Maxim Donskikh , President of Game Insight , said App2Top.ru about how successful the outgoing year was for his company.
Maxim Donskikh
How was the year for the company?
It turned out to be a great year. I would even call it a turning point. After a rather long lull, we managed to release great games – Guns of Boom and Survival Arena.
We came to the success of these games after we completely revised our product strategy and made several important strategic decisions. One of them is to stop wasting your efforts and focus on just a few games in which we see the potential to become super hits.
This is best seen in the example of Guns of Boom. For the sake of the idea of making the best mobile shooter, we had to curtail several other promising projects, combine and reformat several teams. But the result was worth it: I won’t list all the achievements, but in six months since the world release, we have gained 20 million players, and according to commercial indicators in its genre, the project is one of the most successful in the world.
What is also very important for us: the successes of Guns of Boom and Survival Arena have given Game Insight a completely new audience and a new source of money. Now we can say that we have two established business lines: casual games and hardcore games.
Yes, we have not forgotten about casual games, and we are also preparing several big important releases.
In addition, this year games from our “golden collection” continued to develop and grow: projects that have been in operation for more than five years, such as The Tribez, Airport City, Paradise Island 2. For many of our franchises, the outgoing year was the best since the launch.
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
In a practical sense, I consider the launch of Facebook Instant Games to be a very important event. It is not often necessary to observe the emergence of a new global gaming platform and even more so to participate in it. This is another step towards making games the most accessible form of entertainment, increasing our audience by another billion players. Using the terminology of analysts, “we are expanding the funnel.”
For Instant Games , Game Insight has released Tribez & Pets
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
For me personally, the main trend and at the same time a big surprise was a sharp increase in the interest of developers in the genre of shooters. It seems that they have never been made in such numbers. We thought in Game Insight that some are so smart!
This was especially evident towards the end of the year, when mobile clones of PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS flooded into the market. And in general, the situation in this market is beginning to resemble [the gameplay] of the same PUBG.
The second important trend that emerged in 2017 is mobile esports. No one knows until the end what it is and how it will be, but it will absolutely be something more. Game Insight has its own understanding of this topic, which is as follows: mobile esports needs to look for its own formats, and not just copy everything from the “big” esports. That’s why, for example, we came up with the idea of making a match-watching mode in “augmented reality”.
I can’t help but note the growth of Asian markets, especially China. They should not have been ignored before, but now it is impossible at all.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
For me, the game of the year is, without a doubt, “Zelda” on the Nintendo Switch. Moreover, I have never been a fan of this series, nor a fan of Nintendo consoles, but in Breath of the Wild, the game design is simply God-level! An amazing combination of a large number of gameplay features and the intuitiveness of their use. Plus, for 100+ hours you constantly find something new, and in full confidence that you found it yourself, without prompting from the designers (which, in fact, of course, is not the case). Filigree work. And art, of course, and history, and atmosphere, and everything else is also extremely cool.