Epic Games has officially announced the opening of the Berlin office. It will be headed by Paw Larsen and Sergey Galenkin. The first will be responsible for Western Europe, the second for Eastern Europe. We talked with Sergey Galenkin about what exactly the office will do.
Hi! Epic Games already has one office in Europe – it is located in the UK. Why did the company need another one – in Berlin?
Sergey Galenkin, Head of Publishing for Eastern Europe at Epic GamesHi !
The British office is engaged in Unreal Engine and user support, and the Berlin office will be engaged in publishing games. Plus, the Berlin office is focused on Western and Eastern Europe, so it made sense to place it close to both regions. Berlin turns out to be geographically almost in the center of Europe, a convenient connection is everywhere, that’s why we chose it.
You said that he would be engaged, first of all, in publishing. Do I understand correctly that the office that you headed will not be engaged in promoting the engine at all?
The situation is like this: officially, yes, we are exclusively engaged in publishing, but since Epic Games is a fairly small company, so we are doing everything slowly. We help the team that deals with the engine (this team is in London) in working with teams from Eastern Europe, but, of course, the main burden is on Londoners.
And what is meant by publishing? Publishing only your own projects? Or is Epic already starting to enter a new area for itself – the publication of third-party games?
Let’s just say that publishing our own games is also a new area for us, this is the first time we are publishing our own game. Paragon is the first time when we launch our game ourselves, without a publisher, without any help. Moreover, we launch it immediately on PC and consoles. So far, there is no question of publishing games by other developers.
Is it possible to say that the success of the Paragon publishing experience depends on whether you will move towards positioning yourself as a publisher or not?
It’s too early to think about it. So far, our priority is to assemble a team for work (we have just started forming an office, we are just hiring people). Besides Paragon, we have three other big projects coming up: Fortnite, Spyjinx and Unreal Tournament. Therefore, before we can talk about publishing third-party projects, if such a conversation makes sense at all, we would like to sort out our games. For now, the focus will be on them.
I know that the question is very popular (and it has been raised more than once): how will your appointment affect the work of SteamSpy?
My contract (in addition to it) states that I have the right to engage in SteamSpy and the podcast “How games are made”. Therefore, it will not affect in any way. Now they are affected, because I am preparing to move, I have a lot of documents and things to prepare, children still have to go to school, and so on, so I have slowed down Steam Spy a little now, but, of course, everything will continue.
I see. Thanks for the interview.