Results of 2019: Ilya Salamatov from META Publishing about the main thing for the year
We continue to summarize the results of 2019 together with the heads of gaming companies and market experts. Next up is an interview with Ilya Salamatov, the founder of the indie publishing house META Publishing.
How was 2019 for the company?
META Publishing has started – that’s the main thing. And today we are sincerely trying to build the best publishing for independent developers of various calibres. The ultimate task is to do everything better than competitors. I mean the whole range of publishing services: PR, marketing, porting, community management, video production, QA, voiceover, localization and a lot of other things. We believe in this approach, and it seems that everything is working out for us.
Opening your own publishing is an incomparable experience. Not only are all processes being built from scratch, but it is also necessary to build a plan for the development of each of the areas for the next 2-3 years. At the same time, you are engaged in the formation of a product line, HR, finance, production, building relationships with platforms. A huge layer of work. But we are coping. I am very happy with the current team. Guys, if you’re reading this: you’re the best!
Since this is the first year of the company’s life, it was very eventful. We found a house for ourselves – a cozy loft near the Baumanskaya metro station. We have learned how to operate really big projects. Announced the first partnership: we are releasing a cool adventure game The Uncertain — Light at the End from the Moscow studio ComonGames. The game will be released next spring. This is one of the most beautiful projects on Unity at the moment. A number of unannounced games are also in the works.
What events in the regional and global gaming industry do you consider central in the past year?
I refreshed the news reports in my memory. This year, probably, there were no globally important events that could change the entire landscape of the industry in the future. What to do, the end of the cycle.
Of the more or less noteworthy, I will name: the decline in shares of gaming companies, the final completion of the licensing story in China, the rapid rise of the hyper-casual direction in mobile. Also, the official announcement of the new generation consoles, which will be powerful hardware in the physical sense of the word, finally took place. Yes, cloud gaming is still not ready to become a truly massive solution for the market, and in the coming years, games will continue to stand on store shelves.
I also note that the regional industry has gone, it seems to me, to a new round of development. $1.5 billion from Playrix, top grossers Mail.ru , new rapidly growing studios. In my opinion, there has not been such a rise for a very long time. It’s cool to watch all this from the front row and even participate in it sometimes.
What are the main trends in the market today?
There is a hardwired ray tracing support in the RTX line. Support at the PS5 hardware level is also announced. This trend can hardly be called the main one, but I think it’s very cool.
Lighting is a very important element of graphics. Physically correct rendering (physics based lighting) has long been one of the holy grails in CGI. Now, as part of the pre-render (graphics that are not calculated in real time), this issue has been resolved. Now it’s the turn for real-time graphics. Perhaps, such ray tracing may well become as significant a step as the support of shaders at the iron level at the time. Just look at the Minecraft videos with tracing. They look really cool. And these are just the first steps.
I also believe that the use of (pseudo) AI and neural grids can have a very strong impact not only on the speed of asset production (this is already happening), but also on the gameplay of games, on how the game world reacts to the user.
Which third-party game releases turned out to be the most important this year? Plus, which games did you spend the most time on in 2019 as a gamer?
In those rare moments when it was possible to really sit down for a game, and not just run for 5-10 minutes, Death Stranding impressed the most. In an industrial sense, this is a milestone. Plus, Kojima has done a lot to demarginalize the industry.
Since we are an indie publisher, of course, I have watched a ton of projects that have somehow manifested themselves over the past few years. I really liked Dead Cells, Frostpunk was cool. 11Bit Studios seems to have found themselves in the niche of immersive strategies in which the narrative is generated situationally. It’s cool, there’s a lot to learn.
