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 Nikita Guk, CEO and co-founder of Hoopsly.
How did 2021 go for the company?
We started only at the end of last year, then until the middle of spring we assembled a team and set up the main processes. So 2021 passed like any startup — it was intense. There were difficulties, but at the same time it was interesting. I had to juggle 10 things at the same time and at the same time accumulate expertise in the company in all directions at once — from the optimal development process to the purchase of traffic. As a result, we managed to pump up various skills and look at a number of internal processes in a new way.
Working with the team was one of the main priorities of this year. We didn’t so much strive to grow up quickly as we were burning with the idea of bringing cool people together. Therefore, we worked especially carefully with hairing. Thanks to this, we have achieved almost zero turnover and high performance with a small team. It sounded like a typical corporate cliche, I know.
Otherwise, we were focused on working on hyper-casual projects, running in and testing the main processes, screening out prototypes.
I don’t want to brag about any results until there are billions of installations, so we will postpone this moment for the foreseeable future. I will only note that during the year we sent some of the projects to the release, pumped several million installations with a positive ROI and collected a huge amount of information for subsequent analysis. The latter turned out to be the most valuable experience. There are some successes, but I don’t want to reveal my cards ahead of time.
From the interesting: we began to consider midcore and casual projects for publishing and M&A. At the moment, several similar projects are just at the stage of our internal tests.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
The main thing is that hyper—casual has not lost its position and is still flying into the tops. At the same time, hyper-casual projects are becoming more common, in which there are elements of casual projects. The “tail” of revenue from such projects is much larger than that of most simple hypercausals (unless, of course, hits are taken into account).
In general, the industry is actively moving towards hybrid mechanics. Interesting combinations of familiar genres sometimes give a new experience. This is especially noticeable for casual projects.
Yes, I wonder how the work with the mislids will go in 2022. Advertising platforms are now much stricter in tracking such content in creatives.
IDFA’s “ban” is a massive turn towards personal data security. Apple made it possible to prohibit applications from tracking user data, which added a headache to the entire game rendezvous. This has had a particularly strong impact on those teams that are engaged in midcore and casual titles.
Marketing and analytics have been involved in development before, but now their integration into processes should be even stronger.
The hype around NFT, which has already started to decline in the field of art, has rapidly gained momentum in our industry. In-game items were traded on forums even before the advent of blockchain, and now this story can reach a completely different level by attracting additional capital.
About metaverse, I think we can not talk?
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
For tests, tests and more tests. We will experiment a lot with marketing and accumulate expertise (we consider it one of the priority points of growth). By the way, as practice has shown, CTR tests are becoming less relevant. We made the right choice, deciding not to focus on them in our workflow.
There are also plans to continue developing the GC-direction. However, we will move on — to enter the market of casual and midcore games. This will be a new challenge for us and, hopefully, will give us a lot of interesting stories for the results of next year.
In general, the growth of the company is always a pleasure. But, of course, in order for it to go further (and go as painfully as possible), it is necessary to pay a lot of attention to internal processes. Fortunately, we are quite flexible and plan to maintain this quality not only in relations with studios, but also internally among ourselves.