For those not in the know, it may seem curious that Casual Connect is hosting a conference in Israel (19-21 October, Tel Aviv). However, famously nicknamed ‘The Startup Nation’, Israel has long been known as a great supporter of startups and new businesses - and the gaming field is no exception. Eti Nachum, CEO of BlogsRelease, tells more.
Launched recently sandwiched in dire competition between Marvel’s Avengers Initiative and famed indie developer Terry Cavanaugh’s Super Hexagon, Yellow Monkey Studios’ Huebrix has been fighting for the attention its developers believe the game truly deserves. We sat down with Yellow Monkey Studios’ founder and game designer Shailesh Prabhu to talk about the recent launch of their game, the struggle to break out of India to reach a global market and putting Indian indie game developers on the global map.
Huebrix’s success might also have a larger, unnoticed impact that many outside of India might be missing. It is giving many developers in India the hope they’ve always wanted: that it’s possible to reach a global audience outside of their own non-existing games market. ”We have now seen that if you get the game out there in front of people and they see a good solid game, they will take notice of you,” he argues. The game is being lauded by the local Indian game press as one of the few Indian games that reached out beyond its borders that the Indian game development community could be proud of. “The Indie Development scene in India is pretty nascent,” Prabhu says. “There are quite a few people who are interested and intrigued by the scene but not enough people actually doing proper work. We run a small Indie Game Development Facebook group here called LIGD; we have about 300 odd members, but maybe only 30 are active. Also, since the local market is virtually non-existent, most of the developers face the issue of actually reaching out and making their presence felt at the global level.”
Yellow Monkey Studios has been around for over five years. During this time, four members of its team managed to work on three games and release them. In 2007, the studio started off designing and pitching a Nintendo DS based point-and-click adventure called Mortley - A Stitch in Time to many publishers. Regardless of the good response, many seemed to be quite skeptical that an Indian indie studio could complete and polish a game for the DS. “Most publishers ended up telling us to complete the game and then they would see, but that meant a $100.000 US dollars risk for us, and we didn’t have that money,” he says. The launch of the Apple App Store around that time meant a new opportunity for the team and they quickly decided to move to developing games for iOS. The first project to come out of that endeavor was Finger Footie, a top view flick-based Soccer game. Like many other game developers, the team had to struggle to get the game some visibility. So for their second game, Shailesh and his team decided to do something that would definitely catch people’s attention.
The resulting game was It’s Just a Thought, which won them the “Best Original Idea” at the HoPlay 2011 video games festival in Bilbao, Spain. Yellow Monkey studios has been financed in the only possible way most aspiring game studios in Asia are able to: work for hire jobs. “We’ve had to go back to work for hire in between projects or sometimes even during them to pay the bills,” says Prabhu. “The award at HoPlay 2011 with It’s Just a Thought had a cash component to that which, along with the work-for-hire project we did, helped us stay afloat during the production of Huebrix.” Though sales for Huebrix are still growing, the game enjoyed a steady climb up both the iOS and Android charts and has pretty much covered its development costs. Shailesh and his team were recently able to attend their first ever game conference back in May this year, volunteering at the inaugural edition of Casual Connect Asia in Singapore. The event gave them their very first chance to show Huebrixto publishers and meet other international game developers. But after disappointing leads, they decided to release the game themselves after all.
“We don’t have any publishers who take games developed here to the global market and we don’t have any internationally-acclaimed game development awards or more than one conference here,” Prabhu tells. “Even in the age of the internet, I think people really do value you more if they know you and can put a face to an email ID. It’s financially not possible for us at this point to travel to all these conferences to be seen, but we are trying to do whatever we can.” And until now, that effort to establish direct and strong relationships with the international press has not been in vain.
Regardless of all trials and tribulations, Huebrix has become an important milestone for the Indian indie game development scene for reaching the global mobile market, setting higher standards for a game’s level of polish and achieve outstanding recognition by game media from all over the world. They also recently spoke about their journey developing and promoting Huebrixat India’s prime game conference, the Nasscom Game Developers Conference in Pune, India.
Prabhu and his team simply did what any indie developer would, and should do. They involved a blogger in game development, and he made their work noticeable by actively posting about their development process. “I think staying active on these channels helped us get noticed by the right people at Apple and we have been able to get on the New and Noteworthy sections on launch day, and even get some promotional banners in some places,” Prabhu agrees. “That helped greatly with downloads. Besides that, we did press releases and had a proper media kit and promo codes ready for anyone who wanted to write a review. We sent those things out in advance specifying the release date and such. We didn’t really have any budgets for promotion.” But that didn’t stop them from being smart about PR & marketing. They were able to involve the well known and beloved indie-friendly PR expert Joseph Lieberman from VGSsmart glory, who assisted Yellow Monkey Studios in writing and spreading their press releases to the right media outlets. “He really loved the game and wanted to help us.” So far Yellow Monkey Studios’ efforts bore all the fruit they’ve hoped for. “We have risen to Rank 73 in iPhone games and Rank 28 in iPad Games on the iOS App Store, and we hope Huebrix will rise even more,” Shailesh says. “It is actually tough to launch on the same day as Avengers and Terry Cavanagh’s game Super Hexagon, but I hope we will still be seen by enough people.” Prabhu and his team also spread the word of the iOS and Android versions by getting a Flash version of Huebrix published on as many flash game portals as possible. Huebrix has been submitted to IGF China and the international IGF as well, and the game also became a finalist in the ‘Best International Game’ category for the Freeplay Awards 2012 held in Melbourne, Australia.
Huebrix’s statistics till this week have been around the following numbers Prabhu and his team were gracious enough to share with us:
iOS: 22k+ sales
iOS ratings: average of 4 out of 5 Stars
Android: over 600k Downloads confirmed by their Android-focused publisher.
Google Play ratings: 4.4 out of 5 Stars
Huebrix’s Flash version:
• 187k+ plays on Kongregate • 207k+ plays on Armor Games
• 38k+ plays on Newgrounds
Flash version ratings
• 3.7/5 (Kongregate) (9100 ratings)
• 4/5 (Newgrounds) (1500 ratings)
• 7.6/10 (Armor Games)
Following features on many popular mobile game websites such as PocketGamer.co.uk and being mentioned on TheGuardian.co.uk, reviews are also appearing on Appspy.com and TouchArcade.com. Huebrix even received a review on EDGE Magazine’s website (a 7/10), marking another giant step for the little Indian indie game studio. Though Huebrix’s Metacritic just went up to 76/100 (it was 74/100 a few weeks before), the young developers at Yellow Monkey are obviously overjoyed by the attention their game has been receiving.
Yellow Monkey Studios is currently planning their next title and have launched a major update for Huebrix today. They’re also adding a cool new update to Huebrix today that enables ‘Zen Mode’, a special mode for Color Blind people and the much delayed iPhone 5 graphics. Check out Huebrix for yourself here for iOS and here on Google Play.
It’s not easy to be the most popular developer in Ukraine. GSC Game World not only attained international recognition through their Cossacks and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchises, but the studio also quickly became notorious for having educated many young Ukranian game developers. GSC’s former employees can be found in many game companies across and outside the Ukraine. We sat down with GSC Game World’s PR director Oleg Yavorsky to talk about GSC’s past, present and future.
Walking through the main hallway of GSC Game World’s offices outside the city center of Kyiv, it was hard to ignore the sewing workshop where two ladies were vigorously working on some type of clothing. “That’s our new line of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. clothes,” Yavorsky tells me. A few minutes later, he’s trying on some of the ‘prototypes’ to show off GSC’s new line of fashion for fans and community of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. CEO Sergiy Grygorovych went beyond the call of duty to show off the early clothing prototypes to the community, doing a damn fine job at it if you ask us!
Grygorovych started the company at the young age of 16 in 1997, with a small team of friends that were around the same age. Struggling with slow computers and little access to games, the team tried to find whatever they could get their hands on. “Back then, there was a big desire and ambition to create our own games,” Yavorsky says. “That was the ultimate goal.” Young Grygorovych and his team got their first jobs building multimedia encyclopedias, translating other games and making edutainment titles to create their first capital.
“Our boss is a big fan of strategy games so that was our first big desire,” Yavorsky says. Following the releases of games such as Warcraft 1 & 2 and Age of Empires, Grygorovych’s ambition was to create a new kind of game engine that would become the equivalent of Warcraft 3. “We actually took the graphics from Warcraft 2 and put it into our own technology, which allowed us to have 8000 humans and orcs on the screen at the same time,” Yavorsky says. “In the first Age of Empires, you could have 50 units on a screen and the second allowed around 200, but our engine allowed 8000 units on the screen at the same time. We tried to approach Blizzard with this idea and offer them our service, but they didn’t treat us seriously and even got offended.”
The idea of creating the next Warcraft was pushed aside. “We had an idea of creating a historical real-time strategy game based on that engine,” Yavorsky says. “We wanted to be proud of our country and it seemed a good opportunity to showcase the country internationally, because not many people knew what Ukraine was.” GSC Game World would go on to involve their national pride and Ukrainian heritage into what would later become Cossacks. In 1998, Sergiy Grygorovych rented a small booth at the Milia multimedia and game show in Cannes. Joined by well known Ukranian new media and game journalist Alex Ptitsa, Grygorovych showed the Cossacks demo on one small computer. The small demo only featured the three nations of Russia, Ukraine and Europe (as one nation). The technology was so good, that it attracted a lot of attention from publishers. “For Sergiy, as he recollects now, that was the best show,” Yavorsky admits. “He was only 16 years old and around him were all the big companies like Blizzard, Activision, Electronic Arts, Atari and so on. He was overwhelmed and impressed.”
However, nobody would make an offer to Grygorovych because his company was a start-up. “Many companies were kind of reluctant to make a serious deal,” Yavorsky recalls. “Ultimately, we ended up signing with a start-up publisher from Germany called CDV. We were about 25-30 people, and they were about the same size.” CDV would go on and suggest multiple improvements to Cossacks, including growing the number of nations to 16.
“Cossacks was just on time and the right thing to offer to the market.” Yavorsky adds. The game would result in both CDV and GSC Game World becoming known around the world. The game was originally built by just 12 people at GSC headquarters. As a start-up, the company was also working on two other projects, a racing game called Hover Ace and a first person shooter named Venom: Codename: Outbreak. “We didn’t know which game would be our best hit,” Yavorsky admits. “At that time, we though it would be Hover Race, but Cossacks would eventually become number one.”
After Cossacks, GSC continued to work on the other two. After that, the company decided to stick with working on strategy games and first person shooters.
“We were lucky to have every second title we released be successful for us,” Yavorsky says. GSC would eventually end up only specializing in developing real-time strategy and first person shooters, resulting in sequels to Cossacks and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise.
The international and national recognition GSC has received in the years since Cossacks was released did not only bring in a lot of money, but also new people. As the Netherlands once had their Guerrilla studios, Germany had Crytek and the Ukraine had GSC Game World. Once the word was out that GSC had plans to grow, young Ukranian game makers flocked to the company trying to get a job working on the Cossacks of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise.
“By now, if you take basically any game development studio here in Kyiv they will have some of the people that at some point used to work for us,” Yavorsky argues. Throughout the 7-year development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, over 100 people were involved in the production of the game. “Very few people ended up staying throughout those years of trial and error.”
The development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was plagued by hardships, delays and other struggles. “The last couple of years were very hard,” Yavorsky admits. “People were obviously tired of the very long work on the same project.”
When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was first announced, the game instantly received a lot of attention by the international game press. “We became instantly famous, expected and awaited because it was revolutionary in many respects,” Yavorsky recounts. “Internally, it was prestigious to work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. We had two big teams at that time, one strategy team and one action team that worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. I think, internally, the strategy team was a little bit envious of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. team, because they were working on such a top level project.”
According to Yavorsky the sense of prestige also had its downturns. The heightened ambition and the desire to put everything in one game resulted in the game becoming bloated. “Because of our lack of experience to release such a big project, a lot of errors and mistakes were made,” Yavorsky admits. By the fifth year of development, after postponing the title several times, Yavorsky’s job as PR director wasn’t getting any easier. The community who once supported and loved GSC Game World, started to turn against the company. “We saw them already hating us, for not releasing the game for so many years and constantly promising to release it,” Yavorsky says. ”There was a lot of pressure both internally, from the outside and the publisher who wanted to get the game out. At some point, we were even on the verge of breakdown and closing the project. It was kind of a miracle to have the forces left internally to finish the game completely and get it out.
The delay caused GSC to perform some serious cuts to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In the last year of its development, THQ sent a producer to help. “His basic role was to get the project finished,” Yavorsky says. The possibility to drive vehicles, certain monsters and even entire levels were consequently cut from the game, only to later be uncovered inside the game’s code by fanatic modders. “We eventually managed to release a unique atmosphere which still made S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stand out from other games,” Yavorksy adds. With such a hardship behind them, the core team that remained continued onward to create the latest two S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. “With the later S.T.A.L.K.E.R. releases it was a lot easier for us because the team was already well prepared for such a game,” Yavorsky says. “They knew it well and the engine was stable, which made us much stronger.”
As with many other game studios in the Ukraine, GSC had the daunting task during S.T.A.L.K.E.R. of educating their own developers. “We don’t have any universities that teach you game design,” Yavorsky says.”The industry here is at least 10 years younger than other parts of the world. Ultimately, we had to learn by ourselves. Our personal approach is something that we developed through our own designs and experiments.”
Both the Cossacks and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchises show off GSC’s focus on their own home turf and heritage. According to Yavorsky, it was always obvious to base the themes of their games on their own culture and country. “We grew up here, we know how things work here and we know what the world looks like here,” Yavorsky argues. “We don’t know much about LA or London or other parts of the world.”
The dark and gloomy style of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took many people by surprise and sparked a lot of curiosity. GSC took a lot of effort in the game to offer people a look at the areas surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, reconstructing some of the areas into the smallest detail.
Though the palet and art style sparked interest for some games and definitely set them apart from their Western counterparts, it wasn’t always so well received. GSC was contracted by Ubisoft to work on a tie-in game for the Alexander movie starring Colin Farrell, but Ubisoft wasn’t satisfied with GSC’s choice of palet. “Ubisoft believed the picture on screen looked very gray and gloomy, which is, by the way, a very common tendency for local games,” Yavorsky says. “They look very dark. It’s probably some kind of national thing, how our artists see color. Maybe because our lives used to be so gray and gloomy we like darker kinds of things. So Ubisoft had to bring in their own artist who used to correct the gamma on screen and make the picture look nicer and brighter, more appealing to Western players.”
Catering so much to their own country and Eastern Europe, GSC has also had its share of problems because of piracy. The company’s games are released much earlier in Eastern Europe than in the West for that specific reason. “We actually get all our pirated games from the west,” Yavorsky says. “Because they get delivered to the western stores by the publishers like two weeks earlier to end up on the shelves at retail stores.” The early availability of games at retail causes the game to be cracked before it would even be released in the west. “Then by the time it’s released in the west, we would already have it here on the market sold, pirated and translated into Russian,” he adds.
When receiving western publishers at their offices, Yavorksy and his team would regularly make fun of them with their own titles. “We would be presenting their pirated games and very often they would be holding a game that isn’t out on their own market yet and our players can already buy and play.”
The earlier release of GSC’s games in Eastern Europe also only features the Russian language, limiting any use of the game for any westerners that would consider downloading the game. Catering to a very fanatic community of Stalker fans called ‘Ya Stalker’, (http://yastalker.com/home.php) Yavorsky also noticed a growing amount of support from the local fans. “We saw a lot of people on forums blaming other people for not buying a legal copy to support the local developer,” he says. “There was some kind of local pride.”
Fighting piracy is never an easy thing in the Ukraine, but even GSC has been directly involved in the crackdown of pirates. “Sometimes we succeed, actually doing some successful raids with police to seize a batch of pirated discs,” Yavorsky says. “For the police to do that, they need a lawsuit case. They need the right-holder to actually claim his rights were being violated. So we need to be involved directly to get this help.”
The bigger problem GSC and other developers are facing is that people frequently can not distinguish the legal copy from the elaborately designed illegal one. Sometimes copies are even completely mimicked up to the exact cardboard box casing, validation stickers, booklets and extra’s. “The local pirate industry has been very mature, it’s not a problem for them,” Yavorksy argues. “They will just fake it being a licensed copy.” As a result, players have repeatedly contacted GSC with complaints about the lack of a legitimate key in their game to access the online capabilities, only to be pointed to the illegal nature of their copy.
Even for GSC, the need to put their own country and fellow game developers on the global map has become very important. As one of the bigger studios in the Ukraine that grew out of an ambition and desire to learn, new talent is constantly needed to fill the ranks.
“You have to train a new person to fit in the team, to get to know the technology, understand the engine, work with our own technology, instruments and tools,” Yavorsky says. “And you have to find people willing to learn and master it. So of course we have to sometimes baby-sit our new personnel, but that’s the way it happens.” Even today, many new game studios are still founded by people leaving bigger companies like GSC to find their own fortune and fame. It’s the circle of life for game developers in many Eastern European countries that lack the necessary government support and education. “We want the Ukraine to become a center for the production of games, special effects for the movie industry needs,” Yavorsky says. ”Because the talent is definitely here and we have the experience.”
In the meanwhile, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise is now reaching a peak of attention around the world. GSC Game World is making good use of it by promoting S.T.A.L.K.E.R. novels, a TV series pilot and even a clothing line. With a brand new engine specially intended for their S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 project currently in development, some developers at GSC are also looking forward to new ideas and projects to challenge themselves creatively once more, including Yavorsky himself. “I personally don’t want GSC being associated only with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., because we have so many other ideas and projects and titles,” Yavorsky argues. “Personally, I’d love to see Cossacks back in development.”
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is currently in development by GSC Game World and has been scheduled for release in 2012.
“I never imagined that I would work at an IT company,” Nevosoft’s PR manager Julia Lebedeva admits. Before joining Nevosoft and making her first plunge into the games biz, Lebedeva was a radio talkshow host at the Europe Pulse radio station in Tomsk, Siberia. “But now I’m here, I feel like it was my fate. I loved radio, for sure, but games are another field of entertainment. Like with listening to radio, people who play our games feel better, feel happier.” We sat down with the lively miss Lebedeva to talk about her creative PR work, reviewing games and making games for women.
When Lebedeva joined Russian casual game developer Nevosoft as a public relations manager, she was fresh out of her job at the radio station and looking for a new challenge.
”I didn’t have much experience in this sphere, but they hired me because they wanted a creative person,” she recalls. ”A person with ideas. That’s the great thing about Nevosoft. I have experience in another entertainment sphere and my job let me bring ideas from another angle, a completely new perspective than what they were used to.”
Catering to a very broad demographic due to Nevosoft’s casual titles, Lebedeva made sure she took every opportunity to come up new ideas that appealed to the developer’s loyal customers.
“The greatest thing about working at Nevosoft is that the guys, the bosses, the directors, they are really open to all ideas,” Lebedeva admits. Most recently, Lebedeva started making reviews of the games that are launched on Nevosoft’s own game portal, partially returning to the ambience of her old radio studio. “It was just an idea, I offered to do it and they said, ‘Ok, do it’. It has been pretty successful.” Lebedeva’s reviews not only turned her into a popular figure within Nevosoft.ru’s own community of approximately 600,000 Russian speaking registered users, but has rewarded her with hundreds of comments about her work by the community and thousands of views on her reviews on YouTube.
Aside from purchasing professional gear and building a small studio in the Nevosoft office, Lebedeva takes her reviewing work very seriously. The reviews consist of a weekly top three of the four games Nevosoft releases each week, which she plays extensively to write up the biggest pros and cons of each project. “I try to show it from different angles,” she says. “People appreciate this honesty.”
The Nevosoft.ru website Lebedeva publishes her reviews on has turned into a full-fledged social network of players in the past couple of years. ”They write really great reviews of games,” she adds. Her reviews have proven to not only maintain that level of engagement, but spark a lot more in the process when Lebedeva sometimes quotes users on their reviews. “They’re happy that they are appreciated, valued and it even makes them want to write better and better,” she admits. Users can blog, play and do other activities that other users can give points for, resulting in a constructive community that Lebedeva has to deal with. “I think it’s important that they have this opportunity to give each other plusses or minuses on their activities.”
Like any creative person, Lebedeva is not a fan of routine work. Talking to press and writing press releases are an acceptable part of the job, but hasn’t stopped her from looking for something that makes her proud of her work. Since her first game review video in June, the effort required to make her reviews hasn’t lost it’s flair. According to Lebedeva, one of the reasons it hasn’t become boring is the positive responses she’s received from the Nevosoft.ru community, closely reminding her of her own days at the radio station. The number of comments Lebedeva receives on her reviews and the Nevosoft development blog are easily comparable to any popular international game website. “I’m trying to make people know us and love us,” she admits.
Most PR people would be surprised by the directions Lebedeva has taken in her job as a PR manager. But after seeing the results of her work, the success of her engaging and personal approach to PR is undeniable. “There’s always something new,” Lebedeva argues. But that’s not all. Lebedeva combines her PR work with being the partner relations manager at Nevosoft. “I’m looking for non-Russian developers who want to explore the Russian speaking market,” she says.
Her work with foreign developers doesn’t stop there, since Lebedeva also does the localization for projects that need to be translated into Russian. Her love for languages and a job as a translator during her last year of college took care of that for her. “Some people just translate the words, but the context is the most important thing,” argues Lebedeva. “To localize a game, you have to play it and like it. For me, it’ a matter of honor. Russian users really hate badly translated games.” Because of the expense of professionally localizing voice-over tracks for casual games, Lebedeva is currently also considering taking on this task. “I have my own microphone, I can do it,” she says. “It wouldn’t be for the money, I just like it.” Lebedeva can’t be happier about her job, which she feels was made for her.
When Lebedeva sat down to talk with us about her work at Nevosoft, she had just given a talk at Casual Connect Kyiv appropriately titled ‘What Martians Don’t Know? Mistakes Made by Alien Invaders.’ Her talk was the result of asking herself who actually made the games she was reviewing for the Nevosoft community. As an experiment, Lebedeva counted the game credits from 50 games. She found that 95% of the developers working on the casual games for the Nevosoft.ru portal are male, while more than 83% of Nevosoft.ru’s users are female.
Based on John Grey’s famous book, Lebedeva concluded that she was dealing with developers that truly came from Mars, while all the players come from Venus. So she asked herself “How do you guys, who do not understand our logic, thoughts and needs, make games for us to enjoy?” With a strong sense that this has lead to mistakes in some games, Lebedeva decided to prove her thesis by interviewing a large group of female Nevosoft.ru community members. “I took a camera and went to the streets to interview girls,” she recounts. “Then I invited some users from our portal to our offices.” She ended up spending three full weeks conducting interviews and making videos at the office, teaching herself how to operate a camera and edit videos.
Lebedeva presented her findings during her Casual Connect Kyiv presentation a couple of weeks ago. Most of the games directed at girls that Lebedeva looked at ended up being largely based on female stereotypes and had some design mistakes. In real life blonde girls turned out not to love pink, male characters could look more cute and hidden object games could use objects which are more familiar to women instead of wrenches or other power tools. Lebedeva also stole the show at Casual Connect when she turned the tables on all the male developers by showing a video where she asked the same female community members what the game developers looked like.
All the results of Lebedeva’s inquiries are available on the Nevosoft YouTube channel.
Celebrating 11 years of hard work at one of the fastest growing publishers in the game industry this month, Pete Hines, Bethesda’s vice president and head of PR and marketing, has grown his solo operation into a globally operating department. Right before diving into the recent launch of Fallout: New Vegas, Hines took the time to share his stories on building his team, his own philosophies on PR and how a genuine approach can sell more copies.
