Sirotin, Vashchenko and Babayev will smoke hookah at White Nights St.Petersburg 2016

During the upcoming White Nights summer session, three experts from the Russian gaming audience – Leonid Sirotin, Alexander Vashchenko and Sergey Babaev – will talk about the current gaming industry while smoking a hookah.

The conversation will take place right on one of the stages of the event. Why experts will smoke hookah, which topics are going to be touched upon and which ones are to be omitted, – one of the participants of the future conversation – the director of business development of Nekki and mentor of the “Games Market” rubric on VC.ru Sergey Babaev.

The conversation will be “over the hookah.” Why follow him? Is this such a new symbol of the “conversation for gaming life”?

Sergey Babaev
The point, of course, is not in the hookah – the point is in the right people.

It’s interesting to talk to them even in a bar, even on stage, even at the edge of the forest.

“Hookah” is a kind of symbol that means an invitation to a confidential and thoughtful conversation with colleagues. There are no big fans of alcohol in our party, so the conversation goes under the hookah. This has happened in the last couple of years, has gained a foothold and even gained local fame.

Actually, Yulia [Lebedeva, Business Development Director of Nevosoft and organizer of the White Nights Conference] suggested putting such a hint of lampiness and light backstage.

Is it worth waiting for revelations, or will you try not to relax too much so as not to inadvertently tell something?

And what can you inadvertently tell three adequate, self-controlling people. Any question lends itself to one answer or another. It’s another matter if the question leads to the left or worries only one of the interlocutors. But here it is necessary to be able to stop this matter in time, move on to another subject of discussion.

What topics are you going to touch on?

I really want to talk about the current industry. What phase is it in and what are the right steps for its further formation (namely, game dev as a community) should be taken. Why is it important right now to unite (morally), share experience and accumulate the total capacity of the domestic gaming industry, instead of cultivating dubious, sucked-out competition.

Along the way, we want to touch on the topic of the influence of media on these processes: their role, their purpose, their levers of influence on the ecosystem.

It is interesting to talk about the development of indie: to discuss the boom itself, its positive aspects and some negative consequences. Well, you know, how people, for example, after the first thousand dollars are blown into space, how they start writing romantic posts in the spirit of “how I changed after I got rich,” and other loss of connection with reality.

Let’s try to discuss what is really worth doing after the first successes. Of course, we will also mention bright positive examples that move this segment forward and, God forbid, it will move on at the same pace.

Tangentially, we plan to exchange a few words on various small topics. For example, about the contribution of screenwriters to development and the like. For example, I can discuss a lot of internal cuisine in advance with famous writers Zorichi (Yana Bosman and Dmitry Gordeevsky). And already with this base to come out to discuss the topic.

I don’t want to postulate one topic and strain to squeeze words out of myself for an hour and a half. It is better to be in the mode of an easy blitz survey, switch to questions from the audience and start a conversation with each other again.

Are there any topics that you don’t want to raise as part of the conversation?

Yes, I don’t want to discuss (at least for a long time and seriously) the future of the industry. Here I can immediately answer – the industry has a future, it is bright and rich. This topic can be considered exhausted for the next year at least.

Even less do I want to discuss such a topic as “the absence of a domestic witcher”. There is a wonderful round table on this topic by my good friend Petya Kharitonov, where Sergey Orlovsky, who, among other things, has gone through an expensive retail single (HoMM V) in development, tells why there is no Russian witcher now, what is needed for his appearance and in how many years it is achievable. It’s better to just review that table, and prepare new “trick questions” for the upcoming one.

App2Top.ru In turn, he suggests asking the participants of the future conversation their questions right under this publication. We will award premium tickets for the best questions. So the participants of this small competition will be able to hear the answers to them personally.

Questions should be written under this publication. After the question in parentheses, be sure to specify that you are participating in the contest, and also leave the address of your VK or Facebook page so that we can contact you. The winners will be announced on Friday, June 16, in the comments under this material, as well as in our public posts on Facebook and VK.

The winners will be chosen by the speakers themselves.