Elena Grigorian, CEO of MyGames - My First 100 Days as a CEO

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure for me to talk with you today.

Yes, it's approximately two months in reality. Yeah, it's not too long, but nevertheless, taking into account it's only two months, but I have been a part of My Games for approximately nine years already, during which I was engaged in different operational responsibilities across different levels with the company. Before that, I headed the marketing structure, constructing the largest centralized department in the company, and it led to one — I coordinated the efforts of our investment arm. So we had a lot of operational responsibilities at that moment as well. Even if my role was called Chief Strategy Officer, nevertheless I did a lot of operational work. That's why it's not something new for me now in the new role of CEO. Definitely our preparation here in My Games for this transition has been ongoing for nearly a year, so it's pretty okay. I can confirm that the transition has been relatively seamless and well prepared, while it wasn't without challenges of course, but the process was controlled, which is certainly a positive aspect.

Yeah, it seems that the strategic role is slightly different compared with the rather operational CEO role. But taking into account that I've been a part of the company for so many years already, definitely I know a lot about the strategy, our business, our operational things. So I believe that the transition was seamless and smooth enough. Definitely I extend my gratitude to all My Games team for their unwavering support for these months. I believe that our management team is now stronger than ever, and we are progressing together. Over the last two months, we have successfully upgraded our strategy, established goals, and concentrated on the crucial issues and tasks. We have initiated standard year-end procedures such as budget planning, performance team reviews, and so on. So I can say that everything is progressing pretty well, and the transition was pretty successful, I believe.

Well, yeah, in reality it's very interesting because definitely I thought about my first 100 days and what exactly are the most important things I need to do, what my focus should be, and so on. Definitely it depends on different situations and different structures, but for me personally, my primary goal for these two months was definitely my team — ensuring that our team has all the necessary resources to effectively do what they do best, transform their passion, creativity, and professionalism into great immersive games. So it was crucial for me. Definitely it involves the establishment of procedures, internal cultures which are able to help them unleash their full potential. From my perspective, over the past two months we have made significant progress on that front, aligning our strategies with the plans for 2024, identifying our key areas of improvement in operations, expanding our hub network that we create, the work environment which helps all our teams to work with comfort and joy. Maybe you heard that this year we successfully opened new hubs in Armenia, in Georgia, in Abu Dhabi, and in Serbia, in addition to the existing headquarters in Amsterdam and office here in Cyprus. So it's fun because two months sounds like a lot of days, but in reality these almost 60 days flew by like a moment. To keep the pace of our business and our industry, it's so important to be focused. For me, it was important to remember that I can't do everything at once and do it well, so I decided to take a breath and focus my efforts only on what is important and urgent, and only postpone non-urgent things. Because definitely there are a lot of things to do, and you should concentrate your first efforts on the most urgent things. Also, it was so important for me before any big phase in my life, like being appointed CEO, to not forget to discuss with your family beforehand that they might not see you much at least for the next three months. So we agreed with them on this situation, and it was agreed beforehand. It's much easier for me now.

Yes, it was a situation that should definitely be discussed beforehand. In my daily routine, I'm someone who puts a lot of effort and finds satisfaction in hard work, and it has always been that way. So work is a significant part of my life, both professionally and personally, because many of my former colleagues have become my friends, and I like to spend time with them after the main work calls are done. So I wouldn't say my daily routine has changed drastically, but spending time with my family definitely has to take a back seat for the next couple of months. In usual daily routine, there is no huge change at the moment.

Yes, of course, the issue of work-life balance is a difficult one, especially when it comes to the C-suite position, especially when you're doing something you love. I really love what I do, and I really give myself to the process, so this balance is not always possible. I'm CEO of a growing gaming company, but at the same time I'm a mother of two, I'm a wife, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, and I'm a person with my hobbies and interests. So definitely it's challenging. I can't give you a magic recipe for how to do that, but for myself, I do my best to find this balance every day. I have never suffered from it, and I have enjoyed my work and communication with colleagues and partners for 20 years. Of course, I have invented habits that allow me to combine what is pleasant for me and useful for my work at the same time. For example, I try to learn something new every day; it's a kind of new habit in my life, but more about what could be used for my work, because it's always of maximum interest. So it's a combination of something interesting for me personally but at the same time very useful for my work. The same story with sports: I do sports in the morning, but at the same time I think about the upcoming meeting and write down important things and tasks on a Dictaphone. So it's a combination of pleasant things for my health but at the same time a very useful part of my day — to spend some minutes, some hours just alone with myself to think about the new day. Of course I try to make sure that the time I spend with my family has maximum quality and is useful for each of us. I believe and I know that we all appreciate it very much.

Yes, thank you for this question. It's very interesting to talk about My Games in a very concentrated way. Talking about strengths: you already indicated that our key strength is our great high-professional team with different expertise because we have a diversified gaming portfolio — that's the second strength. But nevertheless, this diversified portfolio helps us collect very different expertise inside of our team. We do games on different platforms, on PC, console, and mobile at the same time. We have diversified business models inside of our business: we have our own games that are developed inside the company, at the same time we have licensing business — we license third-party games to be published all around the world in different countries. The third source of products for us is the investment arm — it's one more way to have products in our lineup. I believe it's our strength: this huge diversification of our business in very different aspects — different development teams that have their own unique way to success, wide range of products on different platforms, different business models inside one company. So that's definitely our strength. Talking about weaknesses, I can indicate pretty much the same things: a wide range of teams and products can be a weakness when we talk about a united strategy, united objectives. So it's important for us to work together, to go the same direction, because the team is huge, a lot of different teams in terms of production cycles. We need to work hard to unite everyone in one strategy and to go in the same direction all together. Sometimes it's not so easy. Talking about opportunities, mainly talking about the market: at the moment, many gaming companies should think not only about their own category in terms of platform but should think wider. For example, mobile game developers should think about the experience that PC game developers have. An opportunity for us is that our experience is so wide in different platforms in development and marketing. For example, when we talk about mobile marketing, for us it's much easier to understand how PC marketers involve gamers into their product, and this experience is very important at the moment for mobile marketing as well. It's much more difficult for other gaming companies to acquire this expertise, but inside My Games we already have this type of expertise. At the same time, for all these years we have a wide partnership network, and it's an opportunity for us to involve their expertise and background to help us grow. Talking about threats, definitely I believe it's pretty much the same threats as for many other gaming companies in the world: the movement of players' time spent into non-gaming apps from gaming ones — that's definitely a threat in terms of further movement and further privacy restrictions. Definitely threats for us as a developer and publisher of mobile games mainly, and of course growing competition in the gaming market in general — one more threat for all of us. So that's a kind of concentrated sketch of what's going on with My Games in terms of SWOT analysis.

I believe that at My Games, our organization is structured in a different way compared with many gaming companies because we have 10 in-house development teams, and each team has unique expertise and specialization in the development of diverse game genres and platforms. This setup forms a kind of micro-industry within the company, enabling constant consulting and collaboration among different teams. Definitely the key of our uniqueness lies in this diversification — not only in the variety of games we create but also in the skills and focus areas of our employees and teams. This diversification strategy positions us ahead of the industry curve in many cases, allowing us to test different hypotheses at the same time, and the results of these experiments are constantly shared across all the teams, fostering a collaborative environment. This collective knowledge-sharing process enriches the entire My Games structure and team, ensuring that insights from one genre or platform can contribute to the success of others within the company. So of course it's a huge strength, our diversification, but of course we have a kind of umbrella centralized structure that coordinates the efforts of our 10 development teams to guarantee that all of them are going in the same direction. This is important.

Yes, definitely. I believe that sharing experience and collaboration all together is inside the DNA of the company because we are formed as a combination of different development teams. For us it's so important to share this experience and share the result of any experiments we have inside each team. Taking into account the size of the company and diversification of the studios, when we have a kind of internal event, it looks like an industrial event for 1,000 people. For example, we have working groups between all the marketers from all the studios, the same story with working groups between all the game designers in different development teams. They collaborate together and discuss different topics together, and share not only their knowledge but their metrics at the same time. For us it's much more important to have a united trend tool that everyone knows the figures of any experiment, any product. So it's a kind of community of developers that can share not only their knowledge but their figures at the same time. You could look at any marketing campaign at any studio, any product, and look at the result of any event that we have inside our games, and ask the question: what happened, what was the result? This collaboration between the studios is definitely a key, and we are very, very good at it because of huge amount of internal events for different topics just to share the experience.

Of course we are trying to have documents like best practices for different experiments, but nevertheless it's much more important to have someone inside the team who can answer your questions. That's why it's not only the documents, it's mainly face-to-face communications where you can ask questions and understand what's going on in real life. Of course we're trying to find something in a Confluence at the beginning, but we have a kind of experimental culture inside the company. Even if you have a document that this hypothesis was already checked one year ago, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to do the same today, because everything can change. The market changes greatly every year, the competition environment changes greatly, and the marketing channels and partners change greatly. So try again and again. Maybe one day your experiment could be much more successful than the previous one. So documentation is not the best way to keep this drive to experiment again and again.

First, I can share that our development strategy emphasizes the balance between mobile and PC/console projects, and we try to keep this balance to have some PC/console projects in our lineup every year, while at the same time growing our portfolio in mobiles. For example, now we have two PC/console products in Early Access set to launch at the very end of November: Hawked, which was announced already and is going to be released rather soon, and one more title that we have in our pipeline and prepare for launch next year — War Robots Frontiers, we have already mentioned this game. So we have two PC/console products to be released at the end of this year and next year. Annually, our diverse development teams contribute to the creation of approximately 10 mobile games annually. Definitely not all of them will be globally released or even successful; some will be closed over the testing process. But nevertheless, we are trying to keep the skill to have at least 10 games per year at the latest stage of development.

Yes, at My Games the green light process for new games, before it is started, is a multi-phased evaluation by our analytical team. They analyze categories, genres, and overall potential of each product. This evaluation is a combination of creative, financial, and market considerations. After that, as soon as everything is quite good during the light process, we start preparation of an MVP. Definitely the most important step for us is to have real metrics on a real audience of our products. So we believe that it's so important to show your product to the audience as early as possible to get real feedback, to see real metrics. Of course we have some stages of friends and families, studio review, and so on, but nevertheless it's significantly important for us to have real metrics from the audience. Of course it's a little different between mobile and PC/console, but nevertheless if you have a product that can be reviewed by the audience, you definitely should do that as soon as possible. So we try to get this feedback and adapt our further development process based on the result of this feedback and on the result of metrics we can get after that.

Yes, we are trying to combine the best features from one approach and from another, and we find a kind of balanced approach that we use.

It's much important to see that the main part of our business and our revenue was concentrated outside of Russia for many, many years already. The main part of our revenue comes from the US, UK, France, and Germany — these are our main revenue countries, and it was like that for decades already. We continued our international expansion, continued growth of our key markets in the US and Europe, but at the same time we think about the Asian market as well. So our international expansion due to our products and our ambitions in terms of audience growth is much more important for us. For example, during this year, it was important for us in terms of War Robots that we finally obtained the ISBN for War Robots to be published in China. We have always been greatly interested in the China market, but there are a number of conditions we need to meet before launching the product there. Currently the door has opened for our key product, War Robots, so we have the opportunity to launch and have local campaigns in China. We are in preparation for this launch to be released at the very beginning of next year. It's a great step for us, a huge change, and we truly believe in the success of the game there. Talking about the structure and the team, I have already mentioned that we opened new hubs across the globe: Abu Dhabi, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia. All are contributing to our mission of fostering a truly worldwide presence for our team. Even before the pandemic, we had an international team and we were quite flexible, and the pandemic accelerated this transition to remote. This remote mode has helped us greatly at this moment.

It's a kind of combination of help that we can organize for our team that lives in that territory. It's not only the working spaces — definitely not only about office spaces and co-working spaces. It's mainly about our support of the territory, support of our team in terms of different procedures, legalization, bank account opening, technical support on the territory, and any other support that we try to organize for our teams. That's why it's pretty a lot of work to open a new hub — because it's not just the legal entity on the territory and legalization, but it's more about the opportunity to support our employees there in many different aspects of their life and professional work.

Yes, definitely. It's not necessary to concentrate your efforts on the exact project located in Serbia. You will definitely continue to work for the project you started. But if you need any help in terms of technical support, health care, or legalization on the territory, or to spend some time together with your colleagues, you can be inside office spaces and co-working spaces if it's useful for you. The structure is pretty the same, but if you live on the territory of our hub, it's much more convenient for you to be a part.

Definitely, this is the case. You're right.

Yes, yes. In reality, we started to do it even before the pandemic, but during the pandemic this process was accelerated — this transition to remote work. We built a solid infrastructure that allows the team to work remotely. We moved to remote work during the pandemic and established the principles of remote work in 2020. We realized the efficiency of this work for us, and we successfully launched our hit game Rush Royale because remarkably, that entire development team worked remotely on this project. The game is one of our biggest successes now, collecting 63 million installs. The game was done on the remote regime already. After the pandemic, the decision was made to stay in the remote mode of work permanently, as we saw good results produced by new project teams and gaining feedback from the employees on what's best for them. This year we decided to build this network of hubs to enable our colleagues to meet and work together on some projects if they need. Of course, speaking about the operational team, it's very important to organize a team that helps to support this transition. This is the joint efforts of several teams: HR, IT, legal, finance, communications, and many others. To be successful during remote work, constant communication is key. We understand that, so to ensure everyone is informed about the progress of any project, the challenges we face, the benefits we receive, everything is communicated constantly on different levels. We have a lot of internal events to support this communication, flexibility, and transparency. So it's important to guarantee this efficiency at the end of the day, having almost 100% remote employees.

Well, at the moment, as I already mentioned, the main part of our revenue comes from traditional territories like the US and Europe. Of course this is one of the biggest points for us in terms of stability, and we concentrate our efforts at these territories when we think about new products, new marketing campaigns, partnerships, and so on. But definitely, when we think about growth points for us in terms of territory expansion, we think not only about the US. At the moment we think mainly about Asian territories, Asian countries like China — I already indicated that — like South Korea, like Japan. We know that at the moment our share in these territories is not so huge compared to the total gaming industry in the world. Of course these territories capture half of the gaming revenue in the world, but for us the share is significantly smaller. But at the same time, we have products which are pretty successful there. For example, War Robots: Japan is number two territory in terms of revenue stream for War Robots. If you look at the competitive landscape there, we understand the potential for War Robots is still pretty huge, and we believe that for War Robots it can be a potential territory for further growth. Same story with Rush Royale: South Korea is number four territory in terms of revenue for Rush Royale, but the share is still pretty small, and we believe that South Korea can be a territory for Rush Royale for further growth. Tomorrow we are planning special local marketing campaigns in South Korea for Rush Royale at the beginning of next year. We'll see how it succeeds, and we will hope for a great result. If it is, we will try to increase our local efforts on this territory to grow Rush Royale in South Korea. Japan and South Korea are also significant markets for Tactical, and again, even if they are number two or three territories in terms of revenue, we still believe the potential is pretty high. That's why for us, Japan, China, and South Korea are number one territories in terms of growth points. We do a lot of local initiatives on these territories, trying to understand our full potential, and we will definitely do experiments in terms of local operations, partnerships, local marketing campaigns. So 2024 will be the year for us to test these new territories in terms of ambition, and we'll see. I really hope that next time we meet, maybe some quarters later, I will give you more details about the exact results we can get at these territories.

It's a very difficult and very interesting question to talk about because it's much more important to think about our future and what we should do to guarantee our success. For the whole gaming industry, it's not the easiest time, so it's important to understand what can be adopted and upgraded in our strategy to guarantee our further growth. Definitely the economic recession in developed markets has a significant effect on the gaming industry now. If you've been working in games for a long time, as I do, you know that the gaming industry has always overcome all economic crises smoothly. It's the first time that during an economic crisis, games are not in such good shape. My belief is that games have always been the cheapest entertainment, which has always won in times of crisis. But everything has changed now, and the answer is simple for me: I believe because no less attractive but cheaper entertainment appeared on the market. I'm talking about short video and video in general. We all know that downloads of non-gaming applications show impressive growth, and the most part of this growth happens with music and video categories. These categories are the record holders for growth rate of user time spent. So both downloads and time spent go from gaming to non-gaming apps. Definitely it's not just the highest growth rate, but nevertheless the growth rate for time spent in games is not the highest at the moment. We are losing downloads due to competition for users' attention and time spent, and at the same time we are losing in-app monetization due to lack of value targeting opportunities we used to have for almost a decade. So I believe that for the next two years, we should stop praying for the surge of payers. It's time to learn how to work with a mass non-targeted audience. We should think how to attract it, but what is much more crucial is how to keep it in our games and how to monetize it, because it's much more difficult than to make the game and monetize the players. Maybe enriching the gaming experience by mixing it with other forms of entertainment products could help. I believe that if we as an industry have the ambition to return to a two-digit growth rate path, we need to upgrade our approaches both in product development and in marketing. So this all sounds pretty bleak, but I wouldn't like our listeners to get an impression of hopelessness about what is happening in the gaming industry at the moment. Yes, today it's not the easiest time for gaming companies, but I'm sure that gaming entertainment will be able to rebuild and find its new way. We are in the epicenter of these changes at the moment, which is taxing, no doubt, but also extremely inspiring, I believe, for me personally and for My Games.

Definitely. Thank you.

No, thank you very much for listening to us. Thank you very much for your questions. I really believe that everything will be great with games, and I really hope that My Games and believing in that intent will be successful. I hope that everyone will be with us during our new releases. If you play PC and console games, Hawked is a fantastic product, so you are welcome to test and play Hawked — free to play on Steam. Get that game. Thank you again for coming, and thank you everybody for listening. On this point, catch us on the next episode. Thank you. Bye-bye.