“Around the circle!" – Russian publishers on Krey. “Whoever has it and who is developing games,” they fed in response. However, they agreed in one: in the industry something is wrong. There are no cool games. Piracy crushes. Import fell. There is nothing to be proud of. Why? For half a year, Gamemia studied the binding of “authorities”, “Kommersant” and “Finance”, re-read an interview with a year ago, compared the facts, listened to records and looked for press releases, talked with Nikolai Baryshnikov, Maxim Donskoy, Gleb Fedorov, Sergey Galenkin. , Malik Khatazhaev – and is now ready to present the exhaustive history of the Russian gaming industry from the origins to the present day. How it was and why it was just like that – in an exciting study that has never been conducted by any Russian gaming media
Any of the questions asked in the hat of the articles – why do so few cool games in Russia, why cannot we be proud of our own developers, how it happened that piracy has become the main problem of the industry – at one point or another came to each of us.
Domestic hits can be counted on the fingers, but after all in 2003, after " Confrontations "," Korsarov "," Access code: Paradise " And " Blitzkrieg "It seemed that we were waiting for a shaft of inimitable projects.
In the same 2003, the own conference of computer games developers-Cree, at which professionals told Gamdev’s newcomers, how to make games, how to interact with publishers, how to promote their project on the Western market. It helped? Where is there! For many years, the industry never got up from the knees: in the game backstage, the voice is heard every now and then that Cers this year is the last that the state will soon take all for itself, that it was time to throw the development, since nothing sensible is coming out anyway.
However, there are optimists. Gleb Yalchik, head of the production department Creat Studios , For example, it claims that after the 2008 crisis, the industry has "a chance". What kind of chance is this and why it is missed, since it was in a row, let's understand.
The emergence of the industry
Typically, the industry is understood as a whole sector of the economy, which includes the production of goods, its distribution, and sometimes even an audience that acquires a product. But now this concept has blurred. Speaking "industry", today they first have in mind the market. There is a market – there is an industry.
If we consider the Russian gaming industry from this point of view, we can name the exact date of its occurrence – December 18, 1992. On that day in Russia, sales of an unofficial clone began Nintendo Entertainment System , for which the Moscow company Steepler Actively imported the "gray" cartridges from Taiwan.
The clone was called " Dandy ". There were no gaming market in Russia before it, there were only a few electronics stores with a very modest assortment of licensed games at sky -high prices. The parish "Dandy" fundamentally changed the situation. An industry that we know now arose in Russia – with its many problems and vices.
Other memorable dates
Happy birthday to the Russian gaming industry, we did not decide right away.
A good date for starting the reference could be June 6, 1984, when Alexei Pazhitnov, who had been in a couple of years later in the United States, first presented his legendary " Tetris ". However, that show did not affect the future of the Russian gaming market: while Pazhitnov’s game earned millions of dollars abroad, in the Soviet Union they only dreamed about a market economy.
The emergence in 1991 of the company " 1C ", The largest Russian gaming distributor to date, is also an important, but not fateful event. Games "Yellow" took up much later, in 1996, when the market of computer and video games already existed.
Another date, which, if desired, could be considered the birthday of the Russian gaming industry is October 14, 1991. The first Russian game studio appeared on this day, Nikita , which all the nineties released good, important for the game industry. Another thing is that this company has always acted according to existing market laws, and did not create new development conditions.
Perhaps this was the right and only right path: to develop inexpensive games and programs for children that paid off mainly due to sales in foreign markets, and not due to modest sales in the CIS.
If all Russian studios did so, then in a few years the number of such firms would increase. All of them would be oriented primarily to the West, since in the Russian market to recoup their product could not. Or – here is another option! – would create cheap projects for the domestic market. Over time, a healthy market would have appeared in the traditional scenario of the development of the gaming industry.
This scenario, according to Alexander Fedorov, director of the leading Russian industrial portal DTF.ru and the chairman of the Board of Directors of Kre, is as follows: “Cheap projects appear on the empty market. The market is growing. Those who came earlier begin to develop more serious projects, which are released against the background of simpler. So large developers appear. With an increase in the supply in the market, it turns out that it is not enough to release the project, it must be promoted, and this can only those who have money. Here the publisher appears ".
Unfortunately, in our industry, everything from the very beginning went completely different.
Self -interest or hack
Not always a bad game-the result of someone's self-interest or hack. An example of this is the history of the development of a trash project " The revenge of Yakuza ".
In 2001, a young team Oxide , consisting mainly of students, the Western investor allocated funding for the development of a “three -dimensional game in the cyberpunk genre”. The problem was that no one in the studio had imagined how to make a game. “There was no dizdok. There was no real experience. There were no gaming designers. There were no artists. There were five programmers and the project manager, ”wrote Gleb Lebedev in the post -Mortem.
Young enthusiasts, of course, could not stop. They worked on the game, studied at the university (someone even ran from the army) and wanted to make a hit. The plans were Napoleonic: “Create a city in the game that would live its life, while the player could travel along it, falling into all kinds of alterations”.
True, after the Western publisher called the game Pakka-Man (Pac-Man), but it did not work out with the Russian publisher, the developers measured their ambitions. They abandoned dialogues, flying cars, a huge city. Well, since the engine was not optimized and slowed down even on top configurations, they decided to make game levels small.
Unfortunately, this did not help the game. After almost five years of development-from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2006-the "revenge of Yakuza" went to the shelves, but did not cause anything but disgust. Scary graphics at the 1998 level, slurred comics instead of script videos, boring, according to numerous reviewers, gameplay.
It would seem that everything is bad, but this story has a good ending.
In 2006 site Gamedev.ru Together with the organizing committee, Kre held a competition for the best article on the game design. The second place with the material “sober calculation” was taken by the same Gleb Lebedev, who worked on the “Yakuza revenge” as part of Oxide. True, it is not quite about the game design, but about how to evaluate the flight of designer thought – that is, to estimate the project budget. The article is written sensible and in detail and interesting even now: www.DTF.ru/articles/read.PHP?ID = 38309 &
The beginning of the end
Here it is-December 1992. Right before the New Year, the Moscow company Steepler launched Dendy, Taiwanese Clone Nes. At that time, no official permission from Nintendo Steepler did not have, but it was impossible to dig up: small changes in microcircuits, another case – and we can assume that your product is original. At least in the early nineties, the legislation still allowed to turn such things.
The emergence of the console in the Russian market itself meant little, if not for two very important circumstances.
The first is an extremely aggressive advertising campaign.
The second is the sale of the gray cartridges of Steepler.
Now that the advertisement has become (except jokes) part of our life, we have learned to ignore it. From the screens of TVs they can assure as much as you like that Tag powder is the best choice of a young housewife, but for the consumer this message is nothing more than a noise, at best – a notice that there is powder of such a brand on the market.
In the early nineties, the situation was radically different. People believed advertising. They took her for a clean coin. Therefore, so often turned out to be deceived by a bright cover, a sonorous name, a loud brand.
In addition, it must be remembered that the Dendy campaign was aimed primarily at the children's audience, most susceptible to advertising. So there is nothing surprising that almost every child in the country wanted to find a prefix under a Christmas tree on January 1, 1993.
But not every family could afford this. People barely made ends meet. Prices liberalization led to the depreciation of money in the hands of the population. A third of the country's population was behind the poverty line.
If the games for Dandy cost the money comparable to her, then the advertisement, no matter how aggressive it may not have reached the goal in such conditions. This would happen in any other country in the world: it is well known that the manufacturer usually sells a console at a loss to ozolly on the sale of games.
In any country in the world – but not in Russia. The Moscow company Steepler earned money precisely on the sale of consoles due to the fact that the cost of expenses did not have expenses for an entire staff of engineers. Taiwanese factories on which Dandy was produced simply copied the developments Nintendo. By 1992, Nes was very outdated, the production of its copy cost a little – and it was possible to make excellent money on sale.
But again – in order to buy the console, we needed games.
And they, of course, were.
Unequivocally write that Steepler traded counterfeit, due to a mass of legal subtleties. From the August issue of the magazine "Power" for 1994 (No. 28/90 of 02.08.1994) It is known that Steepler sold cartridges at a price of $ 5 to $ 20 apiece, while licensed games cost from $ 30 to $ 100. Conclusions, as they say, make yourself.
The contract with more than fifty firms throughout the country allowed Steepler in December 1992 to create a full -fledged dealer network. Successful sales stimulated its expansion. According to the newspaper Kommersant (No. 132/600 of 19.07.1994), just six months after the start of sales, by the summer of 1993 in a half -starry country, Steepler had been worth about one million prefixes.
The market arose – and Chinese copies of NES began to arrive immediately on it. Thanks to the Steepler advertising campaign, the demand for the consoles exceeded the proposal, and these fakes were also in great demand. In the same 1993, 16-bit of the next generation appeared on the market. These were either "gray" deliveries or Chinese copies.
The popularity of the consoles, also spurred by the program of Sergei Suponev “Dandy – New Reality” produced at Steepler, soon brought tangible results. By mid -1994, the capacity of the Russian gaming market approached $ 250 million (for comparison: the approximate market volume in 2010 – $ 500 million, however, excluding pirate traffic).
And then Nintendo and Sega officially came to the domestic market.
The contract with one of them allowed Steepler to legalize. The company's management perfectly understood that with such income it can easily be pressed if desired. And in November 1994, Steepler entered into a contract with the Nintendo, undertaking to sell only the original products of the company. The capture of the pirate cartridges immediately began.
Antiddf is alive
One of the most high -profile scandals in the Russian gaming industry erupted in 2006. In the center of it was a small blog Antidtf , on which in a rather sharp – Podonkovskaya – form appeared statements about all the key figures of the domestic Gamdev.
The name for the blog was not chosen by chance. DTF portal.ru – the main "corporate" site of all Russian publishers and developers. For many years, the main industry news is published and discussed there. Many insiders lead to DTF.ru.
Therefore, many perceived the appearance of Antidtf as a click on the nose. An anonymous author, not embarrassed in expressions, denounced the industry (unprintable vocabulary was cut or replaced): “Even the last Vasya knows that they pay poorly in Gamdev. Therefore, the latter Vasya dreams not of salary, but about piano/bonuses. Royali/bonuses – an integral part of the myth: “Here we subscribe, pass the project – and we will heal”. Boys, there will be no piano. First, sales are really bad. Secondly, you will be thrown on the royal, as “b throws."Or" R.". Thirdly, no one will buy your bad game anyway, and you will expose the budget three times. And who told you at all that someone lives with the royal in Gamdev? Publishers live with a stream of a little cost with low cost and localizations. Some of the so -called publishers have a large shadow business in the form of a small factory in Altufevo, which in three shifts pirates everything that can.
The developers live with non -core money, like Odessa, or there, “with.", Either engage in offshore, or parasitize on large publishers. Directors are engaged in caching – they sign as many contracts as possible for fake legal entities and display a cache. Analogy with the oil market: the loot is pumped out and not a penny is put into a pipe itself, that is, in the company and key employees. Simple heads, of course, are sitting on a deaf suction and feeding on promises. Money, it happens, is not received for months ".
As a result, ANTIDTF was closed from above: in posts, noticeable Gamdev figures were often mentioned, and the manner and form of statements, apparently, led to the closure of the magazine. The Antidtf website, which arose shortly after removing the blog, also did not last long: it was one thing to take someone to clean water, another is to insult people.
Since then, the word Antidtf has become a household name, and on the Internet you can still find posters, T -shirts and mugs with the slogan "Antidtf alive".
Pirate norm
But it was too late.
Users are too accustomed to cheap games, and numerous dealers – to high sales of non -faculty products.
Steepler had to refuse to cooperate with many of their partners who, without the support of the manufacturer, no longer had such freedom in the spread of pirate prefixes. In addition, by 1996, all the main manufacturers of the consoles had already had official distributors in Russia.
Everyone was interested in the destruction of the pirate market.
But it wasn't there. It was at this time that the personal computer became one of the most attractive gaming platforms. And the discs for it, as you know, are much easier to produce than chips for cartridges.
The efforts of Steepler throughout Russia appeared a huge number of outlets ready to sell unlicensed products. So when the company sharply changed politics, nameless pirates quickly took its place. Steepler literally protected their way. Furiously advertising the prefix, under which there were no games, but which was compatible with pirate games for NES, the company has created perfect conditions for creating a wide pirate dealer network.
“A fake has actually formed a gaming prefix market in Russia,” said Kunimas Yaga, who held the SEGA managing director in the early nineties, in an interview with the magazine “Power”.
Thus, the concept of "licensed game" from the very origin of the market was rejected. The player did not even have a choice. If he wanted to play (and he wanted, because the Dandy’s advertising campaign was one of the most aggressive on the nascent Russian television!), he bought a relatively inexpensive prefix and the only games presented on the market.Unlicensed games. This accustomed the Russian player to the fact that pirate products are the norm.
Game market to default
While Steepler expanded the market, we have more and more developers' studios. In 1993, at least ten game studios worked in Russia – Gamos , Nikita , Creat Studios , Animation Magic Inc. and others. But each of them was guided primarily by the foreign market.
More or less earn on the emerging Russian market at that moment only could Nikita. But she was also counting on Western publishers. Only they could provide the studio with orders and pay for the development – and for a very tasty to the then employee to the price list.
In the early nineties, there were also distributors of licensed Western products. You know their names very well – this is " Buka " And " SoftKlab ". In a few stores, they sold Western games – however, they were in no hurry to localize them, they bypassed the translation of the manual and boxes.
The distributor business was far from the profitability of Steepler, but it grew up, because the audience also grew up, ready to purchase boxed versions of PC products (by the way, few people know that Buka first specialized in the sale of console games!).
When the market was ready to consume the Russian product, it was yesterday's distributors that began to publish. SoftKlab is a slight exception: before the unification with 1C in 2009, this company has never spoiled by the publication of Russian projects. And she did the right thing.
Publisher and distribution – two completely different activities. “Historically, it so happened that they were united, because the market was not so developed,” officially announcing the beginning of publishing in October 2005, said Sergey Orlovsky, then the general director Nival Interactive. – Distribution is primarily logistics. Laws of large numbers work there. The market does not need a lot of distributors, because the larger the distributor, the easier it is to work for it, since its costs are reduced. The more distributor channels are filled, the more profitable to everyone. And the publishing house is, first of all, work with risks and work with brands, here we need an individual approach to each product ".
The publisher traditionally very carefully conducts several projects, while the distributor has several hundred. It is clear that the distributor who also plays the role of the publisher cannot pay due attention to each project. As a result, the overall quality of projects decreases.
Maxim Donskoy, former editor -in -chief DTF.ru, the founder of the blog Inside Social Play and the head of a small studio Road 404 , notes that in the zero in the Russian market for a dozen projects, there was often only one curator from the publishing house. He could not physically keep track of all the projects. So, the developers were "without a leash".
There were no such problems in the nineties, but the processes have already been going on, which later led to it. In particular, Russian developers began to slowly invest in Russian developments.
On the one hand, this is fine, since our projects could pay off in their own market. On the other hand, this could lead to the fact that the developers would begin to focus on the small Russian market, in which the competition, and therefore the quality bar, were much lower than on Western. This, in turn, would lead to a decline in quality. And if Western projects came to the domestic market and began to play on an equal footing with Russian, the latter would simply have disappeared.
Looking ahead – so it happened. But in the mid -nineties, everything was still relatively cloudless.
Boxing versions of Russian games at a price of $ 20-30 were successfully sold on a par with export hits. Moreover, in 1997, when a significant audience was already formed, ready to buy games at a normal price, sales have reached a good level. According to Nikita representatives, the revenue of the game " Parkan: Chronicle of the Empire "In the Russian market, then amounted to $ 1.7 million. At the beginning and mid-1998, they sold very well " Truckers "," Russian roulette "," Allods " And " Vananers ". The same projects felt great in the West.
All this suggests that in parallel with the pirate market successfully, although slowly, the market for licensed products developed. The problem is that by the time the licensing market is the pirate, thanks to Steepler's policy, it has grown to a huge size. And in a critical situation, in the 1998 crisis, which rejected the country several years ago, official suppliers could no longer contrast the pirates. Russian publishers had to play according to their rules.
Masks shows
Over the twenty years of the existence of the industry, the state has not learned to support it, but even tolerate it. The key problem of gaming developers in our country is that every time they open the office, someone begins to break up to them. The developer becomes a walking victim for the police, for the tax – for all.
For example, in Voronezh there was one successful company that made at least two good games and licensed its engine. An outfit from the Office for Combating Economic Crimes (UBEPA) was periodically visited by an organization that punishes the use of pirate programs. People in masks and with machine guns at the ready, burst into the office, built everyone along the wall and, under the slogan of checking the unlicensed in simply confiscating all computers and took them to the department. And it was necessary to give them money to get cars back.
Having redeemed its computers twice, the studio leadership installed two steel doors at the entrance, and between them – the switch. And when someone began to break on the outside, the employees had time to open one door, look into the eye, chat, pull the switch and then open the second for a long time. And the switch, meanwhile, cut down all the computers and made them load from the clean disk. UBEP was broken – and, except for naked Windows, I did not find anything.
But UBEP is half a bastard. Another headache of the Russian studio is the tax inspectorate. Here the developer sits in the office, prepares for the release, and come to it from the tax, check the reporting and whistle: “Hey, this is generally what? You have shown losses for three years! Obviously some theft ". He replies: “No, no, wait. I have been developing the game for three years. I will invest my money. Yes, I have losses, but then the game will be released and … ”But in the tax, such arguments are not ready to accept such arguments. There, only at the temple only at the temple is twisted and say: “Well, why? Plant you right away or so confess?"
Game market after default
The Russian economic crisis of 1998, or simply default, was caused by a host of reasons. Here is the financial pyramid, started by the state itself (as you know, the financial pyramid is always turned upside down and always falls), and extremely low oil prices and gas (our main export product), and a huge public debt, and a series of Asian crises that have shared the domestic economy.
Western economists expected default, but they believed that the Russian government knew how to act in such conditions. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. The consequences of default were much more serious than everyone expected.
The ruble exchange rate towards the dollar fell strongly. If on August 16, the day before the crisis, six rubles were asked for one dollar, then less than a month, September 9, already twenty -one rubles. So there would be a good part of the savings accumulated by citizens of the country. The standard of living has fallen. A huge number of small companies that worked only on the domestic market went bankrupt. Only those who collaborated with Western partners felt more or less: they received salaries in dollars, and the consequences of the crisis almost did not affect them.
Since the ruble sagged, all the imports went up strongly. So, those who could afford to buy a license yesterday, now went to buy a pirate.
The crisis knocked out the soil from under the legs of publishers. Distribution of imported products – the main article of income – suddenly turned out to be unprofitable. In the country, no one else could pay thirty dollars for the game. The companies almost lost the young market at one point.
A “beech” found a way out of this situation, which proposed spreading games at low prices without a familiar box with a manual. This measure, as well as protecting discs from copying, made it possible to greatly reduce the pirate market.
True, now, in ten years, we can safely say that the industry did not give anything. Piracy did not win, but the orientation to the domestic market led to the emergence of a huge number of domestic gaming slag.
But the point is not that the transition to Jewel was wrong. By no means. Just a chance that appeared thanks to Jewel, almost none of the Russian publishers, except for 1C, really did not use. And "1C" went to the external market and at the same time in the domestic market played according to general rules. In the future, this allowed her to strengthen, uniting with Buka, Soft Clab and, perhaps, the only real Russian publisher, studio Snowball , and become one of the largest European gaming publishers.
Fold zero
The good desire of domestic distributors to take on financing gaming developments in the jewelry market turned out to be a bear service. Such a policy led to the emergence of the main problem of the domestic game – subsidiaries.
Here's a simple example for you. Imagine you are a young father or mother. Your baby crawls throughout the house, periodically trying to stand on the legs, but still cannot take the first step. What a loving parent should do in this situation? Build a crutch so that the child, relying on him, could walk?
Rave.
A loving parent in this situation should stand aside and remove sharp objects from the path of the child.
To make it even more clear, remember the diapers. Many parents complain that if a child is put on a child for a long time, he is written in bed for up to ten years.
A diaper for our industry was the financing of large gaming publishers. Because of him, most domestic studios never had an understanding that games are primarily a business. The developers received sponsorship and sat down to create (at best!).
But in the zero there was no debugged mechanics of gaming production. There was no elementary production culture. Most publishers did not understand until 2008 that such a model is insolvent. But if we understood, then we would now talk about a completely different game.
Perhaps many publishing offices simply had no desire to understand something. This was very facilitated by favorable economic conditions of hearty zero.
Thanks to high prices for oil, the well -being of the population has sharply grown. In almost every family of a millionaire city, a computer appeared. The demand for games has grown immediately. People began to buy them more often, including spontaneously. Sales have grown sharply, and sales of each product.
Literally everything was sold in the new market. Other Russian publishers managed to sell even those games that Western developers posted on the network for free. And by 2006, reservoir arose on the market. “A large number of titles negatively affects the salesiness of each individual game, if it is not an indisputable hit,” Dmitry Arkhipov, vice president of the development of the company, said at that time at that time Akella ".
In other words, an extremely wide range that appeared thanks to sustainable demand provoked a paradoxical situation. In the middle of the zero, the difference in profit was observed only in cases where the project in quality characteristics greatly exceeded any other presented on the market.
For a domestic developer, such a situation turned out to be a destructive. The average team did not make sense to work qualitatively, because for a good game, according to the results of many years of work, she received as much as hacks from a neighboring sharashka – for a project, balanced in three months.
If the developers were independent entrepreneurs, they might count on the best share. But it was convenient for them in a subsidized scheme, it is convenient when the publisher completely refuel them outside the creative process.
However, the subsidized scheme itself was far from the ideal.
The diaper system
In relations with developers, the publisher acted more like a bank, not an investor. “The publisher repelled his investments not from the general revenue, but from the percentage that the developer was due,” explains Maxim Donskoy.
For example, the publisher gave a million dollars to develop. The developers had to receive 30% from sales. The game came out, brought the publisher the same million, but this did not mean at all that the game went to zero. This meant that the project worked 300 thousand dollars. The studio began to receive interest on sales only after the project was gaining thirty percent of another 700 thousand dollars, that is, it earned more than 3.3 million.
In such a situation, it was extremely difficult for the developer to get the same percentage of sales. It was necessary to make a very strong, very high -quality project. But even in this case there was no guarantee that the developers would receive their money. After all, sales themselves depend not only on the quality of the game, but also on how the marketing department of the publisher works, what advertising is produced, how the publisher promotes the project in other territories.
Having introduced a similar scheme, the publisher reinsured and minimized his risks, simultaneously depriving the developer of all motivation. There was no difference to the team whether to develop an average game or frankly passing – in the end it turned out the same money.
The diaper system has already failed at this level. However, both publishers and developers were quite pleased with the existing state of affairs. The first business grew, regardless of what they sold. The second received money, regardless of what they did.
Thus, the developer did not work for the final result, but for advance. It was beneficial for him to live with the publisher’s money, delaying until the last development and ultimately releasing a low -quality game.
Therefore, while most publishers and developers spoke of impressive growth and wide horizons, a number of figures tirelessly, the year since 2005, insisted that a crisis had come in the industry.
“There was no industry before the crisis,” Gleb Yalchik, head of the production department Creat Studios, pronounces the verdict. -When one or two companies can create a quality product, this is not an industry for a country of the same size, with so many companies and such a potential. ".
In the middle of the zero in Russia there was a very special type of developer.
Unscrupulous
To blame all the blame on the publishers (they say, they made porridge) at least unfairly. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, there were teams that made very high-quality projects in equal terms- Katauri , Maddox Games , Avalon Style Entertainment , Seaward.Ru and others.
Secondly, when the money is paid, it is customary to work. You can accuse the publishers of stingy as much as you like, but they – with a very rare exception – carried out financial support. How much – now it does not matter, the fact itself is important.
Unmotivated developers, in turn, delayed the development, hacks, begged for additional funds. In addition, according to Maxim Donskoy, "some developers actively fools publishers". This happened according to the following scenario.
The young team came to the publisher with the idea, asked for money to develop. The publisher gave them. When the deadline for passing the project came up, the team said that the game was not ready yet, but asked to finance another, according to them, a supergenial project. The publisher, as a rule, pecked on this. It took some time again, the developer again pleased the publisher with a message about additional financing, stating that neither the first nor the second project would be ready without money. The publisher has nowhere to go – the money has already been spent. If you don't give it yet, you risk losing everything. As a result, the team received funds, but she was in no hurry to finish the projects, continuing to milk the publisher until he torn relations with her.
Sometimes the developers still pleased the publisher and released the project. But “the game was not sold, since the task of developers was not to make the game, but to make money” during the development, says Don. So, in his opinion, “a small budget is not a problem. Even if the Russian team gives the budget Call of Duty 4 , then a sensible game will not work – there are no specialists, there is no development culture, there are no managers, there https://sister-site.org/professor-wins/ is nothing ".
Living evidence of his words is the history of one St. Petersburg studio.
This story became public due to a video that got into the network two years ago. On it, Mikhail Bazhenov, founder of the Adamant Holding Company, mainly engaged in the construction and operation of shopping and entertainment complexes, reports top management Parallax Arts Studio.
The fact is that Adamant company has financed the development of Parallax Arts Studio games for seven and a half years. Huge funds were invested-only to write a design document managers asked the investor $ 400 thousand. As a result, three projects were issued – "" Liquidator 2 "," Utopia City " And " The outcome from the Earth ". Projects turned out to be very weak. The investor decided to figure out what was the matter, and invited Andrei Kuzmin, General Director and founder for the inspection " K-d lab " And Kranx Productions.
According to the results of the audit, it turned out that “the main task of the company's top management was to not publish the game, but to correctly convince creditors and shareholders that the development of games should last years”.
In other words, the leadership bred investors. It turned out right there that in the studio, kumov, people engaged in management, did not mean anything in the games or in management, and the development departments were in no way connected by each other. In general, a uniform mess.
Studio for the Bleanie
Another typical Russian problem is the lack of transparent financing schemes.
Sometimes, instead of the financing agreement, incomprehensible agreements of the transfer of rights to the engine, to resources, for modifications, to something else are created … The Czechard is started, in which what is written on paper does not correspond to what is happening in real life. In this situation, even if the project is successful, the matter will not end well. The earned million no one honestly will share their deserts. No, everyone will begin to wave his fists, trying to snatch a larger piece.
And it happens that the game financing occurs through a personal loan agreement. That is, money is given not by companies for the project, but are issued by receipts as a personal loan of the director of the studio. And when he spends all the money, and the project cannot hand over, they come to him and say: “Well, what is friend? You hit! What do you have there? Six acres, apartment, car? Come on here!" – and they will rob pussy.
If these were the relationship of two companies, then everything would be decided amicably. The founder would come and say: “Well, excuse me. I could not. If you want – take the code, graphics, whatever you want – just close the company ".
But here everything is different. The founder signed for live money, and on paper from the point of view of the law it looks like this: "There was a citizen a, he came to a citizen b, took half a million dollars". Naturally, everyone will recye from him.
And if a person really has six acres, an apartment, a car, a family, then he has to go to the office for a year and a half for free, label, persuade friends to work for him, and all in order to release the project.
The situation is absolutely unhealthy: the publisher takes the developer for gills, and he is not thinking about the game, but about how to save his life. Instead of closing a bad project, the disabled teams are tormented for two, three years, scary, try to finish something, and in the end they release a naughty game. Not because they can’t do well – because they are not going to do well. They just want to hand over the project so that they get rid of them. As a result, not those who can develop the game survive in the industry, but those who can get out in an extreme situation or steal something.
Problem management
The lack of managers who would put things in order – the problem in Russia is a long -standing, which, by relevance, is not inferior to the problem of fools and roads. An effective manager who will save the Fatherland and lead her to a bright future is one of the most important domestic archetypes. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the problems of the Russian gaming industry it occupies a very important place.
In this regard, Nikolai Baryshnikov and I, the head of the game direction "1C", at Gamer 2010, came out a very funny dialogue. I asked my usual question, which before and after asked dozens of our other publishers: why so few cool games are being made in Russia. But in response I heard – they say, there are not enough developers.
I made big eyes.
"How so? – I ask. – So many talented programmers, artists, and you say that there are no developers!"
Baryshnikov turned the phone in his hands and, almost at me, slowly said: “We have an extremely big problem with management, project management. And this is a key thing for developing a game, an extremely complex mechanism. It is not enough just to collect talented programmers and artists, you need to very correctly evaluate the risks, set them tasks ".
Almost spoke about this in an interview with DTF.RU Yuri Miroshnikov: “Soviet production culture has been lost and a new market has not yet been acquired. For example, planning is underway completely ugly. Often the team does anything – self -expression, high art, but not planned work on the project. The performing qualifications are quite at the level of world standards, but the directors of the tasks are weak ”.
These words are over eight years old, but they are still topical. As an example, domestic developers Miroshnikov cited Hindus: “In which the Hindus are already ahead of us? They have professionals who plan work and coordinate its implementation. It is clear that this leads to an increase in staff two times, but it pays off. There are almost no such specialists in Russia, unfortunately ".
In fact, one of the main problems of the Russian gaming industry is the inability to plan several years in advance, inability to invest. Moreover, today a person who is engaged in a business warehouse is also engaged in the design of the game. And these two things are very difficult to combine.
The improper policy of publishers, the unscrupulousness of the developers and the lack of professional managers led to the fact that the industry was not ready for the new crisis.
Apocalypse and a bright future
The global financial crisis has grown from the mortgage, which has excited the United States since 2007. It happened largely due to the fact that the huge mass of borrowers simply did not pay money on a loan for housing. Some people simply did not have money, while others, remaining on paper, respectable borrowers, turned different cunning schemes that allowed us to get away from payment.
When the number of such “respectable” borrowers reached a critical mass, banks that issued loans to the right and left in the hope of earnings on speculations in a very ugly situation. The fact is that they also had obligations to the creditors. Only their banks could no longer fulfill them, since the money for creditors had to bring borrowers. And that money did not have. As a result, it turned out that the bank was not able to fulfill its obligations, which means it is bankrupt.
Among such banks were the largest, international. As a result, the crisis turned out to be the world, surviving banks stopped lending for a while, everyone dragged on their belts, the demand for goods fell, and the non -competitive companies ordered to live long, because they kept either on loans or on the illegibility of people in a well -fed time.
Most Russian developers were just such non -competitive companies. They produced low -quality products relevant only for the domestic market. But after the crisis, this market was closed to them.
The retail is ceased to be Russian games. Before the crisis, the Russian industry was chasing the quantity, and not for quality, therefore, when there was a crisis and purchasing power decreased, people began to pay not for two, but for one game a month. This one game turned out to be foreign because it was better and better. The second game – Russian – ceased to exist.
“It happened due to the fault of Russian publishers,” Gleb Yalchik is sure. – They followed the economic model, which seemed attractive before the crisis. Before the crisis, the publishers performed the functions of not publishers, but distributors. We buy a western project, sell to the local market; The internal product is made as low as possible budget as possible as soon as possible. As a result, we get a product that is uncompetitive in the Western market and is difficult to competitive in Russian. This is a dead end path, since all over the world the cost of development for all this time has only increased. And the crisis clearly showed that the industry as such is not, because as soon as the earnings of the distribution fell, all the developers were out of work. There were one or two developer who could independently look for money and make a product ".
Malik Khatazhaev, studio president Lesta , sees the problem a little different. In his opinion, "there were no conditions in Russia for creating something new". Sales before the crisis were only due to the "artificial inflating of consumer demand". It created the illusion that the domestic market needed such projects. Together with this illusion (as well as with inflation), development costs grew, and it was unjustified.
In general, on the retail publishers – the main investors of domestic developers – incurred losses: the money poured into the development did not return to them.
Thus, the crisis reduced the possibilities of investing in the development. As a result, Russian publishers closed 80% of their developments, says Malik Khatazhaev, and did not open new. At the same time, Nikolai Baryshnikov is sure that only the startups disappeared from the market: “The names that were by ear did not disappear. Someone was retrained, moved to incidents or online. Say that many have disappeared, you can’t ".
Be that as it may, it is necessary to understand that the crisis has affected different market segments and different companies differently. Consonic products, PC projects, online games-both client and social-these are all fundamentally different types of business, which is clearly visible in the processes that are now taking place on the market.
The jewelry retail is slowly dying, but sales of gift editions are growing. The market of console projects also feels good-its growth is 20-30% per year.
Electronic sales that Western analysts are so fond of scaring so now are growing, according to Nikolai Baryshnikov, “significantly – by tens of percent (because growth is almost from zero). Another thing is that in the domestic market sales in the number are still several percent of retail sales ". In other words, in the next 3-4 years the retail market will not die. Baryshnikov refers to the experience of music companies: “It would seem that everyone has long been buying music via the Internet, but look – music discs are still sold”.
As for the casual games market, he, according to Malik Khatazhaev, is "not flourishing". This is due to the fact that the market is oversaturated. “If earlier any casual project paid off, and any average casual project brought 100-200% of the profit, now it pays for himself at best-although, as a rule, this does not happen. As a result, the quality of projects is growing – developers strive to attract attention to their game. So "in content, the incidents are getting closer to retail projects," Khatazhaev notes.
The most confident in the online multiplayer games market feels. Even during the crisis, he did not stop growth. According to publishers, “the sensational crisis passed by once”: in an interview with DTF portal.ru at the beginning of 2010 Dmitry Devishev from Astrum Nival He noted that in 2009 his company increased the turnover by six times. Mikhail Ulyanov from Gravity CIS He said that in 2009, “We, by monthly income, were a few times ahead of the larger American division of Gravity”. Nikita Skripkin from Nikita Online added that in a crisis year his company has grown more than three times.
There are three reasons for this success: a conventionally paid distribution model, successfully tested in Asian markets, a large number of imported products (publishers do not risk development, they take and localize the most successful Asian projects), as well as a large number of cheap, but extremely profitable browser online online games.
It is bad that, like in retail, there are few large domestic games in online. Eat " Allods online ", In development" The legend of the knight " And Prime World. The projects are very large and serious – players from the CIS are waiting for them no less than Star Wars from BioWare , – But there are only two of them. However, in this segment of the game market there are domestic games of the second echelon that regularly bring income. There is a hope that even though the Russian online has a bright future.
At the same time, one of the employees of the largest Russian online game operator believes that the market of conditionally paying games is “this is a very unhealthy market. It quickly arose (everything that occurs quickly, just as quickly and disappears), is designed for people with very unpretentious tastes and a tendency to freebies. Such markets do not live for a long time, it is like a casino ".
Gleb Yalchik also believes that the chance of the industry is associated with other games – social, where until recently there were only small firms that could disrupt the jackpot on a naked concept. Of course, the situation has changed over the past year. Leaders, large players appeared, the struggle with virality (“friendly spam” began, when the glasses are given for bringing new players), the number of developments grew rapidly. But the threshold of entering social games is still relatively low. It is thanks to this that the market of social games is open, and a team working on a bare enthusiasm can still open on it. A traditional garage scenario is still possible here, which the Russian game industry missed 20 years ago.