STUDIOS // WARGAMING | BETA
Surging forward
Wargaming is mobilising its resources on the fresh battlegrounds of console, mobile and eSports. Aaron Lee travelled to Paris to discover how the MMO giant is maturing
WARGAMING’S FRÉDÉRIC MENOU and his staff have been getting funny looks from their new neighbours at the prestigious Tour Horizons offi ce building in Paris. “It’s a very funny thing to come into a corporate building with a lot of people in suits and bring 171 Wargamers here,” he chuckles, casually dressed as he is in a navy blue polo shirt and jeans. “Everybody’s looking at us like, ‘who are they?’” What the suit-and-ties from the likes of pharmaceutical company Roche and hospitality corporation Sodexo probably aren’t aware of is the $474.93m in revenue, according to SuperData, that the World of Tanks developer made last year. A sum that’s enabled the rapidly expanding fi rm to relocate its European headquarters to this 18-storey building, which was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and resides in the Boulogne-Billancourt, on a site formerly occupied by Renault’s car production plants. “We had this tremendous success and then we had to run after it. We had to grow very quickly,” Menou, Wargaming’s managing director of EMEA & NA, explains during Develop’s visit to the studio.
Catching up with this “exponential growth” has been a big challenge, but Menou says a mixture of Wargaming’s family culture and a do-it-yourself mentality has allowed it to not only learn from its mistakes, but take charge of opportunities that its free-to-play military MMO was never even intended for.
WAR ROOMS
There were fewer than 50 staff when Wargaming fi rst opened its European division in France in 2011. Escaping the cramped
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conditions of their old offi ce was a key reason for the move, Menou says, and its 171 staff now occupy an entire fl oor of the three-tiered building at Horizons.
“We built this family as closely as we could. We like to work with each other and we’re convinced that liking the people you work with is key to the future the company and for the motivation of everybody in the long term,” he says. “We believe that being on the
We had this tremendous success
and then we had to run after it. We had to grow very quickly.
Frédéric Menou, Wargaming
same fl oor and seeing each other every day, and having a mingling area where people can talk to each other and play pool helps a lot. And the door to my offi ce is always open.” Wargaming had moved in only a week
prior to Develop’s visit – the fi rst publication worldwide to do so. But even at this stage, wandering around the open-plan studio, there was a sense that communication and collaboration are both encouraged by the space. Floor-to-ceiling windows treat the eye to some striking views of West Paris. Whiteboards dotted about the workspace allow staff to scrawl ideas and pictures. The meeting rooms have sci-fi -style, full colour displays showing who is present in them and when they are next free. Military-themed décor – ammo crates, sandbags, cameo netting – adds to the considerable paraphernalia strewn across each desk.
World of Tanks: Blitz (main) is taking
Wargaming’s 20th century tank warfare to new platforms and an entirely new audience of players
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