The time of cargo cults in game marketing has passed. Interview with Max Donskoy, President of Game Insight

As part of the Mobio Talks show, Mobio founder Alexei Pisarevsky interviewed Max Donskoy, president of Game Insight.

We discussed the development and promotion of games in Russia and abroad, indie developers and their chances of success in modern realities, how game marketing has changed over the past 4 years and much more.



In the gaming industry, Max since 2001. In 2008, he joined IT Territory, with whose team he moved to the Astrum Online Entertainment holding, and later to Mail.Ru Games, where he headed the social games development department. In 2010, Maxim founded the Road 404 studio, which was part of Game Insight. In December 2014, he headed the marketing division of the company, and at the end of 2015, he became President.

Game Insight needs no introduction, tell us a little about yourself: how did you get into the company, and what was your path to president.

I got into game development a long time ago. He started at the company IT-territory, which was engaged in the development of browser games and succeeded in this more than others. You can compare, perhaps, with the “Fight Club”. Then, Astrum Online Entertainment holding was formed on its basis. There I was engaged in a casual direction, and we were one of the first to launch games for social networks in Russia. With many like-minded colleagues, we later ended up at Game Insight.

And then what happened?
Game Insight was formed as a result of combining several studios, one of which I directed. It was called Road 404 and made, for example, City Airport - one of Game Insight's biggest hits.

We set up the work so that everyone could do many different things for the benefit of other studios and Game Insight in general. For example, in addition to managing the studio, I was engaged in publishing, then marketing. Well, in the end, he became president.


Ilya Yeremeyev (creative producer of Game Insight) and Max Donskikh.

How easy were these movements for you? Surely what you are doing today as president is very different from what you did as a marketing director.

Now it seems that everything was logical and easy, although each time it was a leap into the unknown. In fact, there was only one job in all positions - to make the games go out and be successful. I solved this problem from the point of view of both development and marketing. Only the scale and degree of influence on the tasks changed.

You have a lot of experience in game development. What is the gold standard of the development studio: what it should consist of, which departments, which mandatory competencies should be in the team, which cannot be dispensed with.

The gold standard of development has not changed in recent decades. To make a game, you need programmers, game designers, and artists. Well, if there is still a carrier of the idea of ​​the game, which would push it. It is very good if he will be the owner of the studio or at least he will be motivated to death for financial success. Then more likely that the game will work out.

But if we are talking about Free-to-play games that Game Insight deals with, then just making a game is not enough. The most important thing begins after the release - at the operating stage, when the audience arrives. This audience should be entertained with constant updates, new content, features, events. All this should come out with a certain frequency so that the players do not scatter, return.

To build such an architecture, people with special knowledge are needed. Already at the development stage, it is important to work out how the game will develop in the future - both in terms of technology and from the point of view of game design.

In addition, the operation is associated with a huge number of numbers, which was practically not there before in the game industry. This is a constant removal of metrics from the audience: what the user does, how he plays. Accordingly, we need those who collect and process these numbers. It can be game designers, producers, analysts - it doesn’t matter. It is important that they be on the team.

And, of course, nowhere without marketing. Here is the modern gold standard, the team is a decent size.

You said that you need programmers, game designers and artists. Let's say these guys are gathered in such an indie team, as they are called. Do they have a chance of success in modern realities?

Of course, they have a chance. Exactly the same as everyone else - not very large.

You need to immediately determine that indie games, due to the fact that they are made by small teams, most often live by a different business model. Small teams cannot provide a long and systematic development of the Free-to-play product, so they go the other way: make Paid games or free, monetized on advertising. This is a slightly different niche, but yes, there are some chances.

Speaking of indie, I would divide the teams into two categories. There are developers who are burning with the idea, abandoned everything for it, invest their money in its implementation and self-realization. This is respected regardless of the commercial result.

Another category of indies is small teams that, for some reason, get together, but try to make business out of it: they think which game the market will take better, where is a niche to climb through. This is not much different from conventional commercial development, but the scale is smaller.

Of course, there are examples of success, because often indies try new genres, ideas. This is very positive for the market.

That is, there are positive examples from the series “came up with a new genre and went flying”?

There are, but it can rarely be put on stream. It’s good if you managed to make a hit, and then you need it as in a casino - you took the money home. It is very rare to reproduce your success, because each time it is a new experiment, and so that each experiment succeeds - it does not happen. Small teams most often can survive only one failure. A large company is much simpler in this regard: there is a financial cushion and the ability to continue to work even after unsuccessful releases, release new games and grope for new success.

And what, then, should the indie team do if they have done and succeeded in making money? As I understand it, there are two ways: you can wait for the conditional Game Insight to buy you, or you can try to grow a team and develop.

Almost everyone chooses the path to develop, but here it is important to be aware: it is already a commercial enterprise, and it works according to other laws. As a result, to repeat success is obtained really in units.


White Nights Conference, 2015

With indie, everything is clear. Tell me a little about marketing, you did a lot of it. Obviously, today and three years ago, these are completely different things. What has changed in the market?

Three or four years ago, they were engaged in marketing by eye, very roughly assessing the correlation of the efforts made and the resulting result in terms of attitudes and, ultimately, money. There was little transparency, tools, analytics. As a result, certain cargo cults were formed, how to launch or promote games: put them on top at the start, buy some articles, branding on portals. Once it gave a result, once it didn’t. Why? It was not easy to figure out. Moreover, in our case, traffic is the blood of the business, new users are constantly needed. So the farther, the more difficult the tools for attracting them became. It was necessary to understand what was happening, where the user came from, what he was doing inside the game. Analytics pushed on and on, and purchases were optimized for specific purposes, and not just "let's drive the game to the top, we’ll get a bunch of organics, and that’s all, we are in chocolate." This is from a common change.

Obviously, everything has become more expensive. Competition is growing, and everyone understands that without a constant influx of new players, the business does not work. Budgets are increasing collectively throughout the industry, so an individual user becomes more expensive. This leads to the fact that no one is interested in buying just users. Because for this money, which is no longer small compared with what it was 3-4 years ago, everyone wants to get a specific user, with a specific profile, and it’s desirable, that’s direct, very desirable, paying.

Looking at the conditional Machine Zone, it seems that everything is fine with them. They still buy everything. Do they measure everything so well, or is their automation so cool, or is their LTV so high that they can afford it? Or just do not count the money?

And yes, and yes, and yes. And everything is cool, and LTV is high, and they don’t count money. It is difficult for our companies to compare themselves with Machine Zone or Supercell, they play a completely different game. Firstly, in investment, respectively, in a constant increase in turnover. Ultimately, the bet in their game is a certain dominance in the market and in the genre. If you have achieved this, then no matter how much it costs, you already receive benefits from the first place. Many try to live in such a model, but only a few succeed.

Not everyone has enough money?

The stakes are really high and, since so many companies are competing, just a big LTV, money or a good marketing team is no longer enough. There must be one, and the second, and the third and another 10 points on top.


3 main people in Game Insight from left to right: Anatoly Ropotov (CEO), Max Donskikh (President of the company) and Igor Matsanyuk (Chairman of the board of directors)

What the grid or agency, conditional traffic provider should do today, let's call it so that it works with gaming companies? It's no secret that they are the most advanced in the market of mobile application developers. They can do everything, they like to do it themselves, they think well. What should such guys do?

Good question, they asked me many times. I myself asked him to the agencies many times: “Why do you need us?”, And no one could answer me. It's no secret that gaming companies make their own purchases well on their own, this is due primarily to the fact that User Acquisition must be very tightly integrated into the operation. It is necessary to respond very quickly to all changes within the game: promotions, changes in user behavior and so on. It is difficult for an outside agency to get involved in this. In addition, game companies are very sensitive to their data and do not like to share it. And without them, traffic providers cannot be optimized for specific KPIs and the goals that buyers face.

If you still answer the question “How can agencies be useful?”, Then these are most likely some very narrow segments of services that are difficult or expensive to learn by developers and publishers themselves. One example is traffic in Asia, which is very difficult to work with from Europe, and to work with which you need either a presence in the Asian region or local partners.

Tell us more about Asia. China, Korea, Japan - these countries are very interesting for any game developer. What is going on there like success?

With Asia, the situation is this. If you look at the game market as a pie, then the share of Asia in it is constantly increasing. Japan and Korea are the most profitable regions in mobile games. China is also growing rapidly, although until recently it was believed that no one was paying there. At the same time, it is not easy to work with them, because the audience is very specific both from the point of view of its closeness, as a market, and from the point of view of players' preferences.

Mobile games earned $ 40.6 billion in 2016. Asia earned more than half that amount, $ 24.9 billion, SuperData's Market Brief - Year in Review 2016 report.

Developers from Europe and the USA, like Game Insight, still dominate the American and European markets in revenues. Only a few manage to make their way to Asia so that this is a significant part of the income. Everyone wants to go there, but there are a lot of obstacles. In the meantime, it is much more noticeable that Asians enter the European and American markets.

But they are also hard.

If we are talking, for example, about Chinese games, then they can afford to have a thousand people in development and do everything that is possible inside this game by features and amount of content. This leads to the fact that their local players expect the same from all games. The same applies to other Asian markets. If we are talking about Japan and Korea, then there in the game events should be included several times a day. In Europe or the United States a much more measured rhythm. Therefore, when a European or American game reaches an Asian audience, some Japanese or Korean is 10 times faster than the developers expected, goes through it and swallows all the content, and then sits down and waits. He will not wait long, and then go back to his some Puzzle & Dragons.

What about other markets? As far as I know, you recently had experience in Turkey, you actively promoted the games. Why Turkey

We chose Turkey for the softlatch of our shooter Guns of Boom for several reasons. Firstly, they play shooters there, and secondly, the game was launched on Android, and there is a large share of Android. Thirdly, attracting an audience is quite inexpensive there.


Guns of Boom - a new shooter from Game Insight, almost 2 million downloads on Google Play

Still softlunch. You didn’t plan to earn especially there?

We plan to earn and earn there, but, roughly speaking, after the world release, in any case, the situation will change, and the main markets will still be America and Europe.

Is everything really bad with Russia? No chance to make money here? Does it make sense only for Russia to release games?

I don’t see the point. Game Insight does not do this for a long time. This can be justified only by some unknown reasons, for example, if you are building a farm since then, “Prostokvashino”. But, other things being equal, why limit yourself to an audience with Russia? Yes, it’s easier to work with it and in general you can start with it, but why rely and build a business on a Russian audience for a gaming company? Mobile stores, compared to the previous gaming era, have opened up a global market for developers. That is, you made a game, uploaded it to the gate, checked off where you want to open it, and here are all your players - America, Europe, Asia, whatever, and Russia as well. And this is a global change in the game market, because before you developed some kind of game for 1C money, and then you had to launch it in each region separately, it was very expensive and difficult.

What do you think about prospects on any separate platforms? iOS and Android are understandable. On Desktop, have you tried yet to make social programs, is any Steam growing yet?

Everywhere is good. We have tried a lot of things for ourselves, now the focus of Game Insight is games for mobile platforms. Before that, we focused very closely on games for social networks. Choosing a platform, you need, firstly, to assess whether it is suitable for your game. It is foolish to ignore new platforms if they are suitable for technology and for the audience that can be found there. Therefore, if it turns out, you need to try everything, there are prospects everywhere.


Max Donskikh and Anatoly Ropotov (CEO Game Insight)

What is missing from the game development market? What are you waiting for in a few years? What will appear?

I am waiting for new ways to distribute games, new channels. Because all platforms and channels pass, albeit at different times, approximately the same path. A new platform or channel appears, and the first who get there break the bank. Then there is growth, with the growth of the market competition increases, and over time it becomes more difficult to find your user. Game Insight has already managed to be on this wave twice. At first it was social networks, a completely new area. Then we were one of the first to switch to mobile platforms. And I would say that I am waiting for such a new leap, where again we can rebuild and bring new games to new users. Maybe it will be VR, maybe games for instant messengers - we'll see. In any case, it will be interesting.

Excellent. Then on this good note and finish. Thank you so much for coming.

It was a Mobio Talks show, subscribe to our youtube channel so you don't miss new releases. If you have any questions for Max, ask in the comments.