Pixonic CEO Philip Gladkov said App2Top.ru what was the outgoing year for him and his company.
Philip GladkovHow was 2018 for you personally?
The year passed very intensively: new challenges constantly appeared that had to be overcome. From the point of view of experience, it was probably the most intense in the last three years.
How was the year for your company?
The year was quite difficult. Pixonic continued to grow rapidly, War Robots turned 4 years old, continued to develop and test new games.
For the successful growth of the company, the team also needs to grow. Such a rate of growth of the necessary skills is given very hard. We made a lot of internal changes, there was an internal restructuring at the beginning of this year, but everything went well.
What event of 2018 do you consider the most important for the industry?
There are quite a lot of events, but a landmark one is definitely Fortnite’s refusal to enter Google Play and subsequent revisions of Steam commissions, and the release of a new app store from Epic Games.
It is also important that China has suspended the issuance of licenses, but at the same time, Chinese developers are seriously competing in the global market, and this must be taken into account next year.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
In general, the Russian game dev continues to burn. A lot of studios are gaining momentum and people have been invested in a large number of game studios and projects, the market is very heated, the fight for personnel is very strong. There are many changes within the management both in our company and in other companies, more and more articles from Russian developers are published on foreign portals. I think this is a healthy process and a guarantee of the competitiveness of the Russian game master in the future, as well as the opportunity to communicate more closely with foreign colleagues. In general, I am proud of Russian game development and the fact that we are part of it.
What are the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most?
At one time I actively played Guns of Glory and admired how wonderful this excel table is with a large bunch of monetization mechanics. Also, a number of hyper-casual games fascinated for a while: Hole.io , BigBigBaller and similar.
Vermintide 2 is a great dynamic game where the developers have done everything to make the game look cool, and not bother about what the game doesn’t need. When you are in the batch itself, you have no time to look around — there you will just see that the allies are waving their weapons 2-3 meters from the opponents, and they die.
Age of Conan — it was a month of a fan in a co-op, but they did not reach the plot part, it was often unclear what to do.