Who's Who: An interview with Snegoffon

We are opening a new category “Who’s Who”, in which we are going to introduce our readers to mobile (and not only) game developers. The first material of the heading about the studio Snegoffon.

Us on App2Top.ru (on alexander.semenov@nevosoft.ru and press@app2top.ru ) game developers often write, asking us to write a review on their project. In most cases, we do not want to do this, because we are still not a b2c review site, but, let’s say, more “about business”. But, of course, this does not stop anyone and they continue to send us letters with requests to highlight this or that product.

What did we decide to do in this regard (instead of writing numerous letters “sorry, we don’t write reviews”)?

Now, if we receive such a letter, we will take a short interview with the developers and publish it under the heading “Who is who”.

This, firstly, will allow all of us to understand the existing market a little better (who, what, why and how much is doing), and secondly, it will give minimal visibility to those teams that have done something, but have not been able to show up anywhere else.

It is clear that we are unlikely to be able to give a place on the podium to everyone, but we will at least strive for this. By the way, I am sure that everyone will be only too happy to criticize the projects of those teams that we will write about.

The first conscious experience (movement) in this direction for us will be an interview with the company Snegoffon, which is the developer of the clicker “Corruption”. Our questions are answered by the company’s CEO Timur Zhabko.

Hello, Timur! Please tell us about your company: who are you, and also what and how long have you been doing?

 Timur ZhabkoGreetings.

In short, Snegoffon is an IT company based on 3 whales:

• own projects
• custom development
• and a small venture fund

We have been working since 2008. The main project that is known to a wide audience is the alternative social network “Human“. The main specialization is working with highly loaded web applications. The team is not very big (21 people), but everyone has their own area of responsibility and we are coping as best we can.

Why did you decide to take up mobile games?

Games are a long history. I wrote my first game for BK-0010, there were developments of board games and large field role-playing games. But it has never been the main source of income. Periodically, in different projects, we returned either to algorithms and game mechanics, or to gamification of processes.

But we seriously started playing games just while working on “Human”, because at some point we had a fairly large wave of the audience of 16 – and they perceived the project as a game, we had to urgently develop game applications.

Further — more. With the development of social networks, we realized that we need to be present in them. This is how our SocialCore technology was born, which allows us to quickly launch our own applications in 4 major social networks (VKontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki and MoiMir) and not suffer with their payment systems, user graphs, alerts and API difference.

Now we are switching to mobile solutions, because this is the trend of the time and the need to survive with our type of content.

Last September, you published the clicker “Corruption“. Tell us a little about him and his results in the market?

Created a little earlier, in September last year, a mobile version appeared.

By and large, it was born spontaneously, against the background of protest movements, the constant exaggeration of the corruption topic from all information sources. I wanted to dilute the hysteria a little with irony. And since we are always experimenting with formats and had no experience of middle core games at that time, we decided to see what would happen and how it could be done with not very much blood.

In dry figures, the statistics for May 2015 looks something like this:

• Total players created: 1021789
• Total registered players: 691548 (23220 – mobile share)
• Active players at the moment: 18812 (9884 – mobile share)
• ARPPU: $10.8 (mobile’s share is higher than it was at first)

But this is data for the entire game, because mobile is just one of many entry points. I believe that there is a growth potential of at least an order of magnitude. And now we are making every effort to achieve these indicators.

What, in general, did you expect from the project when launching it into production?

Money, fame, rock and roll. But seriously, we understood that we were not able to make an A+ class game right away, we did not have a very good idea of the environment and the pitfalls that we had to face. We were aware that this is a pure experiment that will give us experience, and, preferably, will return the funds invested in it (not yet in full). In fact, it is a testing ground for various mechanics and hypotheses. Now, based on the experience gained, we are preparing the 2nd version of the game, with a heavily redesigned gameplay. We are also preparing a number of casual projects.

What serious problems did the company face during development and promotion? How did you decide?

The first serious problem is the wrong technology. Since we already had a browser version and a version for social networks, our programmers decided to use PhoneGap to minimize costs, as a result we got an almost erotic novel “50 shades of PhoneGap”. Now we know how to cook it, but if we knew what we were going to face at the start, we definitely would not have gone down this path.

When promoting, we did not use the methods of pumping and massive gouging on the brains for two reasons. We have already had a similar experience with the browser version. Yes, the user base is growing so significantly, but the conversion to the payment audience is not the best. There is also a substantial stream of One Day Users. Therefore, it was decided to have a calmer, but more ecological growth of the audience.

Are you satisfied with the launches, will you try yourself in game development further?

You don’t have to try — you have to do it. The first pancake is not a lump yet, but it is far from ideal. As I said earlier, we are now preparing the 2nd version of Corruption, I think that in a couple of months we will roll out to release. Also at a very low start, the project “Paintball 2.0” is a casual shooter. And there are several more projects under development / prototyping, about the life of which we will be very happy to tell you when they acquire their own history.

Thanks for the interview!