear that the project was working?

Andrey: We realized that the project is working out after the PTA. But we didn’t plan to significantly increase the studio.

The team coped with the required number of bugfixes perfectly. Further directions of development could be the release of DLC or work on a new project. We have released the DLC after all, the Blissfull Sleep supplement was released in May 2017. But the very specifics of the game, game mechanics and plot do not imply an operational and non-costly release of add-ons. Therefore, now the team is actively working on a new, larger project.

The theme of “Big Brother watching you” turned out to be very successful for marketing. Partly thanks to her, non-core media actively reacted to the project. Do you think, with a different topic or less emphasis on it, the game would have such success as it has today?

Andrey: The sharpness and relevance of the topics that are touched upon in the game were received after all the storylines were invented, formulated and outlined. Nevertheless, profile SIM had an increased interest in a game with a similar theme.

As for non-core media, it turned out to be largely spontaneous. The marketing of the project was as experimental as the game itself. Periodically, we had thoughts about trying to promote the game through the political field. But, firstly, we are not political technologists, and, secondly, we published a game for the whole world, and for a competent worldwide political company, many times more resources and budgets are needed.

Plus, we don’t put any political message into the game. We wanted to make a non-standard project that would give players a new, unusual gaming experience.

If we consider marketing as a whole, the topic “Alawar releases a new project” turned out to be as fertile for direct communication with players as the topic of “Big Brother” for communication with the press.

In which country is the game most popular in terms of sales?

Andrey: The top countries in terms of the number of copies are not original: China, Russia, USA.

Alawar has published about 600 mobile games himself, but in the case of Beholder, he decided to turn to Creative Mobile, which had never published premium projects before, why?

Andrey: Let’s not hide it, Creative Mobile was not the only company we showed the project to before the release. There were many of these companies. But Creative Mobile turned out to be the only one whose CEO himself played a bunch of hours in Beholder and caught fire with the project.

The answer to the more general question “Why did we decide to look for a publisher in principle?” it is also quite simple: you can output mobile projects either by traffic or by feathering. No premium game (or even a free version with full unlock) will pay for the traffic. The features remain. Creative Mobile has more experience in obtaining such features.

Perhaps the most important question is: How did Beholder’s success change Alawar itself? Has it been decided now for more teams to take on something original?

Andrey: Beholder did not change the company.

On the contrary, Alawar is changing, shifting its focus to new interesting market segments. And the consequence of these gradual changes was the release of the Beholder game. And the success of the project only confirmed the correctness of our chosen direction. In the future, we plan to release new interesting projects in different genres, settings and styles, but all these projects will be united by one thing – unusual and original.

What are the requirements for new Steam projects in Alawar today?

Andrey: We do not have any specific list of requirements for a Steam project. It should be a project with a twist. Not necessarily an original idea, but necessarily some original feature that would sharply distinguish the project from a number of similar ones.

In addition to the creative component, we have a very strict attitude to the technical quality of the project. We are constantly expanding and improving our QA and the requirements for the technical quality of the project are constantly growing.

At the moment, our main focus is on working within the company, in our own production slots. By the end of 2017, we plan to create a new slot based on Alawar Stargaze. In general, we intend to increase the number of full-cycle slots within the company and will soon open new cool vacancies.

What else can we expect from Alawar in the near future?

Andrey: On August 23, our new game Distrust is released on Steam. The developers – the Cheerdealers team – along with Alawar Stargaze and Warm Lamp Games are our internal studio. This is a polar survival, in which the player will have to guide two characters through an abandoned base. A distinctive feature of the game are the various crazies that the heroes of the game periodically fall into. What is the cause of these crazies, how to deal with them and whether it is possible in principle – we will find out after August 23.

And, of course, there are announcements of new projects ahead, and not only on PC, Consoles or Mobile.

Clear. Thanks for the interview.