Results of 2021: Alexander Shilyaev from Melsoft 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 Alexander Shilyaev, COO/CMO at Melsoft Games.
How did 2021 go for the company?
Family Island has grown up, entered the top 100 mobile games by earnings and took second place in the genre of farms. This is largely due to the fact that in 2021 we released three times more new content compared to last year.
All year we have been learning from our partners how to work with a game that earns several times more than us. We can say that we are already ready for this. The most valuable lesson we have learned is the ability to focus on the main thing.
The advertising campaign with Mariah Carey for Christmas showed that Family Island perfectly coincides with the values that this holiday expresses. Family, friendship, comfort and the spirit of adventure. There is no dissonance when switching from advertising to the game itself. We have created an amazing and bright world that I want to return to.
My Cafe still holds positions in the top 3 cooking games. New modes are appearing in the game, the team is doing a lot of experiments, which, I hope, will allow us to take new heights in 2022.
What event or trend of 2021 do you consider central within your niche?
If we talk about the niche of casual games for a female audience, then the main trend here is not to focus on any one type of gameplay. Expeditions appear in match-3 games. Match-3 levels appear in farms. In parallel, a whole genre is developing-the transformer merge, from which you can assemble a farm, a puzzle, and a study of the territory. All this happens in one player session.
It is also worth noting a further lowering of the threshold of difficulty of casual games. This is best done by Turkish studios. The main casual game of the year is Royal Match from Dream Games, which was able to immediately bite off a big piece in the ultra—competitive niche of puzzles.
Zen Match from Turkish Good Job Games is a new kind of casual game for a female audience. A mixture of tapeworm and merge-3, in which all components are simplified to the limit. Pictures are piled up on the screen, and we sort out this blockage, combining them three by three. By the way, this is one of the few examples of the successful development of a hyper-casual studio in the direction of IAP games.
Cookie Run Kingdom is another interesting release this year. The game showed how even such an atypical genre as role-playing battles can be adapted for a female audience.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2022?
Our plans are only for further growth. Remember what we said about focusing?! We believe that our games are not even close to realizing their potential.
