Pavel Kostin, the head of production of the Kaliningrad company HeroCraft, spoke about the results of the year in the company and the changes in Steam.
Year for the company
There were both great successes and failures. The successes, of course, include our Tempest project, which was launched on Steam, Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf, which is consistently popular, and a number of successful launches on new platforms, such as Apple TV or Android TV.
Several projects have earned much less than we would like. Probably, for a large publisher, this is normal; the most important thing is to draw conclusions in time. Now we are not only sitting, reaping the fruits of past successes, but also actively planning our 2017 year. For example, a mobile version of Tempest is already in development, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf, on the contrary, is being prepared for launch on Steam. This is not counting many other projects.
Event of the year in the world
For me, the event of the year was the collaboration between Nintendo and Apple. Both the success of Pokémon Go and, to a greater extent, even the incredible launch of Super Mario Run on iOS. There is much more behind this than just launching a major brand (and the game has not earned fantastic money for this site).
But this is a kind of official recognition from a very conservative Nintendo that the world has changed forever, it’s time to adopt new rules. And Apple appreciated this gesture, supporting Nintendo’s move in an unprecedented way.
Mobile platforms are now setting new trends and new quality standards themselves, and this will affect both the future of Nintendo for years to come, and the AAA titles gaming industry in general.
Trend of the year
For me, the two key trends of the year are the entry of the largest Asian players into Western markets, marked by the purchase of Supercell for an unheard–of $8.6 billion, the success of Clash of Kings and the colossal financial performance of Chinese Internet companies. And this whole story seems to be just beginning – the Chinese market is still growing, but it is already cramped. I think we will see a lot more interesting things in the coming year, including new financial records and deals on the acquisition of entire consortia and corporations.
The second significant trend for me was the changes that befell Steam. Steam has long been considered a platform where almost any indie developer can make a crazy and interesting project, go Greenlight with it, and find their audience. The platform supported this image in every possible way – both with the Greenlight service itself and with very powerful promotional support for all releases, including games from indie singles. Over time, thousands of indies rushed to Steam, filling it with a variety of projects, both interesting and outright trash. Is it a joke: of all the games released in steam, 40% were launched in the last year!
But now everything has changed. Promo support and free screenings were replaced by default with a recommendation system that is much more convenient for large companies and high–budget games, localization restrictions appeared – in general, the time for experiments is over, Steam has set a course for large companies, expensive games and error-free recommendations.
And it seems that we will see this cycle again: no matter what new platform we are talking about, whether it’s VR, TV or cloud services – first loyal conditions for singles, a huge variety, then – market overflow, restrictions and feature systems that support large companies and expensive projects.
Game of the Year
I myself play not only on mobile devices, but also on consoles and on PC, but no matter how much I would ask for the role of the game of the year to restart Battlefield, the next Resident Evil or the new Uncharted, I will probably vote for Pokémon Go.
People who had never played mobile games, or games in general, suddenly discovered the existence of game projects, and how children ran after Pokemon. Maybe now the hype has already gone down, but it really was a completely new phenomenon that affected not only the gaming industry, but also the media sphere as a whole. A phenomenon that has shown that games can enter into the everyday reality of every person, even if he does not consider himself a player.
And I congratulate you on the upcoming New Year 2017! I hope it will bring us all a lot of really interesting and good games, well, we will do our best to contribute to this!