He spoke about new trends in marketing and the company's successes on the mobile sceneAlexander Derkach, Marketing Director of Playrix.
Alexander Derkach
How was 2020 for the company?
It's been a crazy year. Oddly enough, in a good sense of the word. All 12 months are in one breath.
A few years ago, when planes were still flying and meetings were held in person, I saw the phrase "Move fast and break things" in one of the Facebook offices. Move fast and make things.»
This is how we live at Playrix: we are not afraid to dream, we are not afraid to set ambitious goals, we are not afraid to work hard, make non-standard decisions and look for new opportunities.
In general, if you look back, you realize that it turned out to be a year of realizing the accumulated potential.
The ability to work remotely appeared in Playrix back in 2015, and during this time we have perfectly configured all the workflows associated with a distributed team. Since the beginning of the pandemic, remote work has become a necessity for the entire industry, and not some special innovative feature. This has become a challenge for many companies. For us, nothing has changed, and we were fully focused on implementing the market's demand for entertainment during the quarantine period. As a result, there is a twofold increase in installations and an explosive growth in revenue for games.
Around the same time, we crossed the milestone of one and a half billion installations of our games. In the world of hyper-casual projects, this will no longer surprise anyone, but outside of it, only a few mobile companies in the world have managed to do this in their entire history.
Following the results of the first three quarters of 2020, App Annie declared us the second largest company in the world among mobile game publishers. The last time a European company did this was in 2016. At the same time, it seems that quite recently we became the third and did not even imagine that we would take the next step so quickly.
We have launched our new game, Manor Matters. It is already growing well in terms of income, but more importantly, we see a huge unrealized potential in it. We believe that very soon she will dominate the HOG genre.
But perhaps the most important thing that we have succeeded in over the past year is that we have learned to see and unlock potential: in products, in teams, in ideas. With this vision in 2020, we have been very active and fruitful in M&A. At the same time, we still believe that there are still a lot of interesting and talented teams on the market that we can help make their own breakthrough. Therefore, the M&A theme for Playrix remains one of the most important for 2021.
As a company, we have become bigger and more visible in the market. We have grown significantly in terms of the number of employees, now we are almost 3,000. It was a challenge for us not to become big and unwieldy. Now we see that we are coping with this challenge. We have retained the ability and ability to change quickly and radically, to create innovations in games, marketing and approaches to work.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
During 2020, game marketing took several more confident steps towards the UA as a service model. This is primarily the launch of new tools from Facebook and Google. There is also a clear trend towards further weakening of less "smart" second-tier channels in the gaming advertising market. As a result, a three-polar world is emerging more and more clearly: Facebook, Google, and programmatic buying. In fairness, it should be noted that the initiatives of the stores in the field of privacy can greatly change this picture already in 2021.
What new market trends would you note in general?
I think we will only understand what really happened in 2020 from an industry point of view after some time. There is a feeling that the changes have been very significant, but now we just don't fully understand them.
The pandemic has brought a whole new segment of the audience to the games. The whole story of closed cinemas, periodic lockdowns around the world as a whole is changing people's attitude to entertainment, increasingly shifting them online, creating new opportunities for games.
Following the change in the focus of people's attention online, e-com also shifts its focus, raising the level of competition in the advertising market above the usual level. As a result, to successfully cope with this competition, innovation is needed in game marketing right now. All these are system—forming changes, the results of which we will see only after a while.
Another important trend that will affect everyone is privacy. Apple is confidently moving towards the abolition of IDFA, and I think it will bring its plans to an end. One way or another, Google will have to do the same. This is likely to lead to a global restructuring of the mobile advertising industry. Of course, it will not die, but it will be a completely different industry. Small players in both the advertising and gaming industries may suffer the most from these changes.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
We see a lot of potential in the development of our current flagship games. These are huge projects whose loyal audience is very large. I won't be mistaken if I say that we don't mind doubling it in size.
In addition, we are actively continuing to develop new games. Last year, I talked about 20 projects launched in development. This year we have already actively conducted tech and soft launchies for them. Some of the projects look very cool and will be released in the very near future. In general, our goal is to be present in all genres and fight for leadership positions there. It's very difficult, but very interesting.
We also understand that we can and want to grow further as a company. Our next goal is to create an organization design where every talented industry specialist will find a team that works according to the principles familiar to him on cool and interesting products. As with remote work, we want to achieve a breakthrough here not in words, but in deeds.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
On the mobile market, the top-free charts are still occupied by hyper-casual games. As a professional, I strive to make my impression on most of the new products. But as a gamer, it's hard for me to single out something really interesting and breakthrough this year. I periodically return to various mobile RPG projects. Playing them requires a lot of free time, so naturally I drop them. And I still keep dreaming about the perfect IDLE game of a "busy man" that will just tell a story without commitment. But the market is probably too narrow, there is still no such game.
If we consider games as art, then as a gamer I still prefer console projects. In 2020, I single out the Last of Us Part 2 for myself. For me, this is not even a game, but a cultural statement. In the modern world of microtransactions and attention deficit, such projects are rare.
I will not be original, I will also mention Cyberpunk 2077. The company, whose CEO and Co-Founder on LinkedIn indicates Guardian of values in his position, could not have made a bad game. Bugs will only be fixed — and in six months everything will be fine.