Mentor of the “Games Market” category on vc.ru and Nekki Development Director Sergey Babaev shared with App2Top his thoughts about the outgoing year.
Event of the Year
Perhaps the event of the year is the purchase of King for $5.9 billion. Against this background, even the news about the purchase of Riot shares by Tencent pales.
Trend of the year
It seems to me that this year’s trend is the absence of pronounced trends. Those who knew how to make games and earn money strengthened these competencies, but no one jumped on a new train and made a global discovery. Quality increases, competition increases.
A lot of people started talking about indirect marketing or growth without marketing at all. If back in 2014 we talked about this as a miracle, today many have come to understand that we should strive for this: we need to form brands with an accumulated audience and work with them qualitatively. Few people were able to come to such a model, but a certain shift in the focus of attention in this direction is pleasing. At the same time, traffic virtuosos are still in demand and very rare shots on the market. One does not interfere with the other.
At some conference in 2012, it was said that VR was about to come. They say, in 3 years it should be expected like a thunderclap out of a clear sky. Three years have passed, and we are all talking about a few years and a future blow… By the way, it will certainly be, but until a device-defining game appears, until the optimal controller is found, you can only speculate and try to calmly study this area, swimming with small investments.
On the part of the media, I can say that there is definitely a trend towards convergence of market participants. It became clear that your success is in how cool you are, not how bad your neighbor is. There is no point in spreading the secrets of the polichinel, bristling in the presence of these “competitors” and so on. More openness, more communication, more information…
I believe that part of the success of the VC gaming segment lies in getting into this period, when people not only talk about the importance of communication and information openness, but also follow these theses, and we only give a platform, reap the fruits of this good time.
Gaming category VC.ruAchievement of the Year
There is such a thankless task – to choose one of the best of several worthy ones, and I will allow myself not to choose, but to list several companies and point out their achievements.
Playrix is just a fantastic system for working with distributed teams. 200 people scattered across 30 cities make world-class hits (Township, Fishdom). I have worked with purely remote teams as a producer and I know how difficult it is. Respect to the guys for such a tricky (in conditions of a shortage of personnel) architecture of the company.
Vizor Interactive – breakthrough successes on FB of their titles are impressive (Klondine, Loyalty). The team continues to raise the quality bar (and often its own) in bodybuilders and farms, bringing genres to a new level.
Pixonic – for cool Walking War Robots. I entered the game without expecting anything special – I left only after an hour and often come back. The right session action on mobile phones.
Rillisot. I don’t remember if the PixelGun project was this year, but I paid attention to it in 2015. In any incomprehensible situation, I open it to feed a little experience. Short sessions, easy controls, high combat dynamics and a relatively low value of life, all this is in the setting of the Minecraft cubworld. A great mix. I’ve got a VIP status!
This year we were very pleased with the announcements of large expensive shooters. There are two coolest companies in business at once – “Kefir!” with the OneLife shooter, where one life is given for one copy of the game, and Battlestate Games (formerly AbsolutSoft) with Escape From Tarkov, which has a single, offline and so on. For the last project, I would write everything off to the exuberant fantasy and unrealizable plans of dreamers, if it weren’t for the developers of a very powerful Contract Wars product with a huge audience and popularity on social networks. The guys once found what the audience needs and risk doing it a second time. If they don’t get too carried away with the process, of course…
Escape From TarkovDisappointment of the Year
I don’t overestimate expectations and rarely get disappointed. Applies to everything from movies to people. This is especially true for games. If you don’t like it, I just stop playing and that’s it, I don’t write angry posts about it on FB.
Game of the Year
I will be banal – “The Witcher 3″. Probably the only game this year that I passed at all and tried to prolong my stay in every possible way, wandering around, doing any tasks, and simply blowing up the nests of ghouls with homemade bombs.
The Witcher 3Year for the company
As for VC. I want to make a post about metrics thoroughly and with all the information on my hands a little closer to the end of the year. Now I can say that the best month has exceeded 260 thousand units (this is purely a rubric, in isolation from the whole big vc).
I really like the dynamics of the course I chose a few months ago – big views about personalities. We refused to communicate with non-top people (practically only the founders with rare disappearing exceptions), refused quick “interviews about the announcement”, replacing them with articles with headline questions. Interviews are now big thoughtful materials in which the interviewee is tapped from all sides – as a person, as a businessman, as part of the industry.
What for?
If you Google the name of any major person in the industry, you will get a set of disparate and sometimes contradictory small bio, their reprints and other snatches of articles. Even if you drive in “Sergey Orlovsky” – a detailed clear bio will not fly out, you need to look to find it. Here we want our interviews to fall out for such requests, where a person is represented from all sides. For example, I am very proud of the materials about DTF with Fedorov and Maslov, the material with Sergey Titov is a somewhat mysterious person for young developers who made a cool big business in the west and worked at Riot.
We also received the support of the coolest Riot Games company in the world, and with the support of Playrix, we opened gaming vacancies. And these are phases, well, about 0 or 1 in my plan for the development of the rubric, so stay tuned!