The chief for working with developers on the VKontakte platform and executive producer Mail.ru Games Ventures Maxim Babichev told App2Top.ru about how he remembered the outgoing year.
Maxim BabichevHow was 2017 for you?
A year has passed in one breath. Trips and meetings, work at the headquarters, family, vacation at last. Hundreds of hours of meetings and hundreds of hours of internal work on the platform.
The year was busy, we managed to do almost everything that was planned: a lot of big and small updates on the web and in Direct Games, a lot of internal changes.
We have also laid the foundation for 2018: already now there are several almost completed agreements, many developers are preparing to enter the platform, new products are being prepared. So I myself think that we all did a good job in the gaming platform.
I also join the work in parallel Mail.Ru Games Ventures as an executive producer.
How was the year for the company?
For VKontakte in general, the year is just great. We are growing and I like the processes that take place inside. I recently celebrated my ninth anniversary in VK and it seems to me that now is the most promising and productive time in all the years that I have been working in VKontakte.
The most important thing in the company’s affairs for me personally is that the VKontakte gaming platform has returned to mobile devices in a new guise, in the form of Direct Games, a mobile HTML5 platform. This is a big direction in which the main focus will be on the games in 2018.
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
Definitely PUBG. The fact that “Battle Royale” has become a super-popular game mode that perfectly adapts to completely different games (for example, Fortnite and Chinese mobile pubgs) is a big event. Even Google has made a small New Year’s project in the same style – “Santa Claus Radar“.
Another important event was AR. And also — Nintendo Switch and, of course, — Last Day on Earth.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
I can definitely name two trends — the “battle royale” and the accelerating movement towards HTML5 and WebGL.
“Battle Royale” is an important trend, because it gave a completely different, new gaming experience. The player is no longer bound by rigid boundaries when the whole team depends on him and you need to get ready, turn off the phone and allocate 40-50 minutes for the match. Plus, of course, it’s important that the genre has a low entry threshold, and it’s not scary to lose.
HTML5 and WebGL are an important trend, because the industry has said “bye bye” to Flash and has taken up the transition to technologies natively supported by browsers on PC and mobile ecosystems. I believe that this will lead to a new round of development of games in social networks, both on the web and on mobile devices within Direct Games.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
Last day on Earth. As I have already told my colleagues from Kefir!, this was the first game in a long time that has repeatedly infuriated me.
I hated this game the whole time I played it, because I wanted to play it more and more. This is the first time a mobile game has caused such emotions in me.
So for me personally, this survival is on a par with another main event of the outgoing 2017 — the appearance of the “battle royale” genre.