Results of 2018: Igor Elovikov from Playrix about the main thing for the year
Playrix Creative Director Igor Elovikov told App2Top how the year went for the company and which projects became central for him in 2018.
Igor ElovikovHow was the year for your company?
The year went well for Playrix. Despite the lack of releases, we have worked very hard to launch as many new games as possible in 2019. At the same time, we did not ignore our existing projects, thanks to which we achieved record figures and took a strong place in the top 10 mobile game developers in the world.
Which event of 2018 do you consider the most important for the industry?
I think many will agree with me that this is a Fortnite release on mobile platforms. An amazing result, proving that mobile phones are quite a platform for similar games. I think there will be even more examples of such products that were previously considered “unformatted” for phones.
However, in addition to the success of Epic, it is very exciting to watch the company’s ambitions to become a full-fledged platform on a par with Steam and even Google Play. Let’s see what they will do in 2019.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
In general, it is quite difficult to identify any trends. Interestingly, there have been no notable releases on the mobile market, at least in the West, apart from Fortnite. Apart from Epic, the market seems to have frozen a bit. The leaders did not make any jerks, there were no genre-forming releases similar to Clash Royale from Supercell or our Gardenscapes. Everyone is trying something, but there is no such thing to shoot.
If we talk about the mobile market, we can single out one general trend: everyone is trying to find the next big thing, a new breakthrough product, but so far without much success.
What are the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most?
I liked Empires & Puzzles from the Finnish studio Small Giant Games, although the game is quite niche. Nevertheless, the project is in some way a breakthrough: This is the first significant success in midcorn match-3.
A lot of people tried to repeat the furor of the Japanese Puzzle & Dragons, but no one succeeded before Small Giant Games. The Finns have an interesting product that opens, in fact, a new niche.
I can’t help but mention RDR2. Even comments are unnecessary here. In every sense, an epoch-making game.
