Results of 2021: Oleg Rogovenko from Awem Games 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 Oleg Rogovenko, the founder of Awem Games.

How did 2021 go for the company?

We continued to develop Cradle Of Empires. The game turned 7 years old this year and throughout this period we have managed to keep its financial indicators stable, despite the high competition in the Match3 market. In the first quarter of the year, we achieved record revenue (for the entire history of the project!), but then a situation arose with IDFA, and we temporarily rolled back. The product backlog is full of interesting features, behind each of which we see a good probability for bringing the product to the next level.

We made a big step towards the release of the second game. We do not sacrifice quality in favor of speed, we believe that “Quality is the best strategy”. The analysis of the first audience of the novelty speaks about the validity of this approach. The audience of the new game is much wider than that of Cradle Of Empires, and the only type of negative reviews in the stores can be reduced to the phrase “we want more content”.

We have attracted 60 new employees to the company. We pay a lot of attention to the development of the company’s culture. Culture is our third, “invisible product”. During the year, we managed to make noticeable steps in this direction, despite the distribution of the team across several countries. No matter what they say, the restructuring of companies to a hybrid format of work is a slow process by nature, it does not solve the problem of involvement and efficiency. Therefore, our “hybrid” is still closer to working in the office.

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

Regarding trends, we have to balance. On the one hand, we keep the focus on bringing what we started to the goal. On the other hand, there are things that cannot be ignored. We have to take them into account and adjust the company’s course at the tactical level.

Things that touched us:

• IDFA (iOS 14). Since our Cradle Of Empires is more focused on the “intellectual whale minority”, it has become more difficult for us to find an audience. We have to look for new approaches to procurement. The production once again revised the priorities in the direction of expanding the audience of the game. Marketing had to do a good job to rebuild the purchase under IDFA. We have worked on converting users to consent to share their data, changed the methodology for calculating efficiency for iOS campaigns, and found new ways to track traffic. Of course, we have slowed down in the purchase, but we are holding the blow well.
• The influx of investments into the industry has aggravated the already inadequate wage growth in places, which once again demonstrated the problem of a shortage of people. I consider it as a temporary phenomenon. No one has canceled the laws of economics. The salary is ultimately determined by how the employee contributes to the product and the team, and not by how he sells himself at the interview. Guys who have high demands for money, but at the same time have 2-4 jobs in their resume over the past couple of years, do not look like employees you can rely on. The fact that they continue to receive offers only speaks about the spontaneity of employers’ decisions. I think many new investors in the gaming industry will get burned, and then the situation will return to normal.
• Western companies have entered the CIS market. This is good, because there is a much more productive and mature culture in the West, which will now be instilled in our market. And this is another right challenge for our still young industry — competition with the Western rate.
• COVID continues to have a positive impact on player engagement and a negative impact on the performance of gaming companies. Remote work is still not as productive for the team as the office. Socialization suffers. When we gather at events in the same location, the joy of personal communication is clearly noticeable.
• The growth of the merge genre within the puzzle category. The genre is close to Match3, in which we have great expertise. I think merge has a future, but we still need to see how the first wave of popularity of the genre will end.

Curious events:

• Apple and Epic Games dispute court;
• the growth of mobile games using AR;
• accelerating market consolidation;
• a very successful Arkane series from Netflix based on the game League of Legends;
• strengthening restrictive measures for children’s access to games;
• Blizzard scandal;
• hype around metaverses and NFT;
• cross-platform growth;
• permission to connect other payment systems to parts of regions in Google Play.

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

2022 promises to be interesting for Awem Games. We are planning to release our second game to the world. The market is large, the quality of the game is on top (perhaps this is the best thing Awem has done in its entire history), its metrics on the softphone are good. The degree of hope and optimism about this is high.

We will continue to develop Cradle Of Empires. Several big interesting features will be released. The results of A/B tests and the revenue record achieved this year give confidence that the game has great potential, and doubling its current income is a realistic goal.

We will continue to prepare the company for scaling for two products. We rely on a strong company culture. Our active communication with candidates is increasingly focused on culture-fit.