15 years of Targem Games: interview with the founder

In 2017, the Yekaterinburg studio Targem Games, the author of such games as Ex Machina and Star Conflict, turned 15 years old. App2Top.ru I talked about the history of the studio with its founder Stanislav Skorb.

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : How did it all start? How did you get into development yourself?

Stanislav Skorb, CEO and Founder of Targem Games: I got into development not by chance. I’ve wanted to make games since high school.

It often happens that someone just wants to, and that’s it. And I started making games at school. When I studied at the university, I continued to develop them.

By 2002, experience had accumulated, people appeared around who wanted to do the same thing. Gradually, a team gathered that wanted to do something.

Did I understand correctly that your first team gathered when you were studying at the university?

Yes, but I was no longer a student, but a graduate student. The backbone was recruited from those with whom I studied together.

What was your specialty?

Mathematics. When I was in graduate school, I was engaged in image recognition. There are even articles, but I didn’t finish graduate school. Because at last we made something that could be published, which had prospects. And game development began to take up all the time.

How difficult was it to find a publisher then? How did their search take place?

It was a good time to find a publisher back then. Russian game dev was “on the rise”. Publishers earned money on projects both in Russia and abroad. And they were actively looking for teams. In those years – from 2000 to 2006 – many new teams appeared. We were one of them.

We did a demo version of “Magic of War” for a year. At the end of 2001, we decided that the game looks good, it can be shown. We sent out demo versions to publishers. Including 1C and Buke.

1C were thorough. Yuri Miroshnikov worked there. I asked all the questions: what are we planning next, what kind of team we have. And she took the Buka and came to us from Moscow to Yekaterinburg herself. We watched the game and said, “Well, cool! Let’s subscribe.” Subscribed. It turns out that we haven’t been looking for a publisher for a long time.

The first Tagem Games game was “Magic of War“. It was released in October 2003. The project was a tactical strategy with role-playing elements in the spirit of Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat and the Myth series. The gameplay of the game was not based on the construction of a base and the extraction of resources, but on combat skirmishes with enemy armies.

You mentioned that you showed the publishers a demo version. What was in it?

There wasn’t much else there. The picture at that time was pretty. In terms of gameplay – one level, three or four characters. As such, there was no game yet.

I have heard a lot of criticism about the conditions under which they worked at that time. Roughly speaking, at first a certain advance was given, then it had to pay off, and only after that the developers received some percentage.

Yes, this is a separate big topic, which, by the way, explains why we released only a dozen projects for zero.

The conditions were bonded. The developer received a percentage of sales only after the advance issued by the publisher paid off three times. As a result, few people made a profit (only the most cunning managed).

This, by the way, scared off some, forced others to cheat. For example, you get an advance, but you consider part of it as your profit.

But fifteen years ago it didn’t seem scary. I used to make games for free before, but here we were paid for development. It was fun: we make games, we do what we’ve always dreamed of. By the way, our projects paid off (including thanks to sales in Western markets), but not in the way we want, not dozens of times.

Of course, there were financial difficulties. For example, we finish a project alone. Our team is small and inexperienced, everyone has to work on the same project, and the contract has run out of money, because we are not 100% on time. In the creative process, you always linger a little bit. I delayed it for a month, and the “uncle” says to you: “Why are we going to pay you more? That’s it, come on, finish it, I promised you under the contract!”.

After that, you sit and think what to do: the team has nothing to pay with, and the project needs to be completed.

I had to get out of it. Sometimes the publisher came forward, added a little money. Sometimes I had to go to a technique that was popular among Russian developers at that time: you subscribe to a new project, but you finish the old project with an advance from a new project.

Accordingly, then you get into debt for a new project, but you can also start another project in parallel…

Publishers didn’t give enough money?

There was money. The problem was that no one knew how to work normally: neither publishers nor developers. Because of this, many of them conducted two projects.

Then they learned to handle money better, but it was still more profitable to have several projects at once. You never know, for some reason a hitch will happen, something will go wrong under the contract or the money will run out. I always wanted to have a backup option to work on.

About 10 years ago there was a period when my studio was making 10 games at the same time! Not everyone, of course, was in the active stage. Half was frozen, half was just beginning. But 10 projects were in development.

Why they all came out is a separate question. Perhaps my stubbornness is to blame. I’m a stubborn person, I can’t stand unfinished business. Therefore, my team brought everything to the end.

When I looked at the release schedule of projects, I thought that an iron hand ruled in the studio. Every year one project is completed, then another is taken and also completed in a year.

It didn’t happen then. It was like this: we have typed projects, let’s finish now, we have to finish everything.

Important: We have never done projects that we don’t like. They took it and released it. At the same time, we always tried to experiment. After the “Magic of War” strategy, we started making games about cars.

The first Targem Games game “about cars” was the post-apocalyptic Ex Machina. In Russia, the game was released in December 2005. Inspired by “Mad Max” and Fallout, she told the story of a world turned into a desert, through which the survivors roll out on armored trucks. The role of one of these survivors turned out to be a player looking for his father’s killers. In addition to rides on open levels in the style of Interstate 76, the Ex Machina player could pump his car and take quests.

Then, even before the emergence of the iPhone, they took and made a mobile project. We didn’t sell it anywhere: the market was undeveloped and we didn’t know how to sell. It was interesting for us to try all this. Therefore, they took and tried.

It turns out that you had creative freedom.

Not quite. We were very dependent on publishers. They didn’t always agree to do what we wanted. And that’s why we were looking for those who would agree.

For the first ten years, we slowly grew, became steeper and steeper. And throughout this period, the model was the same: we showed several projects (usually of different genres), and the publisher pointed at one thing with his finger and said: “Okay, let’s do it.”

The games were in a variety of genres. At the same time, there were also custom projects. But there were very few of them – three pieces. But all with sonorous names: “Night Watch”, Battle vs. Chess and mobile “Demiurges”.

Although it is wrong to call “Demiurges” completely custom-made. The topic that mobile “Demiurges” need to be made was simply thrown by Nival. And no one knew what they would be. We made them together with them.

Have there been turning points in history?

There were no special turning points.

We had no profit for a very long time: we spent everything we earned. But they made good games. They became better, more experienced.

We really wanted to do a project on the console at one time. And they did. It was a MorphX port of “Symbiont” on the Xbox 360. Nothing, a good game came out. Recently, fans wrote to me, asking when the sequel will be released.

It was one of the first domestic projects on consoles. After that, we made a port of our PC game on the console – Armageddon Riders. They just took it themselves, saved up some money – saved on breakfast – and ported it, and released the game themselves. It was a new experience for us.

The story of their release, by the way, is wonderful.

We’ve been doing this for a year. They decided to publish only in numbers. At that time it was impossible for us to publish on discs – it was expensive and difficult. We needed big investments, which we didn’t have.

As soon as we decided to publish the game on the PlayStation Network, the store was hacked. He didn’t work for a month. When the PSN was repaired, games began to be distributed free of charge (after the PSN was hacked in 2011, Playstation 3 users were offered to download free games to choose from as part of the loyalty restoration program, – approx. editorial offices). And very, very many people came just to watch the games.

It so happened that just at that moment we came out. No one else took the risk. We made good money on the game back then. It was good money for us. And, by the way, the game is still on sale.

Armageddon Riders, which appeared in 2011, developed a racing theme in a new way for the company. Targem Games has already had races before. Sledgehammer 2007 was dedicated to the rivalry of heavy trucks, the creation of Insane 2 was going on in parallel. But when developing Armageddon Riders, Targem Games came from an unusual side. The company has added the stylistics and mechanics of Carmageddon to the traditional racing concept: the ability to crush zombies and put weapons on cars.

It was our first money. And we realized that it was much better than working for a publisher. Of course, it was clear enough, it just wasn’t possible.

Important: all more or less successful Russian developers who survived the “troubled times” and crises, somehow earned themselves. Someone was selling to the West, someone else was doing something. We were lucky to be among them.

Now we are doing MMO projects. They untie their hands a lot, because you have a project that constantly brings some money. Not once a lot of money, but constantly brings, you control this process yourself.

Why did you move into this new niche, and not continue to develop for consoles?

Consoles are great, but our second console game sold worse (Planets Under Attack). At the same time, we have invested quite heavily in it.

This project was unlucky with the publisher. It’s very difficult to publish on Xbox on our own, and we decided to work with the Germans – TopWare Interactive, for whom we also did Battle vs. Chess.

They “threw” us, we did not receive half of the money from sales. But still – we expected that the project would sell better.

Plus, we came to a simple thought: to engage in such games is from the category of “lucky / unlucky”.

If you are lucky, you will beat off a couple of budgets, if you are very lucky, you will earn several times more. If you’re not lucky, it will be sad.

MMO we were offered to do Gaijin Entertainment. We agreed. We had no experience, we did not know how to create such games at all.

Gaijin Entertainment invested in us and we took on the creation of Star Conflict.

And was it an investment, or was it again a model like “we will publish”?

It was an investment.

How long have you been creating the project?

They came to the PTA in a year and a half. The release took place exactly two years after the start of development. Now the project has been on the market for five years.

As far as I understand, this was the turning point when you began to grow steadily and earn money?

This is not exactly a turning point. They just did. Before that, they did it in one way, then they learned how to do it on consoles, learned how to publish themselves. Then we learned how to make online games.

Star Conflict, which appeared on digital platforms in 2012, is an action-MMO in the spirit of World of Tanks and War Thunder. Only instead of real World War II technology, the player sits at the helm of a spaceship. The official release of the game took place in 2014. On Steam alone, the number of game owners is more than 2 million.

What projects are more interesting for you to work on?

It turned out to be more interesting for me to work on online games than on offline ones, because there is a very lively connection with users. You make any change – immediately people comment on something there to you right away, and you see how they start playing the game more or less … Everything is visible with their eyes. This is much more interesting than burning a game to disk, sending a master copy to print and starting to make a new game. (Laughs).

On the other hand, when you have made a project and sent it to disk, you can rest for a month. And with MMO it won’t work that way.

Of course, there is more tension. But it’s still interesting. From the very beginning it has been like this and now it continues: I make games because it is interesting.

Plus, now online development brings in more money than anything we’ve earned before.

And, most likely, you will soon earn even more. Crossout is on the way.

Yes, in Crossout we just want to do everything that we could not or did not have time to do in Star Conflict at the time.

After Star Conflict, we realized what we were doing online: we have made a project that earns well. And now we need to do something else using our experience, but simpler.

Crossout turned out to be not very much easier. There are fights, plus, a constructor. But still, it turned out to be for a large audience. There are a lot more people playing games about cars than there are games about spaceships.

In my opinion, we have no discipline. (Laughs). We have a flexible start of the working day, from 8 to 11. You can leave, respectively, from 6 to 8. You need to work eight hours a day.

The exception is students. They go according to their schedule (there are few personnel, so we take students).

The main thing is that people work 8 hours a day.

No tricks.

The same applies to the construction of processes. The work is built in the same way as any other projects: concept, plan, minimal control.

Apparently, successful people have picked up.

Is it really so bad with the frames that students have to close the “holes”?

After all, no one will come to Yekaterinburg from Moscow. It happens that people come from other cities, but rarely. We have to raise everyone ourselves. Including students.

Sometimes the result is even better with students, because when a person comes from another business, he is not so interested. And if it’s a student, then his eyes are burning, he’s like, “I’m going to start making games now!”.

It’s hard with students because they’ve never worked anywhere much, they don’t know what discipline is at all, they don’t know that you need to take time off when you want to leave in the middle of the working day… I have to live with it somehow.

But you can completely redo it for yourself.

They just grow up with us. We are growing, they are also growing with us. Our staff turnover is low.

How many of you are there now?

We are big, we are about 100 people. We plan to expand. Due to the fact that online projects appear, quite a lot of people are required for support and testing.

Are there any thoughts about relocating or opening new branches? To make it easier with the people.

I don’t think it will be much easier if we open offices in other cities or countries. I don’t see any places where it’s good with shots.

They often move just for the sake of comfort.

One of the developers who moved to Europe once told me: “It’s great to make games here. They are grown like flowers in a garden, and you are suffering in Mordor.” But this is also nonsense. It’s probably more comfortable to live there, but it’s like who, I’m very comfortable in the Urals, and successful development does not depend on the place, but on which people I picked up, how the process was organized.

Very soon you will launch the second MMO. Are you doing something else?

Now we are messing with VR.

For example, in 2014 we made a small project BlazeRush – racing. First released on PS3. It is successful, we have ported it to a lot of places: on PS4, on Steam released. We recently made a version for Oculus (and it got into the launch line of the device). Oculus loves her very much. They write to us to make a sequel, they are ready to finance it, but our team is not so big now to do everything in the world.

We have a version, we have shown it at exhibitions. There, in the workshop, you can personally screw the parts to the machines.

But now there are no resources to add VR functionality to the game either. Although, perhaps we will, we are currently negotiating about this.

More recently, a mobile game was released under the Star Conflict franchise.

Aren’t you going to concentrate on mobile?

Concentrate – not yet. We made Star Conflict because we had the experience of mobile “Demiurges”. By the way, both of these projects are one of the few that we have made not on our own engine, but on Unity.

The disadvantage of the platform is that it is harder to attract players in mobile. And be visible too.

The project turned out to be good. I got a feature from both Apple and Google.

But it seems to me that in order to make only mobile games, you have to live with it, and I am skeptical about mobile gaming. On smartphones – not at all the games that I play in my free time. Now I’m going through Horizon Zero Dawn. Before that, Doom passed. I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft.

Mobile titles don’t get stuck like that. I’m playing some nonsense. I play preference or such games where it is necessary to shout. But it’s still a service. Our MMOs also have it, but there is also gameplay. Therefore, it is more interesting for me to deal with games for large platforms.

However, let’s see how life goes. We don’t have such a goal right now that we are going to do just that, and that’s it. We change and take different projects into development. Brought to the release of the mobile Star Conflict. Now let’s take another mobile title. For example, we are offered to make a Crossout for smartphones. Perhaps we will undertake to do it. Probably not. We do not need to think far ahead.