Nekki: “to make it better, it is necessary not to add, but to throw away”

This week, the Moscow-based company Nekki is releasing Shadow Fight 2 on Android. In connection with this event, we talked with the authors of the game about the industry, clones, technologies, as well as about old and new projects of the company. 

But first, a little bit of graphs and figures. Shadow Fight 2 softlonch on the Apple platform in Russia took place last year. And since December, the game has been consistently in the top 50 grossing in the App Store Russia. 

And now the interview. 

To the questions App2Top.ru The answers were: Nekki CEO Dmitry Terekhin and Technical Director Evgeny Dyabin. 

Hi! Now everyone associates the company Nekki with the game for social networks “Shadow Fight” (hereinafter Shadow Fight). But the company itself is 10 years older than the project. How did it all start?

Dmitry: The company was founded 12 years ago. For me, games were originally a hobby. I played browser games that were still appearing at that time and were absolutely free. And one day I was offered a game engine. I was still programming myself back then. I took the engine and began to make my own project based on it, which then grew into a “Golden Boot”.

I didn’t quite understand about the engine.

Dmitry: I was playing two games at that time: one big and famous, and the other smaller. There were only 16 players in the second project. The author of the game was a student, he had a session, and there was no time to play the game (generating football matches then required daily manual work). At some point, he scored on this case and offered to give the project into “good hands” so that the game would not disappear. I took what I had and gradually redid everything.

At what point did you decide that you would earn money from this?

Dmitry: In the process of working on the Golden Boot, a team of like-minded people began to form who wanted to do it even for free, on pure enthusiasm. And the name appeared – Nekki. We chose it by chance, but it turned out that it translates from Japanese as “enthusiasm”, which was very appropriate for the moment.

“Golden Boot”

The understanding that you can earn good money at games appeared after the success of the “Fight Club”, whose players left decent amounts in it. But there was a very vulnerable balance in our first Golden Boot game. For this reason, we could not and did not want to sell any advantages in the game: users would not understand us. 

Instead, we implemented VIP ranks, thanks to which it was more convenient to play the game for those who paid something. But we understood: this is not the limit, in order to earn for real, it is necessary to make a game in which payments give an advantage. So our next game was Gladiators.

You launched it in 2007.

Dmitry: Yes, somewhere like that, the process was very long, we were still studying then. Then, just in the year of graduation, we launched the game. She showed good growth, allowed us to rent an office, hire people. However, before that we also had an office, but such a conditional one. With Gladiators, we began to expand, paying employees normal money. 

As I understand it, you have been working for a very long time without much profit. Is it possible to say that it was from 2002 until the release of “Gladiators” that you worked at zero?

Dmitry: Yes. We received absolutely symbolic money. 

Evgeny: They spent it on the server.

Dmitry: They let you rent a small office and buy food, but nothing more.

“Gladiators”

Between 2002 and 2007 – five years. During this period, you managed not only to promote the Golden Boot, but also to launch soccer.ru . For me, both initiatives look quite logical: football fans gathered together, first they made a game, then a website about football. And in this row, the “Gladiators” are a little out of line.

Dmitry: In fact, it is rather soccer.ru a completely separate story. Today it is a large website with its own pool of correspondents and photographers. 

But games are what we’ve always wanted to do. In general, we initially thought that we would be engaged in classic PC games. We wanted to make a game about football, we were looking for publishers, investors, we were looking for ways to get a license to use Russian football players and football clubs in our game, but nothing worked out, and probably for the best. We have maintained our independence, got the opportunity to earn well and find our market.

And the plans to create your own A-title were already after the success of the Golden Boot, closer to the launch of gladiators?

Dmitry: They were before the launch of Gladiators, when we had no excess profits, there was no way to increase the staff. Then we thought that it would work out if someone gave us money for it. 

What happened next? 

In the wake of the Gladiators, we began to grow and expand. And we had the idea to make a new game about football, which would be simpler than our first project.

The Golden Boot was the market leader in football managers (it had 5,000 players), but it was difficult, it could be played once every few days, all the teams were real, there was a queue to register to play for a certain team, it was necessary for someone to throw it. In general, there are many moments.

Therefore, we decided to make a game in which everything will be much easier, you can play at any time, teams are created on the fly, they are fantasy. That’s how “11×11” appeared

And it was a great surprise for us that the project without any advertising and marketing very quickly became popular and commercially successful. In a few months, the game overtook the “Gladiators” in terms of revenue and “flew into space.” If there were 5,000 players in the Golden Boot, then we were already talking about several million. “11×11” was in the top 3 browsers in Russia. 

“11×11”

How can you explain this success?

Evgeny: The niche was good. You guessed right with the genre and niche.

That is, a simple manager about football is what the market needed then?

Evgeny: Yes, this is what was missing.

How did you come to the development of “Shadow Fight”?

Dmitry: When the browser games market became less interesting, social networks appeared, where people began to leave, we realized that it was time for us to go there too.

In fact, we didn’t want to go to social games for a long time, we hoped that their time would pass, but then we realized that it was getting harder and harder to mess with browsers. And we went to make social games. At first we did a “Merry Circus”, this game was intended for girls, but we did not understand the female audience, and so we could not understand it.

Evgeny: The girls played too suboptimally.

Dmitry: Tormented and wondering why we can’t do anything, we saw a very simple game about a bee in Vkontakte, which was clearly made by a schoolboy, but which had millions of players. And then we thought that if we were schoolchildren now, we would also do some nonsense and, probably, it would be very cool. And then we remembered that when Zhenya was a schoolboy, he made just such a game. And that game was Shadow Fight .

Shadow Fight 

Evgeny: There was a prototype that we took as a basis. I wrote it in my first year, not at school.

I was just trying to make the game as simple as possible. And there were shadow men. And we decided to repeat it only in flash, as a social version. The idea was simple: you take, choose any friend and beat him. We made it in three months and received a huge number of installations, much more than we expected. And the growth continued, it was necessary to unscrew monetization. The game did not bring money. There was nothing to pay for. And the next year we were busy adding various features to the game, weapons, tournaments, items. As a result, monetization was raised to a good level.

What still makes money in the game is the clan system and boss raids. We realized then that socialization keeps people in the game and motivates them to pay better.

But there is an opinion that socialization is secondary. How much a friend has earned at one level or another does not give a big increase in money and retention. But you, as I understand it, completely disagree with this.

Evgeny: Here, by socialization, we do not mean the possibilities of social networks, but real sociality, when people unite into clans, really communicate with each other, they can throw them out of the clan, because a person went to a raid badly. 

And the mobile market, in your opinion, has grown to such a level of socialization?

Dmitry: In principle, in the same Clash of Clans there is already some socialization, there are clans, there is PvP. Everything is coming to this. 

Yes, that’s the question. All your first projects were free, and you made Vector paid. Why? 

Evgeny: When the idea came to us to make a game for the mobile market, we decided, based on the social experience with Shadow Fight, like this: now, in three months, we will make a prototype, which we will launch and see.

Vector

We conceived it as a mobile project, but since all our programmers were fleshers, we made a flash version in Vkontakte. The game was made quickly, but monetization was not expected to be large. The main thing for us was to launch. And when we launched, we weren’t sure yet that free-to-play would win over paid. Then this scheme has not yet completely won. We thought that the paid model could still show itself on mobile platforms.

Dmitry: We started making it with the expectation that we would make it quickly and earn money from advertising, because the game would have a high virality, and the game really had a very high virality, the number of its mobile installations was 40 million, plus 10 million on social networks. 

Plus, we had the following calculation. At that time, Nekki did not have a mobile audience. By making a game with high virality, even with low monetization, we could gain an audience for use in the following projects.

Actually, now we are moving along this path.

Already when porting the project, the idea arose to make two versions of the game: paid and free. In free – to show ads, and paid – to sell for a dollar without advertising. This decision has paid off.

You made a very bold statement: “we decided to make a viral game, and in the end, it turned out that way.”

Evgeny: Specifically, in our case, we just looked at Shadow Fight users, saw that they liked animation, arcade. It was a risky assumption, of course, that the audience of our fighting game would take Vector with a bang. In general, the games are somewhat similar: similar animation, similar visual style, arcade gameplay. But there were no guarantees, so we wanted to make the project faster. When we launched it, we didn’t know at all whether it would be viral or not. 

Dmitry: But, of course, we have certain principles/approaches to development that are more or less working so far. We believe that, firstly, the game must be original, that is, it cannot be a clone of any game. Secondly, the game should be suitable for any popular, but not occupied niche (in Vector, parkour has become such a niche). Thirdly, the game must be of high quality and have some feature that will make it unique, difficult to reproduce by competitors (animation is now our feature).

Vector

A little earlier you mentioned that there was a desire to do a big project. Now there is such a desire – to develop something for a PC or console?

Dmitry: We are now more interested in technologies that allow us to do this.

You were engaged in browsers, social and mobile projects, and then you took up technology. Why? 

Evgeny: I’ve been doing it, I’ve been doing it for a long time, in my free time. The idea was to give animators a tool that would allow them to do the animation manually, but take into account the laws of physics and get a more realistic animation.

And not draw everything frame by frame?

Evgeny: No, it’s still necessary to draw, but when it’s drawn from the head, it turns out either cartoonish or bad, but we get quite realistic. And we did it for the first time in “Shadow Fight”. And suddenly we noticed that the players really like our animation. We didn’t think it was so important for the players.

Dmitry: We can make an animation that cannot be done with motion capture. Let’s say the hero picks up a 100 kilogram sword. Hardly any actor is capable of this.

Evgeny: At least, he won’t be able to show it naturally. He can take a paper sword, but then it will be seen that the sword is not real.

Engine from Nekki

Are you planning to sell a license to use your animation engine?

Evgeny: We plan to make it publicly available for free, we will try to create a community of animators around it, see what happens.

How easy is it to use?

Evgeny: It’s simpler than Maya, weighs two megabytes, everything in it is configured immediately for animation, but it’s still too different from traditional programs like 3DMax or Maya. 

Dmitry: The trick is that learning to animate in it is easier than in Maya, but if you already know how to animate in Maya, then it will be difficult to retrain.

Aren’t you afraid that it will also become viral, and after the launch everyone will use it?

Evgeny: It would be nice.

How easy it is to integrate your animation into engines. For example, in Unity?

Evgeny: We haven’t worked with Unity yet, we’re just planning, perhaps, in Shadow Fight 3. We are just implementing support for exporting/importing animation into formats that are compatible with Unity, 3D MAX, now we seem to be doing well.

Let’s get away from technology. Now a lot of people are talking about marketing tools, how do you feel about them?

Dmitry: In our experience, there is no artificial virality. Apps that spam friends will increase your performance by 10% at most, but it won’t create a big bang when everyone calls friends. There will be no snowball. 

Word of mouth is not calculated by marketing, everything depends on the originality and coolness of the game itself. It will be interesting for people to tell their friends about the game, if only they liked the game very much, if there are no analogues. To say: I’m playing another clone of Clash of Clans – well, somehow not cool.

Shadow Fight 2

Today there is a topic – traffic is everything. I remember that when we spoke at Wnconf 2014, you mentioned that you did not invest in traffic. Many do not believe.

Dmitry: We want to learn how to invest in marketing, but we have never succeeded yet.

We make games with high virality, but low monetization.

You can make a game that squeezes the maximum amount of money out of the user, but then again he will not tell his friends about it, because he will not be happy about it. And, conversely, people will show a generous game to friends.

But did you buy the installations? For Vector, for example?

Dmitry: No, we haven’t bought any installations for this game.

In a situation where a company wants to make clones, then there is nowhere without traffic. That is, either the company makes a very cool clone, while they have brilliant analytics and they can cut monetization above the market average. Then their advertising will pay off. Or you need to make an original game, and for this, the team should not just have hired employees, but really those who dreamed of making such a game.

We are convinced that it is impossible to invent a successful game just like that, the idea should crystallize over the years.

And how do you feel about “smart cloning” when one popular mechanic is taken and refined?

Dmitry: Yes, this is a good way. Only for its successful use it is necessary to learn how to simplify. Many people think that now they will copy the game, add a lot of features to it, and from this it will become better. But to make it better, it is necessary not to add, but to throw it away.    

Evgeny: For example, we rolled out “11 by 11” without a number of features that were originally intended. And then we realized that these features were not needed, people loved the game for its simplicity. 

Shadow Fight 2

The release of “Shadow Fight 2” on Android is planned soon. The game is still in the “soft launch” mode on iOS. Is it more complicated or easier compared to the first part?

Evgeny: The game is generally different. The fight itself is about the same, but the role-playing elements, the body kit are completely different. Here the bet is made more on RPG elements. And here we have already focused on the well-known mechanics of monetization, studied other projects, did not invent everything ourselves.

Dmitry: If we talk about simplification, then the whole Shadow Fight series is much easier than any fighting game..

Evgeny: Fighting games are a hardcore genre, not the most popular in the world. In it, you need to study and learn combinations for hours, bring them to automatism. And what is interesting: no deviations from this tradition have appeared for many years. I really love fighting games, but I can’t play them even at the level of an average player. I rarely use super-punches, mostly I work only with basic ones.

And we, starting from all this, thought, what if we take and make only simple combinations in a fighting game. Maximum: stick to one side + hand – one blow, stick to the other side + hand – another blow. Will this make the fighting game worse? In some ways, yes. Especially for fans of classic fighting games, but after all, our social version found a review in the souls of 40 million users, which means they like this topic, so a simple fighting game has the right to exist. 

Dmitry: It turns out to find a new niche: it’s enough to take a game that has only a hardcore audience, simplify it, make it casual, then the game will open up to a new wider audience, thereby creating its niche. 

How are things going in the mobile market for the second part of Shadow Fight?

Dmitry: We launched the game only in Russia, we wanted to make a soft lunch, we didn’t announce it anywhere, we didn’t tell anyone, but in three days it rose to first place in downloads on both iPhone and iPad. 

So, are you happy with the launch?

Dmitry: We are happy with the virality, but now we are working on monetization and retention to prepare the game for a global release.

Thanks for the interview!