Results of 2017: Andrey Zimenko from Wargaming about the main thing for the year

Andrey ZimenkoHow was 2017 for you?

For me, 2017 turned out to be one of the most productive and eventful. This is an announcement and active work within the framework of Wargaming Mobile, a lot of useful conferences and new meetings, good growth of existing projects, a number of new deals and new challenges.

And now about everything in order.

One of the key personal moments: I recently returned to Moscow after several years in Minsk, I began to see my old friends and colleagues in the industry more often, and I am very happy about it.

Since the beginning of the year, I have been regularly launching Mavic Pro and honing my skills. I managed to fly over the Caribbean islands, London, Cyprus and in the national parks of California. Of course, there were also drone accidents (the current Mavic is already the second in a row).

This year was also eventful in terms of the number of conferences in which it was possible to participate. He expanded the network of contacts that allowed him to open a number of publishing opportunities and attract good and professional guys to his team. Separately, I want to note the increased quality of the DevGAMM and White Nights conferences. Productive networking, increased scale, world–class speakers and new conference locations – the organizers are doing their best to ensure that the gaming industry in our region works as efficiently as possible. Thank you!

How was the year for the company?

With the formation of the Wargaming Mobile department, which worked for some time in stealth mode and was announced by me in June at White Nights, we have greatly increased our activity in the mobile industry on all fronts: M&A, publishing deals, internal development. To put it briefly, 2017 is the year of scaling the mobile direction within the company. We aim for 2018 as the year of launching new products and expanding our presence on mobile platforms.

This year we opened the Wargaming Mobile HQ office in Berlin, founded a development studio in Moscow, and we were joined by a studio in Copenhagen that specializes in casual games. Moreover, just a few days ago we announced a strategic partnership with Gunslinger studio from Los Angeles, which is working on an excellent RPG game for mobile platforms.

Of the upcoming major product launches: the global release of the mobile World of Warships, which will take place soon enough. This is a big event for us, because the mobile audience will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the same ship gameplay on their mobile devices. Of course, we adapted the gameplay to make it a pleasant and interesting experience.

World of Warships Blitz
If we talk in detail about what I was doing with my team, then it should be noted that in 2017 we very successfully scaled the Gods and Glory strategy, which we are working on together with Friday’s Games under a publishing contract.

Reached #1 Top Grossing Overall in the RU App Store and got into the top ten most profitable games in 25 more countries. This is a very good result, and we do not plan to dwell on it.

Gods and Glory
At the end of October, Wargaming opened a mobile development office in Moscow.

At the moment, this is one studio, within which we managed to assemble an excellent team with a rich and versatile experience. Now the guys are working on a cool new project, which we will announce next year. Actually, the development of the Moscow office will be my main priority in 2018. Taking this opportunity, I would like to invite professionals to join our team: we still have a number of vacancies open in our friendly team. Vacancies are here.

We also continue to consider various options for partnerships with independent developers, in particular publishing deals. In June, we launched a publishing program together with Amazon, DeltaDNA, AppsFlyer and Unreal. As part of the program, we help talented developers with launching games into an effective softlonch. We do this without obligations, simply providing a number of high-quality services for product analytics, marketing attribution, as well as to the Unreal Dev Network for those projects that are being developed on Unreal. This is how we find new games for ourselves, expand our network of contacts and are ready to offer the publishing house to the games participating in the program that have shown good results in softlonch.

What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?

I think this question will break records for the number of identical answers, but I can’t answer it any other way – PUBG. This project has once again demonstrated that no matter how saturated the game market and competition is, there will always be a place for an original project with fresh gameplay. And the main role is played not by the development budget or the developer’s company, but by the player experience.

Obviously, the genre of “battle royale” games will receive very active development in 2018. It will be interesting to observe the development of the genre, how developers will monetize such gameplay using the freeplay model, and what kind of distribution the genre will receive on mobile devices. NetEase, for example, already has several PUBG clones on mobile, here they are ahead of Tencent.

I myself haven’t had time to play PUBG properly yet. I plan to catch up on the New Year holidays.

What trends of the outgoing year would you note?

The main trend, of course, does not apply to games, although games began to occur in one form or another: blockchain in general and cryptocurrencies in particular. About bitcoin, for sure, grandmothers are already talking at the entrance. And it’s a little scary.

If we talk about the gaming industry, then in addition to PUBG, I would call the following trends:

1) The appearance of full-fledged and high-quality mobile-first MOBA. Five by five, three lines, combinations of objects, and all this with a very convenient control system that allows you to get the feeling of a full-fledged MOBA on your mobile device. Examples: Arena of Valor (formerly Strike of Kings), Mobile Legends.

Mobile Legends
A number of such MOBAs are still in the softlonch, and I am sure that their number will grow greatly, but the cost of launching a project in this niche will be extremely high, given which players are competing in it now, as well as what quality level they have already set.

2) Another trend worth paying attention to in the CIS region, and which I consider very useful for the industry as a whole, is the activation of large companies and private investors in the direction of investing money in startups and mature independent teams.

In the last few years, there has clearly been a shortage of active players in this field, as a result of which it was quite problematic to attract money for development or find a publisher for free-play games (including). Not to mention the strategic investor, whose main value is the expertise that the team gets access to.

This is one of the reasons why we started developing the mobile publishing and M&A direction within the framework of Wargaming.

It’s great that such initiatives take place, which creates the ground for the emergence of new cool teams and projects!

Name the projects of this year that you liked the most.

Of the mobile projects I really liked:

• Strike of Kings is a MOBA from Tencent, which looks like it will soon take a dominant position in this niche, and not only in China, where it has already happened. The first mobile MOV that I play with pleasure.
• Last Day on Earth: Survival is a very good and fresh combination of survival and role–playing game for the mobile market. “Kefir!” – great fellows, I follow the development of the project with interest.

Have a nice holidays to all and go ahead in 2018!