Results of 2016: Konstantin Sakhnov from Rocket Jump about changes in the company

Konstantin Sakhnov, Director of the Rocket Jump gaming Department, told App2Top about how the company’s approach to working with employees has changed this year.

Year for the company

Rocket Jump has had a busy and productive year. We have been reorganized, the management structure has been optimized.

Any studio faced with rapid active growth faces a global problem of maintaining efficiency. And this is not surprising. In a team of 20-30 people, you can agree on almost everything. But the bigger the structure, the more attention you need to pay to its management.

Our priority is the high quality of manufactured products. And I believe that it can be achieved only with systematic and methodical work with the team. Therefore, in 2016 we increased our focus on working with people. Corporate training has appeared in the company: senior colleagues give lectures and talk about successful cases from our practice. We invite professionals from other companies to share their experience: for example, this year an Amazon evangelist Mike Hines gave a lecture at Rocket Jump. We send our employees to external training.

We paid special attention to feedback. Any specialist working on a project should always know how the management evaluates his work. He should understand what the company expects from him. Working with people is like game design: you need to find a balance between regulating processes and a friendly, “lamp” atmosphere in the team.

An excess of regulations creates bureaucracy. Their complete absence is anarchy. And no matter how cool people work, they will not move one iota if they pull the project in opposite directions.

And, of course, this year two projects developed by us came out at once: the Imperial mobile strategy and the Dakota social farm.

My personal key achievement of the past year is the transition to the position of director of the gaming department of our company.

Event of the year in the world

The first thing that comes to mind is the story with Hideo Kojima, which began last year after the release of Metal Gear Solid V and ended with the powerful announcement of Death Stranding and receiving an award for contribution to the industry at The Game Awards. But the biggest impact on the gaming market, in my opinion, was Pokémon Go and its incredible success among a wide audience.

Trend of the year

I will highlight three important trends. The first one is AR/VR. Never before have these technologies been talked about so much. There were high-quality prototypes and interesting ideas. No need to go far — the same Pokémon Go.

There is less talk about the second trend, but it seems to me that it should be taken into account in the future — this is the rapid development of the Asian game development and publishing market. While Western and domestic developers continue to struggle for the quality of products and the cost of advertising traffic, Tencent and other Eastern giants are exerting more and more influence on the international gaming market, moving forward by leaps and bounds. In addition, the annual growth rates of the local market in China significantly exceed Western ones.

The third trend is indie. It was also observed last year, but this is where I see the increasing presence of indie at conferences and the need for novice developers to learn and develop. People want to make games, and it pleases.

Game of the Year

For me, this is undoubtedly World of Warcraft: Legion. I’m a big fan of Blizzard products, and, of course, I ordered a Legion collector’s item in addition to the boxes of previous addons standing on the windowsill at home.

Knowing my interests, my friends gave me an English-language encyclopedia on Warcraft even before it went on mass sale. I am happy to share with the readers of App2Top a photo of a corner of Warcraft at my workplace.