Gaijin Entertainment CEO Anton Yudintsev said App2Top.ru about the main trend of the outgoing year.
Anton YudintsevHow was 2017 for you?
This year, like the previous one, was spent on the road: I spent almost a third of the year on a plane and on business trips.
We want our games to be available in different countries, on different platforms, which means we need to travel to meet with publishers, partners and platform holders around the world.
How was the year for the company?
This year, together with Targem Games studio, we launched our new project – the post-apocalyptic online action game Crossout.
The game was released simultaneously on three platforms – PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – and in the first month gathered more than 3 million players worldwide. This is a great start, and we see that the players really liked the opportunity to design their own combat vehicles from scratch. Every day, hundreds of completely new armored vehicles appear in the game, not similar to each other.
We regularly add new details so that players have even more opportunities to create the car of their dreams, as well as new combat modes where players could fully enjoy their creation in action.
Crossout
Launching new projects, we also continue to actively develop the current ones.
War Thunder celebrated its fifth anniversary this year, received two new nations (Italy and France), new maps, new modes, several hundred models of military equipment, and is also preparing for release on Xbox One and Xbox One X.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
The highlight of this year for me was the loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront II, they also marked the main trend of this year.
Paid games have long begun to borrow monetization tools from freeplay, moving away from the classic game +DLC model. This is explained by the fact that budgets for development and advertising are growing, and prices for the games themselves are not increasing, since a significant increase in cost would inevitably lead to a drop in sales.
Loot boxes are popular in shareware games. Just one properly assembled “chest” can provide an average monthly revenue in a frituplein MMO in a few days. It is not surprising that the developers of premium games decided to try out such an effective method of monetization. They experiment with different approaches, some attempts are more successful, some cause more negativity in the community.
EA chose, perhaps, the toughest monetization, actually combining elements of gambling (loot box) with paytuvin in a paid premium game, and it hardly turned out to be a good idea. But there is no doubt that this trend, and that the consequences of such decisions will remain with us for a long time.
Star Wars Battlefront IIName the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
Game of the Year – PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS. This is not the first game in the battle royale genre, but the first so successful. First of all, thanks to the excellent replayability of matches. Every next match is different from the previous one. In addition, unlike the usual survival games, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is a very dynamic session action movie, where the first collision is only a few minutes away.