"I was bribed by the fact that Belka Games are ready to spend profits on the team"

Since November last year, the Belarusian studio Belka Games has been headed by Alexander Bogdanov. Prior to that, he launched the Social Quantum, Game Insight and Playrix gaming divisions in St. Petersburg. Editor App2Top.ru Alexander Semenov talked with Bogdanov about his path to the industry, the development of X-Mercs and the reasons for the transition to Belka Games.

We talk to Alexander via Skype. Despite Saturday, he’s in the office. On the table in front of him is a paper cup with coffee, to which he constantly takes a sip.

Do you have a full working day today?

Yes. I like the business I’m doing, I don’t see the point in resting. And now is not the time, not the time for rest.

And only on weekends you can safely sort out those tasks for which there is not enough time in the turmoil of the working week. For me, such a rhythm is the norm.

Alexander Bogdanov

Don’t feel sorry for yourself? You can understand the love of work, but sometimes you run out of strength.

You’re partly right. There is always a risk of burning out, you need to know the measure. To prevent this from happening, I observe a rhythm that is familiar to me and adhere to a certain routine.

For example, if I work on weekends, I try to spend no more than 5-6 hours on it. First I go to the gym, then to the office, and at the end of the day, personal matters are already going on. If you drive yourself completely, then as a result, efficiency decreases, and no one needs it.

I passed this stage on X-Mercs. It was our normal practice in crunch to stay at work until two or three in the morning. We felt like heroes. But the next day a work hangover came, which had a very destructive effect on work. You could walk away from such overwork for a week. The most unpleasant thing was that everything that we did with extra effort at night, then had to be redone. There were a lot of bugs, everyone was tired, in a hurry. As a result, the harm from such a broken rhythm is incomparably greater than the short-term benefit.

Dangerous. And what happened to you before overworking? How did you get into the industry? Do I understand correctly that you yourself are from Arkhangelsk, where you studied Banking?

Yes, it almost is: my first education concerns financial and general management. I studied full—time for free with everything that follows – sessions, a whole day at the university, a diploma, everything is fair.

At that time, this education seemed understandable and stable, because then there were not enough managers and bank employees. These institutions were just being formed.
This education gave you an understanding of what you would do after University. It was very important, especially in Arkhangelsk.

Game development, on the contrary, seemed to be something far away – what is happening in the USA, Europe, but definitely not in the Arkhangelsk region.

However, since childhood I have been stuck in games. I started playing on Delta-C and ZX Spectrum. I don’t remember how old I was then, but it was thanks to them that I got my first conscious gaming experience. Dendy, Sega and NES were after.

Games for me even then were partly collectible in nature. I tried to play everything I could and be sure to go from start to finish. I bought a lot of games, I passed each one through myself. It was very interesting for me to understand them. Because of this, my school periodically suffered (however, I was never an excellent student). We can say that games were already my passion back then.

Then the first personal computers began to appear in Russia. Among my friends, he was one of the first to appear to me. Thanks to my parents. I saw a lot of new games on it, including the legendary Doom, one of the first pseudo-three-dimensional first-person shooters. He impressed me so much that I did not leave the monitor for days.

But at the same time, you still chose another one as your first specialty. How did you get back to the games? Was it before or after graduation?

It happened in the fourth or fifth year of University. I came across a disk with 3ds Max. At that time, it was not yet named Autodesk, it was called either simply 3D Studio MAX, or Discreet 3dsmax. Thanks to him, I understood what three-dimensional modeling is, started creating models, texturing them, mastering animation, rendering and the particle system.

Was there a moment before that when you stopped playing? They say, an adult uncle, not up to games.

I never stopped playing, but because of my studies and the fact that I seriously took up sports, there was not enough time for them. In part, 3ds Max brought me back to them in a roundabout way.

Before that, I tried to draw only by hand. But it turned out so-so. Here I immediately made a character, and prepared a texture for him, and he began to move. It was really cool.

So I started making my videos, editing, mastered Premier at the same time and realized that my education is not what I really want to do. Everything was finally decided in the fifth year.

We had practice. We were thrown into various companies and banks. They threw me in too. I didn’t like it at the bank very much. I have nothing against bank employees, but this is an absolutely uncreative profession. At least, this was the place where I was assigned: the credit department, where there is one routine, paperwork, constant approvals.

At first I put up with it, because it is stable, to some extent prestigious. But one day I overslept. Getting ready, I was in a hurry, I forgot to put on a tie. They wouldn’t let me into the bank’s office. They said: sorry, friend, we have a bank, a strict dress code, we won’t let you in without a tie.

As a result, I made the final decision that all this formalism and routine is not mine. I completely switched to my hobby — three-dimensional modeling. He immediately went for advanced training in the direction of “Information Technology”. My University — Pomeranian State — provided such an opportunity.

I studied for a year at these courses and left my Alma mater with two diplomas – with higher education and advanced training in the direction of IT.

Then I tried everything I could in Arkhangelsk. In those days, it was just the dawn of video advertising, 3d, special effects, screensavers for television. I did the first, and the second, and the third. At the same time, he opened a computer club where he organized tournaments. Some of them were based on Quake 3, which I really liked.

So I hung around in Arkhangelsk for a year and realized that I was doing the wrong thing. It was games that I wanted to do. And I threw my resume on job.ru .

Pomeranian State University

What position did you apply for?

The resume was on a 3d modeler. I threw it in and was surprised to find that the specialty is very popular. I was showered with offers from Moscow and St. Petersburg.

It was only later that I realized that there was a great hunger for specialists at that time. It was just beginning. No one was missing then — no modelers, no game designers, no programmers.

And at that time there were not even close to any institutions that would give such courses. Everyone was self-taught.

Why did you choose Peter?

At that time I had a choice — either Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Peter is a bit like Arkhangelsk. This is also a port city. Even in St. Petersburg, the family had friends, and I liked the city more — it is quieter, quieter.

I arrived, rented a room, and off I went.

Was the first company a gaming company?

Yes. I was invited by the Kenjitsu Company. She was a division of Nikitova, a Ukrainian studio specializing mainly in outsourcing. She focused on major Western players, for example, we managed to work with them on projects for Electronic Arts.

The St. Petersburg division of Nikitova was headed by Ivan Tkachenko [later the founder of Signus Labs, today engaged in the American startup Cider Corp., — approx.editorial offices]. He gave me the way into the gaming industry.

At the same time you enter the Academy of Arts. Was this required of you, or did you realize yourself that there is not enough classical education?

I got a job at Kenjitsu as a three-dimensional artist and I quickly realized that it was not enough to know how to move polygons and make a sweep to work with organic matter. It is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of proportions, light, color, and anatomy. Without all this, it was very difficult for me at first. I didn’t understand why, for example, my character has some strange hands, elbows are not in place, legs are not the same. There were especially many problems when it came to working with the face.

Colleagues saw how I suffered with this, and recommended me to enroll in evening drawing courses at the Academy of Arts. There were students there who then wanted to enter the Academy itself. I studied there for almost a year. And thanks to these courses, I had my first revolution in consciousness in terms of perception of the world. After I finished them, I began to perceive the world differently.

What was it all about?

I began to notice at least these proportions in everything. I began to instantly understand what is closer, what is further away, what is in the light and what is in the shadow. My perception of objects has completely changed.

I went through classical school there from the ear to the head of David. We have been drawing only one nose for more than a month at the courses. And this is not a joke. I came to the courses three times a week, sat, drew, and then constantly ruled.

And I would like to advise everyone who is engaged in three-dimensional graphics, but does not know how to draw by hand, to go to such courses. Firstly, it is useful when texturing. Secondly, any courses that are related to academic theory greatly restructure the perception of the world.

How did you turn from a modeller into a PM?

I have always classified myself as irrepressible and ambitious people. At that time, my irrepressible ambitions got along with such a character trait as “I know everything”. After about six months or a year of working at Kenjitsu, I began to climb everywhere: why the deadline was fucked up here, why it’s not ready here, why it’s not right here, but here it’s just fine.

HSE gave me theoretical knowledge of management. It helped me a little. I wanted to apply this knowledge and I felt that I was responsible only for my work, develop horizontally and be only a cool artist, although I really liked it, it wasn’t enough for me. There was a desire to take responsibility for the work of the team, for entire projects.

My immediate supervisor believed in me and instructed me to conduct a small project with outsourcing graphics for a game about some zombies. That’s how it all started.

After that, you have already started in IT Territory immediately as a PM, and not as an artist.

It was as PM that I started a little earlier. After I left Kenjica, I got a job at a little-known company that agreed to take me to the PM position without proper experience. I learned a lot that year. I understood the basics of developing a full game cycle and the basics of project management.

A year later, another company — IT Territory — decided to launch a division in St. Petersburg. The heads of the new studio were Andrey Mikhlin [now a producer at Social Quantum, — approx.editors] and Sergey Andrievsky [previously director of Nord, a St. Petersburg game development studio Mail.Ru Group, now working at Social Quantum,— approx.editorial offices]. They formed a division in St. Petersburg almost from scratch. Called ITT Nord.

After we met, I came to them for an interview. After that, I was offered to try myself in development management already with them. Of course, I agreed with pleasure. It was about working in an ambitious company, with a good and interesting team. I wanted to work there.

How important was it for you then, what exactly to work on? You just mentioned that you played Doom a lot, that you loved Quake, but you did casual games in IT Territory Nord. Wasn’t there such a thing that you did some games during the day, and in the evening you launched others “for the soul”?

I won’t lie to you. I was quite green then. I was a weak specialist. I was offered an excellent position and I took it as an opportunity to improve my professional skills. Of course, it was important to me what I was doing, but at this stage I did not seek to get into companies that were engaged in hardcore AAA development.

At that time, for example, IT Territory Nord was also engaged in projects like Faora

Yes, when I came home, I sat down at a computer or console, played Morrowind, Oblivion and other similar things.

On the other hand, although it does matter what kind of game I am making, but in the first place in my work I have something else. I want any of my projects, no matter what niche it belongs to, to be as cool as possible and commercially successful: “Loot defeats evil.”

Did the love for casual games come with time?

I really like city builders. I was very glad when the era of such projects on social networks and on mobile came, because SimCity 2000 is in my blood. It can also be interesting to get distracted by match-3, for example, by the “Watchmaker”.

Without love for what you do, it is probably impossible to achieve success. Therefore, from some point of view, we can say that I still love this direction, because I play it for myself.

Do I understand correctly that you also met frituplay there, in the IT Territory?

Yes, but not immediately. The studio was formed for the casual market. Do you remember when Big Fish Games was distributing premium stand-alone projects? At first, we were engaged in similar projects. Casual girls.

For me, frituplay started with “Dragons” and “Cosmix”, but I didn’t take a big part in the development in “Dragons”, I helped with modeling and graphics for the project with my left heel, but nothing more.

The St. Petersburg office of IT Territory began working closely with frituplay later, when he took up web projects: “Tanat”, “Faor”, and then for the casual “Favorite Farm”. But I had already left the company by that time, so it was not possible to work hard with these genres within the framework of ITT Nord.

Was your departure related to the fact that IT Territory entered Astrum Online?

There was no connection. When I started working at ITT, I met Igor Matsanyuk [co—founder of IT Territory, today chairman of the Board of Directors of Game Insight, – approx.editors], with Alice Chumachenko [founder of Game Insight, today heads the GOSU startup.AI, — approx.editorial offices], with Vladimir Nikolsky [co-founder of IT Territory, today Operational Director Mail.Ru Group, — approx.editors], with Alexander Vashchenko [was COO in IT Territory and president of Game Insight, — approx.editorial offices]. They are very charismatic, strong people. And in general, I liked IT Territory very much as a company.

The fact that structural changes have taken place in it, I considered a big step forward. With the advent of Astrum, the gaming industry in Russia has changed.

This deal greatly influenced my opinion about the ITT top team. They are the first in the Russian industry to make a big business out of games. It was great.

Regarding my departure from the St. Petersburg division, I did not voluntarily leave the company, the founders of the studio fired me.

Suddenly.

Now I can talk about it calmly, I perceive the whole situation with humor, but then I considered such a turn to be a universal injustice. They say, how so, I’m so cool and cool, I worked tirelessly, and they asked me.

Moreover, now I think it was absolutely the right decision from the point of view of ITT Nord management. Perhaps even belated. At that time, objectively, I did not have sufficient knowledge and competencies to manage game projects. I had a period of “learning” and developing processes for the sake of processes. The most important thing — understanding the product — was not there.

I had perfect hierarchical structures of work drawn up, all the development processes were designed in flowcharts and everything seemed to work, but it turned out to be some bullshit. Everything is correct, according to science, but something is constantly going wrong.

There are signs, but there are no results.

Exactly. I learned this lesson quickly and never came back to it again. Since then, I have been trying to do without unnecessary bureaucracy. You can’t do games like that.

Actually, I went out and went to do my own thing. I’ve always wanted to do my own thing.

Then it was the dawn of the social market, the golden time of social networks: do what you want — everything is rushing (or almost everything). On this wave, I met two very cool guys, with whom we started doing business, opened our own studio. I’m talking about Pasha Sudakov and Zhenya Safronov. At that moment we were called Bad Rabbit. Then, after we broke up, the studio started to be called Fairplay. I like to think of it more as Fairplay.

The guys were from an animation studio and they had a small material base, there were computers, there were acquaintances. The three of us gathered, sat down and started working, began to come up with some projects, look for funding, do something.

We saw VKontakte as the main platform for ourselves. We grew up, at the peak we had about 25 developers. We moved to a nice office in the center, then there was another crisis and the cost of rent in St. Petersburg dropped dramatically. We tried to cooperate with various publishers, with various investors — both with profile and not so much. In general, with everyone. There were successful projects, there were unsuccessful ones.

One of the most successful is Aviamagnat. We did a project in which the player not only built a city, but also an airport. Produced us then Mail.Ru . From their side, we were produced by Maxim Donskikh [founder of studio 404 Road, today president of Game Insight, — approx.editorial offices]. Aviamagnat was our first truly successful, big project.

Aviamagnat

It turns out that inspired by your project, he took up the “Airport City”?

Perhaps. After all, we did not implement everything perfectly, we could have done better. And Max subsequently did really better.

The second person who sent us from the Mail side.Ru produced, there was the great and terrible Kostya Inin [today, like Donskikh, also works in Game Insight, — approx.editorial offices]. Maxim then went to Game Insight to form his studio within the framework of GI, and we continued to work with Bones.

Can you tell me how much the game earned in the peak?

I don’t remember the numbers, but we gave 50% or even more to Mail.En and we had more than enough money left. We have been developing two more ambitious projects in parallel.

What went wrong? You launched one project, then a couple more. So they would have continued.

We chose the wrong strategy. We tried to do a lot of projects. It was necessary to develop a successful one instead. On the contrary, we have stopped paying due attention to the “Aviamagnat”. Then we thought that if one game brings such and such an amount, then five airline tycoons will bring five times more. This was our main mistake: the other four aircraft magnates did not take off.

We did not understand that it was necessary to make decisions on the product based on at least basic analytics. We didn’t understand marketing, the promotion of the game was something very far away for us. We sincerely believed that we could release the game and become millionaires tomorrow. This is a very popular misconception that has often been encountered by investors, especially non-core ones.

It was only over time that we realized that it didn’t work that way. The game must be supported, analyzed, promoted. Well, by the way, sometimes it works, but in very rare cases.

You were getting bumps while working with your studio and at the same time you were studying again. Tell me, why did you get additional education again?

My new academic period started before FairPlay. I studied a lot while working at ITT Nord.

I felt that I still lacked knowledge in project management. I didn’t understand how to build processes, how to structure huge amounts of information, how to isolate it from an array of data, how to keep focus.

This is Scrum, Agile now, that’s all. But then none of this happened. But there was a fundamental school of project management. This is the International Institute of Project Management — PMI. It still exists and is developing successfully.

He was a novelty in Russia then. I attended their courses for about two years. That is, I took one course, went to the next. The highest international degree at the Institute is PMP, project manager professional. It is difficult to get it, it is considered the highest achievement. But I was so badly hacked that, although not from the first time, I got this degree from the second time.

At the same time, I entered FINEC, for a course on the basics of project management.

In PMI and FINEC, I worked out all the theory that can only be worked out on managing projects and processes, all this base. It is clear that in practice most of this knowledge was not useful. This huge fundamental array must be passed through and adapted to life. Getting and preparing for PMP, which took me almost a year and a half, turned out to be a turning point in my life.

I took a long time to pass. For the first six months I was preparing for the first exam, I didn’t pass, came out, clenched my fists and went to prepare for the retake. I studied for another six months or a year and passed the second time, got a degree. By the way, it was possible to take it only three times, I didn’t pass it on the third one — that’s all, so far, the road is closed.

And this was probably the second revolution in my mind. I changed my view of the world again.

In addition to gaining a huge amount of theoretical knowledge on project management, my second revolution in consciousness was as follows: I learned to perceive things and tasks structurally. It is structurally. Put everything in its place in the project, keep the focus. I began to understand which data from the set are the key ones and in what sequence they should go. It sounds simple, but put people behind a large array of data, most of them will be lost, some part will find the essence and only a small percentage of them will build the correct sequence. All this also allowed me to better organize my time, both working and personal. Time is our most valuable, irreplaceable resource. It is important to use it effectively.

I think it was a breakthrough for me, I started thinking structurally. It then helped me to solve large, complex tasks.

Did you finish your studies when you worked at FairPlay?

Yes, I was finishing my studies and stopped doing my education, because business began to take up all my free time.

This is the second or third year in FairPlay. You have your own studio, you are theoretically savvy. So why are you leaving for Social Quantum instead of developing your own company?

It wasn’t quite like that. Our company has split up. Zhenya left to do his business in marketing, and Pasha and I stayed to make games.

At that time, we were in deep stagnation. We didn’t understand what product to do next, we didn’t have analytics and marketing. But there was a very friendly cool team. We realized that we needed to build the necessary infrastructure. For this reason, we started looking for a partner who would help us with its creation, help us make new successful games and act as their co-investor.

It so happened that after another CRI, I met Fedya Zaitsev [head of development at Social Quantum, — approx.editors] and Andrey Tertitsky [founder of Social Quantum, — approx.editorial offices]. At that time, they were just looking for people who could assemble a team in St. Petersburg to develop a mobile “Megapolis”. We agreed that they would invest in our studio with Pasha, and we would help them with the creation of the Social Quantum division in St. Petersburg.

“Megapolis”

Did you build the St. Petersburg office of Social Quantum from scratch?

There was already a small team that was freelancing in St. Petersburg and engaged in prototyping. Andrey Yamov acted as the head of this small team. With him, we opened the Nord Quantum studio in St. Petersburg, where we began to actively recruit people.

In parallel, there was our studio with Pasha, which up to a certain point was engaged in a joint project with Social Quantum.

So you worked for two companies at once?

Yes. We had an open, partnership relationship. We were two friendly companies. I’ve been doing both.

At a certain stage, the development of a joint project with Social Quantum did not go well with us. We have curtailed the project. And we were faced with a choice: either to fully integrate into Social Quantum, or to continue doing something of our own. We had a very strong team of developers on Unity and we decided to continue doing our own projects.

At this moment, Max Donskikh very successfully fell on me with a proposal to launch a Game Insight studio in St. Petersburg. I invited them to come to Moscow to discuss it.

I came to Max on Tula, to the central office of Game Insight. All ITT tops were there — Sasha Vashchenko, Alice Chumachenko, Igor Matsanyuk. I was very glad to see them again. There I also met the very charismatic Leonid Sirotin [founder of the Like Games studio, was the general producer at Game Insight, now an independent expert, — approx.editorial offices]. Lenya, of course, is cool. I have never seen such dedication as he has before. I don’t think he slept at all. I could calmly answer Skype on work issues at three in the morning and at the same time be in the office in the morning.

In general, we sat down and discussed it. They offered to create a Game Insight studio in St. Petersburg, but there was a condition that I stop any interaction with Social Quantum, other partners and deal only with the Game Insight studio. I agreed.

Initially, there was a suggestion that you would do Russian XCOM?

No, there were no concrete ideas at that time. We just got together and shook hands.

I was full of energy, enthusiasm and I wanted to work with these people. I was sure that together with Sasha Vashchenko, Igor and Leonid, who by that time had already achieved success more than once, we would achieve even greater success. There was no doubt about it.

Leonid Sirotin was just then promoting experimental projects. We tried both runners with meta, and analogues of “Space Rangers”.

He acted as our general producer. Together with him and Sasha, we were thinking about which project to take on. So the idea to make a mobile XCOM on a fritupley model slipped through.

Leonid Sirotin, Anatoly Ropotov, Alexander Vashchenko and Alexander Bogdanov

Of course, you couldn’t say XCOM, you had to say TBS in a sci-fi setting. We were on our hands so that unnecessary analogies would not arise.

I really liked the idea, because I loved the classic XCOM. And the first, and the second, and even the third. This genre was very close to me. In general, we stopped at this idea.

That time was very cool. Then we were engaged in ideological development. We were all burning with this idea. They made a dream game, and in general I remember that time with great warmth. We had a great, talented team, a cool project and tempting prospects loomed ahead.

Was there any fear that TBS is necessarily a long session, for an hour? They say, it’s not a mobile story at all.

Sasha and Lenya, as strategic people, suggested trying to do something less experimental. But the team and I caught fire with the idea of mobile TBS.

What happened in the end?

During the development, we collected all the rakes that we could. For the development of X-Mercs, it is quite possible to write a manual “How not to make games”. We complicated the gameplay, changed technologies, increased the number of mechanics. At the same time, which is very important, we have observed all the basic principles of gameplay on mobiles, such as the length of the session.

Even before the start of active development, Lenya came and said: so, guys, the length of the session should not be more than five to ten minutes, no thirty minutes or an hour. There were short sessions, but there were a lot of mechanics, there were a lot of game entities, parameters, perks. The game turned out to be very hardcore.

In addition to these bells and whistles with game mechanics, we were also idealists from a technological point of view. We tried hard and complex solutions. We “launched spaceships”. For example, we took scaleform for the interface instead of clear common UI solutions when developing on Unity. Scaleform worked very crookedly on mobile phones, it devoured memory mercilessly. All this led to constant alterations. We sawed out scaleform, switched to ngui, endlessly updated the Unity version. The game has been remade globally several times both from a technical point of view and from the point of view of mechanics.

X-Mercs

When did you realize that the game wouldn’t work on mobile?

When we went out to the softlonch. We saw that our retention for the first week is low, as is the conversion of the tutorial. We finished them, of course, but we still saw how people came in, realized that they were in hardcore TBS, and left.

There was a loyal audience that stayed and played a lot, but it was not enough for the project to be financially successful.

Was there no temptation to spit on mobile and adapt the game for Steam?

This idea was. It arose after we went to the softlonch on mobile phones.

But the game never appeared on Steam.

Coincidentally, at that moment there was a restructuring in Game Insight. And the two leaders who led the company forward — Leonid Sirotin and Alexander Vashchenko — left it. It became sad. I’m used to working with them. It seemed to me that the company had lost its vector of development, lost its common goal.

There was another problem. I had no idea what was going to happen next for our team and studio. We have been developing X-Mercs for four years, we were ready to further develop the current product and develop new ones. But the new GI leadership did not outline clear prospects and goals for us.

For me, the absence of a goal is unacceptable. As a result, due to the fact that I worked so hard with the team on one project that did not bring us the expected success, on the other hand, due to the lack of prospects and goals, I burned out and decided to leave the company.

And didn’t get your hands on the Steam version?

Yes, we just managed to start optimizing for PC.

Before the conversation with you, I talked with Yura Krasilnikov [Business development Director of Belka Games] and he expressed the idea that the project was undervalued and ahead of its time. What do you think about it?

I think the project is great. We, including from a technological point of view, did what no one had done on mobile platforms before. Unity has noted us more than once in its presentations, and one of the editors has called us the best mobile game several times on Igromir.

Probably, the project was really underestimated and came out ahead of its time. But I still think that an experimental project — no matter how large it may be — is still experimental. It should have been launched earlier. To file down the prototype in six months or a year, as we originally planned, and see how it goes.

In this regard, I really like how Andrey Pryakhin works [founder and CEO of Kefir Studio!, — approx.editors], he’s doing great. Last Day on Earth was made in a couple of months and launched. After making sure that the metrics are excellent and scale well, they began to finish the project.

As for us, we did almost a classic boxed version. We made a monumental project from beginning to end, with the whole plot, history, a ton of content.

We still had to move in stages then.

You’re tired, you’ve left the company and, judging by your LinkedIn profile, you’ve become an independent expert. What happened to you next?

Yes, I burned out a lot in 4 years of crunches and lack of vacations.

I informed the new management that I wanted to quit. The guys reacted to this normally. They said they would think about it. Some time passed, they called me and said they were ready to start the process of terminating cooperation.

I had plans to rest for six months or a year, travel around the world, see everything: I didn’t see a damn thing myself, I wasn’t anywhere, I was burning only with work.

After I announced my dismissal, it was decided not to leave the studio in St. Petersburg, but to relocate the entire team to Moscow. I still don’t understand this solution, maybe I don’t know something. I was convinced that another lead would be put in my place and our team would continue to cooperate with GI precisely as a St. Petersburg studio. We even had a lead who was well suited for this position, — Seryozha Orlov, at that time the technical director of the studio. He could very well lead it.

The prospect of relocation to Moscow seemed very strange for the team. As a result, no one went and almost the entire team also left GI.

I felt responsible to the guys. I was collecting them, I promised them a bright future, and then — bang, I left the studio and this initiated a process in which the team decided to disband in fact.

In short, I started helping the guys stay a team. Everyone worked together for many years and no one had the desire to disperse. The six-month vacation had to be postponed.

Then Sergey and I just met Igor and Dima Bukhman [the founders of Playrix, — approx.editorial offices]. They wanted to open a Playrix division in St. Petersburg. As a result, the entire development team, together with Sergey Orlov, joined Playrix. A new stage in my life has begun.

And last November you became the CEO of Belka Games. This is a great team. But why, after a hardcore game, did you go back to the casual games that the guys are doing? Didn’t you want to continue doing hardcore?

No, I didn’t want to anymore. I made my dream project, spent four years on it. But, leaving the office, sitting down, not in my F-150 Raptor, but in something much simpler, I wondered: “where is the money?” So my personal focus has shifted dramatically towards financial success.

Alexander at the helm of a car that is not an F-150 Raptor

Right now, like my team, I have a very high financial motivation. We strive to produce exclusively commercially successful projects. Well, during the cooperation with Playrix, I have significantly strengthened my expertise in the casual product. And this is not about an idea, but about business, about money.

Why Belka?

Belka was bribed by the fact that its founders, Yura Mazanik and Dima Khusainov, are ready to spend the company’s profits on the team, not even on top managers, but on everyone. It’s very cool, I think.

In this company, you can achieve real financial success both for the team and for yourself. No one else has offered anything like this anywhere near. Also, all my potential, all my knowledge and skills turned out to be in demand at Belka Games — it’s cool! I finally feel absolutely in demand.

These are the main reasons, but there was another one. I was a little tired of St. Petersburg, I had lived there for more than 15 years as a result, I wanted to try to move my family somewhere else. After all, the constant greyness in the weather was starting to get. It also seemed that I had done everything I could in this city.

Belka is in Minsk, my mother is from here, I have only warm associations with this city and country.

Please tell us what Belka is like today. She is known as an industry veteran, but in fact this company is one game — “Watchmaker”.

Last year, as Dima and Yura told me, they decided to radically change the company’s development strategy. We decided to focus on long-term goals, to make the development more professional, which cannot be realized without a strong team and the introduction of new processes. There was a goal to make Belka Games a truly successful, big company. So a new strategy was born — Belka Games 2.0.

Today, the company has top managers and leads of directions that face two large-scale goals. The first is the formation of a strong team.
We gather talented specialists with strong professional expertise.  The second goal is to build the entire infrastructure around development: analytics, marketing, QA, support, community management, and so on. Plus, all this needs to be tied up with processes so that everything works as a single organism, without creating processes for the sake of processes.

All this is necessary to launch commercially successful products. This is our main goal. We expect to release several ambitious games in the near future, which should take the company to a new level.

We also see great potential in the Watchmaker now, we are engaged in its development. Few people have seen the project. His audience is far from exhausted. We are improving the game qualitatively, its performance is getting better and better every month.

We are well aware that only strong and motivated teams create truly successful products. For this reason, we pay a lot of attention to motivational programs. We believe that the team should be directly involved in the financial success of the games they create.

Already now we can say that Belka has managed to build a bonus model that does not depend on the subjective assessment of anyone.

We also strive to be a high-tech company, now we are undergoing a small technological revolution.

Belka in the current composition

How the old team reacted to the innovations. From their point of view, everything may look like this: they have been doing a project for a long time, and then a new top comes, new people come, and they are also paid bonuses for a project that they did not do for the previous five years.

Yes, it’s difficult, there is a certain misunderstanding, but I was lucky, the team is very talented and friendly. We manage to find a common language with very few exceptions. So, there are no such big difficulties here. The adaptation of new processes is going well, everyone understands why all this is being done and sees positive changes in the company.

I am trying to build a structure that is based not on directive management, but on making joint decisions. It works very well, this culture is very close to me. Therefore, the guys and I only make joint decisions at all levels.

You know that Mail.Ru Group is buying everyone up now. Are you considering such deals yourself now?

We believe that the company has not reached even close to its potential. It makes little sense to sell the company now. We are not considering this option right now. But, as Yura Mazanik says, we are in business. If someone comes tomorrow and says that he is ready to offer something very big, then why not? We are ready to consider this. But I think it’s too early now. The company has not yet released the hits that we have ahead of us.

Thanks for the interview!