Alexey Savchenko, Unreal Engine Licensing Manager at Epic Games, told App2Top about how the outgoing year has passed for the company.
Year for the company
Hello everyone
2016 is somehow accepted to scold now, but for me personally it was an extremely active and interesting year. On the personal front – a new position at Epic, moving to the UK, finally finished the book (I plan to publish it in 2017), the child went to school.
For work: more than 80 days of trips, 11 exhibitions.
A couple dozen UE4 projects have been launched by studios in the post-Soviet space and in Eastern Europe. A lot of indie projects (I don’t even know how many exactly) have started using our technology, really many – hundreds. Plus, more than a hundred medium and large projects have been announced for the entire range of platforms. There are a lot of interesting things in VR (PSVR line of games, interaction with Hollywood studios) and in Enterprise (SpaceX, Tesla, Ikea, NASA, McLaren and so on).
Now we are trying to actively help developers from the point of view of marketing. Our grant program continues to work. We introduce publishers and potential investors, assist with the presence at exhibitions. Several major system initiatives are planned for the first quarter already. GDC 2017 promises to be extremely active. Unreal is likely to grow slightly in the region.
The engine has had a major update every few months all year. We are steadily and organically evolving from the point of view of the toolset. It takes a very long time to list what has been added and has become better. Personally, I remember Sequencer, the improvement of the animation pipeline and the progress in the mobile branch of the engine (for which thanks a lot to our Asian licensees).
Also, we announced and released Paragon, which is gaining momentum extremely successfully, opened an office in Berlin, which is engaged in operating our games. The next mobile game from Chair, developed in collaboration with Bad Robot (J. J. Abrams studio), as well as the VR game Robo Recall, has been announced.
In general, we have not a year, but a solid rock and roll! It’s great in every way.
Event of the year in the world
I will name a few within the industry:
- global entry into the commercial retail of VR devices;
- The release of Pokémon Go is precisely as a game-related event;
- everything that happens around Konami and Hideo Kojima is the most interesting developing story with industrial personalities.
Trend of the year
VR is growing slower than expected. This is where the standard story with new platforms works: many developers use old approaches and mechanics, but they already understand that they need to experiment more and conform to a fundamentally new interface. There is a lot of money in this story, but mostly on the frontend in investments. However, some projects, like Raw Data, already earn the first millions per month or comparable. In 2017, many major announcements are expected, platforms, pricing and discount policies will adapt, it will be possible to talk about something more specifically.
Game of the Year
Most of all I played Battlefield 1, Final Fantasy 15, Project Genom, Paragon and Overwatch, but the game of the year, as in 2016, is still Hearthstone for me, which I played at airports and in the evenings for some absolutely insane number of hours this year.