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 Obruchev, the head of the game direction at the Bombora publishing house.
How did 2021 go for the company?
The year 2021 was quite successful for the game direction “Bombora”.
We actively published books related to video games, and mainly focused on two categories — books about the games themselves and books about how to make games.
This year, in the category “books about games”, we published stories about Mass Effect, Doom and Zelda, released an excellent artbook on Halo (it was very successfully released on the eve of the series). We also published a comic book “Video Games. Incredible chronicles of the gaming revolution in comics”, dedicated to the history of games.
The most anticipated release for us was the new book by Jason Schreier “Press Reset”. Yes, she has not yet achieved the results of his “Blood, Sweat and Pixels”, but this may well happen.
As for the development, unfortunately, we have released fewer such books. One of the most significant events was the publication of the book “Game Programming Patterns” by Robert Nystrom. The third book on working on Unreal Engine has also been published — “Unreal Engine 4 for design and visualization”. And already, literally at the very end of the year, an updated edition of Vasily Sabirov‘s book called “The Numbers Game. How analytics allows video games to live better.”
Well, it is impossible not to mention the first book published in Russian dedicated to the game-studiz — “Igrodrom” by Alexander Vetushinsky.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
The year 2021 has changed a lot for the book industry as a whole. The main problem for publishers was the huge increase in prices for paper and printing services. Some types of paper and cardboard increased by 50%. This, unfortunately, led to an increase in book prices — by about 20%. This situation is very unpleasant for book publishing. The trouble is that, according to our estimates, the increase in prices for paper and printing will continue in 2022.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
Despite everything, we are building optimistic plans for 2022. We are going to increase the team of the publishing house’s gaming direction and are going to attract many people from the video game industry to cooperate.
Next year we are finally planning to release the long-awaited book Level Up! under the authorship of Scott Rogers. In addition, we are preparing for the release of the book Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, Slay the Dragon by Robert Bryant and Keith Giglio, Video Game Storytelling by Evan Skolnick and the book by Celia Hodent The Gamer’s Brain.
We have a lot of books in our work and from Russian-speaking authors.
In the near future, a book by Vyacheslav Utochkin and Konstantin Sakhnov, teachers of the Higher School of Business of the Higher School of Economics, will be published — “I want to go to game Dev!”. We also have two books planned from Natalia Andrianova. One of them was written in collaboration with Svetlana Yakovleva and is dedicated to narrative design, and the second one was written together with Grigory Radovilsky and tells about the basics of game design.
A book on community management from Daria Stal and Evgeny Reznitsky is also being prepared for publication. It is worth mentioning that at the end of 2022 we plan to release a new book by Alexey Savchenko.
We also intend to publish several books on the basics of working with different game engines.
We have a lot of plans related to the category of “books about games”. For example, we are preparing to release a large encyclopedia on Assassin’s Creed and two wonderful artbooks on Guardian of the Galaxy and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. We are also working on a book on the history of Devolver and a biography of Richard Garriott, the creator of Ultima.
In our flagship series “Legendary Computer Games” in 2022, we will release books on Baldur’s Gate, Resident Evil, BioShock, Final Fantasy and The Witcher.
We will continue to publish books about the history of games. There are plans to publish a book by Chris Kohler and Shuhei Yoshida called Power-Up — it is dedicated to the history of the Japanese gaming industry. Well, let’s please our readers with the Game On book! from Dustin Hansen.