MyTona Founders Alexey and Afanasy Ushnitsky told App2Top.ru about the main successes of the company for the current year.
Alexey and Afanasy UshnitskyHow was the year for the company?
The year for MyTona as a whole went great: we entered new markets and grew a lot. This year we have laid the foundation for several new projects that will be released in 2018.
Seekers Notes has become the most successful hidden object game in the Western market, peaking in the box office Top 10 on iPad in the US, UK, Canada and EU countries. This year, the game finally entered the markets of Japan, Korea, China, Thailand and Indonesia, and we are already seeing the first positive results. We are very pleased that Seekers Notes has been included several times in holiday collections on the Apple App Store, Google Play, Microsoft Store, Amazon.
We also had an exciting event: the soft launch of our new Cooking Diary game in Canada. This is a time management project that we have high hopes for.
In addition, we have experienced a real growth spurt. In a year we have doubled (from 150 to 300 people), launched offices in Ivanovo and Vladivostok, and are preparing to launch offices in St. Petersburg and Malaysia. We moved to a new office in Singapore, as we no longer fit into the old one. And this summer we held the first internal conference – we gathered the entire MyTona team in Yakutsk for a few days. We discussed plans, shared experiences and had fun!
MyTona Internal Conference
In 2017, we not only acted as the organizer of the conference for the first time, but also shared our experience with colleagues on the shop floor throughout the year.
We have performed at seven major conferences: Casual Connect in Singapore and Seattle, Pocket Gamer Helsinki, 4C Conference St Petersburg, Devcom/Gamescom 2017, White Nights Conference Moscow, DevGAMM. We have also become platinum sponsors of Casual Connect Singapore, White Nights Moscow and DevGAMM Minsk.
What events of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
PUBG release (PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS). To go this way from a mod for Arma 3 to a full–fledged game and at the same time break all records in popularity, capturing more and more players online, is worthy of respect.
And, of course, it is worth noting separately the explosive success of the Playrix team – for the Russian game dev, this is a truly historic event that greatly inspires all developers from the CIS countries.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
It is safe to say that now AR is a new norm, a new standard. Games that were not originally created to use AR receive AR support and expand the familiar gaming experience and sensations. Apple and Google have developed platform AR frameworks to help, which is good news.
Apple’s ARKit
It is also worth mentioning the successful transfer to the mobile platform of those genres that previously enjoyed success only on the PC.
For example, Arena of Valor from Tencent this year revealed the commercial potential of MOBA on iOS and Android. The Royal Battle of Rules of Survival from NetEase Games has demonstrated the demand even on mobile for a niche that did not exist in the industry at all until quite recently. Earnings Lineage II: Revolution, in turn, showed that very soon one of the main mobile genres may be MMORPG.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
I would like to mention the game Homescapes from Playrix – a successful evolution of their own game Gardenscapes.
We can also mention two high-quality and interesting games as an example of successful adaptation of non-mobile genres on mobile devices.
First, Last Day on Earth: Survival from Kefir!. This is a game in the genre of zombie survival, which was made quite quickly and after the release quickly rose to the tops.
Secondly, Guns of Boom from Game Insight. The project is a first–person shooter, which is convenient to play, contrary to the opinion that it is impossible to implement convenient gameplay in shooters on mobile devices.
I would also like to mention The Wild Eight, a survival game from Yakut developers, which conveys the atmosphere of the harsh Yakut winter well.
The Wild Eight
An entertaining setting, a large selection of characters and excellent game mechanics – that’s what we, like many other players, liked about it.