Results of 2019: Salah Sivushkov from Axlebolt 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 Axlebolt Business Development Director Salah Sivushkov.

How was 2019 for the company?

The main project of Axlebolt at the moment is an online first—person shooter Standoff 2. The main successes of the company for 2019 are associated with it.

Every year in the official group of the game we release a post with plans for development. Rereading last year’s post, I see that we have fulfilled the main promises made to the players for major updates. Thanks to their release, the product has grown a lot. Today, Standoff 2 allows us not only to invest in the development of the studio and directly into development, but also to look with confidence into the new 2020.

Standoff 2
As for the internal results of the outgoing year:

• we have doubled our staffing since the summer. This allowed us to focus not only on Standoff 2, but also to launch work in other directions;
• we have significantly strengthened all product areas in the team (first of all, art, animation, modeling and development have grown significantly);
• we have built processes and increased community management and marketing teams. We can say that we are now an international studio, because now we have a community manager from Brazil. I’m not sure he’ll understand me, but anyway: Gordon, hi!;
• It is also worth mentioning from the news that this year we have organized our own large mocap zone. For action games, animation is the most important indicator of quality. Thanks to the fact that we can now capture the movements ourselves, we can make the animations more lively, which means more cool;
• We are very pleased that a strong community of players gathers around Axlebolt projects, which creates content, discusses, criticizes and supports our products. This is very valuable! As an example, I can give YouTubers TicTac and Velu. They collect millions of views by shooting videos about Standoff 2.

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

For the regional one, of course, is the strengthening of the investment portfolios of our large IT companies, their desire to achieve the fame and volume of Tencent, NetEase and Activision Blizzard.

If you read the comments on DTF, you will see that idle commentators do not believe in it (for some reason they do not believe in Russian game dev at all). However, we know that there are chances: the volumes are already comparable in terms of orders. I believe that our gaming giants have the opportunity to grow up to world legends, and I root for it with all my heart.

For the global mobile industry, the central event will highlight the growth of gaming due to the hyper-casual direction, the people who came to games thanks to it.

What are the main trends in the market today?

Large IP addresses have appeared on the mobile market before. However, this year this trend has strengthened. We received on mobile Call of Duty, Mario Kart, the next Might & Magic, Auto Chess and many other brands that are historically associated primarily with “big” platforms.

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?

I try to get acquainted with all the major game releases, watch everything that gets into the charts of the most downloaded and grossing games. I will note Wildscapes, Stack ball and the Call of Duty: Mobile already mentioned above.

The main releases of this year in mobile are Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass. For these services, 2019 was the starting year. It is very interesting to see what the story with them will result in over the next three years.

As a gamer, I played Hearthstone, Standoff 2 and Homescapes the most. In situations without the Internet, she saved me Neo Cab is a great story game.

I am ready to single out Death Stranding as a separate event in 2019. The first independent development of Kojima Production s, Hollywood actors, a huge number of memes on the game.

I want to end this little rewind by congratulating readers on the upcoming New Year! Live, rejoice and make great games!