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 Vlad Suglobov, CEO and co-founder of G5 Games.
How did 2021 go for the company?
This year we celebrated our twentieth anniversary. Few companies reach such a date. We met her with 900 employees in the team and record results of the year. There have been big changes in the industry over these 20 years, but we have managed to adapt to them and continue to develop. I want to say a big thank you to all our employees — you are well done!
Also this year, as part of the option program, we divided $5.4 million among 84 employees. Now 380 people are participating in this program. In addition, we have expanded bonus programs and launched processes aimed at self-realization of employees in their own creativity, for example, on R& D projects.
We also moved to a new office in Kharkiv, made a complete redesign of the office in Kaliningrad and continued to open offices in new cities. During the pandemic, we have increased the number of remote employees, but we plan to gradually return everyone to the offices. It should be more fun if you have gone wild on the remote.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within our niche?
There are always a lot of interesting things going on in the industry. For example, it is impossible not to note the situation with app store commissions, which is gaining momentum. It is already clear that commissions will continue to decrease: through regulatory pressure, alternative payment processing, competition between platforms and active access of developers to the web.
And that’s fine. Developers and publishers will have more money, which they invest in the development of new games and marketing. That is, they will create what players generally come to the app stores for, and increase demand. Ultimately, this is beneficial to the platforms themselves — the ecosystem will develop, and the turnover of stores (and even sales of devices) will grow. Some platforms have already realized this and reduced commissions, others have yet to do so.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
Next year we will continue to work a lot with games. Now we have about 30 projects in our portfolio, most of which we actively support. By the way, in the last quarter, our own projects brought G5 70% of revenue. Another 30% was provided by games for which we act as a publisher.
Among all the games in our portfolio there are several points of growth — we will continue to develop them, increasing the audience and sales. We also have nine more games that are still in development or at different stages of the softlonch. We will continue to deal with them and expect to find new growth points among them later.
Over the past two years, our profitability has been steadily growing, including due to the reduction of fees in stores. We hope that next year our profit and turnover will grow again under the influence of the same factors. And, according to current calculations, our team should also grow significantly. So see the vacancies — there will be a lot of them!