“We need to look at things more soberly”: Magisterion about leaving mobile and abandoning Unity

Sergey Korolev, CEO of the Russian Magisterion studio, announced the closure of the mobile direction and the abandonment of Unity. Sergey told about the reasons for leaving App2Top.ru .

Dragon Stones
We are leaving the mobile market and selling off the remaining projects, as now the company has opportunities to develop games for PC /consoles, which I personally have always liked more than social networks and mobile phones.

This is growth rather than frustration. And I do not in any way encourage someone to do the same, since this often requires other teams altogether. You never have to rush after the crowd. Yes, there is a good window of opportunity on the PC now, but everything has tightened up on mobile phones. But everywhere there are problems and you need to work hard. It’s just that if that’s the case, then we decided that it’s more productive to do what we like more and not get sprayed on everything.

But this, of course, is not the only reason. The requirements in the mobile market have greatly increased, it has become more expensive to promote. And in terms of complexity and cost of development, many mobile toys are much larger than turkeys on Steam. The last time we restarted a mobile farm with the publisher (2 years after freezing). And the difference is now quite significant, the launch was unsuccessful. Not only has the mute gone up in price and it is not profitable to buy it at the current exchange rate, but also the tops of new products have clearly begun to work worse. Either you’re on the main page, or you get a so-so conversion. It is good in this situation only to traffic sellers.

Royal Lands
The mobile phone market is expected and has matured a lot.

There are a lot of really cool toys, all these collections on the main ones (beyond which there is not much point in climbing into the bowels). It became difficult to track even hits. The army of developers only continues to grow. In this situation, the average toys are eliminated pretty quickly. There are more publishers – yes, but there are few fools among them: everyone is looking for potential hits and rarely ready to invest in development. And if they take toys for publishing, then not everyone experiences softlonch.

By the way, in recent years I have also been engaged in consulting at various levels. And often, when you see the game, you realize that it will not take off at all. This is especially true for clones. Many still saw such a middling and believe that my bullshit will shoot. It’s useless to dissuade here. But few people fight back even to zero. I know comrades who not so long ago spent more than 20 million on the development of two obviously failed games. In such situations, when you come in the middle of development and offer to stop / change direction, you are usually looked at as a mad villain. But the market is not to blame for this – many simply underestimate the complexity of creating a real hit. Yes, there are a lot of players, but they usually choose the best.

Dark Hunters
All this is not whining that everything is bad and you need to leave.

No, we just need to look at things more soberly. And not to hope for a chance. When someone experienced tells you that the game is bad, it’s not out of spite, but out of sympathy, rather. It is worth listening and acting on the fail fast principle. Otherwise, you can lose several years without much return, as happened, for example, in our case. The iron rule to bring projects to the end by all means went to the detriment and in the end we just lagged behind the market. This is despite the fact that in the fritupley, the main load falls on the team after the release. So it was decided to change direction while there is still a fuse.

As for the decision to abandon Unity. I was one of the first developers in Russia on it and immediately said that a great future awaits it. But years later, it seems to me that his development has gone in the wrong direction. In pursuit of big games, many things don’t change for years (landscapes, prefabs, editor interfaces, and so on). And the pricing policy clearly requires changes against the background of competitors. This is a typical growth sore and once at such a pace, for example, the Virtools engine was ruined. Although Unity, in my opinion, is still the best solution for mobile and in general most games and teams. Perhaps we will come back to it later if we take up work, for example, multiplatform games (which, in my opinion, is the most reasonable thing to do now).

Master Town
I always say: each project has its own engine (there are no universal solutions).

And you can earn well everywhere, the main thing is to try to do something cool, communicate more with experienced colleagues, study, work on mistakes. Many still live on social networks, and some devour investments in fashionable VR. But it’s not that somewhere is better. You just need to measure your capabilities, teams and market needs are interesting. Do not rush after the crowd and look for large niches in which the team has something to offer, since there is nothing worse than making a game that nobody needs.