How was 2017 for you?
This year was special for me, because I met him not as an employee, but as a newbie business founder.
The first commercial consulting and recruiting projects started already in February. At the same time, I began to prepare the first HR stream in the CIS at the gaming conference for the DevGAMM.
I also initiated a “Big Salary Survey” of a Russian-speaking game dev. Since May, I have hosted or participated in several roundtables with industry leaders, including representatives from CD Projekt RED, Ubisoft, Pixonic. I delivered a dozen reports on motivation, salaries, compensations and benefits, the role of HR in game development and hiring top specialists.
Since March, I have been releasing a selection of chosen vacancies of game development. I wrote expert materials for the media and shared interesting publications in the group I created on Facebook for HR, recruiters and corporate PR managers. I traveled a lot, read, studied and taught.
In November, I returned to the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School for a deeper study of systemic HR management.
I think the most difficult thing this year was to decide on the name of the company. Ultimately, VALUES VALUE reflects my belief that a company’s culture and values are of the highest importance. And the most pleasant event of this year can be seen in the change of my last name.
How was the year for the company?
Firstly, I can say that VALUES VALUE is successful and will only grow. We enter the new year with a team of 7 specialists and an understanding of who and in which month will join us next year. As a result, we will grow at least twice.
Initially, our main product was conceived as consulting for gaming companies, now it is recruiting.
The vision of our client has remained unchanged. These are not companies, but employees, whose right to a comfortable job and a comfortable process of changing it, we are ready to protect, even refusing large corporate orders.
In August, we were able to formulate a vision, mission, company values, strategy and priorities until the end of 2018, a growth plan, and a financial model.
I am glad to share that all the goals for 2017 have been achieved. I thank all the partners whose support we enlisted: conferences, media, services and experts. We are known and recommended to. So, we do without advertising and can afford to refuse or put on the waiting list some customer-companies or individual vacancies of current clients. At the same time, we try to help all specialists who turn to us for help.
VALUES VALUE filled positions for CEO, Business Development Director, Producer, two Head of Offices, several CMOs, not to mention a number of positions of game design, art and development areas.
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
I will note the purchase of Plarium and the news about the purchase of Big Fish Games by the Australian company Aristocrat. These major deals could affect the entire CIS market, as Plarium has development centers in Kharkiv, Krasnodar, Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv. The situation is similar with Big Fish, which actively invests not only in marketing, but also in the development of mobile games by teams from the CIS. I know about six studios with whom Big Fish collaborate in Kyiv only.
Reflecting the growth of the industry and the scale of the conferences DevGAMM (which became independent in 2017), Kyiv Games Gathering and Casual Connect, which returned to the CIS.
Which trends of the outgoing year would you note?
There already were mentions in other interviews of such trends like mobile first, the success of shooters from the CIS, as well as loot boxes in PC games. Therefore, I propose to talk about topics that are closer to me and the specifics of the VALUES VALUE business.
Trend one. Asian companies are paying more and more attention to our companies. They are ready to open new offices in the CIS in search of Western expertise without Western costs for salaries and office maintenance.
Trend two. There is a flow of specialists from game development to gambling and slots, especially in Ukraine and Belarus. And how not to overflow, if every self-respecting slot-casino company has already opened or is going to open its office here?
Trend three. There is a great demand for our specialists with experience in casual genres, especially three-in-a-row, from European studios. So, learn and improve your English, dear readers.
I will note the emergence of narrow profiles and the search for Retention & Monetization Managers, Narrative Designers, Marketing Performance Managers, UAM for a specific channel/platform, BizDevs for marketing, and so on. This means that companies are not just growing, but maturing in terms of business processes and level of organizational maturity.
We are pleased about the interest in building HR, Recruiting and Employer’s Branding processes: there is a request for consultations from us or companies are willing to pay big money for the search of such specialists.
The maturation of the market also reflects the demand for personal consulting, and help in finding a job.
Name projects of this year that you enjoyed the most.
I will not be distinguished here by special novelty. This year, Clash Royale has undergone a new birth for me with its 2v2 combat and special event system.
I also liked Phone Destroyer for the great work with the brand.
Visually, I liked Shadow Fight 3.
The new three-in-a-row this year didn’t work for me, I continue to play Soda Saga, Jelly Saga every day, and less often – Gardenscapes. There are projects at the beta stage of my friends and clients, – I look forward to their releases, but I can’t talk about them yet.
