"Our small indie PC game publisher has started to make a profit" Pavel Prokonich from HeroCraft said about the results of 2023
A new day, new results. Next up is an interview with Pavel Prokonich, CEO of HeroCraft.
What was the year like for the company? What have you done that I would like to highlight in terms of achievements?
The beginning of the year was extremely difficult. We entered 2023 facing serious financial challenges that accumulated in the second half of 2022, and with a rather vague understanding of how to deal with them.
Nevertheless, this year ends on a very optimistic note. Such is the swing.
The year was eventful, many difficult and difficult decisions were made. We closed a lot of projects, reducing three quarters of all investments, said goodbye to some employees, successfully or not launched everything that could be launched.
One of the key achievements was the appearance of our new flagship, the Pirate Ships project, which is rapidly gaining momentum.
An equally significant success was that finally our small indie PC game publisher began to make a profit. We have invested in the PC segment for several years, formed a team, gained experience and honed processes. Over the past year, we have made several releases on Steam, very successful ones. So now in our company, a PC publishing house has been added to the successful mobile publishing division.
Have there been new challenges or trends that now need to be kept in mind?
The year 2023 was marked by neural networks. In many areas of the gaming industry, from art to text content, from programming to user support, neural networks are rapidly being implemented and are already transforming development approaches.
We do not seek to be ahead of time and certainly do not rush to replace our qualified and experienced specialists with artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, we enthusiastically explore the possibilities offered by neural networks and actively train our employees to use them in their work. We have AI-based enterprise solutions, we support the initiative in this area and continue to work on integrating neural networks into our work processes. We are already seeing a significant increase in the productivity of our employees in some areas. For example, we have a solution that works with reviews in stores: aggregates problems, writes answers, and connects a person only in the most extreme cases.
What was the year like for the genres in which you work?
Our library has hundreds of games, and it's easier to list those genres in which we are not represented. In the past year, we have paid special attention to games with advertising monetization. We found our niche of physical puzzles and learned how to optimize the display of ads so that players do not leave because there are too many ads. Our goal is to achieve a balance in which games remain attractive to players, and revenues allow us to successfully purchase and invest in the development of this area. We plan to continue working in the niche of such games. It is not so great, but the competition in it is significantly lower than in the segment of hyper casual games, for example.
What are the company's plans for next year?
We definitely do not plan a sharp expansion, we will develop smoothly and evolutionarily. Perhaps we will try to enter the HTML5 games market, we have been wanting to launch our projects on this platform for a long time. However, this will happen in partnership with other companies that will be able to take over the porting.
The second area that we are going to develop will be our mobile publishing house. We will increase our production team and improve it qualitatively. We will be happy to consider the possibility of cooperation if you have an interesting game. We dive deep into every project that we take to the publishing house. This is our big plus. If you want to publish a new game, overcome the glass ceiling in an already launched project, or you do not have enough experience with operating, come and we will help you.
