Artur Shakalis on his dismissal from Odnoklassniki and the future of HTML5 games

The conversation was conducted by Alexander Semenov, the editor-in-chief App2Top.ru .

Arthur Shakalis

What happened in Odnoklassniki? For the whole party, your dismissal was like a bolt from the blue.

Arthur: I wasn’t ready for it either. There were no prerequisites, no “carpet calls”. Moreover, just a few weeks before my dismissal, the company paid me both a visit to the White Nights CEO Summit in Cyprus and a trip to Casual Connect.

Where, by the way, did this news find you?

Arthur: I was at a conference in London, just engaged in the promotion of the platform and the search for new projects. At this moment, they call and say that it is urgent to come to Moscow next week, that it is very important. I arrived and was told that I was fired.

How did the employer explain his decision?

Arthur: I was told a version according to which there is a rearrangement of managers between projects in Odnoklassniki so that people do not stagnate. They also decided to transfer my project — the “Gaming Section” — into the hands of another employee, but there are no projects for me in the company.

Harsh. Where are you yourself now?

Arthur: I’m in Riga.

Are you resting?

Arthur: No, I live.

When you worked at Odnoklassniki, did you work there, or did you live in two cities?

Arthur: There was no need to live in two cities.

Not everyone knows, but for the first years the main development office of Odnoklassniki was located in Riga. This has historically happened.

The author of Odnoklassniki is Albert Popkov. His first partner was a Latvian social network One.lv , founded by Vitaly Rubstein. The latter actively helped Popkov in the development after the deal. In Moscow, there was marketing and administration. Now the development is concentrated in St. Petersburg, but part of the team continues to sit in Riga.

Have you been in Odnoklassniki from the very beginning?

Arthur: I was part of the backbone.

Tell me, how did you get there?

Arthur: It’s a long story. I started in game development, at CTXM, where I worked together with Anatoly Ropotov, the current CEO of Game Insight. Under the leadership of Ropotov, the team ported casual games for Xbox 360. For example, she had a hand in such titles as Zuma, Bejeweled 2 Deluxe and Jewel Quest. As for me, I was engaged in downloadable casual toys.

For CTXM, neither casual games nor console games were priority segments. The company earned its main money from online casinos. Therefore, it is not surprising that at a certain stage our gaming division began to fall apart. I also left.

To Odnoklassniki?

Arthur: No, it happened later. After CTXM, I got to the position of producer of the same Latvian social network One.lv , which partnered with Odnoklassniki.

As a person who was originally engaged in product management, not service management, I lacked work with beautiful graphics and music. But I quickly got into a new topic. I saw the opportunities that such a model of operation provides: A / B testing, the ability to roll out a new version of the service only to a narrow sample of users, constant experiments with the audience.

And for some time I was engaged specifically in development One.lv .

When did everything change?

Arthur: In 2010, when Odnoklassniki got a game API. They understood the importance of the segment, but they had neither a strategy nor an idea of how to work further in this direction.

As the first and only partner, they chose the top social products of the i-Jet studio at that time, including “Happy Farm”. In April of the same year, they launched Farmer, and in May they went to the CREE for the first time to look for new teams.

One.lv and the “Classmates” were already working closely with each other at that time, and I volunteered to help them, because I had connections, I knew guys from the industry. Based on the results of our joint trip, they made me an offer to play games in Odnoklassniki. I agreed.

You’ve been working in a social network for eight years. You’re out of it now. How do you assess the situation with the further development of its gaming platform?

Arthur: Not eight. In total, I worked at Odnoklassniki for about six and a half years. There would be a break for about a year and a half. I was leaving for the startup Creara.

On the future of the social network. God grant that everything will be fine. I will be very upset if she works worse without me. That would mean I didn’t do my job well.

What exactly is going on in her kitchen now, for obvious reasons, I do not know. Judging by the last performance of Yegor Danilov, who became its frontline, the course remained the same, the same one that I am the author of.

What is the course?

Arthur: Further movement towards HTML5.

As Seryozha Meshchaninov said [co—founder of OverGamez studio, – approx.editors], Odnoklassniki took up the promotion of HTML5 even before it became a trend. Her first mobile gaming platform with wap games appeared almost in 2011. Therefore, we had an idea in which direction to work from a technical point of view.

But when we started working with mobile HTML5 games, we suddenly discovered that the developers themselves were not interested in it at that time.

Why? A new niche at that time!

Arthur: There was a classic “chicken and eggs” story here.

For example, I came to conferences and started campaigning for the development of HTML5 games. I was immediately asked if there was money there. I said no, but not because the audience is not ready, but because there is no content. In response, I was told that they would be ready to take up development if money appeared on the site.

Didn’t they realize that they just had a chance to become the first in a market that was still missing?

Arthur: This situation also seemed strange to me. I have seen a large number of novice and independent teams undertake to make games for iOS and Android, not realizing that they will not have the opportunity to break through there, because they do not have money for traffic. Moreover, it was often about creating complex and demanding games. I approached such teams and offered to do much simpler things, guaranteed traffic, but it still seemed to them that their path was a win-win, and what I was offering was a risk.

This continued until Facebook announced the Instant Games platform. The attention of such a major to this niche changed the situation on the market, created a trend. A large number of teams with ready-made HTML5 projects have appeared. But it didn’t completely solve our problem.

Why? You didn’t have a source of content, and now it’s not a problem to find it.

Arthur: Facebook, on the one hand, has done a very important thing for the market, but on the other hand, it has planted a big pig.

In Mail.Ru Groups today divide HTML5 games into two types. The first one is understandable to most Instant Games. These are simple gameplay games used in messengers. The second one is Direct Games. Here we are talking about projects that are deeper in mechanics, which are launched in a mobile browser.

Initially, based on the experience of working with wap games, we wanted to build a platform with Direct Games, with which it is clear how to work, how to keep an audience in them and, of course, how to monetize.

It may seem that I was very upset by the appearance of Instant Games, but this is not the case. Yes, it did not meet my expectations, my vision of how the HTML5 games market should develop further, but it gave life to the direction. Plus, when there are so many teams on the market, there is always an opportunity to persuade one of them to do something more complex.

The number of sessions and installations of Instant Games is now often bragged about, but not money. Why?

Arthur: Because they’re not there.

We are returning to the fact that, perhaps, no one should have gone in the HTML5 direction.

Arthur: Not quite. Firstly, we are talking about Instant Games, not Direct Games. Secondly, at the start, Facebook itself did not have any tools to monetize them. They have appeared only now. Thirdly, Zuckerberg did not realize a normal showcase for them.

But I would call the main problem of all Instant Games that games of this format are used incorrectly.

When you launch almost any classic game, regardless of the specific platform, then you have a link to a specific game. Everything is completely different with Instant Games. When you play games in a chat, you are already tied to a person.

For example, when you were sitting at your desk at uni and listening to a tedious lecture, you didn’t care what to distract yourself with, what to play — “Sea Battle” or “Gallows”. The main thing for you was to cut.

It’s the same story here. You first choose the person you want to play with, and then you choose the game.

And what should the developer do in this situation, how can he keep the user?

Arthur: He needs to change his attitude to the product. To abandon the idea that Instant Games can be exclusively independent projects, to assume that they can also be promotion tools.

What do you mean?

Arthur: Odnoklassniki with Game Insight came up with the concept of Game Engagement 360.

How does it work? Suppose a team has a complex three-in-a-row in a social network or mobile. Let’s say the user runs out of hearts in the game. If he does not pay for them and is ready to quit the game, he is offered to play the blitz version of the game on the Instant Games gaming platform with one of his friends.

Thus, the chat game is used as a viral mechanism.

What was the result?

Arthur: Odnoklassniki liked it, but Game Insight didn’t like it very much.

How does the audience feel about chat games in general? Did she take them at all?

Arthur: For obvious reasons, I can’t speak for Facebook. As for the situation with Odnoklassniki, everything is complicated here. For the audience that we put the games tab above, the retention of the seventh day in the social network increased from 10% to 15%. But from a commercial point of view for a social network, this story is much less profitable than, for example, the sale of stickers or even more gifts.

We have just discussed Instant Games, but have not touched on Direct Games. They are now being purposefully promoted Mail.Ru Group and Google Play. This is the niche you believe in.

Arthur: Yes, I’m sure she’ll shoot. But it’s still the same story as it was in general with mobile HTML5 a couple of years ago. There is no market as such. There are very few teams that do this. At the same time, there is an audience there.

Currently, mobile versions of social web games are mainly made for the Direct Games showcase. With a good implementation, they shoot. For example, the mobile web version of “Pirate Treasures” increased the turnover of the entire title by 10%.

At the same time, there are no successful projects without a desktop web history yet. But again, I want to draw attention to the fact that in the current situation, when we talk about the development strategy of HTML5 games, it is not necessary to separate Instant Games and Direct Games. These are two sides of the same coin. Instant Games has developers, no money. Direct Games has a lot of platforms, a lot of traffic, traditions of user retention, but no developers. We need to cooperate. In this case, Direct Games will take off faster.

When to wait?

Arthur: Here the story of games for social networks repeats itself. Before the arrival of Zynga, no one believed that Flash for the web could make a deep and interesting game for a wide audience. Their Farmville has changed the market. The game raised a layer of the audience, who did not consider themselves gamers at all. In fact, the company has created the industry of which we are all a part.

That is, we have to wait for the new Zynga?

Arthur:Yes.

Is something bothering you?

Arthur: In addition to the fact that not everyone believes in it yet, that is, the story about the “chicken and egg” is repeated again, there are real problems. Now there is no single technical standard.

Before social games, there was a similar problem in the downloadable segment. All games had to be written under DirectX 6 so that they would perform well on older machines.

This was a big problem until PopCap released its engine to the market. It was absolutely free to use. His appearance caused a wave of casual products.

Now it’s the same with HTML5, when it comes to creating complex projects, developers immediately stumble upon a bunch of problems, within which they are forced to “reinvent the wheel” each time alone. There is no single engine that everyone would develop together yet.

The situation is getting better every year. There are solutions designed to become such standards, but so far it is all at the stage of formation.

It turns out that we are waiting for a hit and we are waiting for technology. Are there any other problems that do not allow this topic to light up?

Arthur: I don’t see any business problems. So, really, we are waiting for a hit. Then we’ll live.