Alexander Harutyunyan, General Director of Innova, told App2Top.ru about the most important industry trends over the past year.
Alexander HarutyunyanHow was 2017 for you?
This is my first year as CEO, so I threw all my energy into finding new solutions, new projects, improving efficiency and fine-tuning communication with employees.
People are our main resource. This common phrase is not an empty phrase for me at all. We have built the most open processes in the company, when each employee can offer his idea and independently implement it with the help of the whole company.
So now we meet weekly with the heads of the directions, discuss new opportunities, solve current tactical and strategic tasks.
How was the year for the company?
It is very difficult to divide the events of the last year into personal and corporate. There are a lot of hardcore projects in our lineup at the moment: Lineage 2 and RF Online, Aion and Blade and Soul. We have invested a lot of effort into their development this year, as we value the players who are devoted to their favorite games and have been with us for many years. In addition, the audience of such projects does not forgive mistakes — that’s why we try to think through any changes in games as much as possible.
Plus, a new title was launched into closed testing — Kingdom Under Fire 2. This is a completely unique project — a mixture of MMORPG and real-time strategy.
The company has once again fully focused on games: we have renewed old and established new contacts with developers, strengthened the team with new employees, and built new development strategies.
Well, the most important results of 2017 will be announced in the announcements of next year.
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
There have been so many events this year that it is very difficult to isolate something of the most important. Launches of interesting projects alternated with scandals around top bloggers. What is going on around loot boxes and microtransactions in paid games is generally a separate conversation. This scandal has reached the world level, in some countries launched the process of forming special regulatory commissions, and most importantly — attracted the attention of people as far away from the industry as possible.
But I don’t want to call scandals the most important events. According to Newzoo, this year the computer games market will definitely overcome the $100 billion mark, without any clarifications and adjustments. From year to year, the main event of the industry remains its growth. There is a lot of money in games, a lot of opportunities for further development, and therefore we will attract more and more attention from different sides. And it seems to me that it is the task of each of us to understand this and create a positive image of the entire industry.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
In part, the question intersects with the question about events. That is, loot boxes are also a trend. But let’s try not to repeat ourselves.
One of the most important trends is the crazy success of PUBG. It is not even the success of the game itself that is important, but the fact that everyone started doing the “Royal Battle”. And new titles are created, and in old games modes are added (even where it looks strange). It is clear that this is temporary — we already went through this with MOBA a few years ago. But this year the whole industry is just obsessed with the “Battle Royale”.
The story of the last two years with VR games continues. In the West, it is clearly visible that the interest of many studios in virtual reality is cooling. Because so far few people know how to monetize VR, and too few devices have been sold, so everyone is trying to cut costs so as not to go into negative territory. Unfortunately, it turns out not just cheap, but also bad — the players do not forgive this. In the Asian sector, on the contrary — everywhere you look, everyone is doing VR. Without normal business models, they just follow the trend. But in any case, the technology is already there, it has entered our lives, and either this niche will remain very narrow and specific, or the hype will take on such a scale that it will pull up all sectors of the industry and players.
I can’t help but note the development of the mobile sector — hardware is being pumped and more and more large brands from the online segment are entering the mobile market. There have been large—scale MMO on mobile before, but this year there have been a lot of new announcements, and most importantly, these games look much better. You used to look at the picture and always knew — yeah, it’s one hundred percent mobile. Now everything is not so obvious.
Also an important trend that I would like to note is the increasing nostalgia for old-school PC games. If earlier games of 10-20 years ago were played mainly by ardent hardcore fans and conservatives, now retro gaming is becoming more popular. Even players who have top-end systems, who are used to going through all the newest AAA projects, are happy to launch HOMM2, Morrowind, and the very first Fallout.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
I’m unlikely to discover America. I really liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A stunning project with a unique atmosphere and phenomenal attention to detail. And it’s also a game that single-handedly ensured the success of an entire console. As far as I remember, it turned out that more copies of Zelda were sold than the Nintendo Switch itself. In addition to “Zelda”, I really liked Cuphead — there is some extremely cool art direction there. And Horizon: Zero Dawn, it’s very hooked on the story. There were a lot of other good games in 2017, but first of all these ones were remembered.