"Many people want to buy traffic at the price of GK games, but have LTV of casual games," Dmitry Kuratnik from TapTap about the main thing for 2022

We continue the series of interviews “Results”, in which top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones) tell what the last 12 months have been like for them. This time Dmitry Kuratnik, co-founder and CEO of TapTap studio, shares his results.

What was the year like for you personally?

For me, it was a crazy year with swings from “everything is bad” to “how wonderful everything is.”

It was nice to get back to casual games after three years of working on hyper-casual projects.

What was the year like for the company?

TapTap is a young company and this is only the first year for us. And this year has been very uneven. But, most importantly, and the most pleasant event is that by the end of the year we released our first game, which we had been developing for a long time, within which we conducted a huge number of A/B tests.

I would like to highlight and consider it an achievement that initially my friend and co-owner of TapTap and I bought traffic for the game, and we bought it successfully, in a good plus. It was an interesting and productive experience. Today we are successfully continuing to purchase traffic for it and scale up.

How has the situation changed for the company in the gaming market?

Since TapTap was created in 2022, I can’t say that anything has changed for the company. But I can talk about a change in the situation, based on the experience of operating my previous company, ScarbTale.

There are certain difficulties with monetary transactions between countries, but these problems are not unsolvable.

It has become more difficult to attract investments from European legal entities.

Another thing is that the main criterion for success is the same — you need to make good games that the audience likes.

What was the year like for the genres in which you work?

The trend for casual games in the puzzle genre (we are talking primarily about simple logic puzzles, whose mechanics are simpler than three-in-a-row or mahjong) appeared back in 2021, it remained relevant in 2022 and will continue to be relevant in 2023.

Thanks to the experience of working with GC, many have learned to buy traffic at a low price and now want to buy traffic at the price of GC games, but have an LTV of a casual game.

Puzzles allows you to follow this philosophy. Actually, it should be TapTap. And we believe that this is our strong point.

What are the company’s plans for next year?

We have the developments of the second game, which we would like to develop in parallel and also successfully release closer to the middle or end of 2023.

There are also plans to expand the team starting in January 2023.