Results of 2021: Evgeny Polotnyanko from Odnoklassniki 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 Evgeny Polotnyanko, the head of the Odnoklassniki social network gaming platform.

How did 2021 go for the company?

Yes, everything is fine, we continue to show good dynamics. It’s a little early to talk about the results of the whole year, but based on the results of the first three quarters, we can already judge the steady growth of our mobile platform: its daily audience grew by 22%.

The year 2021 was also important because the games in OK went beyond the actual gaming platform. We decided to use gamification in other social network services as well. We offer users to participate in quizzes, perform various tasks, receive internal currency and exchange it for paid services. While we are not offering this to all users yet, but we are already satisfied with the results, although there is still a lot of work ahead.

We were very pleased with the experiment, with the help of which we managed to involve a new audience in the games due to very short and simple mechanics. One of these games helped to convert 4 million users into regular players.

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

As I expected, summing up the results of 2020, our niche will increasingly focus on advertising monetization of games. We have more and more projects in OK that basically have no in–game purchases – all the earnings on advertising.

For our part, we not only actively attract such games and help them find an audience on the platform, but also carry out serious work to optimize advertising. As a result, advertising revenue in games has grown by some incredible 340% over the year – and believe me, this is far from zero. Soon we plan to share exact figures on the advertising monetization of games in OK. I know that colleagues in our niche are also doing well with advertising monetization.

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

Next year we will continue to focus on the development of advertising monetization tools and will continue to experiment with the gamification of the social network. In addition, this year we have managed to prepare a good technical base that will allow the OK gaming platform to join the main trend of social networks in recent years – personalization: we will be able to conduct various promotions with individual offers from the platform. And of course, we will continue to attract even more good games of different genres to the platform – so come!