Why Wargaming.net to hold a competition among developers?

The other day, the company Wargaming.net announced the launch of the public Wargaming Developers Contest with the participation of the online publication "Habr". We asked the Minsk company why it needed such a competition.

Igor Olekhnovich, manager of the Wargaming Developers Partner Program, answered our questions.

Igor Olekhnovich

Hi! Why does Wargaming even need such a competition? What are his goals in terms of the company's business development?

Hi! It was the ardent fans of our projects who brought Wargaming popularity, so it would be wrong to talk about the competition as one of the events to achieve business goals.

Since their inception, projects from the community have been a kind of cherry on the cake for World of Tanks and our other products. Third-party developers are often immersed in the features of the game no worse, and sometimes even better than us, and are able to create exclusive products for a niche audience, for example, "Clans" and "Esports players".

With the WGDC competition, we want to pay tribute to the long-term work of third-party developers of products and applications, as well as better listen to their community and build communication with it more effectively. The idea that creating a Public API is clearly not enough for this, and led us to organize a competition. 

In addition, the competition should consolidate a shift in the philosophy of product development within the company itself. WGDC is an important step towards greater openness of Wargaming and the realization that our games do not belong to us, but rather to those who play them.

Money is always good, but the most delicious thing, in my opinion, is access to the audience Wargaming.net which the winners will receive. The question is — what kind of access is this, in what form will it be implemented? 

As practice shows, truly talented and relevant mods and applications easily find their way to a wide audience themselves. However, we will also support the winners of the competition with our heavy artillery. 

First, we will tell you in detail about the winners and their projects on our blog and on the contest page, which are posted on Habra. And this is the most visited and popular Russian-language IT-related website on the Internet.

Secondly, we will tell you about the best WGDC projects on all our resources and through all available PR channels. You can read about the best of the best according to the results of the competition in the blog on the corporate Wargaming website, on the websites of our games, in the news and even when logging into World of Tanks and World of Warplanes. They will also receive permanent registration in a special section of our gaming portal — one of the most visited resources on the Runet. Therefore, it is definitely not worth worrying that one of our players in the RU region will not hear about the winners.

Who will be on the jury?

The jury will consist of our experts in various fields: mobile applications, web, World of Tanks developers. There may also be surprises in the face of non-Wargaming and fairly well-known professionals. We plan to present the final composition of the judges in September–October, closer to the end of the development phase.

Thanks for the answers!