Okay. Nice to have you here, Evtim. So happy and excited based on the news that we gave out today regarding that Qiiwi Games acquires a majority part of the shares in Playright Games and starts investment into the hyper-casual games market. Yeah, Evtim, you're one of the co-founders of Playright Games, and please let us know a bit more about yourself. Hi, everyone. I'm Evtim. Like Erik said, I'm one of the co-founders of the company called Playright Games, and I'm really excited to be joining Qiiwi. A bit about me. I have been in the mobile games industry for around eight years now. I started initially as a game designer at Gameloft, then worked as a product manager at Square Enix on some big-name IPs like Lara Croft. I then moved on to be a product manager for Windward Mark Interactive's live games portfolio, where I gained lots of insights about how the casual game market works. This is where I actually also saw and had a glimpse for the first time at hyper-casual games, too. This was just an emerging trend back then. I have then moved on to work for NaturalMotion, part of Zynga, on CSR2, and at one point I just decided to start working for myself I left. I started doing freelance game design consulting jobs at Naavik. Around this time also, I started noticing how aggressively hyper-casual has been going, and it really caught my eye. It also excited me by the opportunities that it provides for game design innovation and the speed with which such innovations can be tested. This is why I really founded Playright Games to be a hyper-casual game studio. For me, I'm really passionate about game design. I enjoy talking about it. I love researching design and coming up with designs of my own. I would regularly play cross-platform titles. I mostly focus on mobile and hyper-casual games through my research, but I do like to play all kinds of games, including PC and console ones with really complex titles. I have noticed that even in these complex games, you can take a really fun iteration, just strip it down to its most basic core, and you can turn it into a basic action loop that is enough to support a great hyper-casual experience. This is why this market is so exciting to work on. Yeah, we're excited to hear you talking about yourself and your history. We have actually been working together earlier on our game, "Backpacker," where you helped us a lot with the economic system in that game and balancing and live operations and so on. We have been in contact throughout the last years back and forth. We have been knowing each other for several years. I'm really excited to get you onto the Qiiwi Games journey now, which I really believe also will benefit the Qiiwi Games group and the current games that we have in our portfolio because your experience and knowledge about game mechanics and balancing and core loops in games is really impressive to me. Really happy to have you here. Can you please tell us a little bit about the other two co-founders at Playright? Sure, yeah. Like we've already said, there are three of us, and one of them is Kristina, my wife. Together, her and I were the original co-founders of Playright Games, and she's the creative force at the company. Her main focus at Playright Games is on level design and tool design, but she's also responsible for creating some of the original game ideas that we have worked on, and we are still working on, and we'll be working on in the future. Her creativity is driven by her passion for story writing and narrative design, and she, like me, has a deep understanding of game design and of what makes a great player experience. She has been instrumental in crafting the flow of our existing games, and her design research involves her getting deeply engaged with titles on all platforms. Similarly to me, focusing on hyper-casual, but we are playing all kinds of stuff because it's really useful for us and to build our knowledge base. When she plays the game, she's trying to understand how games loop and tools work together to create a consistent experience. She and I have collaborated together on a variety of projects. Apart from Playright, we have worked, and we have consulted a variety of different clients with sports titles, casual games, and mid-core games as well. Our third co-founder, Daniel, he's our strategic advisor, and he joined us when we started our hyper-casual journey. He has been instrumental in helping us understand the market and learn how to better match the games that we are making with the demographics that they are intended for. He himself is a really experienced games entrepreneur and product manager, and he's got a successful track record of starting up and growing game studios. Most recently, one of his companies made a game called "Maika Fantasia!" which is a Japanese card collection rhythm game, and this is where him and I met. We actually collaborated on this project. I was brought on board as a game design consultant there. During our collaboration, we actually realized that our skills complement one another really well. We decided to just keep on working together on hyper-casual titles. Daniel's exceptional business experience and games industry knowledge and contacts have been quite crucial in us laying the foundations for Playright. Yeah, really interesting and happy to also have Kristina and Daniel on board here and to work with them going forward. Let's talk a little bit about the hyper-casual market, which has been, of course, growing rapidly the last years and are still growing strong. It's also a market where publishers can be able to grow their player bases a bit cheaper than only target and marketing pure casual games and mid-core games. Can you tell us a bit about how you see the hyper-casual market these days, and what is the development going forward, you believe? Yeah. Right. Well, it's an ever-growing market and ever-evolving, like you said, it has been growing, and it's getting more and more exciting for lots of players. Even last year, when you think about it, lots of the countries around the globe were in lockdown, but still, we had the number of downloads of hyper-casual games grew, which to me is an indication that regardless of how much time players have on their hands, they will still appreciate and would be looking for really easy-to-pick-up experiences that they can enjoy everywhere and at any point, and that these experiences don't have to necessarily be super deep. We believe that this would always be the case. This is why we decided to enter the market with Playright Games. Also we see something else is that the players of hyper-casual games, they are now starting to pick up, and even in the top charts, we can see games with a bit higher production quality than what they used to be back in the days. This is what our focus is as well. We want to build quality games. We can build quality games, and this is our focus. That's where we come in. We want to ride this wave of hyper-casual games with higher quality hitting the market. We also see something else emerging. It's the hybrid-casual games trend. Essentially, a hybrid-casual game features the same really simple-to-understand but really fun hyper-casual game core. To add to this, we add a layer of metagame, which is essentially more depth of the gameplay. Why is this exciting? Up to now, hyper-casual games usually would have an average player lifetime of one to four weeks. In hybrid-casual, the lifetime of players can be much longer, even longer than 6 months. This is driven by these deeper experiences and much more content that players get to engage with. This is where we want to be as well, and we're one of the success stories of hybrid-casual games. Yes. Thanks for that, Evtim. Yeah, it's definitely very interesting, the expected movement of hyper-casual games to hyper-hybrid games. There is also something that we believe will be a very important and good success factor for our partnership because Qiiwi Games have been focusing on creating casual games with meta elements for several years. We have been able to enrich our gameplay experience and engagement levels a lot with those types of meta elements in the gameplay. That is definitely an area where both companies will be able to exchange knowledge and workflows to be able to create really innovative hyper-casual games that can be emerging into the hyper-hybrid market also of hyper-casual games. Another synergy that we really believe in can grow the Qiiwi Games' daily active users and monthly active users and the player base as a whole is that all the games that Playright create that reach specific benchmarks that we believe will be able to work good in a global launch state, they will be published under the Qiiwi publishing account, which means that we will be responsible for publishing the games and creation of marketing material and do user acquisition campaigns and so on. What is interesting with hyper-casual games is that you normally get a lower CPI than marketing casual or mid-core games, which means that we can scale the hyper-casual games, hopefully big, and get a lot of players when these games get viral, and we get a lot of organic installs from them. Then we can cross-promote players from the hyper-casual games to our casual games, which in general have a much higher LTV than pure hyper-casual games. We can also, vice versa, cross-promote players from the casual games to the hyper-casual games based on data and churn prediction models to be able to obtain and keep the players as long as possible within our network. I think that is a really exciting part and a new way of working for Qiiwi Games regarding marketing and to scaling our business as a whole. Yeah, do you have anything else there that you think about regarding the synergies between the two companies? Oh yeah, everything that you have said so far is complete, but I really want to underscore that Qiiwi, on our side, has an exceptional experience so far with the casual market and really great experience with casual games featuring these deeper layers of metagame, which we have been talking about. Given that one of our goals to be a success story for hybrid-casual games, we believe that we can really benefit from your deep understanding of how to take this really simple, although casual core, and apply to it deeper gameplay that keeps players engaged in the long term. What we also see in Qiiwi, and this is why we got excited about the whole deal, one of the reasons is that you have great art, you have really developed BI, tech teams, and also marketing. These are things that we have struggled with before at Playright, and now we believe that with your help, we would really supercharge the business to be a success. Yeah, I definitely agree. There is a lot of synergies and strengths that we will benefit from both parts of the two companies here. Can you tell us something about what we can expect in the near future from Playright Games? Of course, yeah. To summarize it, I would say just expect quality. One of the focuses of Playright Games, and I think I've mentioned it, is that we really want to make really, really high-quality hyper-casual experiences because we believe that this is where the market is going. It's our process as well that drives towards this goal because when we have a game idea, we will take it, build a game around it, test it once, see where players drop off, what do they like or don't like doing, how tolerant are they towards difficulty, all these different bits and bobs that help us understand how we can build a smooth player experience. We iterate on the prototype, try again, and then if it doesn't work, obviously, we move on to the next game. We might be taking our time, but we take all of our learnings. We take all of our innovations, adapt them, and put them into a new game, and we constantly generate this massive library of knowledge, if you will, that lets us make better games and better player experiences that would really make a hit game. We're also busy building a platform of different mechanics that we can pick and mix together so that we actually have a variety of different gameplay experiences that we can offer to players. Think, for example, a runner with life mechanics, and the runner is basically a character running on a plane, and they have to dodge different obstacles, but if they trip and fall, they wouldn't die right away. It's typical. For example, you use up a life, then you keep on running, or a puzzle game where you draw on the screen, and drawing is really currently quite popular game mechanic in hyper-casual, but it's also a puzzle game. It has puzzle elements, so you draw your own tools, you can actually complete the puzzle that way as a player. Yeah, just to recap again, we learn a lot. We are still learning, but we are always aiming for quality, and we already have a couple of games in the pipeline. We've experimented with both arcade and puzzle, and we're really looking forward to showing them off to the world. Yeah. Really exciting times ahead then, just to summarize, really happy to have you, Kristina, and Daniel on board here from Playright Games, and really excited to start widening Qiiwi Games' focus also into the hyper-casual market, where we see a lot of growth potential going forward. Thanks, Evtim, for the call and the presentation of yourself to the investors and shareholders at Qiiwi, yeah, thanks for the call, we will definitely get back to you in the near future, I believe. Great. Thanks, Erik. Thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to working together. Yes, thank you. Have a nice day. Have a nice day.
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