Results of 2021: Vasily Maguryan and Elena Grigoryan from MY.GAMES/MGVC about the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Vasily Maguryan and Elena Grigoryan, CEO and Marketing Director of MY.GAMES Corporation.

Elena Grigoryan and Vasily MaguryanHow did 2021 go for the company?

Vasily: The year 2021 tested the strength of the entire gaming industry: many companies had to stay on the high base set by the last 2020, both in terms of financial indicators and classroom. At the same time, we at MY.GAMES were not only able to repeat the results of last year, but also broke several records.

We managed to implement the most successful launch of a mobile game in the history of MY.GAMES, and it is doubly valuable that we did it already in a new mode of operation — completely switching to remote. This game was tower defense Rush Royale (November 2020, IT Territory), the monthly revenue of the project in September exceeded 400 million rubles, and the average timespend is 66 minutes per day.

Continuing the theme of new launches, it is impossible not to say about our new team first-person shooter World War 3, which was developed in partnership with Farm 51 studio. The game was launched in the PTA on PC in November of this year. At the moment, we are actively working on the product in order to have time to release it in the OBT in the spring of next year.

Also in 2021, we actively developed our cloud gaming service MY.GAMES Cloud. Playing time per month increased 2.5 times, from ~20 million minutes per month in Q2 to ~50 million minutes per month in Q3 2021, and the average ping decreased from 30 ms to 21 ms. We have also expanded the territory of our presence — we have launched new servers in Novosibirsk, which has reduced the distance for users from the central and eastern parts of Russia.

Elena: The year 2021 has also been productive for our MGVC investment business, which has been actively investing both in Russia and abroad. The direction has conducted 12 deals and consolidated two studios — Bamboo Games and Playkey. MGVC also entered the top 10 largest gaming strategic investors in the world, having invested more than $30 million, according to the InvestGame analytical platform for the first 9 months of 2021. We continue to help young developers, including launching educational projects and business acceleration programs, for example, Game Drive, which we conducted in partnership with colleagues from Google, collected more than 80 applications for participation from developers from all over the world.

Despite all the challenges, 2021 has become a very productive year for MY.GAMES. And it’s doubly nice that the efforts of our team are celebrated by the gaming community. In particular, the game Left to Survive from our Whalekit studio received the Best Action Game award at the Best of Galaxy Store Awards 2021 (we became the only Russian winner).

What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?

Elena: I would like to highlight several important trends that directly affected the MY.GAMES business. And let’s start with the basic volume trend — a significant increase in attention to the gaming market after the impressive results of the industry in 2020. Increased interest was manifested in a variety of points of contact: the market and players, the market and society, the market and partners, as well as the market and investors. Let’s focus on the latter in a little more detail.

Additional attention to the market was shown by both profile investors-strategists and venture funds. The number of deals in the gaming industry in the first three quarters of this year has already exceeded the entire last year. The volume of transactions in the first nine months is already 72% higher than in the whole of 2020. Competition for targets is extremely high. New non-core investors have appeared, who often conclude risky deals with an inflated price, inflating an already difficult investment market.

On the MGVC side, we are primarily interested not in the commercial success of the project, but in the studio team and its potential, because it is the human resource that is one of the most valuable investments for an investor.

The second trend that I would like to focus on is the personnel hunger in the industry and aggressive hunting. This trend is strongly related to the first point. New money has appeared in the industry: new studios are opening, existing businesses are scaling up — everyone needs specialists. The trend is further aggravated by the possibility of remote work from anywhere in the world. Companies in pursuit of the best specialists are increasing their bids, competing both with each other and with Western and Asian companies that have also begun to actively enter the Russian personnel market.

We at MY.GAMES also feel the impact of this trend, at the moment we have more than 200 vacancies open in various areas — from development to marketing and HR.

Another important topic of debate in the industry was the concept of the metaverse — an augmented interactive environment for communication, work and entertainment. At the beginning of the year, metaverses began to be actively talked about after experiments in Fortnite and the Roblox IPO. At the end of the year, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and many others showed their versions of metaverse. NFT games based on the concept of digital property are also of great interest to the public. Now NFT games are considered mainly within the framework of the blockchain boom, they are more like speculative exchanges with gamification and do not always have stable business models.

Another important trend of this year is the beginning of a serious redistribution of the market, the positions of past undisputed leaders are being questioned. And here are the new privacy policies from Apple, the introduction of which forced the entire advertising market to restructure its approaches, and not everyone coped equally well.

At MY.GAMES, we are actively working on the diversification of marketing channels, which in many ways allowed us to maintain the effectiveness of marketing procurement at a good level, even despite policy changes.

It is also possible to highlight the processes that have begun aimed at allowing external payment instruments into the ecosystems of the largest platforms: the Epic Games disputes with Apple and their subsequent echoes in different countries. 2021 has shaken the foundations that seemed unshakable, and already the 22nd will show how far this path will lead us.

What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?

Vasiliy: We continue to develop within the framework of our diversified portfolio strategy. This includes both the development and launch of new gaming projects on PC/consoles and mobile platforms, as well as investments in gaming teams around the world, as well as much more.

In 2022, one of the important launches will be the game World War 3. For us, this is the first major release of a PC game in the last two years, so we really hope that all our joint efforts with Farm 51 studio will be warmly received by the players.

We will also continue to experiment both in the development and operating environment of our games, as well as in the search for new products and services for players. A vivid example of such a service is our cloud gaming MY.GAMES Cloud, which perfectly correlates with the goal of making games as accessible as possible. We have already proved the demand for the cloud on personal computers and plan to move on to new platforms. In the foreseeable future, the boundaries between devices will disappear, the focus will be only on the player and the game, not the platform and its technical characteristics. Cloud gaming already clearly demonstrates what the future will look like.

In addition, with the development of the company next year, we will continue to strengthen our international presence, increasing the share of revenue and audience outside Russia (in the third quarter of 2021, 77% of MY.GAMES’ revenue was received abroad), including investing in foreign game studios and developers.