Tanja Evdokimendo Nika Entertainment COO spoke at the Casual Connect Europe 2015 conference. In her lecture, she delved into the Indie perspective. In explaining how to get into various markets, she said, “It is impossible to enjoy success in the Japanese market without very deep culturalization. What we are used to is just localization. We translate the words and so on and so forth … but in Japan, it is absolutely different. You need to add emotions and you need to change the type of art and emotion”. In her experience, the benefit outweighs the cost. To this, she says, “Yes, it takes time. It takes money. However, the deeper you culturalize your game for the Japanese market, the more profit you get”. A new approach to the team formation helped Nika Entertainment work effectively on projects and successfully promote games for different platforms. “We’ve created the Core Team that develops the model system for the whole heap of new products. It helps the Multiple Platform Team to cope with all the tasks on porting to different platforms and successfully fill the roadmap of the project. It teaches how to do it fast and in a proper way. As a result, we have a scalable business now. It works!”, Tanja stresses.
Interview with Tanja Evdokimenko, COO of Nika Entertainment
Tanja is Chief Operating Officer of a company that grew from 30 to more than 170 skilled enthusiasts and fans of games just in a little more than a year. She loves gamedev people and is a puzzle addict.
Gamesauce: Tell us about the work you do at your company. How did you come to work at your current company?
Evdokimenko: Nika Entertainment owes many of its results to the top executives team. We aim at hiring and promoting the most talented and ambitious specialists. The team itself is what drives the company forward and helps it to become a leader. Our experts further develop their professional skills all the time and aim at success together. My role at Nika Entertainment is COO. This means that I am responsible for the realization of the company’s vision of itself as a leader as soon as possible. To achieve that, I get things done, organize the administrative procedures, and provide for the operational work in our company. According to our hierarchy, I am in charge of every other head or director and try to make sure that everything is done correctly, in time and the way it should be done. Previously, I had some experience in management, but right before coming to Nika Entertainment it was a public relations job. Beside that, I used to be the head of the Kharkiv office of an outsourcing company. My most favorite thing about my job is that I can feel responsible for every success we have. It means that if there is even a little contribution, even if it is tiny, I really know that I had my hand in it. At the same time, there is a great problem in that every failure, every unsuccessful attempt, and every drawback of the project and of the team also concern me. To build a business that overcomes any obstacles and is able to shape a new game industry reality - that is a source of huge inspiration and also a challenge for me at the same time.
Gamesauce: How have your past experiences been helpful to you in your current position?
Evdokimenko: It is interesting to know that my first job was teaching children and sometimes we joke that management in game development is very much like teaching children or even more like working in kindergarten, and so the experience of praising and arguing at the correct time and at the correct place, all those psychological approaches - they are really very helpful. Besides that, I’ve obtained a law education, which was my second education; it greatly helps me to understand and manage our organizational structure, to go into all the processes and so on.
Gamesauce: What inspired you to pursue this career?
Evdokimenko: I must say that climbing the career ladder is not new to me because no matter where I was working I had promotion offers and proposals of professional and career growth. That is why it may be just destined for me to be a manager. However, if I am to speak about what inspired me to pursue this career, it was the desire to make games and to become a part of this process, to be like a parent to your own child. And if to speak about who inspired me to pursue this career, it was the founder and the CEO of Nika Entertainment and my mentor Maxim Slobodyanyuk.
Gamesauce: How did you become involved in the game industry? How did you make your start? What do you find to be the most fun part?
Evdokimenko: I remember quite clearly the very day when my career in game development started. It was several years ago when our founder, Maxim Slobodyanyuk, at that time head of iLogos, a game development outsourcing company, called me in the morning. He asked whether I knew someone who was well aware of politics and could become an expert in the new game called “Deputy” in order to explain all the currents and all the hidden processes that happen there. My answer was “yes” because I was an expert in politics and suggested that it would be great for me to try out making such a game. As I was involved in public relations and marketing, it was also interesting to me what would happen to the game next and, after numerous questions on my part, Maxim invited me to take the position of public relations manager in iLogos. As soon as I got into the game industry it was love at first sight. I really like my job and think that making games is quite difficult but it is also a lot of fun. And the most fun part is the communication with all those brilliant people who really love and adore games. Even the way we solve problems may be fun; this is a great opportunity to know them all.
Gamesauce: So what are some of the challenges you have faced in your current position? How have you overcome these challenges?
Evdokimenko: To my mind, challenges and management cannot be separated one from the other, as management as a whole presupposes trying to cope with changes, and challenge is the news about a new change. That is why I face challenges every day of my work and even on weekends. Besides, our company is just a year and a couple of months old which means that the fire brigade is called quite often. Again, this job and this industry are something that makes you creative and innovative, so to overcome the challenges you need to be ready to have them all the time and use your imagination in order to solve them in a proper way.
Gamesauce: What do you do in your free time? What are your hobbies?
Evdokimenko: I don’t know if it’s going to be a surprise, but I like playing mobile and social games in the majority of my free time, even when I have a family dinner or when I go out or when I am at my summer house - I always find some time to have several rounds of casual games including those of Nika Entertainment. However, there are other things that make me happy: spending time with my family and my friends, reading books, taking care of the garden I have now, though sometimes I doubt whether weeds will defeat me or I will defeat them.
Gamesauce: If you were not in this industry, what would you be doing?
Evdokimenko: If I were not in this industry, I would be involved in some digital business anyway, probably connected with advertising or social media. These are the things I’m passionate about - creating something new for very different people. However, very often, when I get a little bit tired I think that on my retirement I could have a kindergarten where I would teach Ukrainian children the English language.
Gamesauce: What was your dream job as a child?
Evdokimenko: Sometimes I think that I have always dreamed about the job I have now because when a 5 year-old I came to my mom with a heap of questions. The main one was - how I would be able to have time for all the jobs that I was going to have. I was planning to become a teacher, a civil servant, a singer, a ballet dancer, a circus woman. But my most cherished dream was to become Alla Pugacheva, a famous Russian singer. Being a COO combines it all and even more!
Gamesauce: What has been your proudest moment during your career so far? What led to this moment happening?
Evdokimenko: Game Development lets you feel the proudest moments quite often and regularly, because whenever your new game succeeds, it feels like the first time. That is why the proudest moments are connected with a favorable outcome of the games and I’m always waiting for such a great feeling every time a new game is launched. I’ve experienced it recently when we released our new hit Fairy Mix at the beginning of March.
Gamesauce: What inspired you to start your project?
Evdokimenko: The founder of Nika Entertainment Maxim Slobodyanuk has established a quite successful outsourcing company iLogos, and he took part in over 300 projects for different countries. But his dream, which he managed to share with several dozen game development enthusiasts, was to create his own products here in Ukraine, and go international while being based in the country which is overcoming a very complicated period now.
Gamesauce: Does your company make free-to-play or premium games and why?
Evdokimenko: We make casual games, that is why the best model for us is free-to play, and for the next 2 years we do not plan to make premium ones, but we are open to experiments.
Gamesauce: What do you think your staff most commonly says about you? What do your employees think of you?
Evdokimenko: I try not to think literally about those things. Because when you are a manager you do not really want to know what other people say about you. It is true that you really don’t want to know. However, there are times when you find out what they really say. I am not disappointed and am very grateful to my boss who taught me that the main principle of management is fairness. When you really deeply think that every deed of yours is fair, you should not be afraid of finding out what your staff thinks. It just means that you act like an adult. So, what I know about my employees is that they think that I solve problems, smile all the time, have no worries, that I am always in a good mood, and that I teach them to do the same.
Gamesauce: What attributes do you look for in a member of your team?
Evdokimenko: It is very easy to answer what I am not looking for in a member of our team. It’s arrogance, being “a star” and one’s disbelief in what we do. This is because I think that enthusiasm and real devotedness are the best character features of every person in every sphere.
Gamesauce: What kind of talent do you find the hardest to find?
Evdokimenko: I would say that being situated in Ukraine and Russia is a great problem for us when speaking about finding talents not connected to development, art and quality assurance. This means that it is quite challenging to find marketing managers, traffic managers, game designers and especially level designers experienced in casual and match-3 games. Everyone understands that Ukraine and Russia lack such specialists. There are digital chief marketing officers and so on, but there are so few game development marketing specialists, especially with international and cross-platform experience. But we found a way out. Now we have a reliable partner - Leadgames, which handles all the marketing activities for our new games. Moreover, we actively hire mentors from the US, Europe, and Asia who help the company to raise our standards to the level of the industry leaders and aim at advancing them.
Gamesauce: How do you handle complications within the team?
Evdokimenko: The best way to handle complications and to resolve conflicts is to talk about the problem clearly, finding out all the pros and cons, listening to all the sides, to all the representatives of this or that situation, be fair and ask people to be fair.
Gamesauce: At what point in game development do you test? How has that been effective for you in the past?
Evdokimenko: We start testing when we have an alpha -version, then it is a non-stop process throughout the whole project life cycle. However, to develop games successfully one should have a deep understanding of their audience. This is why the feedback from the users is the core value. I draw special inspiration from communicating with our fans when I happen to meet them playing our games - in a restaurant, plane, or subway. They give me the possibility to consider the game from a different perspective, to understand how to make it even better. The whole set of Nika Entertainment’s top-management follows the games’ communities and monitors the requests that the users send to the support. This helps us to keep abreast of all events. Moreover, this prevents us from resting on our laurels, allows us to be quick with our decisions, satisfy the players’ needs, and improve the games making them so exciting that the players want to get back to them again and again.
Gamesauce: What was the most interesting reaction to your game? What was the game?
Evdokimenko: Play testing is a part of our daily routine. We tried different approaches, we tried outsourcing services, and we also tried an in-house approach. I cannot remember anything extra interesting, but the play testers’ conclusions and my impressions after reading the reports is that everyone dreams of becoming a game designer and there is nothing you can do about it.
Gamesauce: What do you think will be the next big trend for the next 3-5 years? How are you incorporating this trend into your future plans?
Evdokimenko: All our thoughts are connected to casual and mid-core games. That is why we think that these genres will prevail in our plans. As for the global trend, it is going to be cross-platform, or as we call it, multiple platforms. We are going to make our games available on each platform for our players, wherever we may find them. Offering some mixture of genres, gameplays and approaches is the trend that we are also going to incorporate in our future plans. We also follow the key trends of the whole GamDev market - the mobile one. This is the most rapidly growing segment. And despite the fact that we are currently strong in social games in particular, we are willing to reinforce our position in developing and promoting mobile games in the short term.
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