Results of 2018: Andrey Iones from Saber Interactive about the main thing for the year

Saber Interactive Chief Operating Officer Andrey Iones told App2Top how 2018 went for the company.

Mudrunner and Andrey IonesHow was 2018 for you personally?

The year flew by like 5 minutes. Probably, it does not happen otherwise if you are trying to embrace the immensity — to be in different parts of the world at the same time and at the same time engage in projects with completely different partners from different countries and from different continents.

How was the year for your company?

Saber has been growing all the time of its existence. Sometime faster, sometime slower. 2018 was no exception. We grew up both in our main habitats (St. Petersburg and Madrid) and began development in new territories. Somewhere the growth was due to the formation of their studios, somewhere – through the creation of relationships with partner studios.

This is generally a separate and new experience for us — the production of projects “not inside”. I had to build project management chains, take up the formulation and acceptance of large tasks and entire projects, remote management. We very often acted as performers, and now we had to learn how to be customers.

During the year there were many significant events related to the release of projects. We started cooperating with 2K, released NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 together with them.

NBA 2K Playgrounds 2
Mudrunner has been supported and developed all year.

Also, together with idSoftware and Bethesda, a dozen Quake Champions updates were released.

Our social casino project, Slotterra, has been showing steady growth on Odnoklassniki all year. We recently released a version for Facebook. Other versions of this project are also planned.

Of course, it is impossible not to mention the work on World War Z. The project will be launched next year, and its intensive development has been carried out all this year.

What event of 2018 do you consider the most important for the industry?

I will name one event that affected us directly — the launch of the Epic Games Store online platform. The Steam alternative will definitely change the paradigm of digital distribution on PC, and, quite possibly, on other platforms.

What are the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most?

I will not be original by calling Fortnite. His absolutely phenomenal success proves that anyone who works thoughtfully, takes risks and carefully watches the market has every chance of success.