Vasily Maguryan, CEO of MY.GAMES, spoke about the growing interest of the market in "women's" games in his results.
Vasily Maguryan
How was 2020 for the company? What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
In 2020, MY.GAMES managed to achieve a lot: we launched 8 new games, increased the number of registered users by more than 135 million (now there are 740 million), consolidated two studios (BeIngame and Deus Craft), and invested in 9 studios.
The coronavirus pandemic had a strong impact on MY.GAMES in the second quarter, which was a record for the company. Our revenue increased by 46%, amounting to 11 billion rubles. We thought that the third quarter would not be as successful for us, but our indicators still remained at a high level (twice the growth rate of the market).
Obviously, the pandemic period dictated new working conditions: all companies were forced to send staff to remote operation as soon as possible. It was a challenge, but we managed to transfer thousands of our employees to a remote location within a week. This allowed us to fulfill all our promises that we made to release new games and content. We even entered new markets — Turkey and the Middle East.
Zero City
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
2020 has become a record holder for investments in the gaming industry. At the same time, the trend has led to another phenomenon: cash flows from companies that previously had no connection with this entertainment industry. As a result, in 9 months the amount of investments amounted to almost $ 10 billion. It must be said that large injections do not always mean high investment efficiency: due to the novelty of the market, spending of funds may be irrational for many participants. Investors sometimes don't know how to properly support developers. In MY.GAMES, these issues are handled by the MGVC profile division, which was created about 3 years ago. In 2020, MGVC invested in nine studios and consolidated two more. There are currently 34 successfully closed transactions in the division's portfolio.
Another interesting feature is the increased attention to conventionally female genres both in Asian countries and in the West. Playrix came in second place in the world in terms of revenue from mobile devices after Tencent; Animal Crossing New Horizon sold 26 million copies; in China, developers adjust the appearance of games to suit women's tastes. I think in the future we will see new genres focused on women, outside the framework of puzzles and game decorations. Animal Crossing New Horizons, like many Japanese games, is a good example of this. Our recent successes are also related to the female audience. The game from SWAG MASHA — Love Sick: Interactive Stories — entered the top 5 of all MY.GAMES games in the third quarter of 2020, and Grand Hotel Mania studio Deus Craft became a nominee for the Best of 2020 award from Google Play in one of the most prestigious categories – Users’ Choice.
Love Sick: Interactive Stories
What new market trends would you note in general?
The race of media platform games has begun. Major technology companies are actively playing with the idea of a metaverse: Epic Games, Roblox, Valve, and Facebook are taking the first steps in this direction. Roblox has grown strongly this year, confirming the thesis that content aggregation is stronger than content. They will soon enter the Chinese market, where their counterpart called Reworld is already being developed. Epic Games recently invested in Manticore Games, which makes its advanced Roblox called Core.
In consoles, the transition to next generation takes place as gently as possible. No one wants to lose millions of players on consoles capable of pulling most popular games. Interestingly, Sony and Microsoft's paths diverge in much the same way that Apple and Google's paths diverged on mobile devices. Sony focuses on the premium segment with a high entry price, while Microsoft tries to reduce the entry price as much as possible (Series S, Game Pass). The coming years will show how much such a strategy will pay off. Well, we are waiting for Switch Pro next year.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
Already, MY.GAMES is among the top 50 gaming companies in the world. Our main goal is to improve this result and get into the top 25. Our chosen course on business diversification and our portfolio, which includes games of a large number of genres on all available platforms, will allow us to do this. We will also continue to experiment and launch all new solutions and directions that will be of interest to our audience.
Warface: Breakout
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
I would single out the following projects as the most interesting and memorable:
- The Last of Us Part 2. It is now a rare case when the ambitions of developers correspond to both professionalism and budget. It seems that the multiplayer based on the TLOU2 action game with an emphasis on edged weapons, arrows and crafting will appear either next year (from Naughty Dog) or later (guess — Prologue from PUBG).
- Fall Guys. During the pandemic, the demand for simple, bright and colorful games (the same Animal Crossing) increased. We are waiting for a local co-op/splitscreen on consoles and an early appearance on mobile devices.
- Evermerge is a very talented mix of merge and farm from Neskin.
- Genshin Impact and Seven Deadly Sins are two (mostly) mobile freeplay games with a well—developed narrative. Tectonic shift for both mobile and freeplay.
And of course I play everything that MY.GAMES publishes and develops. This year we have released 8 internal developments — Warface: Global Operations and Warface on Nintendo Switch, World Above, Zero City, Dino Squad, Warface: Breakout, Grand Hotel Mania and Storyngton Hall. In addition, there is also a whole galaxy of projects where we acted as a publisher.