Results of 2019: Alexey and Afanasy Ushnitsky from MYTONA 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 founders of the Yakut MYTONA — Alexey and Afanasy Ushnitsky.

The Ushnitsky BrothersHow was 2019 for the company?

There were some very successful moments, and not so much, but in general, the year went well. The company’s revenues have doubled, and now we have five games on the market.

This year we have gained a lot of experience in development and marketing, in bizdev, in the development of international offices and much more. We haven’t summed up the overall results for ourselves yet, so let’s do it right now with the editors App2Top.ru .

• Released Manastorm: Arena of Legends. This is our first midcore game. Launching a product in a new format and genre for yourself is like learning to walk again. The game has been released so far only in some countries. The players took it well. She almost immediately had influencers and fans who record their fights and do reviews. Now we are continuing to refine it. The fact is that the game’s monetization works well only at the first levels. We are correcting this.

Manastorm: Arena of LegendsNext year we plan to release another midcore game.

• We wanted to launch it this year, but now we are almost completely changing it. We enjoyed making midcore. We plan to further develop this direction.
• Back in 2019, we became very interested in the hyper-casual and super-casual directions. We were going to start making such games, but then we changed our mind: we decided that we would return to this topic next year.
• Our Cooking Diary time management has started earning more than our flagship Seekers Notes. Now Cooking Diary has more than 15 million installations!

Cooking Diary. People’s Choice Awards IMGA 2019Also released this year’s match-3 game Riddleside.

• This is a huge experience for us. The game is still in softlonch, after the release we changed and improved a lot of things: we added a mini-game, interactive meta, content, and made a complete redesign of the game style. There are a lot of changes for the softlonch, but for today we have achieved what we were going for. Soon the game will be released globally and, we think, will be our next hit.

RiddlesideLast year we released Ravenhill — a very beautiful hidden object game in the genre of hidden object.

• Technically, the game is already in the global. However, until recently, its launch was more like early access. We experimented a lot with the game. For example, we added experimental features such as customized avatars. Again, we have redrawn a lot of things. This in general has significantly changed the appearance of the game. Today we see the first results. For example, Ravenhill was in the top 100 highest-grossing iPad games in the United States.

RavenhillWe are gradually starting to realize ourselves as a publisher.

• This year we started collaborating with the cool FNTASTIC team. Now we are working together on a high-budget survival on the Unreal engine. It will be a game with many unique survival systems. If we succeed, the game will take off.

New unannounced MYTONA and FNTASTIC project

By the way, it was fun to find out that MYTONA was in second place both in terms of revenue and the number of features among companies from Russia according to AppMagic (formerly DataMagic) for October 2019.

Of course, all of the above would be impossible without a strong and professional team.

• We’ve grown a lot. Especially our team in St. Petersburg. This year, recruitment was very fast. Now there are more than 120 Mayton residents working in St. Petersburg. Since the recruitment was going faster than we expected, we urgently had to increase the office area several times. The St. Petersburg team turned out to be very cool. She has several new projects in development.

MYTONA office in Saint PetersburgThe team in Singapore is also growing.

• Soon the guys will move to a new office, which is three times larger than the previous one. By the way, this year the office in Singapore is already three years old. Over time, the guys from Russia and the Singapore team began to understand each other perfectly. We are surprised ourselves. As if there is no cultural difference or difference of mentality.

MYTONA office in SingaporeThe team in New Zealand also moved to a new office in 2019.

• Now the guys have one of the best sea views in Auckland. You can go out for lunch and swim in the Pacific Ocean or just have a coffee on the balcony with a stunning view.

MYTONA office in AucklandWe have machine learning teams, an internal tool development department, and other new teams.

• The guys have already achieved a lot.
• It was this year that we began to completely do sound design inside the company. Previously, we partially outsourced sounds and music.
• Today, we also do the entire cycle of marketing and project support internally. It’s about the creation of creatives, as well as about the purchase of users (user acquisition), technical support and analytics.
• The more development, marketing and support teams grow, the more people are needed for the infrastructure, so this year we have several times increased HR teams, a logistics and supply department, an event management department and others appeared.
• We realized that we need to develop these departments ahead of schedule in order to be able to improve the quality of processes. By the way, we already have 750 people in the team. And every time we make sure that creating a free—play game is a huge exciting process and a test of cohesion.
• The whole team has gained a lot of experience. He is an excellent basis for achieving new big goals in the coming year.

The MYTONA team consists of 750 peopleWhat events in the regional and global gaming industry do you consider central in the past year?

We cannot single out any revolutionary changes or significant historical events. The market is developing further, new good games are coming out, everything is going on as usual. If we talk not only about the mobile market, then this is, of course, the announcement of the most powerful VR project so far – Half-Life: Alyx. We will definitely buy VR helmets for the game ourselves.

What are the main trends in the market today?

It’s very cool that there are more teams and products from the CIS in the charts. We are sure that there will be even more similar stories next year. We wish success to our colleagues and hope that new heroes will appear next year.

Which third-party game releases turned out to be the most important this year? Plus, which games did you spend the most time on in 2019 as a gamer?

Of course, Death Stranding. Also, most of all this year we played as gamers in Battlefield, PUBG, new games with RTX graphics. And, of course, as always, we played a lot of MYTONA games. We tried to look at our games through the eyes of a player, so we can also say that we played like gamers.

Taking this opportunity, we traditionally congratulate everyone on the upcoming New Year! Creative success, development, and most importantly — family happiness and good health!