Victor Kislyi might not be a household name in the games business yet, but his devotion to his company, and the MMOs it creates, might just see him propelled to development stardom. Michael French catches up with World of Tanks’ unconventional creator to find out what it’s taken to establish the wildly popular game
WORLD OF TANKS has been hard to miss since its launch in 2010. The military MMO has done extraordinarily well for an independently made game in a tough sector. It now courts the attention of an army of users – and was rewarded last month with a Develop Award for Use of Online. Much of that success is down to the
colourful, driven and immensely enthusiastic CEO of the game’s studio, Wargaming.net. Like so many others, Victor Kislyi started coding games in his home in his late teens. Unlike many bedroom coders, however, today he runs a studio that employs over 900 staff, and has two more MMOs – World of Warplanes and World of Battleships underway.
How did your company come to make World of Tanks and specialise in MMOs? Before World of Tanks, we made 13 titles and that was a good – let’s say at was a ‘university of life’ experience. All of those games were specifically retail
titles, single-player with a couple of multiplayer aspects. About four years ago, we realised this industry was going nowhere, when you talk about retail and single-player things. There’s piracy, $50 price tags, competition and the developer-publisher relationship, which very rarely works because
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of contracts, deadlines, money, acceptance, quarterly reports for big publishers which affect your schedule, and other stuff. Our last big foray was with the London
arm of Square Enix with Order of War, but again, at a time when not many titles did very well in retail. Even some of the really big franchises failed. At the same time, we had a sidekick business of advertising and technology called AdRevolver and, to cut a long story short, after a couple of acquisitions and mergers, technically we sold the technology to Yahoo in 2007. We got, I’d say, $12 million, and we wisely did not buy Lamborghinis and Palm Islands and stuff. Instead we invested in our MMO. At first
we were playing with the technology because it was a whole new world to us; server side tech, connectivity, all that stuff. We were thinking about a fantasy theme first, but then we realised going against World of Warcraft and 400 other MMOs out of China and South Korea was probably not a good idea, so we decided to turn around and do something niche. We thought: ‘What were we doing best
before?’. The answer was tanks. We had done sci-fi tanks and WWII tanks, so we thought we should do an MMO about tanks.
And you built the entire tech base and studio system needed for an MMO? We realised that we not only had to be a good developer. We knew that any MMO is a service, so we, from scratch, built a publisher. We hired some good people; we trained some other people, and put some of our own initiatives on the table. Right now, the whole company is made up
of 900 staff, and we had just 120 employees a year-and-a half ago, so impressive progress was made.
Half of that number is developers, making
more warplanes, more battleships; and other on-going things. The other half is the publishing arm. It’s the same company but it’s a different thing they do. It’s community management, it’s customer support, financial and fraud stuff, PR and marketing. Of course, we have the luxury of being a publisher and developer.
So you built your own publisher because you weren’t happy with other publishers? The truth is that none of the traditional retail publishers, even now, know how free-to-play works. They are big guys trying to do something like Company of Heroes Online, which went nowhere.