We continue to summarize the results of 2019 together with the managers of gaming companies and market experts. Next up is an interview with Kirill Shabordin, technical director of the W4 Game Creation Kit.
How was 2019 for the company?
In general, it is beautiful and extremely rich. At the beginning of the year, we were still part of Social Quantum, we worked very closely with the mobile Unreal Engine 4 (the demo of the future game was already shown on DevGAMM, so the embargo on news was lifted, you can evaluate both the scope and quality of the future product).
In the middle of the year, we created a new company, decided that we would develop tools (mainly for HTML5) for a component game engine and ecosystem focused primarily on the production of game ads (Playable Ads) and the next generation of hyper-casual games. We made several game prototypes, the first version of the SDK, and found partners in both business and indie environments.
Today we have very clear prospects for the future.
What events in the regional and global gaming industry do you consider central in the past year?
The output of Death Stranding and Disso Elysium. Both games answer “yes” to the question: “Could it have been like that?” Obviously, their release will change the game landscape.
We live in a time when Greta Thunberg becomes the person of the year, a YouTube streamer earns more than a good doctor, and the laws of large numbers continue to work. Kojima‘s media phenomenon is not exactly a phenomenon, it’s a gangnam style from the world of games. Now we should expect a lot of, let’s call them, meta-games. Projects that are not games in the classical sense. The event is that Kojima has made the author’s game mainstream, including using Twitter as a marketing tool.
Disco Elysium is more important. It turns out that you can make a good game today and get not only The Game Awards prizes, but also the recognition of the general public, and even money. Not a clone, not match-3, not time-tested mechanics, but just a good game. So it turns out that the best thing we have learned this year is that not only Twitter or the purchase of traffic can bring results.
The Nginx case has become an important beacon for the local gaming industry. After him, everyone who has not yet re-registered began to think seriously about it
The gaming industry in Russia has reached on average the level of income to become an interesting silovikam as a fodder base. This obviously affects the understanding of prospects and long-term planning.
Apple Arcade and Google Stadia launches. It was very interesting to observe how two absolutely non—innovative and secondary ideas were implemented – a subscription service in the field of games and streaming games to the end user. Moreover, if the first was only worth implementing carefully, then with the second, starting from the idea, there were more questions than answers. Everyone was waiting for Google to answer the question: “How exactly will you solve the obvious engineering problems of channel width, what exactly is the rocket science of your solution, why exactly will something work for you that didn’t work for everyone else?” Well, monetization also raised a lot of questions.
No answers were received, the service did not really take off, there was no triumph. Apple has once again carefully implemented another service inside its ecosystem: necessary, understandable, working. Useful for both developers and users.
What are the main trends in the market today?
- Smooth transformation of Playable Ads into Hypercasual 2.0
The Internet of Things, microservices, interactive advertising, gaming platforms in services such as TikTok, an even greater reduction in the gaming session, the maximum fusion of targeted advertising with casual gameplay. The world is accelerating, concentration is falling.
- Serious simplification and democratization of development tools, lowered entry threshold
The “Big U” (Unity and Unreal), God bless them, are doing everything possible to make game development from the point of view of production even easier, even clearer. Game development is becoming less and less an engineering discipline and is shifting towards the production of content and meanings, no matter how strange it may sound. The courses “Become a game designer in 10 days” seem less and less like a ridiculous way of taking money from the population.
- Decentralization of the market, the emergence of EGS, new sites, delivery methods past stores
You can download mobile Fornite without using Google Play; you don’t need Steam to play Red Dead Redemption 2; you deliver content to your mobile game (and often code, which actually violates several rules at once), bypassing the App Store; you sell games inside Roblox, you sell games in Facebook or VK. Any big market was once a small market. There are more sites. And there is a suspicion, quite reasonable, that 2020 will bring us at least two sites that can potentially change the balance of power.
Which third-party game releases turned out to be the most important this year? Plus, which games did you spend the most time on in 2019 as a gamer?
- The Outer Worlds — the best RPG of the year;
- Disco Elysium — event of the year;
- Death Stranding — Mr. Hightrane of the Year;
- Jedi: Fallen Order is an unexpectedly good game from EA.
As a team player, I spend a lot of time in divine Destiny 2, playing Division 2. I play all RPG releases and all AAA releases (like all gamers), I don’t always go through to the end.