25.10.2018

How was the White Nights Conference in Moscow

What happened at the 17th White Nights business Conference in Pervoprestolnaya is studied by the reaction of guests on social networks.

Traditionally, White Nights begins with a pre-party. It took place in the bar at 25:45, which is located just opposite the Moscow Academic Theater.

Many underestimate the pre-party. This is not only a good opportunity to get the first twenty or thirty business cards in an informal, but calm atmosphere. For example, game designer Ilya Tumenko learned to open beer with a lighter at a pre-party.

We hope that the pre-party was no less productive for other guests. 

For the Unilead product manager Konstantin Ivanov, the pre-party is a full—fledged additional day of the conference. At least, this can be understood from his tweet of October 15.

Given the number of lively discussions and the number of guests, it is difficult to disagree with him.

By the way, the games were also shown to each other and not yet exhausted publishers here. The Black Cube Games team even called for this.

The official start of the conference took place a day later, on October 16, at 09:30 in the Congress Park of the Radisson Royal Hotel.

For those who did not attend the pre-party, the first day of the conference began with receiving a badge and choosing a sticker.

Those who came early did not encounter queues for badges.

When selecting stickers, there were those who were torn between putting on the Want to be married badge or confining themselves to a modest Developer.

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The sponsors had to come in a day in order to have time to build the stands. Game Insight had one of the brightest. The company brought not only a real scooter, but also several boxes of apples.

You could even sit on a scooter, it’s a pity that you didn’t go for a ride. 

The stand at Pixonic was also very memorable. Despite the bold futuristic and stylish design, it looked very massive, which favourably differed from other stands.

He also allowed to hold a couple of meetings right there, and those who came just to get acquainted with the company and take notebooks could do it without interfering with the negotiators. 

Traditionally, the Appodeal stand was large-scale. The conference participants used it along with Meeting Points for meetings, discussions and even a snack.

When there were no representatives of the VKontakte social network on site, the VK Game Platform booth had about the same role.

Indie developers also had their own stands. As the organizers reported after the conference, most of the 90 stands fell on the “indics”.

The developers showed, among other things, already released games. For example, this is what the authors of the Grow Beetles clicker did, who won 1 million downloads from Playgendary and Appodeal at White Nights in St. Petersburg this summer.

But most of them collected feedback on games that were just getting ready to launch. For example, the release of an isometric project about car battles in the post-apocalyptic States of Gun Road on Steam is only expected.

Echo of Combats is also far from release. Its developers are now preparing a new visual design and report that the project, although playable, is at the alpha stage.

Of the projects in development, we were particularly hooked on the Make your Kingdom urban planning simulator, which is currently being created by only one developer in his spare time.

The main feature of Make your Kingdom is style and lighting. There are still questions about everything else. This did not prevent the developer from receiving several business offers on the first day.

For some developers, the conference really became a turning point. For example, the developer of the KIANU project, after looking at his colleagues and calculating how much money he would need to bring the game to release, decided to put the project on the table for now and first gain experience by getting a job in a game studio.

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We do not know whether there were offers to the I.G.S Indie-games.studio team, which showed 25 cadre of death. But the developers in their group noted that they were satisfied with the number of reviews. They are confident that the feedback they receive will help them make the project better.

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But not a single exhibition. The official part of any conference is its reports. Some of the guests were delighted with the performances. For example, Pixonic marketing manager Maria Prozorovskaya was very pleased with the report about Scalarr’s machine learning.

Denis Hamin, Marketing Director at Allcorrect, noted that he was interested in a speech about Latin America, which was held by two companies at once — Gazeus Games and Kokku.

Konstantin Ivanov noted the report of Epic Games, which told how to make money on the game if you decided to launch it yourself.

We can’t help but mention at least two performances. First, Playrix’s story about the situation with the Township.

Secondly, the story about how Fingersoft managed to make its Hill Climb Racing achieve more than a billion downloads.

But, to be honest, it’s scary to dive into the topic of reports and speeches, because then it’s necessary to mention both excellent round tables and a whole series of lectures on esports. We won’t do that now. But closer to the end of the week we will start posting videos, thanks to which it will be possible to learn in detail about how it was. Let’s just note that deconstruction, judging by the reaction of the guests, came in.

Smoothly approaching the results, we will note a few figures that the organizers shared with us.

The conference gathered 1300 guests. 65% of the participants were from Russia and the CIS, the remaining 35% were from foreign countries, in particular from the USA, China, Great Britain, Israel and Germany. In total, representatives of 46 countries took part in the conference.

The reaction of the guests is positive. For example, the producer of the Metrostroi project, German Alfimov, noted that he was fed at the conference.

Alyona Karaseva, head of the testing department at ByteX, also wrote that there was something to eat at the conference.

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At the same time, FeArea project marketing manager Sergey Zykov said that although he was very pleased with the event, he was exhausted by the meetings. It is not surprising. According to Yulia Lebedeva, the main organizer of White Nights, about 4,000 scheduled meetings took place within the framework of the conference (and it is unknown how many more spontaneous ones!).

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The authors of the indie game Get The Cat, who were remembered for the touching mascot in the form of a red cat, were also satisfied.

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One of the sponsors of the conference — Pixonic company — even after the event decided to revise its policy regarding the vacancy board, for which it is responsible.

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Evgeny Sudak, who previously held the post of monetization manager at Wargaming, starting from a visit to White Nights, noted three types of problematic companies that exist now on the market and which must necessarily change.

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That’s it. Although, of course, a lot of things were not included in the material. For example, we didn’t mention a great party, just touched on active networking a little. However, if you have something to share, be sure to write about it in the comments.

The next White Nights will be held in Berlin, in February 2019.

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