Results 2020: Evgeny Polotnyanko from Odnoklassniki about the main thing for the year

Yevgeny Polotnyanko, head of the Odnoklassniki social network gaming platform, told App2Top how 2020 went for the social network, and also noted the central trends in his niche.

Evgeny Polotnyanko

How was 2020 for the company?

Despite the abundance of memes about the "wonderful" 2020, the year was more than successful for the OK gaming platform. OK games, like last year, continue to grow. Our mobile platform is especially pleasing: there has been no "low base effect" for a couple of years now, but the platform is growing steadily. We will summarize the results of the year a little later, but, for example, in the first 5 months of 2020, we paid 80% more to mobile game developers than a year earlier.

In 2020, we again refuted the thesis that social games are "no longer the same", and updated several records for daily revenue of the entire gaming platform. Of course, mobile played a significant role in this: on Black Friday, users spent more than 16 million rubles in mobile games. The flow of games coming to the platform does not stop and even increases, new high-quality projects appear.

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

This year, social networks have begun to pay more attention to games with advertising monetization and simple gameplay. A year ago, it was difficult to imagine a successful game on Russian social networks built purely on advertising monetization. Today, this will not surprise anyone, on the contrary, we are actively trying to attract more and more developers of such games. Recently, for example, we increased payments to developers for displaying ads by 20%, in general, revenue in this segment is growing quite quickly.

What new market trends would you note in general?

Of course, this is a pandemic and everything related to it in the gaming industry. People stayed at home, so significantly more people were involved in games on different platforms. Hence the new records, the increase in time in games. Although I would not say that these are new trends. Rather, the pandemic accelerated the development of trends that already existed.

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

I have already said above that social networks are actively attracting games with simple, understandable mechanics, including those built purely on advertising monetization. In 2021, we plan to pay maximum attention to this area. We expect that due to this, the flow of new games to the platform will increase, as well as the playing audience in OK. It is in such games that we see a bridge that will make it easier to convert those who are still far from games in Odnoklassniki into players.

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

I would note the rapid rise in popularity Among Us – a wonderful variation on the theme of the game familiar from childhood. Communication, cunning, manipulation: it is not surprising that the game quickly gained the recognition of players around the world at a time when everyone missed socialization. I'm happy to play by myself.