Results of 2019: Alexander Harutyunyan from Innova 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 Alexander Harutyunyan, CEO of Innova.

How was 2019 for your company?

“Fogame” has significantly strengthened its position in the European market and in the world as a whole over the year. We have visited a large number of gaming exhibitions, established contacts with various companies and continue to take our projects abroad.

For example, Ragnarok Online in the Revo-Classic build and all versions of Lineage 2 are now available on our European platform, and in just a month the year of the Brazilian localization of RF Online will be celebrated.

The Russian-speaking “Fogame” also has a lot of reasons for pride. In the spring, the OBT of the Fogame application was successfully completed, and this year several of our projects have an anniversary at once:

• At the end of November, Lineage 2 Classic was celebrated in Russia for five years;The fourth of December marked the 10th anniversary of the shooter Point Blank;
• closer to the new year, Aion will begin celebrating its tenth anniversary.

The most important thing for us in 2019 was the launch of Lineage 2 Essence, a new version of the legendary MMORPG with accelerated pumping and a focus on PvP. We continue to develop the game, taking into account the wishes of the players. We want to make it as attractive as possible for both old-school and hardcore “linemen”, and for a wide audience.

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

The political scandal surrounding Blizzard took the absolute first place. It clearly shows:

• how much weight has the modern gaming industry gained;
• how many people are watching what is happening in it;
• how the audience is not indifferent;
• what completely non-gaming consequences can a seemingly insignificant action of a player on the esports scene lead to?

The second most important event is the announcement of the new Half-Life: no project has caused so many discussions on the Internet for a long time. The fact that the game will be designed for VR only adds fuel to the fire — gamers are divided into two camps, each defends its position, hundreds of memes are born. The only thing cooler than this in 2019 was probably the hype associated with the launch of Death Stranding. Although, maybe not cooler.

I will also note the launch of Google Stadia. Not because it’s some kind of revolution: there are a lot of cloud gaming services. Stadia is just another one of them. The fact is that even such a huge company as Google has not yet been able to “rock” cloud gaming. Let’s see what happens next year. After all, the start of Stadia cannot yet be considered full-fledged.

What market trends were you interested in watching in 2019?

The confrontation of major gaming platforms distributing PC games has begun.

Epic Games Store, no matter how some players feel about it, is clearly aimed at making a powerful competition with Steam. He uses a variety of methods for this: from powerful marketing and dumping of royalties to the creators of games to direct sponsorship of the development of specific projects for the right of exclusive publication.

And not only Epic Game and Valve intend to participate in this arms race: Rockstar has updated its launcher, EA has returned to Steam. I think there will be a lot of interesting things in this direction in the coming years.

Another important trend is the active development of subscription services. Many sites and publishers are increasingly betting not only on the sale of individual games, but also on providing access to a large number of titles for a fixed monthly fee. This has already been implemented in Xbox Game Pass, PS Now, Uplay+, and not so long ago, mobile platforms — Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass – were also connected.

Such services are aggregating more and more people. New ways of attracting users are being invented for services, and large companies hire well-known studios to develop games specifically for these sites. In general, the industry is moving towards “gaming Netflix“.

And, of course, the development of cloud gaming services continues. Google Stadia has launched, Microsoft‘s Project xCloud, Amazon will probably connect soon with their incredible server capacities, Valve is definitely not going to give up its position in the market. There are still a lot of technical limitations for cloud services, but serious competition is already brewing in the segment.

What third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to exactly as a gamer?

If we talk directly about MMO, then the most important projects of 2019 were Lost Ark and World of Warcraft Classic, and the most unexpected, of course, Apex Legends..

If you look globally, the main releases are Death Stranding, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Sekiro and Gears 5.

I myself only managed to play the new Mortal Kombat with friends a couple of times, which is the eleventh, I felt Sekiro a little. I also tried Red Dead Redemption 2 — I was specially waiting for it on PC (“Fogame” is a desktop platform after all). I “didn’t get it.” Apparently, the Wild West is not my thing.

Played in the Exodus Subway. This is an important project. Now I hope to have time for the New Year holidays to play Death Stranding — such projects should not be missed, as they format the industry in a new way.