"We have crossed the threshold of 30 million users," Pavel Epishin from Yandex.Games said about the results of 2023

We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams. Next up is an interview with Pavel Epishin, the head of Yandex.Games.

What was the year like for the company's gaming segment? What have you done that I would like to highlight in terms of achievements?

The year 2023 has become a year of rapid growth for us: we have crossed the threshold of 30 million users who play on the platform every month. We are already among the top 3 web gaming platforms in the world. Even this year, we experimented a lot: we launched a catalog of games in the format of a vertical tape "Igrotok", presented a series of visual novels based on the famous comic book and noticeably improved the developer's personal account.

How has the gaming market changed over the year?

Games remain one of the main leisure activities for audiences of all ages. They help to pass the time in line or on a flight, and have become a full-fledged part of the holiday. Web games are out of competition here: you can play directly from the browser, you do not need to install applications, so users can discover new games with one click.

The year was also marked by outbreaks of local HYIP trends, such as Skibidi, which faded after a while. I would like to note that this year the players chose not only casual games — there are also complex midcore games in the top.

Has the practice of working with gaming companies changed? How exactly?

We pay great attention to our developers and try to make working with the platform even more comfortable. This year, we launched an updated developer's personal account, saturating it with various analysis tools and metrics. We have started the transition from quantity to quality and are trying to rely on the metrics of playability: the index of game quality, playing time and others. Everything to make the games better, and the development of games brought a decent reward.

What trends would you highlight in the gaming market?

Of all the trends, I would like to mention the most important one for us: the ongoing trend towards cross-platform. Publishers are increasingly focusing on releasing projects on multiple platforms at once. We clearly follow this ideology: we monitor the updating of existing tools and develop new plugins for integration with popular game engines. For example, this year we introduced plugins for Cocos, Construct and Defold. Work in this direction continues, because such solutions allow you to adapt existing projects to work on the platform with less effort.

What are the company's plans for next year?

We expect that the number of players in Russia will continue to grow rapidly. Rapid growth in international markets will also be added to this. Many of our games have been translated into dozens of languages and attract millions of users from different countries.

The games will become better and more difficult. We will work on saturating the categories in which there are currently not enough games, for example, this concerns the "Racing" category.

We are ready to welcome all developers on our platform!