During the Gamescom 2019 conference Viktor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming has given an interview, where he talked about current and new projects of Wargaming and their relationships with artists.
Current directions and projects
This August, it will be 9 years since World of Tanks was released. And there is no reason to stop. It blooms, grows, gets better, more beautiful. World of Tanks, just like World of Warcraft, became a cultural phenomenon. It means that if games are supported and developed properly, they can live forever. WoT is destined to live 10 or 20 years from now on. How is this even possible? You need good game mechanics, a talented development team and the whole Wargaming supporting the machine. Updates, the new content, graphics, and technology improvement go on, which means we’ve been working non-stop for 9 years. World of Warships is full of updates, too. The game was released 4 years ago. Since then, we got new content, new maps, and mechanics. Now, we are working on submarines. This is the key to success with these games, and we’re working on it constantly.
If you have good game mechanics, the game will live forever. We also try some new projects. Some of them work out, some don’t. At Gamescom, we were happy to announce the Caliber, our shooter from a third-party studio. Everything is authentic with Polish, German and Russian soldiers in there. All kinds of weapons are included. Everyone plays differently, so we have 4 different classes of players: assault, support, medic, and sniper. This is more of a tactical shooter, where the reaction speed isn’t that important, compared to Fortnite or Counter-Strike. We have PVE where 4 people gather together or get into a team randomly, so they can go on a mission to get rid of terrorists somewhere in the middle east. The whole idea isn’t about getting out of the corner and shooting faster than anyone else.
Initially, we decided to launch in the post-Soviet space, as we did with World of Tanks. If some weird moments appear, we can fix them. In a few months after the first release, we will make up a good plan taking into account all the results from the first launch, and then make the announcement in Europe.
Publishing and launching games
Well, for example, Caliber was taken by the 1C game studios. We actively participate in the production. The other team is working on Pagan Online, they have already used their mechanics in the game, and people seem to enjoy it. It has plenty of content, 10 absolutely (and I mean it) unique characters in any aspect. It will take dozens of hours to get through the whole game as a single player.
We have a little publishing department that picks the projects, looks through all of them. The mobile direction is more developed, guys there have more standardized rules. They look for small teams that are able to create a prototype. It’s fine to come over with some finished prototypes, but it’s more common, that the idea is discussed, then tested and checked, if the idea has any future.
Engines and Technologies
I will try to describe the whole picture. We have an engine that works for more than 10 years now, and it was fixed and enhanced by our team. There were some mistakes, but WoT has been working for 9 years, and not every engine is capable of it. It’s impossible to hack it and change any settings in the game. WoT has its own customized version of the engine. Of course, we are fine with sharing it, we aren’t going to make a license for it since it’s pretty huge and used mainly for big projects, such as WoT. We decided for ourselves that we aren’t a technology company and we won’t sell engines. First of all, some of our projects include custom solutions, so they can run on any platform. We also have a new project in Great Britain. We’ve bought a small studio and use it as a base for a new team that will develop AAA games. The team consists of British, Americans, Germans, and French staff. The executive is Sean Decker, he is a great professional. I visit them almost every week. The work they show is crazy but in a good sense. The result is going to be amazing. The art is also on another level. In Wargaming, each team has its own art staff. We also have Central Art department, where all the orders come in. It’s founded in Kyiv and consists of 3D artists, architectors, etc.
Each team has an art group, sometimes it can be huge. We also have art agencies and video agencies, but they aren’t that big. It’s our inner video production studio. They work with marketing inquiries, some CG-videos. They impress me most of all. Now, we are able to do all the production by ourselves. We do a lot to keep our artists happy. These guys need festivals, prizes at festivals, interesting new challenges. We try to take external orders to give some variety.
Central Art is all about three-dimensional models, animations, effects, and more. Orders come from the whole Wargaming team, then get distributed internally and, of course, are delivered on time and with high quality. Sometimes, we don’t have enough time, so at stressful moments we have to turn to external outsourcers. In this case, we work with some individuals. In total, we have 500-600 specialists, now I already know that they are top-notch. The quality and professionalism bar has increased, immensely. 500-600 artists create all kinds of three-dimensional graphic designs. That’s amazing. Everything that you can imagine on the chart, from film graphics to the high-poly ships that you see in games, we have all this in large quantities. Sometimes actors are involved. And now, even creative tasks diversity has increased due to a large number of projects and some external orders that we regularly do for the sake of diversity. Last year we launched a new initiative, that we called WG Forge, where we invite “hungry” students or junior artists, provide training courses for them, and the best stay with us. We have different directions: artists, copywriters, programming in certain languages, for which we have three-, six-, nine-month educational programs. We actively promote it these activities and are looking for talents. The agency works with all markets due to the lack of expertise from Europe, America or Asia. We are looking for people from all over the world.
Decision-making process
As a large company, we have a certain process, and you can’t buy everything that is on the market. If you look from another perspective, there are expensive things, starting from the Windows package and ending with graphic packages. We made some basic decisions for common formal things, everything works fine. We trust the heads of the agency and departments in terms of choice. If something new came out, and it is necessary, there’s no problem with purchasing it.
Well, here artists do the work. They manage their work, you don’t have to run after them, so they can give a look at something new. Usually, professionals, who work in this field, brew it themselves, attend forums, conferences. They search on the Internet, they have subscriptions, so they find and test new things themselves. Then, they come to the manager and ask them if it’s possible to get new software, for example. This is just a kind of natural and balanced process. Once we want to buy something, we have a special service that will check whether we have already bought it, evaluate the price, whether it is possible to get a discount, and so on. We do it without fanaticism though, the evaluation process quite reasonable.