Dmitry Terekhin, the founder of Nekki, told App2Top how 2020 was for his company. He also shared the direction in which his company will develop next year.
Dmitry Terekhin
How was 2020 for the company?
A year has passed for us under the sign of the release of a very important project — Shadow Fight Arena. This is a new fighting game in the Shadow Fight universe. Its distinctive feature is synchronous PvP, which all our players have been dreaming about for many years and which we have been working on for many years. We told you more about SF Arena in a separate big interview.
After the worldwide release in November, we received the first million installations fairly quickly as part of the project, but there is still a lot of work ahead on both engagement and monetization. What can already be said: the audience perfectly accepted the new project, in both stores high ratings — 4.5 and above.
Our program for creating realistic Cascadeur animations is also making progress. We have launched an open beta test and provided an opportunity for all developers to use animations made in the OBT version for free in their projects. Several major studios have already included Cascadeur in the pipeline of development.
We have also released new training videos on the YouTube channel - there are already more than 40 of them there. I am glad that a really interested community gathers around Cascadeur, which gives a lot of useful feedback. We have 15,000 subscribers on YouTube alone.
We continue to develop Shadow Fight 3. We are trying new mechanics and customization. There were worries that the Arena release could cannibalize SF3's revenue and audience, but at the moment we don't see this — the third part earns the same money as before the release of the new game.
Together with our partners from Banzai Games, we continue to grow actively. The total number of specialists who work on our projects has exceeded well over 200 people. As a result, the quality of development and the overall growth of professionalism of all teams. This made it possible to defeat a long-term task with real PvP, and make a cool bot for Arena based on neural networks, and generally increase the level of development on all fronts.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
On the one hand, we remain in our niche (fighting games), but on the other hand, we enter a new niche (synchronous PvP) and are just starting to figure out how everything works here. For example, in Shadow Fight Arena, we launched a Battle Pass, a subscription, and we are learning how to sell various cosmetics (skins, taunts, emojis).
In general, we see in midcore that competition is growing, and there are fewer organics. Our games have always received a lot of organic traffic, but every year it gets harder to work with virality. These problems are a new challenge for us, so now we want to focus on areas such as analytics, monetization, live ops, and, of course, strengthen marketing. We are looking for strong specialists both at Shadow Fight Arena and for our new projects, and we are also open to sharing our experience with other companies.
What new market trends would you note in general?
The main trend of the year is, of course, covid. Our developers switched to the remote back in mid-March. And today we continue to work remotely. I will not say that we have not experienced any problems during this period. In any case, this is a stressful situation for most guys who are used to working in the office side by side with their colleagues. Of course, on the contrary, someone's efficiency has increased, but at the same time, someone began to burn out faster due to the inability to communicate live. Nevertheless, we quickly adapted all the processes to the new conditions. It also helped that the development of Shadow Fight Arena was already in the final stages.
But we are still afraid that in the long run, remoteness will affect creativity (since spontaneous communication is not so important for her). We are now looking for ideas of activities that can at least partially smooth this out. So, for example, in January we will hold our next GameJam.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
In addition to developing and scaling the Shadow Fight series on the mobile platform, we plan to launch on PC and consoles in the next few years.
We are also starting production on a new Spine project. In the spring, we released a teaser of the game, thereby marking our new focus for the next few years. Spine is a session—based team fighting game in open arena locations in a cyberpunk setting. The real PvP mode will be the basis. There are six players in the arena at the same time, divided into two teams. Each character has unique melee and ranged combat abilities. Also, Spine's feature will be the cinematic graphics and spectacular animations that we create with Cascadeur. More importantly, we plan to release Spine immediately on mobile devices, PCs and consoles.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
I liked Legends of Runeterra, a very well-made game. I am also waiting for the mobile release of MTG.
As it is, I mostly play Shadow Fight Arena. The game turned out to be really cool, and our employees continue to play enthusiastically, despite the fact that almost a year has passed since the beginning of the PTA.
Well, I was really waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 before the release. I hope the game will remain popular for a long time. This will help the success of our Spine.