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Greetings! I'm Victor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming, and I'm going to answer your questions.
Victor, please could you tell us about the Wargaming company today?
Today, Wargaming is an internationally-operating company with offices
on almost every continent and more than one thousand employees worldwide.
We have development studios in Minsk, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, as well as offices in Berlin, Paris, San-Francisco and the city of Nicosia.
We've recently opened several new offices in Asia in Singapore and Seoul.
The company continues to grow; we are entering new markets and planning to open more offices in the near future.
We have a giant and tight-knit team focused on one common goal.
As you know we've got three massive projects: World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships.
World of Warplanes is in closed beta, World of Warships will most likely enter closed alpha this year, plus we are regularly adding new content to World of Tanks.
The operation offices maintain the game and provide customer support to players in Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.
In the coming future we will further expand our presence in the games market by launching World of Tanks in Korea and Japan.
How do you see Wargaming in a couple of years?
The company has been growing really fast during the last couple of years
and we have every intention of keeping it this way in the future. We'll carry on delivering high-end free-to-play projects with solid and original core gameplay
and a nice balance between accessibility and fun. We're keeping our minds open to development and improvement opportunities.
Also, we always listen to what our gaming community says and grow our projects in view of their wishes and suggestions.
What do people really want from us? Triple-A games and high quality service.
We are working to improve both. Currently our creative energy is focused on the Wargaming Saga.
World of Tanks is live and we are updating it regularly. World of Warplanes will soon be available for a more massive open beta testing.
This flight combat MMO is the top priority for the Kiev-based studio. The core of World of Warplanes' development takes place there.
It is really important to ensure that the game features a well-balanced system
where every single aspect is polished and finalized. We aim high and see it as a triple-A blockbuster.
World of Warships is scheduled to release in 2013 and requires a lot of work, too.
So as you can see, we have a busy schedule for the next couple of years. It's challenging, but pretty motivating and we'll try our hardest to live up to your expectations.
We are a constantly growing team of professionals; we have a decent technical background and solid funding. We are no longer rookies in the market.
How is World of Tanks doing in Asia? There are rumours that the characteristics of tanks vary on the different regional servers. Can you comment on this?
Well, we had some serious concerns regarding the Asian market. Two and a half years ago we made several big trips to get acquainted with publishers in the region.
We heard from everyone that gamers in Asia, for example, in China and Korea would never play tanks, and that we should give up on the idea to enter the Asian market.
Nonetheless, we took the risk and signed a contract with the Chinese KongJong Company.
According to Chinese law, you can only operate in the local market if you partner with a Chinese business. KongJong is a very reliable partner and we are working as one team.
World of Tanks started slowly, but then sped up to hit the top lines of the Chinese game charts because Chinese gamers enjoy the game as much as our gamers do.
Yes, we had to do more promotion and PR activities there.
We arranged for articles in different magazines, gave interviews, posted historical overviews and organized press conferences to raise awareness about the game.
Today World of Tanks is a very respectable, famous and quite popular game all across China.
We also established an office in Singapore. The Southeast Asian market is not an easy region to tap into.
It includes Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, and the gaming industry there is growing to become a huge mature market.
The company runs a full scale marketing campaign from the office in Singapore and World of Tanks is slowly getting its share of the local market.
It is a densely populated part of the world and a highly perspective market for us.
It has less developed infrastructure and fewer payment systems than Europe, North America and even post-Soviet states.
PCs are less popular there than in other regions, too. However, it's booming and might soon catch up with the rest of the world.
We've opened a new office in South Korea and hired local professionals. Now the team there is preparing to launch new servers with test versions of the game client.
As I have already mentioned, the Japanese players, as well as around 10, 000 gamers from Korea, play on American servers with a ping of about 500ms, yet they manage to play pretty well.
As for the different versions of game, we are following one strict rule:
"World of Tanks has to be the same on every continent, on all servers and in all economic systems."
I can assure you that all tank characteristics, achievement ratios, calculation tables and penetration mechanics are the same everywhere.
It is strategically important that the entire world plays the same game if we want to organize more and more international championships - and it's exactly what we want!
We are in the midst of organizing the International "Ural Steel" Championship for the second year in a row.
We hold qualifying matches in Singapore, China, Europe and the USA. People all around the world should be battling on an equal footing, so they should play the same game.
There are some small peculiar features, mainly characteristics of the Chinese and Korean versions of the game that are different from the rest of the world.
These have to do with the state policy in regard to online games. Every online game should feature a special anti-addiction system
and fulfill certain criteria concerning the logging in procedure and payment system.
Also, the majority of gamers there prefer to spend several hours in an Internet café rather than play on their home PCs or laptops.
Keeping this in mind, we are adjusting the game client and UI to ensure maximum gaming comfort for players in Internet cafés.
As for the game itself, our Chinese partners from time to time ask us to introduce some changes but our position on the issue remains solid ---- the game will be the same in all regions.
Why do you think World of Tanks is so successful and popular?
This is a frequently asked question and it calls for a long explanation. Even our team doesn't know the full picture of the situation.
Wargaming has been developing strategies for 14-15 years - you might remember our previous projects. We made Massive Assault, DBA online, Order of War, Massive Assault Network and Inhabited Island.
After all these years, we've managed to put together an amazing team of professionals here in Minsk. They are programmers, managers, graphic and sound specialists.
This core team worked at ground zero of the project and laid the foundation for its success. We had really outstanding people.
I wish every studio in the world had such a team as we did when we started with World of Tanks development.
The idea itself is a very strong factor. World of Tanks is not a boxed game, it has no long, boring and mournful storylines.
Instead, it offers short sessions of dynamic multiplayer experience. The game concept is simple: there are two teams (15 vs. 15 players) driving tanks whilst shelling each other with hard steel slugs.
The game is played in short bursts where a battle might last five, seven or ten minutes long.
So there is no need to spend three hours to finish the match. You may play for thirty minutes, fight a couple of matches
and then go to work, to bed or to a movie theatre with your friend. We've tried to make a high-quality game.
As I already said, the game was developed by our best professionals. Even the alpha version had robust graphics.
Additionally, you should not forget that World of Tanks uses server technologies. It is definitely not a game that works only on your PC.
It was pretty hard using this type of new technology and there were almost no close analogues in the world.
Take for example, first-person shooters like Battlefield or Call of Duty -- they run zillions of calculations using the power of the game client and your computer.
However, in World of Tanks, all calculations are made using the game engine server component. This makes it almost impossible to hack the system
and all players share the same picture of the gaming world. It took a lot of hard work to ensure the server runs smoothly.
One more crucial element is the core idea of the game. Before World of Tanks we made about six different games with various combat machines: robots, tanks, rocket launchers and stuff like that.
Operation Bagration and Order of War are games about WWII tanks. We have made good tank games before.
Speaking of tanks, when it comes to the former Soviet Union, tanks are everywhere. We have monuments in almost every city and town, military museums, books in every family
dozens of movies about WWII. Actually, armored vehicles were the main WWII weapon, especially on the Eastern Front
and we do remember this. Tanks, self-propelled guns, and all other combat armored vehicles
are an integral part of the Russian culture. So we centered on what was close to the people in Russia and succeeded.
Later we rolled out test versions on the European and North American clusters.
It turned out that gamers in Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and the US enjoy driving big, armored vehicles as well.
Even a three-year-old kid understands what a tank is. He understands that a tank has tracks and knows what they are used for.
He understands the way the vehicle moves and how it reverses with the help of these tracks.
He also understands why it needs a turret and what the big thing on the turret is used for - to shoot other tanks.
The tank is not only in the genetic code of the Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians; it is also in the genetic code of every kid and teen.
And of course, it played into our hands. We now know for sure that the Chinese like tanks, Koreans like tanks
and even Japanese players connect to our American server across the entire Pacific Ocean to play tanks.
Their ping is about 500ms. However, 8-10 thousand Japanese players are playing World of Tanks.
So the heart of our success is the tank. Tanks are cool!
Sergey Burkatovsky told us that you have dev plans for two years
but what will happen to the game for example in five years?