After two years of development, a new project by Nekki and Banzai Games, the mobile fighting game Shadow Fight Arena, has been released worldwide. We talked to the founders of the companies about how the game was being developed and why it is their first major step towards consoles and multiplatform.
App2Top.ru : Congratulations on the release of Shadow Fight Arena. The first question is about expectations. In 2017, the launch of Shadow Fight 3 raised Nekki’s revenue three times. Are there any similar expectations from Shadow Fight Arena?
Dmitry Terekhin — CEO and founder of Nekki
Dmitry Terekhin (Nekki): We hope SF Arena will become our most successful project of the series. As for the results of Shadow Fight 3, it is not entirely correct to evaluate them in this way. Firstly, the development of the third part cost much more than any of our other projects. Secondly, by the time of the release of the third part, the revenues of our flagship Shadow Fight 2 were already much less than at the start.
Shadow Fight 2 (2013)
However, what can be said for sure: yes, Shadow Fight 3 is a financially successful project. But he did not fully meet expectations.
How is it?DMITRY: We were hoping for bigger downloads and better feedback.
But the game was still a blockbuster.
DMITRY: Definitely. But Shadow Fight 3 was tougher on monetization. Apparently, because of this, not everyone was ready to play it as actively as in the previous part.
When we took up Shadow Fight Arena, we wanted to make a game that would be more popular, would be better perceived by players.
At the start of work on Shadow Fight Arena, did you start from this in the first place? From the concept of “We want less donation”?
Dmitry: No, of course not. Far from just that.
When we first started making SF Arena, we conducted a survey of Shadow Fight 3 players, asked what they would like most (in the new game).
We have implemented all the items that they have chosen to one degree or another in SF Arena. This is real PvP, and the opportunity to play directly with a friend, and heroes, and bosses from Shadow Fight 3, as well as certain improvements in core gameplay and depth.
Back in SF Arena, we were very eager to cope with the problem of quickly eating out content and mechanics. In a couple of days, hardcore players managed to see everything in Shadow Fight 3 and, even more critically, understand all its subtleties. Because of this, retention suffered.
Shadow Fight Arena is a game with more depth. It’s not just about shifting the focus from single to synchronous PvP, which simply wasn’t there before. Everything in general has become more complex.
Can you give an example?
DMITRY: In Shadow Fight 3, you have only one hero who changes his weapons, uniforms. At the same time, he himself does not change throughout the game.
In SF Arena, there are 15 different heroes at the start, each of which has unique abilities that open up as you level up. And everyone needs to learn how to play in order to assemble a balanced team to fight against a real opponent.
Let’s say one hero enters “Immortality” after death (he can fight for so many seconds and not receive damage); another has shadow abilities, and he quickly accumulates shadow energy; the third, on the contrary, takes shadow energy from rivals.
Moreover, the abilities of each hero will counter each other, so after a week and a month of the game, something new will constantly open up for the user. It will be necessary to master new techniques and new strategies.
What you say sounds, among other things, like working on mistakes. Why was it impossible to do all this within the framework of the distribution of the third part? Why did you decide to do a separate project, and not change Shadow Fight 3?
Dmitry: In many ways, this is really work on mistakes. But very global.
When we did Shadow Fight 3, we switched to 3D. It was a huge and difficult job. We didn’t have time to do a lot of what we wanted.
Shadow Fight 3 (2017)
Now, taking into account our understanding of the genre, we have made a completely different game. It even differs in genre. Shadow Fight 3 is a role-playing action movie, a PvE game, and Arena is a PvP, close to classic fighting games
They are united only by gameplay, combat control and content graphics.
Evgeny Dyabin — owner of Banzai Games
Evgeny Dyabin (Banzai Games): There are too fundamental differences between the games. I will add one more important point to what Dima said. The old one was tied to inventory, the new one was tied to characters. It couldn’t be hung on top.
The project was done for two years, right? How was the process going?
DMITRY: About that. We rocked for a long time.
The main problem of development was the lack of people, because we continued to make Shadow Fight 3, added new chapters and new modes. We had a dilemma all the time: either pull important people out of SF3, or hire new ones. And it is very difficult to find specialists with the experience we need. In fact, until the fall of last year, we were just assembling a team.
Secondly, initially we did not plan to seriously change the project in technical terms. We expected to just take the Shadow Fight 3 technical engine and file everything on it.
Along the way, it didn’t work out that way. I had to rewrite it very much.
Why?DMITRY: On the one hand, it required a number of innovations. On the other hand, we didn’t want to maintain two branches in parallel so that we could do many things for Shadow Fight 3 a second time.
In general, we had to bring the engine into the general code and make it cleaner, supported by both projects, and also embed PvP there. It was a very big job.
Do I understand correctly that after the release of Arena there is a plan to make the long-promised synchronous PvP for Shadow Fight 3?
DMITRY: Perhaps it will appear at some point as an additional mode. Maybe in the form of events.
Aren’t you afraid that there will be cannibalization?
Dmitry: No.
Firstly, as I said, these are games of two different genres. In Shadow Fight 3, you play alone, go through the plot using a personal set of weapons, fight for a rating in asynchronous PvP, that is, you play with bots. In SF Arena, you play in real time with your three characters against the characters of another player, using unique skills.
Secondly, in SF Arena PvP is the main mode, and in Shadow Fight 3 it will be optional and available only within the framework of events.
Thirdly, it is not so important to us whether people play Shadow Fight 3 or Shadow Fight Arena. Someone will play both games at the same time. Some payer, having bought enough in one game, may then want to pay again for something in another game. So I don’t see any problems here.
Moreover, we already had such an experience with Shadow Fight 2. When Shadow Fight 3 came out, SF2, of course, sank in audience, but it still had a very large part of users who continue to play today, and we continue to make updates.
A little earlier, you mentioned the difficulties with the development of Shadow Fight Arena in terms of personnel. Was that really a problem?
DMITRY: I wouldn’t call it a problem. We were just going to form a separate large team.
The guys from Banzai Games and I have never done more than one big project in parallel before. If some were done in parallel, they were smaller.
Here it turned out that we immediately led Shadow Fight 2, Shadow Fight 3, started SF Arena in parallel and took up prototyping another project.
It was necessary to rebuild a lot.
Shadow Fight Arena (2020)
How much have you increased over the past year?
DMITRY: 50 percent for sure.
How many of you are there now?
DMITRY: More than 200.
How hard was it to recruit people? After all, almost no one makes fighting games in Russia (only Sperasoft, which prepared Mortal Kombat and Injustice, comes to mind).
Evgeny: We have never been able to find anyone with experience in fighting games on the side.
DMITRY: We prefer to look for game designers among those who love fighting games and have some kind of affectation in them. It is not necessary that they do them earlier. The main thing is that they like it, that they play it.
We started talking about hiring when we started talking about the complexities of development. Let’s continue the topic of difficulties. If we compare the development history of Shadow Fight Arena with the history of Shadow Fight 3, what turned out to be more difficult to do, what is easier, what new challenges have you faced?
Evgeny: Shadow Fight 3 is a single—player game, it’s much easier to adjust the balance. There are bots, they can behave as we want.
When testing PvP, it became clear that its balance requires more depth of core gameplay, more nuances. In general, making a good PvP game is even more difficult at the level of game design. This was the first challenge.
The second challenge is also related to PvP, but at a technical level. One thing is a single—player game, another is a multiplayer game, where, despite the mobile Internet, everything should be played well online.
These were the main challenges when working on Shadow Fight Arena. One is game design, the second is technical.
DMITRY: When creating SF Arena, there were fewer difficulties. In Shadow Fight 3, we first did the core, and then the same people switched to meta because there were not enough frames. And after that, the bark was dealt with to a lesser extent, from which the project suffered as a result.
During the creation of Shadow Fight Arena, we were able to immediately parallelize these tasks, fully engage in both core and meta.
In terms of production, the story with Shadow Fight Arena also turned out to be simpler. If in Shadow Fight 3 all the resources were spent on creating content, then here the content has already been created in many ways. It was possible not only to create new content in parallel, but also to refine and improve the one that already exists.
A little earlier you mentioned that you are doing another big project in parallel with Shadow Fight Arena. This is also a fighting game and when working on it, do you also start from the technical base of Shadow Fight 3?
Evgeny: No, we are not pushing off. The project is called Spine. We announced it in May of this year. Spine is a session team fighting game with real PvP at arena locations in a cyberpunk setting. At the same time, there will be two teams of three players each in the battle. The player will be able to choose from a variety of characters with unique fighting styles and abilities for melee and ranged combat. Special attention will be paid to the entertainment of the fights and the animation that we create with the help of Cascadeur.
Spine is hard to call a fighting game in the classical sense, because a classic fighting game is “one-on-one, side view”. And here — “three by three, a third-person view.”
But here everything, of course, depends on what can be called a fighting game and what not.
For example, can For Honor be called a fighting game? Many people think that this is a fighting game, although not a classic one.
Spine
Dmitry: I think we can be called an action.
Evgeny: Yes. I just don’t want them to think that this is a shooter. Our project has a lot of melee, a lot of combinations, special techniques. There is shooting, of course, which looks just like in a shooter.
For example, in Devil May Cry, you can shoot with one button, and beat with the other with a sword. You can combine a sword and a cannon. But it’s beat ’em up because he beats a lot of mobs. But if there was a PvP, where three dudes from Devil May Cry beat the other three from Devil May Cry, then it would be closer to a fighting game after all.
Action arena.
DMITRY: An action arena, yes.
How do you see the mobile fighting game market today? Doesn’t it seem niche to you and isn’t that why you are going to enter a new genre of multiplayer action games within the framework of a new project?
Evgeny: I don’t have any specific analytics on my hands right now.
I think that the concept of “fighting game” in mobile today has blurred.
There are classic fighting games on consoles — Mortal Kombat, Tekken and others. These are very hardcore projects. There are also experiments. For example, there was a fighting game without complex combinations under the Naruto franchise.
On mobile devices, everything is more complicated. For example, mobile Mortal Kombat is like a fighting game, but in fact… unclear. There is no way to move or type complex combinations. The game is very casual.
We see our project as a fighting game, which is close to the canonical console. In this direction, the games of the Shadow Fight series have a lot to develop. SF Arena is a great demonstration of this, a good step forward. And, more importantly, we are unlikely to run into the ceiling with him in business terms, remaining in the niche of fighting games.
But from the point of view of design, yes, the framework of fighting games for us today is becoming narrow. That’s why we are taking a step towards action games.
SF Arena, as far as I understand, will be a multiplatform project at the same time. And where will Spine go, will it be mobile?
DMITRY: Conversely.
SF Arena is initially a mobile project, but we are doing a test run on the console and PC.
As for Spine, in terms of management, yes, we will first sharpen it for mobile, so that there are a stick and two buttons, not ten, but at the same time we immediately plan to stick to the console version as the main one. Accordingly, we will immediately develop console-quality content.
In short, SF Arena is a battle exploration, and with the new project we want to explore the console market more thoroughly.
Shadow Fight Arena (2020)
So SF Arena is a preparatory project for Spine?
DMITRY: Here you want to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, this is really a platform for testing some things and preparing the next project. But, on the other hand, those who have already played SF Arena say that it is much more interesting and deeper than Shadow Fight 3. I think it has a great future.
Evgeny: I would say that this is how we planned the test project, in which we will cut the content and make it relatively economically. But now we see that it turns out to be a really cool game, much better than we originally expected.
Therefore, I would not say that this is just a test project, with which we will now break through and test everything. No. This is a game that we have high hopes for. I do not know what will happen with Spine, but Arena is something that, according to our estimates, now has great potential. To perceive it as something in between simply does not turn the tongue.
How did the softlonch and the SF Arena world release go?
DMITRY: Good. During the softlonch, we were afraid that there would be big problems with PvP, but it really plays, and it’s cool. Therefore, we decided a month and a half before the world release to release the game immediately in Russia, as we were confident in the quality of the project. As a result, everything that users asked us to add to the release, we already had plans.
The world release took place on November 3 and was also stable. We have collected quite a lot of pre-registrations on Google Play, received very good features in both stores and are just now sorting out the feedback of players. There is also a useful negative feedback, which we will work on in the next updates, but in general, the game has received a lot of positive ratings in all countries.
Players like heroes, they like to discover them and discuss which heroes are opposed to whom, which abilities for which hero should be used correctly. A large number of videos with top characters are being released. Therefore, so far everything is, ugh, ugh, good. Of course, I am glad that the players already have a desire to pay. But at the same time, the game, it seems to me, is perceived more or less honest. And if in Shadow Fight 3 users complain about the developers that the game slows down their progress, then in SF Arena there are many complaints about the behavior of other players. For example, those who go too much into defense, run away, block or spam with some kind of blows. But we are also, of course, ruling over these problems.
What do SF Arena pay for? Is it not pay-to-win?
DMITRY: We followed the Clash Royale model in terms of monetization of pumping.
In Clash Royale, you can unlock and upgrade new heroes faster for money, but you’re still playing PvP. This is not an action game with progress, in which you rested on a boss who kills you with one blow, then you paid, you killed this boss with one blow, rested on the next one, he also bends you down, you pay again… We don’t have that.
In SF Arena, you play with those who are your equal in rating. Of course, access to a more interesting hero can give an advantage, but only if you play well and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent’s heroes. There will be no such thing that you took and started bending someone down-humiliating them simply because you paid more.
At the upper levels, players are leveling up and competing purely on skill. Plus, in the future there will be events, tournaments, where pumping also does not play a role — therefore there will be a pure skill.
We are also experimenting with customization, with cosmetics. We have a great demand from users for emojis during the fight, so that you can send all sorts of animations to your opponent. Starting or winning stands, teasers… With the release of the game, a battle pass is available, which has already been well received by players. I really like the skins that we managed to make for some characters and will continue to add for others.
Shadow Fight Arena (2020)
At maximum pumping, are all the heroes more or less equal?
DMITRY: Yes.
Both the balance and monetization will not depend on the platform? Will it be possible to play on PC and on console with mobile players?
DMITRY: We don’t know yet. We will try. We would like to make it possible to play. But perhaps we will get some experience that will show why it is not worth doing this.
Evgeny: But, actually, it’s important. If online is shared, then there are fewer problems with matchmaking. On the other hand, the quality of the game may differ on the gamepad and on a mobile device. Therefore, it may be worth dividing.
And when will the release be on consoles and PC? Or will you polish the mobile first and then gradually switch to other platforms?
DMITRY: There are just not enough people for this right now. Especially programmers. But we are still aiming for both ports to be released next year.
Who on mobile do you see as a competitor among PvP games?
DMITRY: It seems to me that Clash Royale and Brawl Stars can be considered to some extent our competitors.
Evgeny: I don’t know if it’s worth it. They are perceived as games of a completely different genre.
DMITRY: When we interviewed users who participated in the PTA, “What else are you playing?” on mobile, the answers most often came across Brawl Stars, Clash Royale and PUBG. So, I think we are quite competitors. At least for the attention of the players.
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