🍾 🎙️ 🎧 Explanation: why monetizers don't have a soul and toxic team members are the most effective 🔓 🗽 👊🏿

This is probably one of the most candid live broadcasts that we have conducted, with a representative of two of the most hated professions in game development: monetization and manager.

On July 7, Vyacheslav Dreer, a game designer and producer of games with 12 years of experience, spoke on our Instagram account . Slava worked in the gaming divisions of web money, mail.ru, Photostrana and took part in more than 50 other projects.

During the broadcast, he said without bullshit and evasions:

how interesting games with poor monetization die and how monetizers turn such projects into profitable
why monetization is sometimes important to the players themselves
why fair games cannot be made where everyone has equal opportunities
why is it not a shame to remain an average person all your life, and not become a genius
why you can't send the best employees to conferences
why a game programmer is the main person in game development
what kind of people are they pouring into online games for a million rubles a month
why toxic people shouldn't be fired and how they can be the most effective people on a team
how stress resistance helps to increase salaries by orders of magnitude

We are sharing the transcript with you.

My name is Slava, and I have devoted a very large part of my life to games. I have dealt with them in different companies, in different positions.

The main position I started with was a game designer. After that, I grew to a manager, for some time I was engaged in monetization, 3 times I was in the position of a producer and a head of the department. He took part in 50+ game projects on various platforms - mobile, social networks, browsers, client games. This is my experience. The maximum number of people I managed was 32. The main companies I worked with were MAIL.RU, Photostrana, Avatarika, a subsidiary of WebMoney. And many more small ones.

Is there any monetization after loot boxes - except for the battle pass with loot boxes?

It's full, loot boxes are not the main thing. If the game is about heroes beating other heroes, you can release new heroes and sell them. You don't need a loot box for this.

Further, if the game stalled, then you can release a new event and make such a monetization that it would be possible to complete it completely for only $ 50, for example. If the player wants to go through - put him the first, most significant, prize if he actively plays for a week (this is how long the event lasts) and pays only $ 1. In this moment, you put something vital to him.

These are just two examples, but there are actually a lot of them. Loot boxes are a mechanic that works well and efficiently, but they are not basic. It is simply the easiest to do and gives the fastest result.

How to justify the presence of monetization in an indie game where the target community is small? In this case, expansion looks more honest. Are there other methods of small but methodical support of the game from the existing community?

There are many beautiful words, little meaning. “How to justify the presence of monetization in an indie game, where the target community is small” - where does this conclusion come from? Such a conclusion can only be made by people who look at these very statistics.

If the player thinks that the community will be small, this does not mean that the developers see and think so.

They launch a project with, say, 3000 users. They see that day 30 returns are 25%. This suggests that if they drive a lot more traffic, they will have a lot more users.

From time to time, some of the sites on which we play - by the way, the ru segment is included in them - are needed to test the main game mechanics. That is, you see that the toy is small and promises to be small, which means that the developers are not going to localize themselves (for Japan, for mobile phones, for client games). That is, they gave their best on Steam and floundered there. But that might not be the case.

Perhaps you are now playing in the place where people are finishing their product and screwing on the mechanics - this is the first justification. This is what the developers call "nubovnik".

The second option is when the quality of the community game is beyond praise. In my memory, there were such products that made a revenue of 100 million rubles for 2K users, because these users were very wealthy and used to playing for big money. They liked it, everything suited them, and everything was done according to them and their desires. Well, a person wants to throw a lot of money every day - on himself, or even dress his entire clan, if he has so much free money; although the clan has already squashed everyone on the server, it still continues to do so.

In such conditions, it may be that the server dies out and a completely new server is created, where these guys are not. But under these conditions, even if there is only one team of such wealthy people, or even one person, a very cool monetization is screwed on. It makes excuses when you look at the statistics. From the outside it seems - "monetization is tough, there are not many players." But a person looks at the statistics and sees that what he launched is bought, which means that the quality of the community is good. And everything is fine with his income.

Well, and the third option: the person who did the monetization is incompetent. This rarely happens, although this option should always be worked out if you see something clearly uninteresting. It is desirable to have the first two options.

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These games come from good people. From time to time it happens that companies of 3-4 people who are passionate about games (they want to make them, for them games are sacred and most important) take and make games.

But they think that people will give them money out of gratitude. They do not calculate the balance, do not come up with products for users, they just make a good game to please users. We are all grateful to them, of course.

Recently, there was an example: the game was the Top 4 in the world among AR games and brought in very modest money. The idea was that the user would play it, feel it, and pay himself. But the user does not do this very often, if he is not motivated.

That's how it happens: guys launch a product, it keeps a good number of users - people play, rejoice, get interest, but don't pay.

Then these guys come to the monetizer and say: let's make the game bring money for salaries and servers? Let it become a little less interesting.

In this case, we begin to look at how obvious and tasty the suggestions we can give to the user are. We collect the initial package and think over the role-playing component - the way the game will be role-playing, for example.

The starter pack will contain a set of gold and crystals with a magic sword, it all costs $ 2. We look at how often this package is shown to the user. Collecting statistics:, for example, 12K newcomers entered the game, and of them only 500 saw the offer? It is not enough. Should see all 12K that entered. Although it is still necessary to make an amendment so that the user goes through the tutorial and sees the sentence after it (for example, the tutorial will pass 9K out of 12 - all 9K should see the sentence).

Further - the sentence seen should click on the user. It so happens that people put their tasty offer in a place where it is not obvious to the user that there can be sales. Everything should be on the main page, the nameplate should shout to you that the offer is profitable and you need to hurry.

Next, we look at what will happen after the user buys the offer - will the quality of his game change? Maybe the sword that goes into it does not give anything special to the player - then you need to ask the question: "Why did you make such an offer that the user is not interested in buying?"

The developer replies that he does not want imbalance, or something similar. But he could give something really useful! He wanted to create a "doll" - a conditional offer that is not really valid; thought it would be bought. This is the wrong approach.

What can be done? An example of what can be done: we give the user the opportunity to go through, for example, the first locations or waves with mobs in a convenient and comfortable position. He does everything easily, everything is beautiful.

After a comfortable location 1 (let it be a village), he gets to location 2 (a conventional cave with orcs, or something else with the word "orcs") and the first orc starts bending him down. Doesn't kill at all, but creates problems. And just here a pack with the same sword, but with a different name ("sword of the orc killer") should pop up. The user buys this sword and the difficulties are quickly overcome. It is profitable for him, it is good for him, he will continue to play normally. I think this is a good semi-private example.

How ethical is monetization that affects gameplay?

Maximum ethical.

Let's say you are an office worker. All day at work, playing in the evening to relax. You are in your right, you feel good, you want to have fun.

But, if you run into a pvp student who has been farming all day, then you will snatch from him over and over again. Schoolchildren are highly motivated to farm, they do it all those 10 hours while you work - they will have a lot of gold and everything else. Such a process will only make you angry, not amuse.

But if a rule like "1 hour of farming = 1 dollar" is incorporated into monetization, then after 10 hours the student will farm these conditional 10 dollars (and will feel that he is a good fellow), you will come and just invest these 10 dollars, and you will be equal with him.

Or, if you want to beat him with a guarantee, invest 20. The next day he will be more motivated to farm.

You come home from work, you are tired, you feel bad - the last thing you want to do is play 4 skating rinks so that the mood would drop even more. You want to win and relax, and the money will help you do this.

When does a project need monetizers?

Probably, in those, when the game model has grown together, the product has fame, and all the main monetization methods have been tested.

At first, you sharpen the game mechanics - after all, we make games, and they have to be interesting. After the game has become fun, inexperienced people just wait to get paid, but this usually does not happen. After that, they invite a monetizer, who starts poking around in the subtleties described above, and in others. The game becomes livelier, more cheerful, more interesting.

Secondly, when you need to increase income. Let's say they gradually grew while you screwed the functionality to the product - this always gives growth. But at one point they stop growing - let's say, when the content is already 4 years old.

In this case, you need a monetizer that will improve not the quantity, but the quality of the content, and the balance, and things that you did not take into account. It will take into account the cost of traffic, returns, monetization points, banners, store revisions, trigger offers.

In general, everything is simple. If there is a project and you need it to earn more, then you need a monetizer.

Four user archetypes - hardcore, schoolboy, housewife, office worker (plays to relax): four lives that the monetizer lives with every game.

This is true. Every time I am invited to a new product, I start 4 game sessions. This usually takes me 2-2.5 days. I live all these 4 types of life in parallel.

First, I get used to being a hardcore player. I want to learn all the intricacies of the game, make effective builds, be the smartest and steer on the skill, and that the game itself is deep.

After that, I come in as a schoolboy - I'm interested in communication, research and the possibility of farming. I want adult uncles to win due to the fact that I can stay awake at night, skip school, and farm, and the game should give me such an opportunity.

Then I go as a housewife, whose husband left for work, leaving a salary card. In a slow cooker, food is cooked, the VC is scrolled through, the floors are washed, it's boring. I want to play a simple game where everything is pretty, where you can choose a set with boots to match the color of the character's eyes and a beautiful suit so that the heroine is the most beautiful and the best, this is important. Other players should be able to give me gifts and like me to be the best and most popular. I do not want to be the strongest - everything should be simple, pretty, and everyone loved me.

And the office worker: I'm having a hard day, I just want to rest. I don't really need to load my brain with anything else, I just want to memorize the usual schemes and builds, and run. And in no case do I want to be bent over. Since I am a conscientious employee, I do not have the opportunity to enter the game for 10 hours and farm. If important game events fall, for example, at 2 pm or 4 pm, the office employee immediately falls off - he will not be interested in the game, he will not be able to compete with others.

I do a session in each of these 4 lives a day, and repeat the next day and every other day. I try to determine how well a product fits all four types. While they are fundamentally different, there are indeed products that fit everyone.

Then I try to find out statistically who is the main audience - I look at the gender of the players, their time and frequency of being in the game. Depending on which group prevails, the game can be changed quite flexibly. The main thing is not only to understand who to focus on in the main, but also not to forget about the other groups: they are also an audience that brings money, creates competition in the project, crowds clans, and so on.

Illiterate collection of analytics: how can you not do so as not to stay with a popular game, but in zero?

Over the past 2 years, I have come across an illiterate collection of analytics quite often. In my favorite company, where I worked before, there was no such weak attitude towards analytics. But, as a rule, people are comfortable with the total amount of analytics in Unity Analytics / AppStore Connect / Firebase, and they don't dig deep.

Let's say there is an event that starts and ends on Friday. We launched it, saw that they were not playing it - for example, out of 12K players, 300 passed it. Conclusion - the event is unpopular, we are not launching it anymore.

This is an illiterate approach. First, you need to see how many people were physically able to see the entry point button for the event. Sometimes, even on such trifles, people are pierced. When 12K people enter the project per day, and only 300 of them entered the event, you need to revise the entry point to the event.

Let's move on: maybe people came in, but got stuck at step 3 out of 12? We need to get into the balance and see what is there. Maybe there is something difficult to pass that needs to be redone or made so that this thing can be completed for $ 0.50. The player's ability to choose between farming days and a small deposit is fine.

In addition, of course, there is a huge amount of analytics that is not collected correctly.

In principle, all analytical moments are when you sit down, dig a little deeper, divide the audience into smaller pieces, make more correct conclusions - and do not forget that sometimes it turns out that programmers make mistakes and collect analytics incorrectly.

If some numbers look suspicious, you need to go to the programmer and tell him about it; about 25% of the time, the programmer discovers that he has done bullshit and fixes it, and the figure becomes believable. Programmers are also real people, they sometimes screw up, especially if they are not checked.

Why can't we make fair games where everyone has equal opportunities?

Try to try this situation for yourself. I come up to you and say - and pay 10 $. You say - what will I get for it? And nothing will happen, just a pretty skin, and that's it. You will not be stronger, nothing will change.

You say no, I don’t want to. And you will be right! Users pay for something tangible. Women want to be the most beautiful, men want to be the strongest. Now, if I offer a sword that is 20% stronger than usual - 200% is not necessary, 20% is enough - you will pay, and you will know that you have one of the items in the set 20% cooler.

Or, for example, for a long time you do not get the last missing item from the set for a complete bonus, and there will no longer be an opportunity to get it (or just a scanty chance), but there is an opportunity to buy it.

Then you either endure another six months without a bonus, or buy it for $ 40. Of course, this shouldn't create a super imbalance. It shouldn't be that you buy something for $ 10 and go beat the whole server. + 20% strength for a thing worth money - this is normal: if a person collects several such things, then he will be able to beat one other player with a guarantee, but not two.

And don't forget to give ordinary players the opportunity to farm some of these things.

Any player should be able to farm for a small set, for example, 3 weeks in advance for each item. Let's say if there are 3 things in it, then this is 2 months of content for a non-paying player. This is quite good.

Either you spend $ 50 and miss two months of farming, being on a par with those who came into the game earlier and farm these two months, or you farm yourself.

The most important person in the game team is the * game * programmer, why is this?

I’ll tell you this: with people who were site builders, or came from 1C or something else like that, to programmers, you’ll be creepy. But after a real game programmer joins the team, you will simply pray for him.

So, let's say you sit and write out the technical assignment for a person, and it says: next week you need to make an inventory in which there will be things and potions, and you need to be able to put them on. The game programmer already understood you.

But a person who is not in the world of games will need not 3 phrases, but 3 pages of TK - what each thing does, how, it will be necessary to draw a bunch of pictures, describe what the potion does, what the sword makes, in which slot you need to stick them ... And even when you write it all down, the person still will not understand right away - this three-leaf TK will have to be taken apart with him, answer leading questions, and after that he will come to you 3-4 times more.

A programmer who knows how the game inventory works will understand everything himself and will only sometimes ask what stats and special effects to assign with potions. He will take everything into account, quickly sketch, and it will turn out well. Communication with such people is much easier, the quality of their work is much better. And besides, they are motivated players who are interested in making games.

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In fact, any "further perspective of IP" is beautiful words that have little to do with reality. There is never a lot of money. You see that you can get money - get money.

Additional content for a full-fledged game - relatively recently appeared as a phenomenon, approximately from the next Assassin's Creed. There, an artificial balance was attached to the AAA game, which required farming, but you could also pay and play more comfortable.

Maybe it's not very cool. But if it is effective - and if Ubisoft thinks so, then it should be effective - then they are great.

The disadvantage of this model is that, indeed, after the implementation of such a thing in your product, user loyalty drops. If the next product is made worse, it really turns out that you slaughtered the golden chicken. This will not affect existing Assassin's Creed titles, but will affect future ones.

But there is such a situation in a company when everything is bad with money, and in order to get out and stay afloat for the next 5 years, you need to earn more money now - otherwise there will be no company and the next games. This often happens in companies that inflate their staff; incomes fall, and a situation arises when it is not clear how to pay good salaries to 300 people (with good taxes).

“Community loyalty” - and this is a measured figure, you can believe in it - is the opinion of only 5% of players. Everyone who is active on the forum - both whiners and praises - is 5% of all players.

Moreover, the negative is discussed much more often than the positive. If everything is good in your game, you don't go to the forum - you play further, you are fine; if not, then you go to the forum and look for like-minded people. In any case, the forum is not the foundation. Real opinion and loyalty are calculated not by forums, but by analytics. That is, it looks like a dump of users, how many they play and pay.

We had such situations when a user was shouting loudly on the forum "LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE, YOU RIPPED THE ENTIRE GAME FOR ME, SO THAT I STILL PLAY WITH YOU." Then I asked the programmer to keep track of the logs of this character.

And it turned out that he did not leave the product, continued to farm and do other things in the game. If he says one thing on the forum, but does another in the game, then, perhaps, for other users it is noticeable - on the forums - some kind of "dropped loyalty level" with complaints that "everything is gone, the admins are pumping out the real", but the numbers are visible other things.

And then I think - well, okay, the person got excited. Maybe he has a need to walk and swear, like a grandmother in a clinic. And nothing special.

You need to draw conclusions from analytics. If you launch an event, and after that users fall off, payments become less, then this is really bad, the event is bad. And if everything happens the other way around, but at the same time someone yells on the forum - well, let them yell.

Developers and managers usually do not climb forums, we have a specially trained person for this. He always sits outside the office by himself, because we don't want him to be saturated with forum pain and then go and drip on our brains. It is important for us that he, somewhere far from us, process this pain, live, and in an unobtrusive mode convey to us the most important thing of the perceived - what is really bad.

In general, everything is done on the basis of numbers. Everything else is an illusion that the community can somehow influence us.

In short: a person bought something and believes that he bought it entirely - are we deceiving him?

Yes. And this is not very good.

Outside the Russian region, no one will allow you to do this. One of the features of the Western community is that these people know their rights very well. If you haven't prescribed something before you do it, you will be dragged through the courts.

There were situations when, for example, a collection of swords sold for money was introduced, and after that (six months later) - a new collection, better than the old one, and immediately lawsuits went to court. Pieces 600. Because then, six months ago, you did not warn users that there would be even better swords, and this violated their rights.

Therefore, read the conditions carefully, although everything is usually written very vaguely there. If you read it well and thoughtfully, it turns out that you do not receive all the content in its entirety.

Climb into any Blizzard game and its EULA, see how exactly they cheat players. They have been battling lawsuits from users for over 16 years - from WoW, from Diablo.

They even made warnings in the EULA like "it is not recommended to play for more than 10 hours in a row", "this game is addictive", "this is not a final product, there will be more additions, be careful." All European games, in fact, also prescribe this.

Are there people who single-handedly created world-class games?

Yes, there are.

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the industry, there was IceFrog - the creator of DotA. The first DotA was just a map created in the editor for WarCraft III - there you could design yourself, write scripts.

He had an idea and created a world-class masterpiece. IceFrog earned 50 thousand dollars on each update (where there would be, say, two new heroes). Then he left, the game evolved and saved WarCraft III from kinking. IceFrog himself was bought by Valve, and he created DOTA 2 - but at the start he was alone.

Experts will now correct that in fact the developer was originally different, he disappeared in an unknown direction, and IceFrog appropriated his map - but this is particular.

The second example is Notch. This is the programmer who created Minecraft - for the most part, alone. Before Minecraft, he made 50 products that no one knows or heard about, but only Minecraft thundered all over the world, and in 2012 Notch entered the ten most influential gaming companies in the world (being one person), in seventh place.

We can also mention the creator of Agar.io - he was also not very steamy, but he created a game that made a splash in the first weeks, and even now does not bend.

There are people who alone can and do something. They are building a name for themselves and a community. Sometimes they use the services of remote artists and other professionals, but do not have full-time employees. For example, they can order drawing of elements for money; sometimes a player comes to them and offers to fully maintain the project forum for drawing a conventional nominal sword.

The main core is still always the loners themselves. I am currently interacting with two lone developers, helping to screw up monetization. The third person I also work with was a loner until a certain time, but now he has rented a room for three people to work with, with whom two more work remotely, he now has a team.

There are world-class loners, there are those who just survive on their own. It is important to understand this: a company of 300 people, where the lowest paid employee receives 3000 euros (and this is all multiplied by taxes) must earn huge sums in order to simply exist. And a small team of one person can launch a trifle that brings 200 thousand rubles a month for, say, three years.

If you're only one, then that's good. And such a product may not be one, but three, for example. And one more of them can shoot even up to 10 million rubles a month. If you only pay taxes and server rent, that is, you don’t rent an office, don’t keep a staff, then this is generally cool.

There are successful loners: programmers, artists, game designers. Even marketers: he orders a project and knows how to drive traffic to it. Now there are many offices that assemble "turnkey", for example, games like "three in a row" for 10 thousand dollars. You bought one, you know how to work with traffic - and you pour it. If you see shoals, the studio will quickly upgrade the project in the places that you name. Loners survive much better because they are more flexible and not interested in billions - they only need little money to stay afloat and be considered successful.

Is it almost free to create a game?

You can, and I sometimes see such a success. The idea is that in order to create a game for free, you have to be one of three main roles: programmer, game designer, artist. And you must do this part of the work at the expense of your own time.

After that, if you are a game designer, then you should at least understand a little about scripts and the rest, and now you should go and take the finished peel from the product. Relatively speaking, you can look at the same WarCraft editor

Who is a good manager, how do you become one?

A lot is invested in the concept of a "good manager". Every time you come to a new company, it turns out that each team puts something new into this concept, and if you are a good manager, you must meet all the expectations of all companies.

Let's say one of the companies expects you to be a good programmer as well - the team lead of a team of programmers. And, being the best programmer, you must be able to teach other programmers, communicate with the team, pump it up, and perform the most difficult tasks.

Other teams I've worked for make a game product, but they also save on game designers. That is, the game is done, but the game designer is not hired. And this position is replaced by a manager - that is, he must also be a person who is well versed in games. I always did it quite well.

It may also be that the company works with outsourcing. Then your main feature is representativeness. You are determined by how you sell yourself to the customer, talk to him, what things you subscribe to and not subscribe to. And after that - how you communicate with the team.

Sometimes there is a position in which you need to show yourself well in front of investors. You sit on their carpet and have to report every 2 weeks for every sneeze on the project. This is not at all like working with a team or audience. This is a very high level, and each report should be prepared like nothing else. Garbage should not be in your head or in papers.

You need maximum mobilization, otherwise they will bite you like a nut. These people turn around in millions - they are very good at understanding people, noticing when they are trying to sell nonsense, prioritizing. They ask a question, and until they get a satisfying answer, they won't get off of you.

You need to be always ready for unpleasant questions: why the release of the product is delayed, why is there little revenue? You could have made the product faster?

A good manager must correspond to all these qualities. As you grow as a manager, you grow in these skills. They are very different for each set. Someone should just set tasks well in Jira, someone should communicate with neighboring departments, when there are no personal advertisers and testers, and you have to queue up to these departments and communicate well with them.

You must combine all these moments, you must be a person who always has his own plan. In case there isn't a big plan, you should always have one that you carry in your head. If he is not there, you are not ready to be a good manager. This must be taken into account.

How to get a cool team?

First, you must understand what kind of people you need. To do this, you need to understand what kind of product you are making.

For example, it can be a product with deep logic, high loads, medium art, and little balance. Or a very beautiful casual game with simple logic and balance. Or even a text game.

As a rule, you already have a team, and you live and work in it. You must understand who is included in it: let's say there are 8 programmers - 4 client and 4 server, 2 animators, 2 illustrators, 2 designers, 2 game designs (one is a project), plus 1 tester and level designer.

And you need to understand what kind of game can be done with such forces. Let's say that such a team cannot make a game of the WoW level - there are too few game designers, but there is a strong programming component (8 programmers is cool) and a fairly average art (6 people). Therefore, you can make a game with complex logic, good graphics, but not too many game mechanics.

In case there are 2 programmers, 6 and 4 game designers, you can do something casual with donations for mobile phones: let everything be beautiful, bright, prizes and congratulations fly out every second. There are a lot of graphics, a lot of game design, and little logic. And so, taking into account the needs, it is necessary to recruit a team.

A cool team needs cool people. Tough people come under a tough idea, tough conditions, and, what is important, a tough person than they are. There is a whole layer of people who do not tolerate an "idiot" over themselves, that is, just a person who understands the issue worse than them.

If they see this, they begin to show resistance to him. They start to double-check everything he says because he is an "idiot". Therefore, in order to lure a tough person into a team and provide it with a long, stable, calm life - and it is precisely such people who can do this - you have to be cooler than him. You should understand a bunch of questions better than him.

But you don't have to be a great programmer yourself in order to lure a cool programmer: you just need to be a cool person who knows the product inside and out. Let's say there is a programmer who starts: "I made your code, I am a game programmer!" You say, “Okay, are you able to make the whole product? Can you add game design components, monetization, marketing to it? No. But I can do it. Let's work as a team. You do your part well, I am my part. Then the project will go off, and each of us will receive enough money so that we do not feel cheated. " The person understands that he is a really good programmer, but at the same time he does not fumble in marketing and design, so he will say: yes, let's work.

After that, you normally interact with him and do not indicate how much salt to add in his kitchen. How a person sees his part - which he understands better than you - let him do it. A cool specialist will require special attention and attitude, and he will need to give them, otherwise he will leave.

Of course, you need to create basic amenities in the office. Corporate events, coffee machines, social packages and so on. A person who produces a good result should receive recognition from the company in the form of such micro-sticks. If you only have a water cooler from the social package, this is not normal for good specialists. So only students will come to you after the institute, who will need to be taught everything. And, of course, interesting tasks are needed.

The two most important qualities of a manager?

You will be very surprised now. When you come to interviews, you are asked two questions and presented with two requirements that you probably already got. When you hear about communication and stress resistance for the 60th time, you stop taking them seriously. But these are the two main qualities for a manager.

Stress resistance. It determines how high you rise, not only in work, but in general in life. Now you have risen to a team of 5 people - and a new level of stress hit you, which was not there before. And maybe you stayed at this level - or fell back on a smaller team (and a lower salary), because you are not able to process stress, you are too uncomfortable.

But if you are able to do this, then you move further and higher, grow, while feeling normal. This applies not only to companies. Let's say you opened a coffee shop, and stress immediately poured on you: checks, possibly fines, and so on. Not coping with stress - they closed the coffee shop. They coped - they opened the second, the third, maybe - they began to seize the city and fight for it with other coffee chains, at fundamentally higher levels.

I communicated with very well advanced people in this life, and one person was interestingly deposited in my memory. Last year we had an informal meeting about projects in a cafe, and he mentioned in passing that he "had recorded a $ 3 million loss on BTC in February." I asked again. He: "Well, I just saw that there was a loss, I fixed myself and got out of there, I try not to deal with BTC anymore."

At the same time, the person remained absolutely calm, benevolent, joyful - although he lost 3 million dollars, this did not stop him from enjoying the pear pie. After that, I returned to the office, and there one programmer (a junior, who later did not justify himself) walked all day, shouted and worried about the fact that his video was not uploaded to his telegrams.

Compare the stress levels of both - and how they deal with it. One person remains calm and understands that the world is full of new ideas and opportunities, and the other gnaws at himself and spoils everyone around him because of a trifle. In general, the level of stress that you can handle on your own will either lift you up or stall.

And you always need to take the burden by yourself. I often communicate with people who are in top management positions, and most of them are also on antidepressants. They once took a load that they cannot bear. After all, how does career advancement work: you have a team of, say, 20 people, and you give some result. You have 7 projects, you lead them, everything is fine, the company is getting money. And they tell you: now take not 7, but 10 projects, and 40 people are added to the team. But in order to lead 20 people and 7 projects, you have already spent not 8, but 12 hours a day, just did not tell anyone. You worked hard, you even liked your job. And now you have to work even harder. At first you are happy: wow, I got a promotion, I'm cool. And then you realize that you have 16 working hours a day.You take these extra hours somewhere, and it starts to devour you. Stress levels skyrocket. The people at the top are forced to work every second. They are always at work with their heads, and if there is a free minute, they immediately try to return to it. Their level of resistance to stress must be high.

The second point is sociability. This is how good you are at communicating with the team, with related departments, with investors, with users, and in representing your company. If you are outgoing, energetic, positive and joyful, the biggest bonus is creating connections around you. Then, if problems arise, you go to the people you like and ask for advice.

This does not mean that you should force these people to do their work, of course, but you can ask for advice to save time. How well they want to help you depends on their skill to communicate.

I had an example when I was given a command from June programmers, there were 5 of them, plus 1 middle. From time to time, we faced problems that the Juns spent 4 days on - precisely because of a lack of experience. In this case, what saved me was that I still had connections with powerful game programmers from my previous company. I just sometimes asked them how they solve this or that problem. In 5 or 10 minutes, such an answer was given, after which the Juns said - this is what was missing, in 2 hours we will do everything. And they did. It's the same with artists; if you have accumulated a pool of remote artists, you can contact them at any time when your own artist is sick, overloaded, etc. and get high-quality material for money.

And after all this, you yourself feel wonderful thanks to your sociability.

I must also say about personnel changes - there communication skills also help as nowhere else. Let's say you have some kind of ghoul in your team, you need to drain it. You tell the general - you ought to send this ghoul from here, and he replies - “oh, everything will fall apart without him, he has already threatened him with dismissal several times, we try not to touch him while he is doing his job, and we quickly don’t have another such specialist we will find ".

If you have built connections, you may be able to answer: “I know a good person from another company, he is the same specialist or even more skillful, just not a ghoul. Let's give him a salary of ten more, he will be able to solve everything. "

At first, the gendir may not believe that nothing will fall apart without a ghoul. But you insist on your own, make a castling - let the ghoul roll the carts in Auchan, and your man comes to you, with whom you have worked for a long time, he is cool, he immediately picks up the work. And he says: there really isn't much work here, I did better. Hiring high-quality people is a great way to save the company money and help the team; now, remote HR teams take one or two salaries for a new person, but in this way you leave this money inside the company, you get a normal person in the team, and at the same time the status of a person who knows how to save money.

What if you have worked in the industry for 8 years, but there are no special achievements? What conclusions to draw on yourself, how to analyze your work? Should I continue? Do companies need such people?

Well, let's say I myself am not much higher than this level. I am just a simple strong middle as a manager, monetizer and game development, I have some experience, I share it with pleasure.

I worked on profitable projects, but I did not create them: I just worked as part of a team that worked for results. 2 times I increased the product by 50% (that is, I made the same product bring 50% more in a month, and again the same product in six months). I don't have any super successes. I was the general producer, but only for small projects. I was the head of the game direction (one of the three, there were 9 projects that had to be monitored so that they brought money).

Very often people conclude that if they have not achieved anything great, then they need to go somewhere else. It is not right. In a company, for example, out of 150 people, successful work requires 90 people who are just strong middle peasants - not geniuses, superheroes, mega-hard workers.

Such people do the main, fundamental work. If you are such a person, then you are holding a piece of the company. If the company has 150 adventurers who every day will come up with some new ideas, want to earn at least $ 5 million per game per month, demand that all products be world-class, and so on, the company will fall apart. Behind the back of every initiative person should be those who really know how to finish the work to the end, and do it efficiently. If you are such a person, then that is good. There is nothing wrong with that, and the company needs you.

According to statistics, about 85% of young people with burning eyes calm down and become the same strong middle. And also, according to statistics, one person in his life can create only one brilliant product. All geniuses who once created something cool cannot repeat their success. You can check this for yourself with a deeper look. Yes, there are companies whose founder once created “product number 1”, and after 8 years “product number 2” appeared, which has become no worse; but if you look closely, it turns out that the second product was mostly created by other people. Maybe he taught them, or they already came to the company cool, but they created it.

If you are happy with your work, if you are in a good team, then you do not need to go anywhere. There is no shame in being just one of the strong pillars of the company. Personally, I am very grateful to the people that I have - I know that you can rely on them, that they will always do everything with high quality. If you feel it is yours, keep working. You don't have to grab the stars from the sky. According to statistics, few projects go global, but companies and people live normally. According to the same statistics, football is played not only in the Major League; in all leagues, people kick balls and feel great because they love what they do.

You've worked for eight years - and who told you that the time for your product has not come this year, or next year, and you will not create it? Maybe your eight years of experience will allow you to create something really cool.

Why is it a bad practice to expel toxic people from a team? Why are these people one of the most valuable in the team, are they a problem, should they be avoided? Do they exist at all?

I'll tell the story. I joined gamedev in 2008, until 2009 I worked remotely; I came to Moscow and in August was hired by Astrum Online, and before that I was not on the staff.

Until 2016, there was no modern concept of "office ethics" and other things. There was just a bunch of energetic people who loved games and wanted to make a cool game for themselves, so that other players would bring them money. This is the logic of all players who have previously invested in other projects.

Any stupid concepts: "microclimate", "toxicity" simply did not exist. If you screwed up a lot, then people were not at all embarrassed to burst into the office and smack you with such words, among which only the inserts "in" and "on" were polite. And you didn't treat it like something creepy - you screwed up yourself. The programmer who because of you spent the weekend fixing your joint might have sent you out of spite next time - and that was fine too, because you yourself are to blame. And if some cheap trick tried to trick you, then the devil with him, he is a trick.

Nobody saw this as a problem. Most of the companies I communicated with believed that all this is not bad or good - it just is.

But in about 2016, some of the HRs carried out research work. It is known that in order to confirm that they do not eat their bread for nothing, HRs need to periodically release some new discoveries and new turns-directions - in general, do a bunch of pseudo-necessary work, which they then tell very nicely about. And this work turned out to be a study of "toxicity". And it went so badly that all HR-s in unison started talking about it, about the microclimate, about the obligatory avoidance of “toxic people”, about “three ways of working with these people” and so on.

This is an artificially created problem that people suddenly rushed to solve. Now I will try to convey exactly what the trouble is.

Yes, indeed, there are “toxic people”. But most of the people on this trendy wave began, without understanding, write down the "toxic" everyone. If a person does not get enough sleep due to the fact that he has a small child at home, and comes to work gloomy, and blathers once at someone - that's it. He is "toxic", you don't need to be friends with him. Another person's cat died - he also comes in a depressed mood, and they climb up to him: “life is fun, don't be sad”! He makes a response in response, and the result is the same.

Or take a team of three. Let two people do the work for the waste, and the third does for himself and for these, so that the department gives efficiency. You meet two boobies near the cooler - they are all laid-back, talking about something funny. And then the third one emerges from the office and barks at them: “Why are you hanging out here, there is no work, or what? Get to work quickly. " And it can also be recorded as "toxic" if you do not delve into the situation.

The trouble is not that the problem exists, but that a huge number of normal people are recorded as toxic. Each of you is in such a state when you make a far from fantastic impression. You can not attach importance to this, but you can stick a label, not give the opportunity to justify yourself and abstract you from everyone.

I often cite another example. Imagine a big beautiful liner. Music is playing on board, people in white tailcoats, everything is beautiful, a mega-waltz is being danced. Everything is good, champagne, an atmosphere of complete harmony. Suddenly, a hatch opens on the deck, and from there, with the words "WHAT THE FUCK," a dirty mechanic crawls out, stupefied from stuffiness. Smoke is pouring out of the hatch, the mechanic swears at everyone. He spent eight hours repairing something on this ship up to his ears in fuel oil so that the whole ship would not sink, and he does not understand these people. And they are all like: “Oh, how toxic you are, you don’t understand that the whole world is not only made of negativity? Look at the positive side! "

Now imagine that on the ship there will be only beautiful people in tailcoats with sequins, and there will be no mechanics. Either the ship will go to the bottom, or half of the beautiful people will have to go down below deck and work instead of the mechanic.

I will add one more thing: you must be able and able to fight off the attacks of any "toxic person" that gets in your way. Not only in the company, but also in life.

Many tricksters in companies know that the boar's roar is the best argument in an argument. You come to ask for something - he barked at you, and you ran away. He is comfortable, he feels good, you don’t load his head with your tasks, but he does his own.

If he started to say: “Listen, please, Seryozha, now I can't, let's get together later,” you would already have won. You would say: "Misha, you understand how important it is, let's do it now, everything is on fire here." And he again - "Seryozha, I can not, they hung up their tasks on me." But then he barked once - the other ran away, the man again goes about his tasks. Conveniently.

You must learn to beat off all attacks, or not notice them, and get your results in any case. I can tell you: you will not find a single top-level manager, busy with large teams and budgets, for whom it will become a "problem for the whole day" that he was running around the office and someone blurted out something to him. These people solve such large problems that for them such "toxicity" is like a corn for a person who loves to travel. This is something that goes without saying, you get used to it and stop perceiving it as a problem.

Don't "get rid of toxic people." These are just people who have seen something or have received something less. You just need to know how to work with them. They often don't mean anything bad. You can't imagine a situation when someone comes to work and starts catching people in order to express themselves over them? It just doesn't happen.

They are often the nicest employees. They, with the words "YES YOUR MOTHER", are repairing what positive people in white shirts have done, who, in the event of a joint, clap their eyes and say: "Oh, we are one team, come on, can you help us?"

What books and lectures should you read before making your own game?

When I am asked this question, I always say this: if you ask this question, then you are not ready to make your game.

At the beginning of the stream, I talked about singles who achieve results in studios from one person - and so, none of them came to me and asked that. They just really wanted to get things done and worked in silence.

Many have the illusion that they can go to conferences and get some necessary experience. I can say this: this life must be felt, not read. You need to gain experience by doing something, not by reading.

At the start of my career, about 3 years after I started doing game development, we had a studio of several teams. The managers sat in the same office, and, as a rule, the general producer came there and said: "Guys, who is making a plan for the money this month?" Some say: "We are doing." Others say, "Oh, we are doing even more." And the third: "Oh, everything is bad with us." The general says to the third: “You, relatives, will go to the conference, you will teach people! And the rest - work, there are no complaints against you. "

Companies have a practice of sending not the most successful representatives to conferences. She is famous. Typically, when someone talks at a conference about how a company has succeeded, it is not the person whose efforts made that very success. That person sits in the office and develops success. Of course, one cannot say that every media representative is a dummy, but this is always not the most top person.

If you are sending the most delicious and experienced person to the conference, he must first be “washed out” by media. The ability to interact, communicate and communicate with people is a thing that needs to be worked out. If you are a good programmer, this does not mean that you speak well, that you have the correct speech apparatus and there is no inertia of speech, that you react sensibly to criticism and will not answer obscenities to a shout from the audience.

The most important thing: firstly, while you are preparing a media representative from a programmer, he loses in skill; secondly, at this conference, he will immediately receive about 4 job offers with a doubling of his salary, because he presented himself well and told a success story that others want to repeat. He will also immediately create a channel on YT, where he will repeat the lectures given and his channel will already earn money. Then he will not write code, but learn to make new conferences. And when prompted to return to work, he replied: "Listen, my channel is already bringing almost my salary here, and the offers are here ... Come on, shall I just quit?" That's it, you've lost this person. Companies that send the best people to conferences first - and get burned - understand this pattern, and the next time they send people worse, albeit more personable.

In general: feel this life and feel the games instead of reading about them. This is much more useful. Don't look for mega-knowledge at conferences; on them, as a rule, a presentation is made and connections are developed. Everything else is tinsel.

How to calculate the balance of games? Balance and pseudo-balance, 2 types of pseudo-balance (pve, pvp), why is it necessary to calculate a complex balance, how should it be done?

The idea is that there is a balance, which is considered by people with a mathematical education, and there is a pseudo-balance, which is considered on the knee. Pseudo balance is not good for the player; the player will feel uninteresting in the game. Let's say there are white, green, blue and purple items in the game; from the point of view of the correct balance, you will take a long time to count the characteristics, but from the point of view of the superficial, you assign 100 stat points to white, 1000 to green, 10,000 to blue, 50,000 to purple. Having done this quickly, you know that a player with a purple attachment is not win by no other player. It counts quickly, is done quickly, and is not fun to play. There is also an option: a large location in pve games; you know that the player must be forced to pass the last boss. And it is necessary that the player does not jump out to other locations before this. That's why you do it like thisso that you can go to other locations only if the player has a sword, because this sword will have the effect of reducing the orcs' defense completely, and on the second location there will be orcs with impenetrable (other weapons) defense - without a sword, the player simply will not work. And, in fact, he will need to get this sword from the last boss of the first location. This is a pseudo balance, it is bad. I answered briefly, in more detail - I don't think it will be interesting.I answered briefly, in more detail - I don't think it will be interesting.I answered briefly, in more detail - I don't think it will be interesting.

Mathematics of the value of goods in games. How to calculate the cost of each bun and make it buy?

A bunch of factors. For example, the region in which you work; relatively speaking, for the Philippines and France, the same pack should have very different prices. Filipinos with the whole family survive on $ 10 a month.

In general, universal mathematics can be applied to the cost of each bun: when a player is farming, one hour of farming time is a dollar. That is, what can be farmed in an hour can be sold for a dollar. An adult will not spend an hour of his life not to spend a dollar, but a student will farm from morning to evening - and they will roughly equalize after the adult pays $ 10. This is a fairly versatile scheme. There are still a few others, we will not touch on them now.

Can a high-level specialist exist outside of large companies?

I will repeat myself a little, because I have already unfolded on this topic.

Yes maybe. I myself am also such a specialist. I do not always have such a job that I work while sitting in the office, but my qualifications in some things are confirmed, and when people want to get results in those things that they cannot get on their own (game development, monetization, team optimization: collect a new one, thin out the old one, plan a budget, recheck the architecture of the project), they come to me.

From time to time, sooner or later, each of the people has a fork for further development.

Let's say you are a good artist, you rise to the level of artlid, you have 5 of your own artists, you set tasks. You grow further, you have more money and authority, you are already an art director, you have 30 people, more tasks, but less art. Your activity went from being creative to management, but you didn't want to manage. Now you have to create comfortable conditions for other people so that they draw well, but you wanted to draw yourself. You don't like this. After that, you make a decision, leave the company and become a highly paid remote worker.

That is, there are two ways - the growth of a manager or a remote specialist. There are a lot of remote specialists, they can be programmers, those who set up security for you, and artists and game designers. Their beauty is that a large company can afford such a person who will ask for one and a half or two salaries for a one-time job. A company does not keep such a person on staff if it has tasks for him only 2 times a year (for example, setting up server security or revising the balance). That is, instead of "idle" feeding him most of the year, she turns to him twice a year with tasks for which she pays well.

I am a fairly high-paid employee, and if the company has money shortages, then I myself feel uncomfortable being there if I feel that it does not take me out. At the same time, if I am offered a one-time job, I agree to it, and everything works out.

In order to become such a specialist, you need to build up a pool of companies that want to work with you. That is, you periodically do something, you are good at everything, and people come to you because they know that you are giving a result.

Explanation: why monetizers don't have a soul and toxic team members are the most effective