Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The first war game, probably, I made myself.
Well, me, my brother and some of my friends.
We created the terrain map 3 by 3 kilometers with rivers, mountains, bridges drawn on some linoleum with a permanent marker.
And we played like that.
And then in the end of 80s personal computers became available.
Of course, there were Tetris and other things.
But then there were the games like Civilization, Warlords, real-time strategies like Dune II, the first Warcraft.
And, obviously, when all these things get together in a mind of a teenager, it creates a critical mass and then, BOOM!
I think that every boy at the end of the 80s -- beginning of the 90s, who had his own computer and video games,
was dreaming about the creation of his own game.
Or, as a beginning, to change a released video game.
I remember that we wrote letters to Sid Meier, telling him how he was wrong and that he must fix some things in Civilization.
And then you understand: no-no, it's useless, I must create my own games.
My classmates, my brother and I -- we preferred the sciences such as Physics and Mathematics.
So that influenced on our decision.
When the first computers became available, we then loved the programming and computer sciences.
These things created this detonating mixture.
So we had no other choice.
Well, we had two bedrooms, each of us had his own room so we decided to move into one bedroom, so we could make the second room into an office.
As far as I remember we placed five computers in there.
We were sitting in a U-formation, sharing the small three by four room with wardrobes, furniture and other things.
And this was really interesting.
Eugene invited me home and showed that he and his brother were making a game, called Iron Age.
This was a turn-based strategy game, turns were sent by e-mail messages.
So that was not that type of real time online gaming that we're used to seeing today.
We thought that this game, Iron Age, which was created and released in 1996,
would have around a hundred to two hundred thousand players or, what would be better, a million!
But it only had six players.
Well, it was me, my brother, those people who made the game, one American, one German and one Russian; his name was Petr.
And then I received a letter from one of the developers.
It turned out, that I played against him.
My style was aggressive and the battle of the newbie and those who created this game became interesting, even for the developer.
So he wrote a letter, introducing himself and asking for me to not send the next turn to avoid the automatic ending of the battle,
so they had time to rewrite the code to make the battle longer.
The original amount of turns was limited.
So that's how I met Victor.
It turned out that I was playing against him.
We didn't have a moment where we said: "We're all here at 18:00, let's set up a company".
We knew that the creation of the game was the objective.
And we were creating it for a long time.
Maybe, it took too long.
That's why we haven't got the exact date when Wargaming was founded.
We consider the year to be 1998, that's when we had told ourselves: "Okay, this will be our main job".
There were always doubts, because that meant the total refocusing on the internal...
Actually, it was an internal start-up.
Moreover, this was a start-up that was created and supported by personal finances.
Plus the money our parents could give.
Of course, there was a risk, some doubts, because it was unexplored territory, an absolutely unknown type of business.
Besides, it was started in a country that had nothing in common with game development as a whole.
The first project of Wargaming Inc. began in the Kislyi family apartment and in the dormitories of Belarusian State University,
where the company's first programmers lived at that time.
The work of the new Wargaming crew began with throwing the network cables between the two buildings on the 11th floor of their residence.
There was a great trouble with electrical earthing in soviet hostels, so network cards were just burning up!
It was funny, really funny, but it was Spring.
Spring was the time of network cards burning.
The meeting went something like this:
Victor came into the room and said: "Look, Sasha, do you know, what the word "wargaming" means? Do you even know what wargaming is?".
I heard that term for the first time.
He asked how it sounded to me and what I thought of this game genre.
Well, there is a class of games, called war games, games about war.
Or in German, "Kriegspiele".
And this word was mentioned in some articles, somewhere on the Internet.
It was used for board games.
And in Wargaming we were making games about warfare.
I think that it is a really natural name.
Perhaps, it was one of a few options.
I don't remember much of the list.
I was in the university 15 years ago.
I was in the 9th grade of a school.
I was creating military strategy games for the Playstation.
I was at school.
I was a sound engineer.
I was entering university.
I was working in the National Academy of Science in the Institute of History.
I was the head of the online department for EA.com.
I was studying in university.
I was in the fourth year.
I was starting a new company.
I was selling advertising.
I was working in a consulting agency.
I was actually working in management consulting.
I was a developer.
I was in university.
I was creating a game that never got released.
I was entering postgraduate studies.
Spending some stupid time in podology study.
I was a student.
I was founding Gas Powered Games.
I was buying bubliks and enticing people.
After our first computer game, Iron Age, that nobody in the world except those six players played,
we understood that, if you want to create games, you must have players to play them.
That's why we chose an already existing board game as our niche.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of thousands of players all over the world were playing this game.
This game was the closest in spirit to the ideals of Victor; he loved miniature table top games.
That was all that he was doing.
It turned out, that his hobby wasn't so unique.
There were dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people that were addicted to such kind of things.
A great amount of fans were playing, using e-mail messaging or gathering up once or twice a year at game conferences and playing together there.
We took the book with the rules, scratched our heads, grabbed drawing rulers and calculators, and wrote a giant amount of formulas.
And then, finally, created the computer version of this game.
Prior to DBA Online, I had no experience of board games.
All of us were still students and we had to study a lot.
We had to learn virtually everything.
DBA Online opened a gate for us to really professional, serious video games.
This game is about 15 years old, or maybe a little younger.
In fact, the game is still alive!
In that time the entire computer industry stepped into 3D technologies.
And only turn-based strategy games stayed as classics, in 2D that is.
We decided to bring turn-based strategy games to the masses.
Everything was done differently from the previous game, there were new people and everybody had much more specified duties.
There were several programmers, several artists, a 3D-modeler
and people like me that couldn't even explain what we did.
And we all like one started the creation of the game with a great interest, great piety, spending almost all of our free time on this game.
We just sat down and created the game from start to finish.
As far as I'm concerned, the most interesting thing about Massive Assault is the system of secret allies.
You might be losing all battles on most fronts, but if you still have one or two secret allies by the end of the game, you can do the following:
when your enemies sense victory and get out of their defensive positions, leaving their rear undefended,
you can use your trump card and win the battle.
That's really awesome.
The first game's release attracted a lot of attention from turn-based strategy fans all over the world,
thanks to favorable reviews by major game magazines.
Massive Assault was mentioned in a huge amount of magazines,
but I do remember the euphoria, when they wrote about our game on the main page of GameSpot.
The review was on the main page of GameSpot for a day.
Victor and I were extremely happy about it, even though the rating of the game wasn't the best.
But we got a review of our game, so our brand was recognizable, we were so happy about that!
Massive Assault gained a considerable fan base.
Unsurprisingly, Wargaming decided to turn the successful game into a series.
Massive Assault Network and its sequel followed, as well as an add-on, named Massive Assault: Domination.
It developed the ideas in the original game further.
But its high difficulty and complexity caused unexpected problems.
The game sparkled with new bright colors: it was beautiful, interesting and with a great storyline.
But it also was, in my opinion, containing our most important mistake.
We didn't understand the difference, the huge difference between western and Russian players.
And many American and some European players in general weren't able to handle such a, let's say,
high level of complexity, hardcore was just too tough.
You know, my father still plays Massive Assault Network, as well as several thousand other people.
Even I would play this game with great pleasure.
But each match is so complex, you have to think long and really hard.
I am really afraid to play this game, because I will fling myself into it and will be lost for society for at least a couple of days.
As for old games, I still play DBA Online.
I still from time to time play a little bit World of Warcraft.
Prisoner of Power and Operation Bagration, from time to time I play these games with great pleasure.
I don't play old games, but I am nostalgic about them.
Yes, I still play Starcraft II.
Except Warplanes...
I booted up Fracture to look at one of the weapons we did, which was called the Vortex.
I want to play Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power and Operation Bagration.
No, you know, now it is only Tanks and Warplanes.
We did play a bunch of Demigod last year.
Frankly speaking, not really.
I have no devices to launch those mobile games that I've created.
World of Tanks is far better than any of my games.
It is strange even to compare them.
We created Massive Assault Network 2, the online game.
And by that time the company was recognizable enough on the Russian game market.
That's why the Russian publishers were interested in ordering a project for us to develop.
Kolya Katselapov entered our room and told us:
"Guys, have any of you read Inhabited Island?"
And the only person who had read this book was me.
"Can we do a turn-based strategy game about it?"
I thought: "Piece of cake!"
We wrote the game concept; "Akella" read it and said: "Okay, we approve it".
And then, according to the concept, we created the new turn-based game, Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power.
While we were creating this game, we tried to keep in mind what we liked in other games of this genre.
In other words, to take the best and add something from us to make it original.
I think that we did quite well, on a decent level.
The press gave a really high rating for the game.
Despite our great love for turn-based strategy games, we should be honest here, this genre is not the most popular.
It is important to understand that such games force people to think, but the main thing in games is entertainment and fun.
Obviously, we used this consideration when we decided to move from this genre and create a game in the more massive and popular genre, RTS.
It is possible that Wargaming would not be where it is now had it not crossed paths with the Arise studio.
Michael Jivetc was one of its founders.
Our most famous project that we created was Ne Vremya Dlya Draconov.
It was a fantasy project, based on the book of Lukyanenko.
We created it with 1C company.
But we were also famous for Koyoty: Zakon Pustyni.
It featured a post-apocalyptic setting.
There were a small number of games in this setting and they were popular among fans of this narrow genre, so our project was also quite popular.
And then in Autumn 2007, our director, Fyodor, told us the happy news that we were joining the Wargaming studio.
The most significant change was that the company became bigger by several times,
so there were more people and so all processes were done differently.
It gave more opportunities.
All was brand spanking new.
We joined our forces and started to build up the new team whilst working on the project, called Operation Bagration.
We earned money from Massive Assault and Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power and so we understood that we should raise the bar,
we should create a game of the more popular genre, the genre of real time strategy.
There were around six versions of the design document.
Victor condemned one version after another one.
It was not what he wanted to see.
Well, it resulted in Operation Bagration.
We decided to add a feature that nobody had done before.
This is large-scale battles.
We made this game to look like Total War,
where thousands of soldiers, tanks and hundreds of planes battle each other at the same time on the screen.
And this was awesome!
This was the main task and the dream of Victor Kislyi that sprang to life, it was to have a thousand units on a single map.
We're innovators here.
We did it and we have the right to be proud.
Developing a new game became a challenge for the designers and programmers.
They wanted to create something great, a game that would surprise the world.
We got in cars with our cartographers, took our cameras with us, and went to the places where the real battles took place and photographed them,
then tried to reproduce these places as our in-game locations.
For once, in a way, this project was quite patriotic and so, when we were promoting our game,
we made a huge emphasis that this is a game about our history, about Russian people.
We showed this game to many veterans, they were glad that we still remember those events, that we hadn't forgotten.
We were not only thanked for our game, but even the Belorusian government officials took interest in our game.
We were taken to a small room, where one of the specialists showed us the game and, of course,
our Minister of Defense is a military man, so he had written down in his notebook all the downsides and inaccuracies of the game.
In the end, he looked at his notebook and said the following:
"Well, the idea is great, but we will not promote you, because there are several inaccuracies".
Then, he read aloud all of the inaccuracies that he had seen in the game.
One of them was that our forces were marked with blue and enemy forces were marked with red.
Our veterans wouldn't have understood this.
Generally, the thing that amazed me the most whilst working with Wargaming
is the high level of enthusiasm of the people and how far they were involved in the project.
Everybody wanted not only to release the game to the market, but to create an awesome, great game, the best!
Our video engineer, Dima Lutsko, created a promotional video.
We drove and showed it at the RGDC.
We thought that this video was so awesome, that every time, when candidates came for a job interview,
we showed this on the plasma TV, turned up the volume really loud.
And then we watched it and tear up.
The first commentaries on the famous portal AG, Absolute Games, were: "It really affected me emotionally. Guys, thank you!"
That's when we realized that everything would be all right, the game would be popular.
After Operation Bagration, the company realized that they were ready to start a world-class project.
The major Japanese publisher Square-Enix also realized it
and entrusted the development of one of their first west-oriented projects to Wargaming.
Order of War, naturally, was about the western theater of war,
about the landing in Normandy, the further liberation of France and the advance to the borders of Nazi Germany.
Generally speaking, Order of War is Operation Bagration but sharpened for western players.
We tried to use existing unique historical cathedrals or historical churches in every location and thus,
every map began to acquire its own particular ambiance.
The hardest task for us was to design the map for the mission with the Omaha landing,
because, initially, we decided that this scenario is overused,
but then we thought that this battle is really important, so we decided to put it back into our game.
We had to create a great amount of unique objects that we hadn't used in other maps in a short period of time to make this mission authentic.
We made cutscenes for Order of War, using the game engine.
Well, the players went from the 3D maps with the arrows on it into the 3D game-engine
and then transitioning into and out of documentaries in a natural way.
In short, Hollywood-inspired cutscenes.
The game was awesome, the publisher was great, but we didn't earn money.
We learned how to create products of international quality
and this was a great launching point for the creation of a new project, Fantasy Arenas.
We started with a simple idea: that we needed to create a fantasy project, but we had no idea about what its setting would be.
So we started with the creation of the visual aspects of this project.
That was a lot of work for our artists.
The artists tried hundreds of different concepts.
After the creation of steel armor and bolts, I really wanted to create something biological like elves, orcs,
their clothes and all sorts of different things that are alive.
Models that we used in our fantasy game didn't simply disappear,
because we used them in the creation of our first and main teaser video for our project World of Tanks.
Victor Kislyi had always maintained a close relationship with Petr Bityukov and had a fateful event happen to him during one of their meetings.
I'd come to his apartment once more, we sat down for lunch, at this time we'd already experimented on our MMO-game engine.
Then, it was about elves and orcs.
And then he, Petr Bityukov, told me:
"Look, do you really need it? There is Warcraft and Lineage and lots of other games.
So let's create the game we planned, but only about tanks?"
To be honest, I'll confess now, at first I thought:
"We shouldn't have drunk that third shot", or something like that.
But then we talked about it, and he said:
"The guys are ready. They're fans of tanks and military history."
He showed me a great number of his books.
The idea to create the game in the unusual setting of the actual historical vehicles
seemed to us more promising than the idea to create another clone of Warhammer.
Why have we chosen tanks?
Because tanks is the leisurely version of Counter-Strike.
That type of game, shooters, is usually popular among players.
But all of them do have one problem, to be honest;
only truly involved players with really quick reaction speeds can play classic styles of shooters.
We wanted to create something a little more measured, something more leisurely, a little more for the people.
I offered Sergey Burkatovskiy to move to Minsk to lead the game design department.
In a matter of, literally, weeks, and that's all, I announced to the employees:
"Guys, say goodbye to the elves and orcs!
Here are the guys that know a lot about tanks.
We will not compete with Warcraft, we will create a game about tanks and invent a name later.
That's it."
Well, I wasn't there at the very beginning of the new project,
but I know that the Wargaming office in Minsk was bored with the creation of historical war games.
There was a murmur: "The war again, all in the smoke, let's do the elves!"
In general, there were a lot of fantasy games even without ours, so we made a game about tanks and we were right to do that!
We started to work together on this project.
We formed, or rather, reformed the old orcs-elves team into the mini-team that began to work on Tanks.
If memory serves me well, we imported the first model, which we copied from Operation Bagration,
into the BigWorld engine two weeks after starting our work.
That can even be considered to be Tanks version 0.0.0.1.
I remember that moment, when Sergey Burkatovskiy said:
"So, there should be nothing complex, everything should be simple!
We are creating an intense tank battle!
End of discussion".
So we did!
All those ideas, which were offered by Slava Makarov, Sergey Burkatovskiy, Petr Bityukov and Michael "Storm" Jivetc from old Wargaming,
were approved and created pretty quickly.
And all these ideas got it right, and so we have never changed them.
It is really a miraculous incident in the games industry, when everything goes according to plan.
I would say that the previous experience that we had with publishers,
helped us to take a strategic look at publishers and the necessity to cooperate with them.
So in the end it was decided to create our own publisher.
Traditionally, there are two tasks: to attract players and to keep them.
Well, to be honest, it consists of a great many specialists and a huge amount of departments.
The biggest departments to mention are the marketing department, the business development department,
the deployment department and the team dedicated to eSports.
Until 2010, we were only a game developer, we had a full development cycle and just a little bit of public relations and marketing.
In 2010, when we were preparing to release the project World of Tanks, we understood that we must create operations.
We had no idea what that really was, honestly.
"Support specialist" and "Community manager" were just sounds and had no meaning.
We realized that we needed such a team, so three months before release we hurried up to form an operations team.
In the early stages of the project, during the alpha test or beta test, the amount of users playing was pretty small.
In other words, when we launched our project, we hadn't had many testers.
The relationships between the testers were really warm and they were like one big family.
So the first public event was held around this time, at the beginning of World of Tanks' development.
We invited Russian press here to Minsk for it, so this became our first press tour.
We showed them Stalin's Line and let them ride on tanks and showed them Dudutki.
It was something unexpected for them.
Since 2011, the company has shown solid growth, almost by 50% a year.
And this rate is one of the best in the industry.
Actually, there's almost nobody who still doubts
that Wargaming has earned the status of a leader in the online game market during the last few years.
The more popularity the game had, the more attractive it was for competitive players.
And they gradually started to form different teams and clans.
And then it was obvious for us that we should hold out a hand of friendship to them.
There already was an audience that was constantly playing in tournaments.
We supported them. And the amount of such people grew from one tournament to another.
Then spectators and fans appeared.
In the Wargaming League, in the RU region alone, there's nearly 1000 teams.
And there are many solid teams all over the world, there are more than 10 000 in total!
Victor, you did it! Yes!
I didn't expect that!
It was a pleasure.
Naturally.
I was very surprised.
Believe it or not, I wasn't surprised.
Practically like my own!
You would have to use too many beeps!
I knew that it would be the bomb!
It boomed even louder than we expected.
Holy moly!
Well, you know, deserved.
Still, ten or twelve years devoted to the players.
Well, it still surprises me a bit.
One of the most positive emotions in my life.
I didn't think a tank game could work.
And then I started to play it and six thousand battles later now I understand why it's successful.
The success of World of Tanks led to further development and Wargaming launched the game on all continents.
Currently World of Tanks can be enjoyed in more than 200 countries worldwide.
Regional offices around the world work hard to keep the gamers in every region as comfortable as possible.
It all started in 2010 in Russia, we were the first.
Whatever happens, firstly, we test it on the Russian server and only after this we would send it to the other regions.
World of Tanks became very popular in Europe early 2011 and initially it was supported out of the Minsk headquarter.
And we established the European office in November 2011.
I was a part of the initial launch of World of Tanks in North America, just about three years ago.
China was started in March 2011 and then South Asia started in April 2012 and then, finally, Korea started in December 2012.
Tanks hasn't been launched in Japan.
For no matter how long Tanks existed and dominated in Russia, there are always key things, dates, and events.
Of course, the biggest event was in November 2011: starting the operations in Europe.
So the introduction of World of Tanks about 3 years ago, I think, is the most significant event.
Player community has been certainly to gamescoms.
I think they always like amazing shows.
Very, very big, very successful.
E3s are also very big events for us.
The fact we have entered into eSports.
Adding all the languages was actually the biggest milestone for us so far.
The more significant event so far is actually still the launch date.
But I'd say gamescom is really special.
What is special about the players in Northern American region?
We have very high expectations for games.
And there is a lot of choice.
There's something that is characteristic of Russian players: they love the game.
They play it actively and are very dedicated to it.
And thus, they make efforts to make us develop the game in a good way, the right way for our users, who we love and appreciate very much.
Japanese players do like video games and are very dedicated to them.
The players in our region are very, very passionate about World of Tanks.
They love the game, they just love to compete with each other.
We're supporting seven different languages.
We have a total of, around, seventeen different countries.
We have players that are German, that are French, that are Czech, that are Polish.
A great community that is very mixed.
That's actually making it very rich.
Well, the Koreans are probably the most completive players in the world.
We dominate eSports globally.
We are not doing it yet for World of Tanks, but I believe that Korean players will dominate in World of Tanks League pretty soon.
Besides this project, our players are extremely interested in the further development of our other projects.
These are World of Warplanes and World of Warships.
The excitement around the future projects is very high.
All the people in our region here are very interested in the future Wargaming projects.
They're really curious about what will happen with World of Warplanes, of course.
They are absolutely fascinated of World of Warships and they can't wait until they get more information.
Actually, World of Warplanes and World of Warships will be more interesting to Asia,
because if you think about that in World War II, tank battles were not placing in Asia.
But planes and also warships were mainly happening in the Pacific War,
so that's why I think that future products from Wargaming will be more interesting to Asian players.
So I think the players and the community are still very much anticipating the new development for World of Tanks.
They're still very...
The new version, the Xbox version is very, very much anticipated.
Well, World of Tanks Blitz is also really anticipated.
Germany is one of the biggest browser-games countries in the world, so World of Tanks Generals will be very popular here as well.
You truly iconize the tanks.
We do the same for planes.
And we do the same, actually, for our battleships, warships.
At this point, Wargaming has 15 regional offices worldwide.
But not all of them are involved in product promotion.
Some of the departments are developing new games.
Persha Studia was established in the year 2000.
It started with art outsourcing for western companies.
But after five years of hard work the studio was ready for something more serious.
The studio began developing Wii, DS and PC games for major publishers up until they had the opportunity to work with Wargaming.
We got a new client, the Belarusian company with the really badass name, Wargaming.
They decided to give us a task to create the prototype of World of Warplanes.
When we created the prototype, it was finished in May 2011.
Wargaming believed in us even more, so they gave us another task: to turn this prototype into an alpha version.
We didn't have the complete vision of the game in mind from the very beginning.
Initially, when we started creating Warplanes here in Kiev, we received the main message for the game...
It was expressed in a few simple words: "intense warplane battle!"
Lesta Studio was founded in 1991 and early on dealt exclusively with video production.
In 2000, the studio started developing games.
The company has created strategy and casual games for PC and consoles.
Lesta Studio launched its first MMO game in 2010.
Soon after this, Wargaming took an interest in the company.
I remember the first dialog about the cooperation.
It was when Victor, Slava Makarov and Veronika Lepekha came to us.
All of us in the studio, as far as I remember, 30 people, gathered in one room.
And we were told the following: "Okay, dudes, do it, let's go!"
Lesta Studio was chosen to create World of Warships primarily because we had huge experience in game developing in general and, secondarily,
because we had experience in the needed field of creating games about the sea battles of World War II.
The experience of our previous games, especially games about warships, really helps us a lot,
because warships are really complex constructions and it is important to know their structure.
If we compare World of Warships with other games of this series,
we will see that the biggest difference is the emphasis on the teamwork and the cooperation between players.
A few years ago, when we realized that our financial situation would be good rather than vice-versa,
we wisely though it might be a good idea to watch the how the industry develops and, as we say,
our specially trained people started to look everywhere to find and study all new tendencies.
Probably, there was no other way, except to move our games to the mobile devices.
DAVA studio was established in 2008 and was connected with Wargaming from the start.
One of the company's key employees had previously worked for WG.
The companies tried to cooperate before the launch of World of Tanks, but with no significant results.
DAVA joined the Wargaming family in 2011.
The World of Tanks Blitz project wasn't our first idea.
At first, we wanted to create several different smaller projects.
The idea of Blitz was created with our managers Andrew Karpyuk, Vitaly Borodovskiy, Stepan Drozd and Alexei Prosin.
Even now we can see the great potential of the game.
I am satisfied with how we managed to port the deep and dynamic PC game onto the mobile platform.
Hundreds of millions of devices are ready for our game.
We are a serious game company, so we can't ignore the preferences of the players from different parts of the world.
That is why, if you want to attract the American users --
and there are a great many of these users and they are really passionate about their games --
we should conquer the consoles.
The Xbox is our first step: World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition.
The studio was created in 1997 and after a change of ownership in 2001 it was named Day 1 Studio.
Their first project -- Mech Assault -- attracted a lot of attention.
The game was quite successful commercially and it helped to promote the Xbox Live service at its very beginning.
Day 1 Studios published some more games afterwards and became a part of Wargaming in 2012.
Joining Wargaming, it really was a perfect match for us.
It was very similar to some games that we've done historically and had a lot of experience on.
The primary difference is that we worked on science-fiction-oriented games and this was much more realistic, you know,
with the 20th century, mid 20th century, tanks and how realistic all the tanks are.
So that was a little bit of a change.
But the base technology and all the stuff that we had used historically worked perfectly for the tank stuff.
The other change was how big Wargaming is.
It's an international organization and we really enjoyed getting out, meeting a bunch of new people, learning a lot
and also we're pretty excited that some of our stuff that we worked on from the technology standpoint
is actually being used in other studios within Wargaming.
The easiest thing in terms of working with Wargaming is they know and understand game development.
The new platform affected some game aspects, of course.
So we had to rethink how the user interface worked.
And the second part that is completely different is the control scheme.
But for the most part there's been no major challenges.
We get the question often, which one's gonna be better, the PC or the Xbox 360?
I really do think it's where you end up playing is what is going to be the decision in terms of what's better or what's not better.
Most of the games are based on the same game engine -- BigWorld, developed in Sydney.
The Australian studio's history began in the year 2000.
BigWorld was oriented toward the MMO market from the start.
At first, the engine was used in numerous fantasy games by Chinese studios.
Cooperation with Wargaming allowed the company to reach a new level.
Yeah, we were really happy to have recently joined the Wargaming team.
Bigger family as it is growing every day.
And keep on supplying the teams with our technology and our expertise.
One of the things I think we really enjoy about our new life within Wargaming is the ability to be able to work really closely with the game.
So in the past, because we're licensing the technology, we were a bit more distant from some of our licencees.
They were making their games and we're just making the software.
But since we've sort of joined Wargaming, it means that we've been able to work very closely with each of the teams
and so we've had our engineers travel to Kiev, to St. Petersburg and to Minsk and be able to work on site, very, very closely with those guys.
And there's lots of advantages, it is pretty exciting to be much closer to the actual game, to the end product,
to feel like we're a much more contributing part to these fantastic games that are being made.
The basis for World of Tanks Generals was created by the company Bytex,
but the project was fully transferred to the Kiev branch of Wargaming and the game changed significantly.
After some time, the team from the Minsk office joined in and currently the game is being developed in the two cities simultaneously.
When it was already obvious that World of Tanks was a success, we understood that there was a risk
that we would end up creating only 15 on 15 games where huge military machines destroy each other in every possible way.
Lots of us enjoyed collectible card games and by that moment we were already creating awesome tank artwork for the portal.
So we thought for a while and decided: "Why not? Let's try to create a collectible card game for the browser!"
Chris Taylor has been interested in games since childhood.
He entered the industry at the age of 21 after seeing a newspaper ad looking for employees for Distinctive Software studio.
Chris' first game was Hardball II.
He played a major role in his next project --Test Drive II, where he helped the team that was behind schedule.
Chris' career was constantly rising afterwards.
When I started off in the business, I was at Electronic Arts and the entire time I worked there I talked about blowing things up.
When I came down to the US and I joined up with Ron Gilbert at Humongous Entertainment, we did exactly that.
Total Annihilation was a game about blowing things up.
The very name, Total Annihilation, was about blowing things up.
Total Annihilation hit the market and it was clear to me that if I was going to continue building my career and continue to do what I loved,
I'd have to start a company.
So it was right around October-November of 1997, I said: "I'm going to start a company".
Gas Powered Games' products were successful and had tons of interesting features.
The game market is constantly shifting, though.
And not everyone is able to keep up with new trends like Wargaming has managed to do.
Well, Wargaming brings a very, very special approach and attitude towards gaming,
the very high regard and respect for the customer, for the gamer.
In the end, Gas Powered Games and Wargaming decided to join forces, resulting in a new burst of development.
It's been an adventure, the company's huge!
There's 15 offices around the world.
It's been really interesting, a lot of fun!
I mean, it's like a family still!
We're doing a lot of research on a new game, it's a free-to-play game, it fits right in the Wargaming games.
You know, you've heard about Tanks, you played Tanks, maybe you're playing World of Warplanes, though.
Warships is coming.
We've got another game that we're going to be including in the series.
And it's a secret still.
I can tell you that it's going to be a big game, it's probably going to be the biggest game ever.
It's going to be huge.
And we're going to be working with everyone all over Wargaming, in the Wargaming family all over the world to build this game.