"After much struggle, we released our role-playing battler," said Sergey Belyaev from INFUSION GAMES about the results of 2025

We continue summarizing the achievements of 2025 with gaming (or gaming industry-related) teams and experts. Next up is an interview with Sergey Belyaev, co-founder of INFUSION GAMES.

How has the year 2025 been for your team? What have you achieved, what are you proud of, and what did you not manage to do?

This year has been the most transformative for us, in both good and not so good ways.

To start on a positive note: after a long struggle, we released our role-playing battler! At the time of this summary, only a couple of weeks have passed since the release, but the metrics are very positive! And they are increasing every day! All resources are now focused on improving, refining, and optimizing the game.

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But where there's positivity, there's also negativity. Like the vast majority of studios, we were caught in the aftermath of the post-pandemic period when there were no specialists in the market, forcing us to take on hiring risks, which eventually led to several issues that we had to tackle throughout the year to bring the product to a releasable state. It was very painful, nerve-wracking, and sad. Some problems remain, but they are now specific, and we understand how to solve them. Due to financial problems in the company, we also had to significantly "tighten our belts," drastically reducing the team size, which inevitably led to shifting the release date and affecting team morale. We've shrunk considerably, but this allowed us to 100% focus on what's most important without getting distracted by superfluous tasks.

A huge thank you to our entire team, who believe in the project and patiently endure all the difficulties and limitations! I can genuinely say that I am proud of our entire team. Now, we have those with whom I can rely on. With them, we can create great games and bring them to release!

What conclusions have you drawn at the end of 2025 as a development studio?

The main conclusions revolve around staffing issues. We decided that in the future, we will take a much more serious approach to hiring choices, regardless of external factors. Personally, I think the biggest mistake was rushing in 2021 when everyone wanted to "jump on the train" of the rapidly growing market: investors were pushing for the start of development and releases, forcing us to make extremely risky decisions. The number of risks exceeded the limit of endurance, and they started hitting in all directions.

We can all see what this has led to: mass unemployment in the IT industry, a huge number of closed projects, bankrupt studios, and an unreasonably large number of skilled specialists ready to work for almost nothing. Of course, sooner or later the market will return to a normal state. I really hope this happens in 2026!

How was the year for the niche/genre you work in?

Currently, we are 100% focused on role-playing battlers. We haven't noticed any major changes in this genre — it's a stable market with a stable audience. The niche we are working in is changing but is overall growing strongly, competition is increasing, and product quality is also rising, which is always encouraging! Healthy competition is always a boost for the industry!

What trends in your niche/genre do you expect in 2026?

Along with Nikolay Shubin, we continue to believe that in free-to-play mobile, marketing sets the main trends. At the moment, unit economics are not very interesting for the vast majority of games — they either don't add up at all or barely break even. The concept of "organic" in the App Store and Google Play has practically disappeared: if you're not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on traffic, there will be no organic reach. Given the negative investment climate, small studios and especially indie developers don't have such opportunities. In our opinion, alternative platforms and stores have good prospects. Among these options are web platforms. For projects without large budgets, this is a great solution that requires no marketing expenses and delivers instant results but requires a bit more effort to adapt products to the specific platform requirements: payment systems, specific SDKs, analytical solutions.

What are the team's plans for 2026?

I'd start by saying that we plan to successfully navigate through this challenging period for the entire industry and achieve operational profitability!

The main plans are to refine the social mechanics in our game, launch on several alternative stores, release on Steam, and earn our first millions.