"With each passing year, players are becoming more demanding towards the project," says Alexander Ivanov from Duckside Games on the outcomes of 2025
We continue to summarize the year 2025 with gaming (or game industry-related) teams. Up next is an interview with Alexander Ivanov, CEO of Duckside Games studio.
What kind of year was 2025 for your team? What were you able to accomplish, what are you proud of, and what did you not manage to achieve?
It was an incredibly interesting year, full of events, new releases, and changes in the team. The team did a truly titanic job to make Pocket Tales what it is today.
Over the year, we added dozens of hours of pure concentrated gameplay, translating into months of playtime for the average player. The game gained new levels, we introduced mini-games, and other live-ops mechanics. We even had in-game events comparable in scale to an entire standalone game. And the cherry on top was our long-awaited 1.0 release, to which we worked all year. We incorporated another game into the game and put radio on the internet added a narrative battler into the narrative tycoon, intertwining the stories across modes. It was practically surgical work—not breaking what already looked good, and making it even better.
The project also surpassed a significant milestone—$2.5 million in revenue. As the old meme goes, "It's not much, but it's honest work." Also, in 2025, we grew our team size by 30% and moved to a cozy new office.
In terms of what we couldn't achieve—naturally, we would have liked to delve deeper into the new mechanics and immediately wrap them in monetization, but unfortunately, this has been moved to 2026.
Pocket Tales
What conclusions did you draw as a development studio by the end of 2025?
The main takeaway is to always better assess your resources, make backups, and be prepared for force majeure situations. Interestingly, this year we worked almost "blind" for two weeks when, without warning, we lost access to our knowledge base and task tracker overnight. Luckily, we were able to recover everything in the end.
Has your interaction practice with publishers/investors changed? Has it become easier/harder to work with them?
Regarding working with publishers—it's tough to give a specific assessment of changes because everything is consistently good with our partnership with Azur Games. The publishing team has deeply immersed themselves in the project, and we started actively looking at analytics and making conclusions about new implementations. In this regard, as a developer, it’s always pleasant to speak the same language with the publisher.
Pocket Tales
What kind of year was it for the niche/genre you work in?
Speaking of the Idle Tycoon genre, based on spy services, this genre remained exactly at the same level as last year. Revenue and installs redistributed among the "top" games but globally stayed the same. Speaking of overall trends, players become more demanding of projects every year. Consequently, projects need to be more complex. That’s why we decided to develop Pocket Tales "broadly" instead of just churning out new levels one after another.
What strengthening or emergence of trends in your niche/genre do you expect in 2026?
I would say that there is a kind of "restructuring" happening in the gaming industry and redistribution of forces. More often, we see major players integrating AI into their processes. It’s an inevitable reality that we’ll have to adapt to if you want to stay afloat. The key is not to overdo it and remember that AI is a tool to be used wisely, not just to mindlessly throw prompts into it and expect Mr. Computer to produce a blockbuster hit.
Pocket Tales
What are the team’s plans for 2026?
In 2026, we are planning a fine-tuning of the entire game for new mechanics with the battler. At the beginning of the year, we’ll finish what we couldn’t, then adjust monetization to the new realities of the game, and proceed to scale purchases. If the past year was the year of content, the coming one will clearly be the year of new meta-mechanics.