2020 results: Alexander Shilyaev from Melsoft Games about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2020 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Alexander Shilyaev, COO/CMO at Melsoft Games.

Alexander Shilyaev

How was 2020 for the company?

The year has passed dynamically. Back in January, we set ourselves the task of learning how to work distributed in order to be able to expand beyond our offices, and the pandemic has accelerated this transition many times. Therefore, since mid-March, Melsoft has been successfully operating as a distributed company.

Since the beginning of the year, we have started implementing OKR (Objectives and Key Results), a system for setting and cascading company goals. On the one hand, it is important to synchronize a fairly large team (by the end of the year we had more than 250 people), on the other, it is important to set more and more ambitious goals for ourselves and figure out how to achieve them.

One of these goals is to enter the top 3 farms in the world with our Family Island product and beat Hay Day in revenue by the end of 2020. We have very little time left to implement this task, but the main thing is that in the year since the release, we have not only scaled the product, but also put the rollout of regular events and builds on track.

We also rebranded the company, changed the logo and corporate identity. On New Year's Eve, we will distribute a lot of new fashionable and stylish merch to employees.

An important event for us, the MelsoftCon’20 internal conference, was also held stylishly and in a new format (of course, online).

What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?

This year, we noticed that it has become fashionable to include several "mini-games" or "sub-games" in the main game (it turns out to be one application, but with different, sometimes even separate mechanics). It is believed that this allows you to keep a different kind of audience in the product, but at the same time direct marketing efforts to one application per store.

What new market trends would you note in general?

I'll mention a couple of things from working with advertising and a couple of things on platforms.

By advertising.

Firstly, mislides in advertising both worked and still work, but in the UK, the advertising standards committee, as you know, banned advertising of some Playrix projects with mislides. Either we are seeing new methods of competition between large projects, or regulators have finally reached mobile advertising. It can be expected that other European countries can take an example from the UK.

Secondly, at the end of this year, browsers will stop supporting Flash and, accordingly, a huge number of projects released 10 years ago will die out, releasing a large number of users and traffic. Despite the fact that the audience has been migrating to mobile devices for a long time, a lot of users still use PC browsers to play games. Plus, it should be noted that many non-gaming mobile applications have quite a lot of revenue and traffic now coming from the web.

By platforms.

We are waiting for the rejection of IDFA in future iOS 14 updates. This did not happen in September 2020 (the year was already busy), but it is waiting for next year. Everyone is preparing for this, but it is unclear what will happen in practice.

You can also recall that the pressure on platforms is increasing in attempts to reduce the percentage of commission. This year we saw the struggle between Apple and Epic Games, after which there were minimal moves on the part of the platform towards small developers.

What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?

First of all, we will focus on scaling the launched products. There's a lot of work there. We also hope to launch our new projects. All this will require both the expansion and complication of development processes, as well as the scaling of marketing (in terms of creatives, procurement, predictive analytics, monetization).

The company is growing, we have become a full-fledged multi-product company, so we will pay great attention to internal communication processes, synchronization of the company according to various expertise and goals.

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

It's funny enough, but this is the second time I've discovered Coin Master. The game is simple in appearance, but the gameplay and promotions settings are simply amazing.