"We have moved to a new stage of development," Sergey Belyaev from INFUSION GAMES on the results of 2023

We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the game teams. Next up is an interview with Sergey Belyaev, co-founder of the INFUSION GAMES studio.

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

The year turned out to be quite productive for the company, but not all goals were achieved. Plus, there were all sorts of shocks related to sanctions. Now we are trying our best to solve the problems that have arisen.

In the middle of the year, it was decided to release our games not only on mobile platforms, but also on the web. The decision was dictated by the changing situation on mobile platforms. We began to observe a constant increase in CPI, as it began to change the market.

Now we are releasing our Arena Heroes project and waiting for the first metrics. Probably, only after that it will be possible to fully assess how successful the year turned out to be.

Arena Heroes

Unfortunately, the second Cyber Wars project is still in development. The good news is that we have certified it to Nintendo. Its release on the Nintendo Switch is scheduled for 2024.

In addition, Nikolai Shubin and I have moved to a new stage of the company's development. From the very beginning, we planned to build a technology company with a focus on games. In the near future, we plan to move from the stage of developing and prototyping ideas to directly turning the company into a holding company with separate business units.

We will be engaged in the creation of financial instruments, a publishing platform for Web games, new tools for promoting games and many others.

Due to the change in the company's structure, we, together with SKAM Studio, conducted a rebranding, which, in my opinion, was more than successful. Now INFUSION GAMES is one of the divisions of the future INFUSION holding, focused on game development.

How has the situation in the gaming market changed?

As I said earlier, the mobile games market is not moving in a very good direction — the efficiency of traffic purchases is gradually decreasing, projects are being closed due to the inability to attract an audience, user revenues are not growing in proportion to the increase in the cost of UA. In addition, it is not news to anyone that the year was one of the most difficult for the entire industry — a huge number of studios were closed and a lot of cool specialists were fired. This, of course, is very frustrating…

What was the year like for the genres in which you work?

It's hard to single out anything, because this year nothing noticeable or serious has happened with games in the genres in which we work. It's even good — there are no new serious competitors, and this gives hope that the players have already missed the new titles.

What are the company's plans for next year?

Next year will be the most important year for the studio in its entire existence. Both projects will be released, therefore, there will be a lot of work.

In addition, as previously stated, Nikolai and I plan to develop our holding after the launch of the projects. As they say, stay tuned