As you might know, this year Wargaming is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Following Slavic drinking tradition, we are going to throw parties all year round. Not that personally I'm a party goer, but couldn't resist giving this one a shot.
Preceding Russian gamedev expo KRI 2013 which we are skipping this year because of WG devcon we had a press-conference followed by party in the one and only extant Cold War underground bunker situated at 65 meters underground in the center of Moscow which territory contains an interactive museum, conference-halls, a restaurant, a banquet-hall.
Bunker-42 in Moscow
It's really deep underground, good that they have elevators. Though on my way there, I used stairs which somewhat regretted afterwards.
Floor minus 17
All communications are on the "outside"
There used to be no red carpet back in the 60-ies
Labyrinth
Wargaming eye-check
There event started with press-conference for ~250 attendees dedicated to WG anniversary. Victor K. went deep into the corporate history, starting with DBA online (first online try), great Massive Assault series which brought company some fame, but not money, and work with publishers.
World of Tanks became "all-in" project for Wargaming. The company invested all of its remaining resources men- and money-wise, so it was either win or lose. Luckily, the first. The key success factors were experience earned with previous projects, smart game concept, solid corporate culture, lots of luck, and support from East-European market at early stages after the launch. Nowadays World of Tanks covers most of the planet, probably apart from Japan, Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. The company itself saw a 25-fold increase since the start of the project and now has personnel of 1500 in 14 offices around the globe.
Press-conference hall
My spot
WoT Blitz closed demonstration was there
After the press-conference we had first closed demonstration of World of Tanks Blitz, mobile game of iOS and Android, in Russia. Even though the game is still at pretty early stage (pre-alpha), it us already able to generate a lot of fun in dynamic 7 vs 7 tank battles, even though the demo build contained only 2 maps and 9 tanks. This demo was hopefully the last one where we used on i-devices, next time will try to go for cross-platform warfare.
The main comments on Blitz were - connection requirements, beta/release dates, integration with PC WoT (practically covered in previous posts
here and
here)
My only concern now is whether the mobile market ready for that kind of deep and real-time challenge or not. :)
