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 Vladimir Markin, CEO of Pixonic (MY.GAMES).
How did 2021 go for the company?
The year 2021 passed very cheerfully.
According to its results War Robots firmly holds the first place in the world leaderboard of tactical shooters (according to Sensor Tower) and is in the top 5 mobile shooters in the USA (a key market for us).
This year, the project overcame the bar of 200 million registered users, and the total revenue from all platforms for the entire lifecycle of War Robots exceeded the $500 million mark.
Today we continue to actively develop the game according to the GaAs model, regularly release new content and develop the community. We are constantly looking for new growth points for the project, which has been in operation for more than seven years.
If we talk about people, Pixonic already consists of the coolest industry professionals. In addition to several teams that are developing new projects, we have launched an R&D direction, the main task of which is to create prototypes for rapid testing of internal ideas and hypotheses on real users.
Also in the last quarter, we began active work on strengthening the corporate culture.
From the important: the War Robots team has completed work on a remaster version, within which they brought the graphics of the game to a new level by launching an Ultra-preset of the visual on the main platforms. The project team actively shared work on the remaster with the industry. We have published 12 articles about this, which have generated more than 100 thousand views of essentially technical materials. In addition to articles with reports on the remaster, we spoke at 3 conferences (DevGAMM, WN and devcom), and we are also going to release a printed book about the project soon.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
Large franchises from PCs and consoles are moving to mobile platforms, cross-platform games are trending, and high-quality graphics on mobile devices are already becoming the norm.
IDFA is the apocalypse. All market participants were put in difficult conditions, we had to return to the origins of performance marketing and adapt to the new conditions of “semi-blind” procurement. Despite all the difficulties, we have almost returned to the usual spread on iOS, and the new reality has influenced the fact that buyers and marketing analysts began to work in even closer conjunction.
NFT and blockchain. These words are increasingly heard in relation to games, there are more and more projects involving these technologies, there are many announcements about investing gaming companies in these areas. To date, in my opinion, some of the implementations so far are more like “financial pyramids”, since the growth in the value of tokens is strongly “tied” to the influx of new users and the ever-growing demand. These technologies are clearly capable of more and, I think, there will soon be many successful examples of their use in the industry.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
Expand and strengthen the War Robots team. We will continue to actively support the project using the GaAs model, look for points of further growth and expand the presence of the project on different platforms (now the game is available on the Apple App Store, Google Play, Steam, MY.GAMES Store, Amazon Store).
We will also strengthen other teams in the studio, we expect more new tests from our prototyping department: we plan to explore new niches and conduct various experiments — stay tuned.