Results of 2019: Dmitry Bobrov from ZiMAD about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2019 together with the heads of gaming companies and market experts. Next up is an interview with Dmitry Bobrov, CEO of the ZiMAD game studio. He spoke about how the current year has passed for his company.

How was 2019 for the company?

It feels like the year has passed in three in terms of positive internal changes, team growth, primarily qualitative.

We have reconfigured many lame processes, greatly improved the speed and quality of data processing of various kinds. This allowed us to devote more time to the main thing — the quality of products that players expect from us, non-standard and unique solutions that create a new user experience even in well-known genres and mechanics.

We are finishing the year with record turnover figures and a record monthly audience.

Our flagship, Magic Jigsaw Puzzles, continues to grow. The product in its current form is already 8.5 years old. For the mobile market, this is the retirement age. Over the past year, we have managed to turn IAP monetization painlessly towards subscriptions and continue to extend this successful experience to part of the rest of the portfolio.

Magic Jigsaw Puzzles

After launching content from National Geographic, Sony Pictures and Cartoon Network in the past years, this year we launched cooperation with new interesting and large partners: we will delight a huge audience of puzzle lovers around the world with real exclusives.

Announcements and releases will go into 2020.

Dig Out! changed beyond recognition in a year. We radically changed the user flow, monetization (it was a really risky step, but it allowed us to give the game a second life as a result), worked on the medium- and long-term goals of the player, added tournaments, redesigned the graphic component. As a result, we managed to raise the conversion to payment on the product by an order of magnitude! A lot of interesting things are waiting for our diggers ahead.

Dig Out!
In the past year, Asian markets, primarily Chinese, have attracted more and more of our attention.

We have intermediate successes, but we are objectively only at the beginning of this path.

New interesting releases are on the way. One of them is planned for the beginning of 2020. This is some rethinking and development of the extremely popular casual genre now. We will limit the details on this.

ZiMAD has become a more open and active company in the external environment. This trend will continue in the coming year. We focus on our strengths, key competencies and prepare to surprise everyone in 2020.

What events in the regional and global gaming industry do you consider central in the past year?

It is difficult to single out specific bright local events from the general mass, however, the successes of the Russian gaming market, the rapid growth of its volumes, both total and specifically in our native mobile segment, cannot but rejoice.

Although Russia still does not generate a significant share of income for us, but the growth of the share in total income and the growth of income per player this year is obvious. In terms of the size of the audience of our games, it is confidently among the top five. It is not surprising to hear that Russia is claiming a place in the top three largest gaming markets in Europe in the very near future.

Of the current global events, I will highlight first of all Apple‘s love for subscriptions, which grew into the launch of Apple Acrade. So far, it doesn’t look more to me than a tiny oasis in the endless desert of frituplay for certain categories of projects and players. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see where it will move and what other vendors will offer.

I will also highlight, in my opinion, significant announcements and clumsy launches of solutions in the field of cloud gaming, first of all, we are talking about Google Stadia.

Of course, the announcements of the continuation of the legendary Diablo series and Half-Life in VR, which has been rumored for so long. According to the latter, this is probably not what most were waiting for, but something interesting is definitely waiting for us in the spring. VR clearly needs a breath of fresh air, and in this regard, a release from such a strong player can be very useful.

What are the main trends in the market today?

Among the large number of noted trends in the market, I will especially highlight the following three:

• Advertising has been and remains the engine of progress. For mobile gaming in general and for us as a company that receives most of its revenue from mobile advertising, the process of market transition to in-app header bidding is important. This has been going on for years, but finally the big players are announcing and releasing full-fledged solutions from beta one after another, which can end the era of traditional waterfalls already in 2020. The selection of the most effective advertising mediations at the moment and the ability to configure them correctly often affect LTV and ROAS no less than a properly configured economy for monetization with IAP. Everything, of course, depends on the genre, the target audience of the product and its monetization model.
• The same ongoing explosive growth of hyper-casual, which takes away some of the paying players from mid- and hardcore products and increases the importance of advertising monetization in the whole market. This segment with its own special philosophy and business model is inevitably waiting for a slowdown or even a plateau on the horizon of the next year and a half, and, as a result, rebirth into something new and more mature. I do not exclude that hyper-casual will eventually be allocated to separate subsections of app stores, as it was done earlier for other kinds of games with the release of the same Apple Arcade.
• I’ll mention cloud gaming again. Despite the previously unsuccessful launch of the Google solution, we are waiting for work on errors and answers from other players. This is our rather close future. In the mobile segment, the undisputed driver of cloud gaming-and in 2020, the more intensive distribution of 5G networks will become.

Which third-party game releases this year, in your opinion, were the most important? Plus, which games did you spend the most time on in 2019 as a gamer?

Recent important releases that have certainly attracted attention: Call of Duty: Mobile, Wildscapes and Mario Kart Tour.

By the nature of the activity, there is rarely an opportunity to immerse yourself in something with your head. Basically, throughout the year, there was a review of many products close to our genre and basic mechanics.

In his spare time in the outgoing year, sports simulators and games of the current genre of Auto Chess were favorites. The latter, represented by the product of the same name from Drodo Studio and the adaptation from Valve — Dota Underlords, can also be safely attributed to the list of the most interesting releases of the year.