Results of 2019: Nikita Zatsepin from BlueStacks 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 the head of the Russian office of BlueStacks Nikita Zatsepin.

How was 2019 for the company?

For the company, the year passed in accordance with the set plans. We have overcome 400 million installations, tested several new product hypotheses, made friends with even more game developers and grew to 270+ people (vacancies can be viewed here).

An important milestone in May was the strategic partnership with Steam, under which developers will receive tools that allow them to publish mobile games in the largest desktop store, bypassing the porting stage. The first releases took place in the fall, we hope that at the beginning of the new year we will be able to tell you in more detail.

The other day we announced a new company Game.tv , which aims to democratize the mobile esports market. We have been working on this project all this year, and it is very interesting to see how it will show itself. Now, with the help of Tourney (a bot for automating tournaments), 1000 tournaments are held weekly, and many gaming companies have already tried out the new service for themselves.

As a source of traffic for game developers, we also want to mention getting into the AppsFlyer index in the Hardcore section in the Power Ranking section. This demonstrates the quality of our audience and the growing interest in it from developers.

Now there is a “maturation” of the Android emulator market. If two or three years ago such platforms seemed exotic to many and I heard different, including polar, opinions on this matter, now there is not the slightest doubt that a fairly large stratum of a very engaged audience prefers to play mobile games with a PC. We see that more and more developers are paying attention to this audience in the product (for example, they take into account players from these platforms in matchmaking in PvP games) and even create their own solutions (Gameloop from Tencent or Purple from NCsoft).

Of course, we, as pioneers, are happy to see the growing interest in this market. And users will only benefit from the competition. We have a lot of plans ahead for the development of the BlueStacks platform and third-party services, and I’m sure we will still have something to please our favorite players.

At the CIS level, I would like to note all the successes of our small but very hardworking team. These are built relationships with hundreds of opinion leaders, and the creation of one of the largest Discord servers about games in the CIS in principle (more than 100 thousand participants, and their number continues to grow), participation in specialized conferences and exhibitions, and much, much more. Largely due to this, the Russian market, in particular, is one of the largest for BlueStacks and the closest attention is paid to it.

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

There were many events, so I will focus on the most memorable in different verticals.

• Ongoing work on market regulation, especially the shareware monetization model. In China right now, if you’re under 18, you can’t spend more than $30 a month on games if you want to. There you can also record loot boxes, and Apple updates hitting the fingers of subscription applications, and the introduction of moderation in Google Play, and so on.
• Secondly, the Epic Games Store‘s struggle with Steam on the desktop market. This story has just begun this year. It will be very interesting to see what it will lead to. Epic Games “came in” with a large number of both exclusives and free giveaways (more than 50 games could be obtained this year without spending a single ruble). Steam resisted and announced Half-Life in VR. What will happen next?
• The Russian market is consolidating, which indicates sufficient maturity and formation. On the one hand, Playrix has already entered the golden three of mobile publishers and is actively buying up teams and projects in order to compete with “big” (although, it seems to me, this definition is outdated) gaming companies like Activision Blizzard and Tencent. On the other hand, the group Mail.Ru The Group is steadily growing with acquired studios, and now it receives more than a third of its revenue from the gaming division. Today, if you are a developer with a sufficiently high-quality prototype, then all roads are open for you: the demand for high-quality game content from investors significantly exceeds the supply.
• Speaking about regional companies, SayGames from Belarus took off like a bright star straight into the world’s top downloads. Great fellows! I can wish to stay on the podium! I will also mention Nexters with Hero Wars – the guys demonstrate miracles both in the purchase and in the monetization of midcore projects.

What are the main trends in the market today?

• The hyper-casual boom of last year seems to have peaked this year. Fewer and fewer companies are able to cope with the growing competition, raising the threshold for entering this market to the skies. And the mastodons of the market themselves (Voodoo, Lion Studios, the aforementioned SayGames and others) are experimenting with new mechanics, making idlers, puzzles and so on. Pure hyper-casual has almost reached the ratio Ad LTV = AC. Most likely, next year this story will begin to subside.
• At the same time, the threshold for entry into higher-quality projects from the point of view of graphics is reduced. Here we must pay tribute to Epic Games, which constantly throws hundreds of assets on the market for free use.
• It is important to note the Apple Arcade subscription service. For projects with monetization not through advertising and in-game purchases, it has become a breath of fresh air. The service has its own audience. The only question is whether the time spent by users in the game will be able to recoup the developers’ expenses.
• Google also entered the games (are we waiting for Facebook?) by launching Stadia. It’s still raw, but nevertheless. The company has also launched several studios that will create content for this platform. As I said at the beginning of the year: it’s still too early for cloud gaming from an infrastructure point of view, but the idea itself sounds great. Plus, more and more companies are entering this market with their solutions. The trend towards cross-platform and cross-device is only growing. I think next year we will start separating mobile and console/desktop games less and less from each other.
• VR this year has become almost a dirty word on the gaming sidelines. However, Valve gave new hope by announcing Half-Life for virtual reality. But isn’t she too late, will this game be enough to increase sales for VR glasses outside the “early buyers” market?
• From the point of view of monetization, the mechanics of combat passes have become extremely popular. Today it is already used in all genres.
• The quality of advertising materials is rapidly increasing in the mobile advertising market. This is a serious challenge for gaming companies that need to build the production of a sufficient number of creatives for testing. Additionally, I will note the Rewarded Video. This is far from a new format. However, it confidently defeats other advertising formats both in terms of monetization and audience retention.
• TikTok is growing by leaps and bounds, which by the end of the year has united almost everyone who is less than twenty years old. To date, this is the only major social network that gives organic. I myself uploaded a random video from my phone there and collected more than 43 thousand views on my naked account. These guys have come for a long time, so one-time experiments in purchasing in 2019 are likely to turn into well-established work with one of the main traffic channels in 2022-2024.

Which third-party game releases turned out to be the most important this year? Which games did you spend the most time on in 2019 as a gamer?
Of the mobile releases, of course, the most impressive for me was Call of Duty: Mobile.

 This is a new standard of mobile shooters, comparable in quality to desktop projects. Some completely unattainable level of optimization, very cool.

I would also like to mention Harry Potter: Wizards Unite from Niantic, which, unfortunately, did not take off similarly to Pokémon Go.

I will also note Brawl Stars. The game has been on the market for a relatively long time, but I devoted a lot of time to it in 2019.

Of the central desktop releases, the main one, of course, is Death Stranding. Personally, the game did not come to me (however, I have not played the number of hours after which it should finally become interesting), but the project is curious about innovation. The traditional action gameplay here gave way to meditative and rather boring travel.

I will also note the restart of World of Warcraft. To collect such a stir 10+ years after the launch of the original is a cool result.