2020 results: Alexey and Afanasy Ushnitsky from MYTONA about the main thing for the year
We continue to summarize the results of 2020 together with the heads of gaming companies and market experts. Next up is an interview with the founders of the Yakut MYTONA — Alexey and Afanasy Ushnitsky.
The Ushnitsky Brothers
How was 2020 for the company?
The year, like many, was not so easy. At the beginning of 2020, we made many plans. Some of this came true, and some did not. Especially for App2Top, we will tell you how this year went for MYTONA.
When we learned about COVID-19, we began to monitor the situation in the world and think about what would be possible to do if the situation worsened.
From the very beginning, we decided for ourselves that the health of the team is the most important thing. For this reason, when the first cases appeared in Russia, we immediately transferred everyone to the remote. We moved from the offices to our homes in two days. Everything went quickly and smoothly. At the same time, we bought what and who does not have enough to work from home — webcams, headphones, microphones (so that everyone can stay in touch).
They adapted to remote work quickly. A lot of things were new to us. Now we are used to working from home.
Once again, we were convinced that we have a strong team ready to quickly assemble and cope with a critical situation. So the coronavirus has not affected our project plans. The efficiency has even increased compared to last year.
We have also been actively expanding, and now MYTONA employs more than 1,000 people
At the beginning of autumn, we expected that the coronavirus would go down, that the team would be able to return to the offices. Then the second wave came.
At the same time, we are optimistic about the future. After all, there is already news about vaccination.
When the situation in the world gets better and we can return to the offices, each employee will have a choice of working hours:
- Completely at home;
- mostly at home;
- mostly in the office;
- completely in the office.
For those who will come to the office from time to time, we will organize a coworking. It will be possible to book a workplace in the office in advance. Of course, there will be different jobs for programmers and artists. We are thinking of creating several offices in large cities so that you can choose the one that is closer to home.
We conducted a survey among the team — who will choose which type of job? Most of them chose to work full-time in the office and mostly from the office. Now many people, and ourselves, lack live communication with each other.
Our HR and PR teams, together with event managers, compensate for this with cool online events. Birthdays of games, Halloween, the MYTONA Heroes challenge and the upcoming New Year's Eve event — everything takes place online. It's cool that it's always with different new features.
An online event where you need to speed through the maze with your avatar
The PR guys also created an internal video news digest, where they talk about the news of the teams, which game updates came out, which events took place. There is a small cut in the video below:
If earlier we all met once a year at the MYTONA Con offline conference, now we gather online every quarter as a whole company. Master classes and team days of teams are held every week. To do this, we use the programs Slack, Discord, Google Meet, Spatial Chat. Wrike helped us in terms of management.
In general, it's cool that we began to gather more often and share news with the whole team.
There are also various photo challenges taking place in Slack. On the first day of the removal, everyone sent their home jobs. Then they began to take pictures and send their pets. And so we come up with something every month.
Employees' workplaces
Employees' pets
On the remote site, we also do not forget about sports — the guys sent videos of home classes or trained together online. This year we introduced two new bonuses: the company compensates for the purchase of home exercise equipment and computer chairs.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it was thought that there might be difficulties in preserving the corporate culture and the spirit of the company. But on the contrary, we have preserved and multiplied it, our communication has improved, we have become more appreciative of our communication. This year has brought us together and proved that we are a great team.
If we turn to our projects, the news is as follows.
Seekers Notes. The game turned 5 years old this year. There are many new features in the game, such as guilds and a combat pass. Every month we observe a qualitative increase in indicators. Since the beginning of the year, the game's revenue has increased by 26%. And another good news at the end of the year was that the game received an ISBN for release in China.
Seekers Notes
Cooking Diary. Our time management has improved a lot this year. The game's revenue increased 2.5 times compared to last year. A very powerful result!
Halloween Collage Cooking Diary x Stranger Things
This year we are learning how to close and revive projects.
For example, we decided to close Ravenhill. This is a very high-quality game, it could live on, but it is difficult to scale it to large incomes. A very strong team worked on Ravenhill, which is already creating new projects.
Ravenhill
We also closed our midcore project Manastorm, which has been in the library for a long time. The performance of the game (including the retention of the first day) was not satisfactory.
Together with the team, we studied the market trends and decided to change the core of the game. The development team reacted calmly to this event and is preparing a cool new version of the game.
This is a normal practice in our industry. Such cases help to create successful games.
Manastorm
From the experience of Ravenhill and Manastorm, we realized that if the game does not bring the expected results, then you need to change the core of the game, and not deal with cosmetic changes and small features.
Launched as part of the Riddleside softphone. This is our new match-3. Now the game has a detective setting. Maybe we'll change his games to another one and change the meta. There are no detective games in the box office top 100 right now.
Riddleside
Crooked Pines. Another one of our match-3. It is also located in sotflonch. Its development takes place entirely in St. Petersburg. We have a professional and productive team there. They quickly and efficiently created a project from scratch. We are currently working on improving the game, and a major update should be released by the end of the year. In general, we are thinking of creating more new projects in St. Petersburg.
Crooked Pines
We end the year with cool news. We are announcing and showing our top-down shooter Outfit, which was recently released at the soft launch in Mexico and Brazil. We have been working on this project for a long time. We think we've managed to create a dynamic, fun, and most importantly fast and optimized shooter. It is designed in an isometric perspective, so it is most convenient to play on mobile devices.
OutFire
In the first iterations, the monetization of the game was set up to upgrade the hero and weapons, and in the spring it was rebuilt. Now it is monetized through skins and avatars.
The peculiarity of the Outfit is the number of game modes and weapons. We will improve the game in every possible way. We have already implemented a combat pass, and we plan to add a royal battle mode later.
Next year we plan to talk about many other new projects.
Yes, that's not all the news.
We have created a new hyper-casual game development company, Myni. There are three games on sotflonch right now. For us, this is something new and interesting. We like that little time passes from the idea to the launch. By the way, the main Myni development team is also located in St. Petersburg.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worthy of attention?
We noticed that there are more projects popular among teenagers in the top of the highest-grossing games. Basically, these are games that contain co-op, multiplayer and some kind of social interaction. They can also be called party games.
A new generation of players is growing now. They are willing to spend the same amount of money on real and virtual goods. It is also worth noting a separate global trend — virtual goods are becoming a large market.
Well-known brands are already moving in this direction. Gucci is investing in cartoon digital avatars that can dress up in their brand's virtual clothes. Balenciaga released a browser game a few days ago, in which they showed their new clothing line (and this is instead of the traditional fashion show!).
What new market trends would you note in general?
One of the trends of this year is to create games without being tied to one platform: mobile, PC or consoles. It's cool when you can play from different platforms at the same time. We think there will be many similar releases next year.
I would also like to note that now the top games have a horizontal balance and are aimed at skill players.
Monetization is also becoming popular, in which the player pays only for cosmetic content, and not for progress. As they said before, virtual goods are on trend.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
When creating games, we will think about their multiplatform nature. We will create them not only on our own engine, but also plan projects on Unity and Unreal Engine. To get into the box office top, it is not necessary to create only casual games.
Next year we will focus on the further development of our team. We will invest more in the training of the team and the exchange of experience between the guys. We try to take talented newcomers and turn them into professionals, not chasing top developers. And I must say that now everything is just beginning in game development: it's time for beginners to start a career in the gaming industry.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as gamers?
As players, we are interested in party games. Among Us, even though it was released two years ago, and Fall Guys. The mechanics of such projects are ideally suited to the current time. The trend for social games will continue.
I would also like to separately mention the game dev of Russia and the CIS. We like that we have a friendly atmosphere that can set an example for other areas, because this is a business with a very good reputation.
Finally, we would like to congratulate everyone on the upcoming New Year, wish success and health to all our friends and colleagues at the game rendezvous!
