2020 results: Yulia Lebedeva from the WN Conference on the main things for the year
How did this year go for WNCONF, — she toldYulia Lebedeva, Partner and Director of Business Development at WN Media Group.
Julia Lebedeva
How was 2020 for the direction?
To put it very briefly, unexpectedly. At the beginning of the year, we managed to hold the WN Conference in Amsterdam, but the rest of the plans had to be urgently changed. Looking back, I don't even fully believe that we managed to do so much in such a short period of time.
When it became clear in March that offline was being canceled, we threw all our efforts into developing our own platform for gaming conferences. They took their own system for making appointments as a basis. It helped that we have always been primarily an IT company, and not, for example, an event agency: this means, in principle, a different approach to business. In addition, we have developers and artists on staff, thanks to whom we managed to create not only the platform itself, but also a virtual exhibition in the form of a city builder.
The first event on the platform was our own WN Launch Week conference, and then we started hosting guest events. In total, almost two dozen online events took place on the WN Hub.
Now we can say that this will benefit us in the end. We have been thinking about providing tools with which the gaming industry can solve problems online for a long time, but there was not enough time to develop them. 2020 made him find it. We are satisfied with the result.
In particular, thanks to online, it was possible to significantly boost the global presence of the brand — this year 30 thousand people from all over the world attended our conferences (21% accounted for CIS participants). This helped us to finally get away from the name White Nights: in the other hemisphere, where many have not heard about the season of white nights in St. Petersburg, the name is not read. Therefore, now our products are officially called WN Hub and WN Conference.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
This year, the trend is the same — go online or die. The world has changed, I had to adjust. Perhaps the most difficult thing for everyone was to accept the new reality (until recently, everyone wanted to believe that a little more and offline would return), and then find new formats that work online. The experiments will continue next year.
One of the main problems of online is the lower level of engagement of participants. It helps us that at the WN Hub, different parts of the event are concentrated in one place: there are streaming lectures, chats, and video meetings.
Many platforms tried to recreate the participants' feelings that they received from offline as much as possible. It seems to me that this is a dead end. It is better to come up with new formats specifically for online and use its strengths.
What will be the stake in the development of the direction in 2021?
In 2021, we plan to continue our course towards globality: we will hold large and small events in different countries. With the return of offline, they will all be hybrid, that is, there will be both online and offline components.
The next big WN Winter conference is scheduled for February 8-12 (most likely, it will still be online only), then in the spring we will hold WN Spring with a focus on Asia: the entire conference will run for five days, two of which will be an offline exhibition in Shanghai. Well, in the summer we hope to see you live in St. Petersburg!
In addition, WN Hub will host more than 50 online events, both our own and partner ones. Online gives you the opportunity to focus on solving specific tasks of companies — whether it's recruiting, training, search for publishing projects, teams for investments, etc.
In general, there are a lot of plans! I hope that 2021 will be more predictable and will allow us to implement all of them!
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? What kind of attention did you pay specifically as a gamer?
This year I played peek-a-boo the most with my daughter, who was born in April. But I managed to check out Half-Life: Alyx in VR. I was pleased with the very realistic picture, smooth animation and, of course, a new level of interactivity, when you can open doors yourself, pick up objects, look into different places. In lockdown conditions, such feelings were very much in the theme! It is unlikely that VR games will become truly massive in the near future, and this, unfortunately, greatly slows down their development, but Half-Life turned out to be cool.
