Results of 2021: Denis Hamin from Allcorrect 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 Denis Khamin, co-owner of the game localization and 2D art outsourcing studio Allcorrect.

How was 2021 for you and the company?

To be honest, for me 2020 and 2021 merged into one big and strange year. In 2020, we sold all areas not related to games, survived a fire in an office building at the beginning of the first wave of the pandemic, learned how to remotely hire employees across Russia and participate in online gaming conferences. In the 20th, they began to try themselves in art outsourcing, and then they were trained under the Go Global Accelerator program. We learned how to use CustDev and in—depth interviews, thanks to which we tried to launch two more new directions – then we counted the unit economy, were horrified, wrote off losses and closed both.

Launching art outsourcing has been an amazing experience for us: this is the first time we have encountered candidates for senior positions who are not interested in KPIs and performance bonuses at all, but expect only a fixed rather large amount on hand. Well, we didn’t compete with leading gaming companies for candidates before, but now we have to.

If you look at the money, in 2020 we grew by 30% in revenue, and this year we want to grow the same way.

I personally tried to live on lockdown locked in one apartment with three children (I don’t advise anyone). Therefore, now I am building a house with separate rooms for all children and writing a book about the Russian-speaking gaming industry, for which I need peace and quiet, close the doors to the room, do not disturb me and tiptoe around. I interviewed for the book, but this process suddenly slowed down, because it is not yet known how I will cut these interviews, what I will change in them and why I need it all.

As a result, I launched the website “Game Dev in the first person“, on which I post transcripts of interviews, a podcast and a YouTube channel of the same name with video versions of my conversations with developers. I hope it will be easier to take interviews now. I can boast of two interviews with the legendary Alexey Pajitnov, but in general my materials lack your likes, comments and subscriptions. Especially the podcast is not enough.

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

In the gaming industry, every day one gaming company buys another or someone receives an investment. This money wave has even covered gaming outsourcers: many have already been bought by large holdings, others are going to be bought.

I constantly came across materials about the co-owner of a gaming outsourcer in magazines, advertising his courses, speeches, etc., until I learned from one such article that the revenue of a gaming outsourcer for 2020 was about $ 2 million. At that moment I was very surprised, because we have almost twice as much. Therefore, next year we will update the site in black colors, decorate it with parallax and generate information guides.

As for localization, judging by the number of requests, next year there will be a significant number of games based on the series “The Squid Game“.

Recently, we seem to have been able to calculate the effectiveness of our participation in online conferences and are now thinking about these figures.

The book about the gaming industry also turned out to be interesting. Actually, I wanted to do most of the interviews in person, sitting in a beautiful studio and drinking mineral water. Therefore, I was looking for a film crew and waited for the pandemic to end — ha-ha-ha (it was in the first wave).

I think, like many, we were waiting for the end of the pandemic and the opportunity to fully go to the office to personally meet new team members. To do this, we even moved into a large, beautiful office. This was before the fourth wave of the pandemic.

As a result, we are implementing online training, we have made a voluntary medical insurance with the possibility of paying for the services of a psychologist and on a regular basis we bring employees from other cities to Samara for several weeks to meet and study. When the pandemic allows, of course.

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

We have been trained in risk management and have started to change the company’s management process. They say it looks like a renovation, so we have something to do for the next 5-10 years. We will develop the art direction, launch the development of games on Unity and provide other services for the creation of metaverses. However, we are afraid of staff hunger and lack of programmers at all.

We will work on the HR brand to become as attractive as possible for potential employees.

We will try to grow by more than 30% in money and we want to feel confident in 2D art.

We also plan to take a strategic session, update the company’s strategy and learn more about investments, mergers and acquisitions.

And I hope to take about 20 more interviews — at least partially in 4K — and write a good book about the gaming industry.