Results of 2019: Elena Grigoryan from MY.GAMES about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2019 together with the managers of gaming companies and market experts. Next up is an interview with Elena Grigoryan, Marketing and Advertising Director of MY.GAMES.

How was 2019 for the company?

2019 has become one of the busiest years for our team. In May of this year, we introduced a new international brand MY.GAMES, which combined all our games and services under one “name” with a common ideology. The rebranding was a natural response to the active scaling of our business outside the Russian market. So, by the 3rd quarter of 2019, the share of our international revenue has already reached 63% and continues to grow.

This growth in new markets is due to the strengthening of the mobile development direction, as well as the scaling of our publishing activities abroad. In addition, this is facilitated by attracting new talented teams to their ranks. In 2019, two studios joined us at once — SWAG MASHA and Panzerdog, which added new expertise in genres interesting to us to our portfolio.

The development of MY.GAMES on the international market has also led to new partnerships. We have strengthened our position in the Asian direction by concluding a strategic cooperation agreement with one of the leading independent Chinese game publishers, iDreamSky. This will help MY.GAMES to present its game projects to the Chinese audience at a completely new level, and will give Chinese developers the opportunity to master Western markets with our help.

Another important partnership was cooperation with one of the world’s leading companies in the film industry — Fox Next — as part of the launch of the mobile game American Dad! Apocalypse Soon. For us, this was the first experience of product development for a large franchise, which helped the team gain new experience and important insights on working with the US market.

This fall we released in Russia one of the most anticipated novelties of 2019 — MMORPG Lost Ark. In the first few months since the launch, more than 1.6 million new users have registered in the game. In June of this year, we also launched a medieval action-MMO Conqueror’s Blade, which we currently publish in all regions of the world except Asia. As for mobile games, our hit Hustle Castle has already collected 54 million installations to date.

In addition, in December 2019, the beta version of our new international gaming platform MY.GAMES Store was launched, on the development of which a lot of efforts will be concentrated next year. We are preparing for the release of unique functionality for both developers and users.

MY.GAMES enters 2020, being already in the top 50 gaming companies in the world, and with more than 1800 talented employees who have extensive experience in game development and publishing. We always try to support the exchange of knowledge both within our large team and with colleagues from the gaming industry. Therefore, in 2019, we launched a new discussion platform for gaming market experts — The Big Deal, the central event of which was the new professional conference TBD Conference, which brought together about 1,000 leading experts of our industry from around the world. We decided to make this event an annual event and have already announced the date of the next TBD Conference — April 11, 2020.

What events in the regional and global gaming industry do you consider central in the past year? What are the main trends in the market today?

Of course, this year everyone was discussing the future of cloud services and the introduction of a new 5G data transfer protocol. These technologies will definitely one day radically change our daily lives, but there are still a number of technical challenges that the industry has to solve.

As a marketer, I can say that 2019 has significantly increased competition for the user. The oversaturation of the information field forces marketers to look for new and new opportunities to attract the attention of a potential player. The time of widespread “hype” seems to be close to its apogee. In an attempt to reach the user, surrounded by constant information noise, the most sophisticated ways of attracting attention are used. And 2019 demonstrated that often all means are good: challenging creativity, provocative presentation, harsh statements, everything works.

Automation of routine development and operation processes, as well as machine learning, have become so tightly integrated into our daily “diet” that they already seem to be something ordinary. Although the process of further optimization will obviously occupy us for many more years. But it is already obvious that it is the creative/idea/story that will become an increasingly serious competitive advantage in working with the product.

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?

Here I would like to highlight four releases — these are Apex Legends, Borderlands 3, Death Stranding and Call of Duty: Mobile.

The MY.GAMES team has great expertise in shooters, and we, of course, always follow new releases in this genre with great interest. Therefore, I would like to note separately the launch of Call of Duty: Mobile, which has become one of the brightest in recent times and whose quality has greatly raised the bar for the entire mobile games market. With this product, Activision set a new record: 100 million downloads in the first week after release, making a huge leap in the mobile gaming industry.

Well, on the field of casual games, everyone watched with great interest the successes of the guys from Moon Active and their super hit Coin Masters. They showed everyone how to blow up the market by rethinking a genre in which nothing original has happened for 15 years.