Results of 2017: Alexey Ilyin from the Interactive Cartoon about the main thing for the year
Alexey Ilyin, the head of children’s projects of the Interactive Cartoon VGTRK gaming direction, told App2Top that his company had managed over the past year and which mobile games he remembered the most.
Alexey IlyinHow was 2017 for you personally?
Hectic, stressful, but at the same time productive. There was a lot more work than last year. Lots of trips, meetings, negotiations.
I visited WWDC for the first time, which became one of the most intense and eventful conferences I have ever been to.
I flew to China twice. The trip to China Joy turned out to be very productive: we managed to sign a contract with a subsidiary of the state corporation China Telecom to publish our games in China.
How was the year for the company?
So many events have happened this year that it’s even difficult to collect everything, I’ll try not to miss anything:
- six wonderful mobile apps have been released;
- we have consolidated the position of the leading children’s publisher in Russia;
- we collected 20 million installations, an increase of 400% compared to the same period last year;
- We released a VR project on Steam and Vive Port, enlisting the support of HTC.
Just the other day, our musical game “Mi-mi-Bears: Big Concert” became one of the best games for children by the end of 2017 on Google Play, not only in Russia, but also in a number of other countries, including the USA!
“Mi-mi-bears: The Big Concert”
We plan to release our first AR project by the end of the year.
Great success for our young team!
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
The new App Store. The store has changed radically and looks very good. From the user’s point of view, it’s nice to go there every day. But for the developer, in connection with such a global change, there are still more questions than answers.
For the children’s segment, in my opinion, the key event was the permission of Cross App Subscription (subscription to a set of applications). The example of Playkids proves that this is indeed a working scheme for monetizing children’s content and is probably a gold mine for manufacturers of children’s apps.
Also an important event was the release of the Nintendo Switch console, and the launch of Nintendo mobile games in its unique, “Nintendo” style.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
I would single out four main trends.
- Fading interest in VR. Unfortunately, the technology could not become mass, and people were obviously tired of waiting for a breakthrough.
- But there was a boom in AR, as [the technology] became universally available to users after updating operating systems.
- Machine Learning will soon enter the lives of most developers in one form or another. It is very difficult to rebuild, but it is already obvious that it needs to be done.
- Blockchains, cryptocurrencies and other ICOs, including virtual cats, have firmly entered our lives, displacing VR from it.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
Iron Marines is an excellent RTS from the creators of Kingdom Rush. Warm, lamp-like, with very pleasant controls. Probably, this is the first RTS, which is as pleasant as possible to play on a mobile device.
Iron Marines
I was happy to pass the second part of Monument Valley.
It’s beautiful, almost like the first one.
We are happy to play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp with my daughter. The continuation of Nintendo’s expansion to mobile platforms has succeeded — the boundaries of the audience have expanded, a new generation of brand fans has appeared.
