Results of 2018: Alexey Morozov from HeroCraft about the main thing for the year
Marketing Director of HeroCraft Alexey Morozov said App2Top.ru , how was 2018 for the company. Including the fact that HeroCraft has doubled its turnover in a year.
Alexey MorozovHow was 2018 for you personally?
It was a productive year, that’s for sure. There are a lot of new acquaintances among developers, partners and in the indie crowd. First of all, this is due to the change of position. Until mid-summer, I was the director of infrastructure, supervised the creation of marketing and promotional materials, conducting A/B tests. Now I occupy the chair of the marketing director — I form a team and dive deeper into the issues of attracting users.
How was the year for your company?
This year, the company has grown noticeably in all areas: it has released several major projects, has taken up the development of new technologies and platforms. We have grown in turnover again — about twice as compared to last year. What is especially pleasant, in many respects this happened thanks to the built-up system of traffic procurement and the building up of competencies in the UA direction. We have improved monetization, increased the staff, which allowed us to make more test materials.
Due to the active growth, we have opened many new vacancies, including remote ones. There were people in Minsk, Kiev, Odessa, Sevastopol and Novosibirsk.
Now about the games. We have released a major publishing project on PC — INSOMNIA: The Ark (we will continue working with the guys from Samara next year). By the way, with this game we visited a game exhibition with our own stand for the first time. It was Cracow Game Days, held at the end of July in Krakow.
Insomnia Stand: The Ark on Cracow Game Days
Another important change affected our console department — we released the game on PS4 for the first time.
The Marble Duel port gave us a cool experience, so next year HeroCraft plans to release several more projects on the curling iron, Nintendo Switch and Xbox.
The WebGL direction has also received tangible development — this year we released Space Arena on Kongregate and Armor Games. The game was warmly received by the local community, so we are preparing ports for two more projects: Tempest and Dead Shell. By the way, Tempest was released in China — we managed to get a feature on Tencent and several times on the App Store.
As you can see, there are many events. From the latest: now we have the game Mafioso: Gangster Paradise in the softlonch in the CIS. A promising project, shows good metrics. We are preparing a full-fledged release by the beginning of next year.
Mafioso: Gangster ParadiseWhat event of 2018 do you consider the most important for the industry?
The year has passed fairly smoothly, with the exception of the entry into force of the new GDPR. This event somehow touched everyone who works with content, including the gaming industry. The resolution did not cause much damage to large companies, but some small projects had to be closed due to the inability to build the necessary infrastructure.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
The blockchain fever is gradually declining, although perhaps this is just the calm before a new storm. Nintendo Switch is very cheerfully gaining momentum — the platform is becoming more and more significant in the gaming market.
It is impossible not to note the emergence of new alternative stores, like Discord, a potential expansion of WeGame. A fresh announcement from Epic Games has added fuel to the fire and exacerbated the competition between the sites. The confrontation of the stores will spur them to introduce more new solutions. I personally really liked the opportunity for developers to stream from the game page on Steam. This is perfectly combined with ongoing sales and increases interest in the product. I think both large and small developers will benefit from the new features they have received.
What are the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most?
I’m still a PC gamer, so console hits have bypassed me. Played Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I liked getting used to the role of the character — he is much weaker than in most games of this kind, so you even start to take care of him a little. This is one of the few games where, moving around the battlefields, you don’t want to search the dead bodies — the atmosphere so permeates the consciousness that you begin to feel sympathy for these polygonal models.
In Frostpunk, the atmosphere and moral choice drags — 11 bit studios can do it. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is an excellent logical development of the first part, the game has become better on all fronts. Chopping down hordes of Skaven right and left is priceless, especially when you are a dwarf and the wheat in the field is higher than your head.
