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 Pavel Prokonich, CEO of HeroCraft.
How did 2021 go for the company?
The year was a whirlwind. It would seem that only yesterday I wrote the results of 2020, and now it’s time to sum up the results of the year again.
We have grown up seriously. Our office, which once seemed large and spacious, is now cramped. And this is despite the fact that a significant proportion of employees work remotely.
This year we have also built a completely new division of games with advertising monetization. As a result, we have learned to squeeze the most money out of such games and buy the right users for them in a chic plus. That is, we have built a whole new business within the company.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
One of the interesting points: personnel hunger forced us to organize internal internships. A completely new experience for the company, we have never trained people systematically before. But in the current situation, it is often more profitable and faster to train a person from scratch than to look for a ready-made one in the labor market.
It turned out that often soft skills are more important than professional skills. And I am very glad that we have cases when employees make a rapid career in a year from “june” to the head of their team.
Two events that have significantly affected the landscape of the industry:
- The story with advertising identifiers on iOS has led to the fact that almost half of the mobile games market has lost the ability to track the effectiveness of advertising budgets spent. Perhaps someone won from this controversial innovation, but the vast majority, including phone users, lost. I’m sure of it. It has become extremely difficult to promote niche games.
- Very cheap money poured into igrostroy. The industry has caught a not very good euphoria. It seems that a huge number of players in the market have lost their heads and stopped thinking about financial efficiency in principle. Allegedly, there is no point even trying to work in a plus — it is much easier to gain investment, and then we’ll see. The hangover for the industry, I think, will be severe.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
Next year — monetization, operation and marketing. We stay true to ourselves. We earn money and teach others to earn it as much as we can. We have several large projects in which we invest. We plan to bring most of them to release.
On the rights of advertising. We really need a marketing lead in the PC direction to promote our portfolio of future PC games. Brilliant man, respond!