Is there a difference between the state of affairs in the video game market and the gambling industry? This was discussed by Vladimir Nikolsky and Alexander Riddick at the recent WN Conference Cyprus’24.

In light of the upcoming release of the MMORPG Gran Saga, we had the chance to speak with the game developer — the South Korean team NPIXEL — about the country’s domestic market and what’s currently happening there.

About how the team, previously engaged in hyper-casual games, took on the development of “Sparta 2035”, a turn-based tactical game in the style of XCOM for PC — the editorial board of App2Top spoke with Gleb Durnovo, one of the founders of the Lipsar studio.

About how profitable the business of topping up Steam accounts in Russia is, whether it’s possible to enter this market today, as well as the size of the Russian gaming market and how much foreign AAA and indie titles can earn in it — we spoke with Anton Chernov, CEO of the platform KupiKod.

This is the second time this month we are addressing the topic of adult games. This time, in an interview format. We discuss the niche of “for adults” projects with Andrey Postnikov, Senior Business Developer at Nutaku.

In March, Slavania, the debut game by FrostLeaf Games studio, published by Game Art Pioneers, was released on Steam. We talked with Vladimir Averyanov, the game designer of the project, about how the metroidvania was developed based on Russian fairy tales.

On April 11, the global strategy Revival: Recolonization was released on PC in full. App2Top talked with Sergey Ulankin, head of console and PC publishing at HeroCraft, about how development was going, how successful early access was, about working with VK Play, and much more.

There is little talk about games in the Telegram messenger. We decided to fix the situation by talking with Daria Novikova, product director at PlayDeck startup. The latter launched a gaming marketplace for Telegram. In a conversation with Daria, we touched on topics such as user engagement, earnings from leading projects, monetization and, of course, PlayDeck itself.

App2Top interviewed Roman Gordy, one of the co-founders of the service, discussing the impact of relocation on the gaming industry and the favored destinations among Russian developers.

Ahead of the imminent release of the Indika third-person action game from Odd Meter, now based in Kazakhstan, we spoke with studio head Dmitry Svetlov.

In early October, a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the development of the game Vasilisa and Baba Yaga was successfully completed. The game developers from the St. Petersburg studio Baba Yaga Games received 960 thousand rubles from sponsors. App2Top talked to Asya Yurina, co-founder of the studio, about how the campaign was going.

In October, it became known that the basis of the new Russian open engine Nau Engine will be a solution from Gaijin Entertainment — Dagor Engine. App2Top talked with Andrey Karsakov, Head of Nau Engine development, about how it happened and what technologies the engine will support.

In February, the official comic book for the Shadow Fight franchise appeared on the bookshelves of the CIS. We talked with Nikita Korzhavin, Nekki‘s business development director, about how the comic was being worked on and what task it solves for the game franchise.

At the beginning of 2023, Terra Nil, an inversion construction simulator about ecology, will be released on Steam. We publish an interview with the producer of the project Ruan Rothmann (Ruan Rothmann).

About the situation in Green Grey, salaries of Russian developers and gray schemes for transferring money to the country — in an interview with Sergey Belyaev, co-founder of the Infusion Games studio.

Yesterday VK announced a change in the commission policy of the VK Play platform, whose store component is the Russian equivalent of Steam. Now developers can count on 95% of the sales of games hosted on the site. We talked in detail about the nuances of the initiative with Rodion Kotelnikov, CTO VK Play.

In mid-May, Playkot hosted the global launch of its new Spring Valley game. By June, its business metrics had reached excellent values: the percentage of those paying was 7.7%, and the retention of the first day for organics was 41%. We talked about the history of Spring Valley and the specifics of its development with the producers of the game — Evgeny Smirnov and Konstantin Popov.

In November 2020, Saber Interactive, a subsidiary of Embracer Group, acquired a 100% stake in the Italian studio 34BigThings. We contacted Valerio Di Donato, CEO of 34BigThings, to discuss the implications of the takeover for a studio that has always prided itself on its freedom and “strangeness.”

How many times has the number of “Allods Online” registrations increased in recent weeks, how things are going in the store with premium projects, why does he need browser games with advertising monetization – we talked about this and much more with Rodion Kotelnikov, the head of MY.GAMES Store.