Gaijin Entertainment CEO Anton Yudintsev summed up the results of the outgoing year in the company and industry for App2Top.
Year for the company
This year has been very busy for Gaijin. First of all, after four years of open beta testing, our flagship project War Thunder was released. We have completed all the tasks that we set ourselves when launching the game, and we are glad to see that we have achieved what we intended – a large-scale military simulator with joint battles of ground equipment, aviation and fleet. Of course, this does not mean that we will stop developing the game, there are still many plans ahead.
We also tried ourselves for the first time in close cooperation with the film industry. Producing the film “28 Panfilovites” was a new and very interesting experience for us, which was not limited only to helping in the production of the film. This collaboration is also not over yet – a digital release has just taken place, and there is still a world rental ahead. But based on the results of the rental in Russia and the CIS and the reviews of the audience, we can already say with confidence that this cooperation was successful.
In addition, at the end of the year we announced a new big project – a squad multiplayer online shooter Enlisted in the setting of World War II. It is being developed by a separate studio, but on our engine and with our support.
Event of the year in the world
The event of the year for me was the release and subsequent rise of Pokémon GO. This is the first game with augmented reality technology on mobile devices that has achieved such popularity. Of course, the technology itself is severely limited by the capabilities of the smartphone there, and the main key to success was the popular IP and a large base of pokestops inherited from Ingress. But the game has attracted a lot of attention to AR, so it’s worth waiting for new interesting projects using this mechanics.
Trend of the year
The trend of the year, as in 2016, remains VR. Three main helmets have gone on sale – Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR – and there are no helmets using mobile phones at all. Samsung, the main player in this market, has been joined by Google with their Daydream VR helmet. Full-fledged VR controllers have become available, significantly expanding the list of game genres using virtual reality. All this leads to the fact that the amount of VR content has increased significantly compared to the previous year. Devices have become more accessible. All this gives hope for further growth in the popularity of virtual reality technology.
Game of the Year
For me, the game of the year was Battlefield 1. The interesting setting of the First World War attracted a new audience, and the high-quality performance met the expectations of fans of the series. Thanks to all this, Battlefield has finally caught up with Call of Duty in sales, which did not happen in previous years.