2020 results: Pavel Prokonich from HeroCraft on the main thing for the year
He told about the planned releases and the company's Birthday in his resultsPavel Prokonich, CEO of HeroCraft.
Pavel Prokonich
How was 2020 for the company?
2020 has become very unusual for everyone. There was a need to work remotely. This has made adjustments to plans everywhere: after all, remote work has its own nuances. In our team, for example, many people began to burn out quickly. Much more attention had to be paid to face-to-face communication. It was unusual to see an almost empty office.
Despite this, we have been developing dynamically. Both the company's revenue and the number of players have grown significantly over the year. The company itself has grown. There have been almost a third more of us in a year: almost 150 people. I will be writing articles soon on the topic "How to maintain the entrepreneurial drive of indie teams in a large company."
Our top Space Arena project has surpassed the 5 million player limit, and we continue to actively develop it. Literally everything is interesting there: new graphics, new social mechanics, new discoveries in game design. Now we are carefully building an English-speaking community on it.
The company is conducting three major investment projects. One of them — codenamed Pirate Arena (suddenly) — approaches the softphone. We will make the first launches at the beginning of the year. Our games sometimes lacked high-quality graphics, but here we tried our best.
Pirate Arena
In 2020, we fully launched on consoles with our premium titles. By the end of the year, sales on console platforms became noticeable in the company's total revenue.
Mobile publishing plays a significant role in our company. In the past year, we have significantly rebuilt it. Now we select external projects much more carefully, but we put much more effort into them. Our publishing house has got its own product director and its own analysts, and we attach a producer to new projects from the very beginning. And we are even trying to teach external teams to rebuild their processes and work primarily from analytics and data. The process is complicated, but where it is possible to convey to the teams the importance of proper operation, we have very good results.
Well, an important moment for me personally... HeroCraft celebrated its coming of age yesterday, December 17th!
We have a real development veteran in our team who has gone all this way with the company. For every Birthday of the company, he sends everyone this piece of code with congratulations:
/ Animation.java Created on December 17, 2002, 11:44 */ / GameCanvas.java Created on December 17, 2002, 11:46 a.m. */
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
Console-quality graphics come to mobile, and they become important for success. Cool special effects and expensive photorealistic graphics, a console approach to policing and impeccable player experience — all this is an understandable competitive advantage for large companies, a potential component that can reformat the tops in the coming years. As a result, this will allow mobile platforms to attract even more players from other platforms.
There will be more artificial intelligence in games. Neural networks will come to AI, analytics, and marketing (and have already begun to come). A bot that qualitatively poses as a live opponent will reduce the cost of operating games, improve the quality of the gameplay and remove many problems from session games, which can give them a new impetus in development.
What new market trends would you note in general?
It is interesting to watch the formation of the Epic Games Store. Epic is not without scandals, but systematically reformats the seemingly concreted relationship between platforms and developers.
The rest of the market is waiting for consolidation and specialization. This, however, does not negate the likelihood of another Among Us. That's why our market is good — not everything is decided by marketing budgets. At the same time, the importance of analytics and proper operation continues to grow.
VR will get a little bigger. Oculus Quest 2 provides an amazing experience and has all the necessary infrastructure to make, and most importantly, successfully sell the product. We are waiting for cheaper hardware.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
We are increasingly positioning HeroCraft as a production center. We act as a publisher who is ready to invest in teams both financially and with expertise in terms of marketing, operation and monetization. And we are ready to share knowledge and resources on a very serious level.
It's not just about consulting and organizing an exchange of experience. We are ready to work with our developers side by side on a daily basis: take over some of the work, close those segments that require the accumulation of large and expensive expertise. This applies equally to internal and external teams. We are ready to correct positioning, develop monetization and help change processes, teach you how to build work from analysis and data. Accordingly, we will develop and train our team of marketers and products.
We are not afraid to invest in premium games. And we know how to sell them. Several of our premium titles are due to be released next year. This is the unusual stealth horror Gravewood High, which has already collected many awards, and Revival, the ideological heir to our classic hit for push-button phones, and a couple more interesting games. The first platform for these games is PC, but of course we will transfer them to mobile platforms as well.
We will bring two large internal projects to release and actively work on several external ones. We will do our best to meet the expectations of the developers who trusted us.
We have a large library of physics puzzles and arcades. This is not hyper-casual, our projects have a slightly more complex gameplay. But we will try to explore this niche and build up work with them according to a model similar to the modern approach to hyper-casual products. Let's separate them into a separate direction, we will learn how to operate a library of games, work with cross-promos and purchase traffic. Is there a similar project? Join us!
And, of course, we will try to enter the VR market by porting several of our games. The test builds are already ready, and the gameplay in them has flashed with new stereo colors. I don't know how successful this adventure will be from a financial point of view, but with the first release on VR, HeroCraft will be present on all significant platforms, and this is an achievement that not all industry giants can boast of.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
I have quite specific tastes, I avoid AAA titles. I prefer management games. I play Football Manager 2020 periodically, two or three matches a week. At least somewhere Baltika is playing in the Champions League… Of the other games that I managed to try this year: Prison Architect 2, Civilization 6, Rise of Industry, passed the Shadow Run series. Sometimes we drive with the children Among Us.
In the light of the upcoming holiday, I personally wish everyone a Happy New Year and Christmas! Let all the madness of 2020 remain in the past year, and next year will bring the industry only new successes, unusual projects and stable (but explosive!) height. I wish you many, many new hits and whales!
