Nikita Ivanov, Business Development Manager of the service, told about the innovations in Yandex.Games in his results of the year.
Nikita Ivanov
What was 2020 like for the company?
The year 2020 was marked by intensive growth for us – we grew more than 4 times. The number of projects in Yandex.Games has reached 3 thousand (we achieved this result in just two years).
We have been actively engaged in expanding the functionality of the service. Our goal was to increase the level of user engagement and retention.
For example, we have paid great attention to the development of our recommendation system. Yandex is a technology company, many of our services use complex algorithms for the selection of personal content (in the same "Search" and "Zen"). This year we have used all these technologies to develop a new game recommendation system on our platform. So, we began to offer users personalized collections: either games that they have already played, or games that they definitely want to play.
Game recommendations have been earned not only in the Yandex.Games service, but also in other points of contact of users with games within our ecosystem. In addition, we began to use GIFs and gameplay videos more at such points of interaction. This made it possible to immediately show people what awaits them in the game.
Additionally, we have worked out the possibility of sending game pushes in our applications: we plan to significantly expand their logic in 2021, which we will definitely tell the developers of our platform about.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worthy of attention and what new trends in the market as a whole would you note?
We are seeing a movement among developers to adapt old popular projects for mobile app stores and HTML5 technology.
We are currently focused on helping developers adapt games for both desktop and mobile audiences.
I emphasize that it is important for the development of the industry that HTML5 games have grown to the level of native games over the past few years. At the same time, they do not need to be downloaded, as before. Users are becoming increasingly aware of this convenience. This can be seen at least by the increase in conversions to the game and the increase in the time that users spend in them.
In order to better shape our company's long-term development strategy, we have conducted several major studies on the gaming market.
The first thing that catches your eye is that people don't want to dig into huge catalogs and choose. Instead, they want the right game to find them on its own. That is why we focus on the development of recommendation systems: This is how we help both users and partners who post games with us.
In addition, we noted an interesting trend in the growth of requests related to games with social interactions: against the background of the pandemic, people want more communication and support. Therefore, we are considering how to reflect this desire of users on our site. Now it's hard for people to gather with friends in the kitchen to play. We try to help them with this with the help of our technologies.
If we talk about the trends in the global gaming market, then we cannot ignore cloud gaming, the development of which we are closely monitoring.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
We will work out what users expect from us: expand the range and level of complexity of games (from hyper casual to midcore and possibly hardcore), improve the recommender, look for exclusive games and projects that cover the need for users in social interactions. We will also consider new directions within the gaming industry.
I would like to take this opportunity to invite all developers to connect to Yandex.Games, and for questions about our service, feel free to contact me. We are open to interesting partnership offers, come on!
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
If we talk about third-party projects that interested me personally, then this is, of course, Death Stranding, which became a revelation for me. This game is not entertainment, but rather a philosophical statement. In the modern world of total acceleration and simplification, there are not enough such profound works. And of course, it will be very interesting to look at Cyberpunk 2077 when I get to it.