Editor's column: "Happy New Year and let's not look back!"

A story with a digression and congratulations.

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I’ll start from afar.

Various festivals are regularly held in St. Petersburg in the summer. Often you can find small nooks with “indicas” on them. As a rule, there are about a dozen computers on which young developers show their achievements to a non—demanding audience – colleagues and schoolchildren.

A couple of years ago, at one of these events, I overheard a conversation between two guys about fourteen years old. Both lamented that they don’t make games in Russia. In childhood, something else came out, but now everything is very bad, nothing worthwhile is being created. They say, the mist is not the same as in Poland.

I just smiled then. When you’re fourteen, you can’t say that. However, a year later I was not laughing. I heard about the same words at a serious gaming conference from an adult man engaged in the business development of a startup.

As it turned out a little later, this is a fairly common point of view. Now good, firsthand people familiar with game development are even writing books in which zero is called the golden age of the domestic industry.

These words sound insulting. As if the industry has not achieved tremendous success over the past decade.

In the noughties, development was mainly subsidized. Studios lived on budgets allocated by Russian publishers, received almost no bonuses from sales and made mostly content designed for the domestic market (one that cannot compete on an equal footing with Western products).

Today we can talk about at least a hundred studios that provide for themselves. Largely due to the fact that their products are in demand on the world market. They are developing, their revenue is growing. The best of them (not one, but five or six companies) compete equally with Western tops.

The same companies are actively investing in training, in building processes, in the formation of a community, including development (often indirectly) and, of course, in new development, not only mobile.

What are these words for?

I want to wish our industry and all of us not to forget how cool it is right now, to be proud of ourselves, of our cool projects (there are really a lot of them), not to look back at youthful memories, which, as often happens with them, appear in a nostalgic light, and go to new cool goals, projects, dreams.

Happy New Year, friends!