We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Lana Meisak, vice president of business development, marketing and publishing at the gaming company Gismart.
How did 2021 go for the company?
This year we have focused our efforts on strengthening our positions in priority business areas. This gave positive results. Over the past 12 months, we have released and scaled more than 20 mobile and HTML5 games. One of the most successful game releases of this year:
- Body Race (50+ million downloads);
- Pencil Rush (40+ million downloads);
- Foil Turning (40+ million downloads);
- puzzle Cross Logic.
The success of the latter prompted us to form several puzzle development teams.
We have also released two new games on Snap Games — Crazy Run and Friends Quest. By the way, our first game on this site — Color Galaxy — is still the most successful game on the platform.
The indicators of our entertainment wellness applications have also increased. In particular, the flagship applications Beat Maker Go and Piano have added 20 million downloads each. In general, stable growth was shown by most of the products of the Gismart DJ line. In the wellness series, the main growth was shown by the Facetory beauty application, which in May of this year was awarded the Webby Awards for the AR Coach functionality, which allows you to monitor and adjust the performance of facial exercises.
In November, we crossed the mark of 1 billion downloads, almost half of which are games. Over the past year, our games have been downloaded about 230 million times.
As for the team, we are 320 people today. The Kiev office of Gismart has grown to 100 people, the Minsk office has been slightly reduced due to relocations and remote work, the team composition in London has remained the same. In addition, we have an office in Warsaw.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
I think we won’t be original here. We, like the entire market, were affected by the changes related to IDFA. This has significantly affected the purchase of traffic on iOS, and it has also become more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. This has made it more difficult and more expensive to run product tests on Facebook. From a positive point of view, these changes forced us to delve into other procurement channels, change and improve approaches to testing new product ideas.
In addition, we have become more likely to resort to technological marketing experiments related to attracting users using web traffic.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
In June 2021, we entered the world’s top five publishers of hyper-casual games. Our goal for 2022 (as part of the hyper—casual direction) is to gain a foothold in the top five global publishers. In practice, this means that we have to keep the mark of 60-80 million downloads per month. As for casual games, we plan to release four new titles, as well as start developing two new large-scale casual games. By the way, now we are looking for Head of Casual Games.
In the new year, we will continue to expand our portfolio of HTML5 games on Facebook Instant and Snap Games. We also plan to present our mini-games on new major social platforms.
In addition, we conducted a detailed audit of our application portfolio and decided to move towards deeper development of several products at once (among them there are both music and wellness products). The goal is to build large products—brands that have maximum value for users within the niches we are interested in.