App2Top.ru I conducted a live broadcast with Kirill Zolovkin, an indie developer and founder of the Heart Core studio. We discussed the problem of the shortage of personnel in the Russian game market, the nuances of development for PC and consoles, and also talked about the pros and cons of the GameMaker engine.

The other day App2Top.ru conducted a live broadcast with Alexey “Flazm“ Davydov, an indie developer and head of the studio of the same name. We talked in detail about the development of the Time Loader physical puzzle, the mechanics of the game and the difficulties encountered in the process. They also discussed working with publishers, the modern indie scene and budgets.

On October 20, a space western from Alawar was released on Steam. The novelty is called They Always Run. Its unique feature is a hand—drawn visual style. We talked about how it was created with the producer and lead artist of the game Stepan Komarov.

Downloads of the Belarusian FreePlay studio have reached almost 500 million. Most of it — 290 million — falls on the hyper-casual hit Join Clash. About the history of the studio and its approach to development App2Top.ru I talked to one of the founders and CEO of FreePlay.

The Green Grey company has become more active. After two PR campaigns — involving Zurab Tsereteli in the creation of the Mountain Goat Cup for developers and launching a program about games on Muz-TV — the company announced the first deal. She invests $4 million in a joint mobile shooter of the designer of the Corsairs series and a serial IT entrepreneur. Details about the deal and the publisher itself are in our material.

Popular video blogger Vlad Paper opens the game publishing house RedTower. His company is ready to provide any project with guaranteed organic matter of 2 million units. How it works — in conversation with App2Top.ru Ruslan Voronetsky, Business Development Director of A4 Group of companies, who manages the blogger’s non-YouTube businesses, as well as Nikolay Voronkovich, CEO of RedTower publishing house, told.

Ilya Eremeev and Maria Kochmola, with the participation of Sergey Titov and GEM Capital, launched a gaming investment fund. It’s called The Games Fund. We talked to his co—founders about how he works and what projects he is ready to invest in.

The hyper-casual games market is becoming more competitive. In mid-February, MY.GAMES announced an investment in Espresso Publishing. This is a new hypercage publisher. We talked with Zakhar Serebryannikov, CEO of the startup, and Elena Grigoryan, Marketing and Advertising Director of MY.GAMES, about what he is going to offer to the market.

Pancake Week, a festival-sale of games by Eastern European developers, was held on Steam from March 8 to 14. It was initiated and organized by Meta Publishing. We talked with Ilya Salamatov and Ilya Grabelnikov, top managers of the publishing house, about how the sale was being prepared and held.

At the end of January, the American game developer Tilting Point announced the launch of a Russian division. We talked about the new studio and the challenges it faces with the president of the company, Samir El-Agili.

What the product manager (PM) is responsible for, whether his responsibilities depend on the company, what professional qualities are important to him — we talked about this and much more during WN Winter’21 with Chong Ahn, Head of Product Management at Electronic Arts.

Flime is a young company developing instant and hyper-casual games from Belarus. In the two years since its foundation, together with Gismart, it has managed to mark five successful releases. Two of them have managed to get a total of 45 million downloads since August alone. We talked about their creation and internal processes with the co-founder of the company Artem Legonkov.

At the end of October, Belarusian Vizor Games released a new major project — Atlantis Odyssey. According to AppMagic, by the end of November, the game can reach revenue of a million dollars without advertising. We talked about the project and its development with the leading game designer of the project Ilya Marchenko.

Next year G5 Games turns 20 years old. The company is approaching the anniversary at the peak of its form. In January-September of this year alone, she earned $117 million. We talked about how the company developed with its co-founder and permanent CEO Vlad Suglobov.

In December 2019, Alawar was headed by its co-founder Sergey Zanin. We talked with him about the early years of the company, about how it grew. They also touched upon the challenges that Alawar faced, discussed the situation around Stargaze and plans for the future.

September turned out to be successful for the domestic Spaceland game. In the middle of the month, the project entered the launch line of games for Apple Arcade, and at the end it was released on Steam. We talked about the history of the game with the creative director of the studio Anton Mikhailov.

What difficulties have stood in the way of HTML5 in the recent past and what can be expected in the near future, read in our material written based on a conversation with Odnoklassniki and Playtox.

In early September, HeroCraft released the Hyperforma arcade game on the Nintendo Switch. This is one of the few Russian projects that have appeared on the site so far. We talked to the publisher about the history of the project, its porting from mobile and the difficulties the game faced during release.

On August 14, the launch of the new match-3 from Playrix — Wildscapes took place. We talked with Anton Chernyagov, who holds the position of General Manager at Playrix, about how the project was created and how it differs from the previous games in the series.