Victor Kislyi
Drawing on his Soviet upbringing in Belarus and a summer job in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Victor Kislyi founded Wargaming in 1998 to develop and publish military strategy video games.
While the company’s earliest properties, DBA Online and the Massive Assault series, never measured up to Kislyi’s aspirations, World of Tanks brought Wargaming to the forefront of the free-to-play MMO market.
World of Tanks continues to dominate as one of the most sophisticated online worlds to date. In 2014, World of Tanks set a Guinness World Record with 1.1 million players simultaneously connected to one server.
Wargaming’s catalog now includes World of Tanks Blitz for mobile platforms, World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition, and the upcoming World of Warplanes.
At the time of this interview, Wargaming had grown from a founding team of five to more than 1,600 employees around the world. Today, Wargaming employs more than 3,500 people in 16 offices. Kislyi remains the CEO.
Ramsay: What was your life like before 1998?
Kislyi: The game making actually started before that in 1996, but it was literally done in the dorm room or bedroom. We were just a couple of enthusiastic high school friends trying to make some games. Before 1998, we were making very amateurish games that went nowhere. But we trained, and we realized how hard it was. In 1998, we started to develop our first commercial product.
Ramsay: How old were you when you started making games?
Kislyi: I was 20. Before that, I was just a student. I was studying physics at the Belarusian State University. You know, students: they do have a little bit of free time, and we were using that free time to make games.
Ramsay: What led you to start a business?
Kislyi: We all were a part of the Soviet Union before 1991, and even during the Soviet Union years, we got introduced to the Western computer games culture. My father purchased probably one of the first Sinclair copycats for me—a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer made by some guy at home. Of course, it was a pirated Spectrum with pirated cassettes and everything. There were no official Atari or Nintendo anything here; only a few of people had access to those. I invited all of my friends to play those first games on the ZX Spectrum. In certain institutions, the ZX Spectrum was the first IBM-style computer used for engineering, calculations, and computer-aided design.
They were also the first for PC games, like Civilization. As boys, we were fascinated with building empires, fighting battles, or driving tanks in interactive environments on computers. Plus, during the Soviet Union days, boys were supposed to be, let’s say, military inclined. Strategy and military games really impressed us. After reading about how successful they were in the West, like Doom II, Warcraft, and Civilization itself, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we make something like this, sell a million of copies, and become rich?”
It was not so much about starting a business. We had realized you have to make a game first, which is true today as well, so we experimented with C++ programming, to try to create a game which had never been created before. That’s how we started, and we just started to make a good strategy game.
Ramsay: What strategy game was that?
Kislyi: The first game in 1996 was, ironically, a mixture of Panzer General and Risk. Panzer General was not yet released, and we did not have Risk, the board game, in the Soviet Union. The idea was that we’d make a global domination game with, essentially, a huge fantasy-like world map. We had certain maps that represented our planet, and other maps were created for the sake of strategic beauty. You would have countries supplying resources, which are used to buy various kinds of troops, and those troops would move on hexes or squares to fight tactical battles, like in Panzer General. You would have a mixture of ground strategy, rules for political alliances, and tactical battles, too.
Around this time, my family moved to a new apartment given to us by the government; it was a nice and big four-room apartment. And the first thing I did was draw a map on the linoleum floor with a permanent ink marker. I used little pieces of paper to represent troops and dried watermelon seeds to represent cavalry, and with that set of rules, we were playing a board game. My parents were not very happy, so they had to buy a carpet to cover the mess.
Next, when we had access to computers and programming. Just a bunch of friends from the physics department, we just decided to make that game on the computer. You can understand the production values meant it went nowhere, apart from teaching us what making even a simple, ugly game means.
Against the computer though, you could crush the computer at any level, so it was not fun for us. We realized that the only way to play the game was against live opponents. The game would have to be player vs. player. We used play-by-email mechanics, although you did not have to actually attack and send in by e-mail. It was a server-based game. You’d play through a client, automatically racking up your sequence of movements that would then be sent through the e-mail server to your opponent. Your opponent would just have to click a “check for opponent” and they’d see the board change.
However, without marketing and without production values, this game had nothing apart from some nice ideas and a basic implementation. There were really just a few people playing this game, pretty much all friends.
Ramsay: Were computers readily available to you then?
Kislyi: I clearly remember that when I was 14, we already had Yamaha computers. The country realized that information technology would be the future, so computers started to appear in various places. Parents bought Sinclair or Tera computers for their kids, and institutions had Yamaha computers for basic programming and algorithmic lessons. Since the early 1990s, although we were a part of the Soviet Union, we had quite a lot of computers in our lives.
Ramsay: When did you get a desktop computer at home?
Kislyi: It was probably 1992. There were again the IBM PC rip-offs made locally using the Intel-style processors. I first had a black-and-white monitor, and then I got the first 16-color VGA monitor. We would put together computers from spare parts. We would go and buy cheap RAM, new video cards, Sound Blaster cards, and so the computers were evolving on our desks.
Ramsay: How did you turn the board game into a business?
Kislyi: Okay, we did not use the word business. The beauty of the game development industry is that, and we believed it then and still believe it now, it’s about the games. We believed that if you create a game that’s enjoyable, smart, and beautiful, the business would evolve and wrap around that game easily, smoothly, seamlessly, and naturally. After that, you would just put sales and accounting people around it. We were not thinking business.
Ramsay: How many of you believers were there?
Kislyi: In the beginning, we had five or six guys, including my brother. I hired—I say “hired” but they were paid like $25 per month—a bunch of other friends from the university. We were driven by enthusiasm until 2000. There was no money. We just had a little money from my father who viewed this as a little toy for his sons and their friends. It was more about enthusiasm. We had thought, “We’ll make a game that will sell one million copies, and that will make our business.” By 2000, we had no more than ten.
Ramsay: Can I assume you didn’t have a business plan?
Kislyi: No, I remember describing the business plan to an old lady who was a friend of my parents, right? She could not understand why a bright guy like me with parents coming out of science—my father and my mother are scientists in chemistry and physics—wasn’t going into science like them.
I remember a conversation with her when I said, “Listen, ma’am. You make a game, whatever the cost is, and let’s assume a year or two of production. And then the game sells 100,000 copies around the world, and each copy is, let’s say, $30. You would immediately make a couple of million. That’s a good business.”
That convinced her. She stopped teaching me life lessons. You don’t need a business plan. You just have to make a game that sells a million copies.
Ramsay: You were 20. Why didn’t you have more business experience?
Kislyi: After the breakup of the Soviet Union, most parents wanted their kids to be businessmen. There were a lot of accountants and MBAs, and places you could go to study economics, study for an MBA. Thank God my father said, “No, you are not going to be an accountant; you’re not going to be an MBA businessman.” I am thankful to him for that.
His idea for me was more of an academic science career. He did not let me go for an MBA, but I considered it important, so I purchased a bunch of books about management. I just read. That was my business education, and that was enough. Plus, my true MBA was Civilization.
Civilization is a game that needs to be given to everyone on this planet who wants to do something in life. You build your empire, but in essence, it’s your business. You sit there for two weeks, playing a couple of hours per day, and you have to deal with an economy, politics, army, exploration, religion, and production. Civilization is probably the best MBA experience ever. I did not have any business experience before. I had just a couple of books and Civilization. I played the first one, and now, I’m playing Civilization V.
Ramsay: Where did your entrepreneurial spirit come from, if not from your parents?
Kislyi: During the last two years of the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain dropped, and especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we were introduced to books and television programs, like BBC, some American programs, films, and literature. I think the American Dream penetrated our society, and a lot of young people became excited about capitalism and the free market.
In 1995, I went to America to stay in New Hampshire as part of a student exchange program. I was working in the White Mountains for three months in a typical summer job, but I saw how beautiful this country was, how entrepreneurial it was. I was breathing in the American spirit, which helped me a lot. We started making our first game after I returned from America in 1995 or 1996. It was all inspiration; it was all enthusiasm.
Ramsay: There were five of you working on the first game?
Kislyi: Yes, my brother, Eugene, and three college friends.
Ramsay: Did they stay with you throughout the company?
Kislyi: Unfortunately, one of them died about seven years ago, but yeah, the rest of the guys stayed.
Ramsay: Are they still with the company?
Kislyi: Yes, most of the people are, but, of course, right now we have a lot of people, and people come and go. The old guard has mostly stayed with one or two exceptions.
Ramsay: I don’t want to say “lead founder” because you weren’t starting a business. How about this? Were you the project leader?
Kislyi: I have to say I was always the mastermind behind the things we do.
Ramsay: How did you convince the others to go along with you?
Kislyi: Most of the people who joined during the enthusiastic phase were computer science graduates or students who knew a lot of programming. They did not want to go and do scientific or business programming. Everybody was playing games. All boys were playing strategy games, of course, so it was easy. I said, “Hey, come on, join and let’s make the best strategy game of all time.” They could not refuse; it was that easy.
Ramsay: When did your team evolve into a business?
Kislyi: We understood that we would be making games, as a business, for a long time before we would be successful. You don’t know whether the first game will be a success, or the second game, or the third, and so on.
And so we very wisely started a so-called offshore programming department. In the 1990s, Belarus had become one of the world’s centers for outsourcing, flourishing in 2000. There were companies here doing custom programming for Microsoft, Oracle, and other big companies in the West.
We started something like this on a smaller scale, working on small websites, ecommerce, and accounting software; there were no video games. We were doing commercial software as contractors. That was a small business, but a business that was generating good money for us, enough to sustain our game development team, which we grew from 10 to 20 people.
We had that business experience which maybe other enthusiastic, independent game developers didn’t have. We had discipline about time to market, project management, all aspects of software development, and all hardships, too. But there was no one particular date when someone said, “Okay, now we have a business.” We were still dedicated to making the best game of all time. It just naturally happened. The money flowed, and the business evolved.
When we launched our first game, called DBA Online—DBA stands for De Bellis Antiquitatis, which is Latin for “Of the Wars of Antiquity”—we rented a server and put together a billing system. We had to have a website to promote the game, and we had to do some public relations. When the first $10 hit our account, that was when we started to build a real video game business.
Ramsay: Where did you get the first ten dollars?
Kislyi: Well, DBA Online was your typical tabletop miniature game. We licensed the rule set of the most popular Asian tabletop war game, and we made a complete computerization with thousands of historical troops. You would have Romans, Greeks, Asians, Chaldeans, Mongols, and all those troops you’ve seen in the Total War series. Our one-month subscription fee was $10, which gave you unlimited play. We thought that was a good price, and we had a few hundred, then a few thousand, players paying that subscription fee.
Ramsay: How long was the typical match?
Kislyi: One turn would take you five minutes up to ten. However, if your opponent was in New Zealand, and then you take your turn from somewhere else, you’d have to wait until the next day for him to wake up. One match could take up to 40 minutes across two weeks. You were able to play dozens of matches at the same time, but obviously, this wasn’t a mass market feature.
Ramsay: Where did you go after you had your first subscriptions?
Kislyi: Well, the good news for us was that we tapped into the already existing, very hardcore, but very united, war games community—you know, the typical beer-and-pretzel war gamers. We allowed them to play the exact same rule set with the exact same armies and sophistication, in terms of tactics and strategy, over the Internet anytime and anywhere.
When we ended up with thousands of players, we realized that being niche can pay off in certain circumstances, but we wanted to do something more mass market. That’s how Massive Assault came into existence. We actually took the rules of our very old game we had made in 1996, we had a bunch of bright guys create a nice 3D engine, and we refurbished the very old game into sci-fi. There were robots, tanks, and helicopters; futuristic heavy weaponry; and different planets and landscapes. That hit a sweet spot when Panzer General died off and Heroes of Might and Magic 5 had not yet been released.
Believe it or not, Massive Assault scored 80% on Metacritic and Game Rankings, which was not a typical thing for an indie game. As GameSpy put it, “strategy gaming has never been so sweet!” We essentially made a classical hex-based, turn-based Panzer General, and we blended relatively sophisticated political and tactical rules with very beautiful 3D visuals. That’s how Massive Assault took off nicely. Massive Assault made us a name in the mass market game industry.
Ramsay: With Massive Assault, you wanted to take the game in a mass-market direction, so why choose sci-fi instead of fantasy?
Kislyi: Good point. We already had one of the deepest historical simulation games with DBA Online, and we realized that having a military history base for the game adds a lot of constraints, like archers cannot shoot more than a hundred meters, right? We wanted the freedom to make “wow” weapons, like big, walking robots shooting rockets. Nobody could say that wasn’t realistic because nobody has seen big, walking robots shooting rockets!
Massive Assault could have been fantasy, but there were already a lot of fantasy games, and we didn’t want any historical constraints. We just wanted to make a generic game with tactical variety, a wide range of weapons, and varying movement speeds. With sci-fi, you can design your own rock, paper, and scissors, and let your imagination carry you as far as possible.
Ramsay: Were you self-publishing?
Kislyi: We self-published DBA Online, and that was a great, great experience. With Massive Assault, we ran around the world, made some phone calls, and found a publisher. Matrix Games was a very niche, very classical turn-based strategy publisher. They weren’t very big, and not very powerful, but they put the game in America for us. GMX Media was our publisher for Europe, and Akella was our publisher for Russia. Big names like EA and Microsoft would not take on turn-based strategy games, so they passed on us. We had to go with smaller, presumably more dedicated publishers to get the game to retail.
Ramsay: Why didn’t you publish Massive Assault, like DBA Online?
Kislyi: Massive Assault was more of a mass market, retail product with AI and a single-player campaign. When you self-publish online, how do you get players? You need marketing dollars, right? With DBA, it was easy because we did viral marketing amongst the existing armchair generals, and that was easy because they were already well-organized. But with Massive Assault, we didn’t have the marketing dollars to promote the game. We did not have access to retail, and at least, in those days, that was the only way to reach the mass market.
Ramsay: How well did the game do at retail?
Kislyi: The truth is the retail version did not bring us millions of dollars. We hit all of the negative aspects of working with a publisher that you can imagine, so aside from the advance, we didn’t see a single dollar from the US market. That was a bitter experience. We saw more royalties from our European publisher, who did a really good job in England, Germany, and France; they were sending us checks every quarter. And we received good advance payments from Russia, somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000.
All in all, Massive Assault sold only around dozens of thousands of copies over a few years. The people who purchased the boxed game played through the single-player campaign fairly quickly, but the most enjoyable part was the online, face-to-face battles. That’s why we made a spinoff, and we had a provision in our contract that allowed us to do so. We spun off an online-only version called Massive Assault Network, and again we were self-publishing like in the old days. Well, we realized that was very expensive.
Ramsay: What can you say about your experience with Matrix Games?
Kislyi: Believe it or not, on the day when we were supposed to submit the gold master, there was a big blackout in New York. This was 2003. The whole tri-state area had no electricity. Matrix Games is based in Staten Island, so we could not call them, we couldn’t get them on ICQ, and we couldn’t e-mail them. So, we missed the gold master date due to the blackout.
And then we found out we were missing online play codes in a number of boxes. GameStop, EB Games, or one of the big retail chains received a shipment without the codes, and they were not very happy, so they returned those copies and we immediately lost one retail chain from our distribution network. Everything was against us, and then there was piracy. Matrix never recouped the advance, so we never saw a royalty check.
Ramsay: There was a sequel, right?
Kislyi: Yes, we did Massive Assault: Domination, which was published again by Akella in Russia, and DreamCatcher Interactive performed well in Europe and America. The first Massive Assault obviously gave us a lot of mass market knowledge, like how to do public relations, marketing, and community.
I think Domination made our name in the game developer realm. Not everyone purchased the box, not everyone played the game, but everybody was hearing about Massive Assault. I toured with the guys from DreamCatcher in America. In Europe, PC Gamer and all of the magazines were talking about the game in interviews, hands-on demos, and those things. Domination was again very well accepted by the media, and it made a big splash. It made us decent money, again. Not millions, but more than the first, and it allowed us to move forward.
Ramsay: Many independent game developers struggle with landing publishing deals, and there you were in Belarus, signed and working with multiple publishers simultaneously on your first games.
Kislyi: Well, since the days of the first Massive Assault, an essential part of our business strategy was going places to meet new people. I was flying around the Western world meeting with, of course, magazines for interviews, but I was also going to GDC, E3, and other conferences to meet with publishers. I had realized that in order to be successful, you have to know everyone. That was my goal, and at a certain point, I did know everyone! We fostered good relationships with publishers at conferences, visited their offices, and talked about the past, present, and future. Those connections wove together into business.
Ramsay: Before World of Tanks, how big of a company was Wargaming?
Kislyi: In 2006, we had probably more than 40 people, and everyone was on salaries. Until World of Tanks, we were very amateurish but enthusiastic. There was very little income personally, enough to buy food and rent a small room to live in. I was living with my parents before then, and then I had ten years of unparalleled enthusiasm, just working to build the team, our experience, connections, and expertise for the future.
Ramsay: In 2007, you acquired Arise. Was that your first acquisition?
Kislyi: Yes. Arise was the same size as us. We were both small, so we just said to them, “Hey, come over. Let’s join forces and make big games together.”
Ramsay: How was acquiring another company even possible for you then?
Kislyi: Remember we had a side business, a non-game business where we were doing custom software development? We were doing that from 2001 through 2007. We had an ad serving technology called AdRevolver, which we used for banners in Belarus and a little bit of Russia. Our market was not big.
In 2004, BlueLithium, an ad network in California, called us and—it’s a long story—they wanted to use our technology solution. We met each other for the first time in London, and we sold the technology to them while continuing as a research and development center for them. By 2007, BlueLithium was quite a big company with a lot of revenue from advertising, and Yahoo acquired that company for $300 million. We got good money out of the deal. That was our finest hour, our lucky day, and we wisely did not start buying Ferraris and islands. Instead, we invested heavily in our video game future.
With that money, at Wargaming, were able to double our team with Arise, and we started building a new real-time strategy game called Order of War, which was published by Square Enix in 2009. We had also already been playing with MMO technology, which led us to World of Tanks.
Ramsay: Mergers are sometimes hard to handle. What did you learn from integrating Arise into Wargaming?
Kislyi: Arise was more of an outsourcing company, so my message to them was simple: start making your own game. That worked! There are always difficulties though. They had their own game designers, who thought our game designers were not as good as they were; that always happens. Mergers take time and patience. You can’t order people to be friends forever; you just have to wait. They were reasonable, and we were reasonable, so we just had to be smart and polite. The merger took maybe a year. There was no other way.
Ramsay: In the meantime, you were still growing quite rapidly.
Kislyi: Yes, of course. We were 60 and the Arise team was 50. We continued to hire people who were new to both teams. After one year, there were more new people than old. That, humorously, helped with the merger. We brought in so many totally new people that the merger wasn’t an issue anymore!
Ramsay: What impact did bringing Arise into the fold have on your company?
Kislyi: The Arise team reinforced each and every department we had. Their programmers became part of our programming department, the quality assurance guys became our quality assurance guys, and so on.
Arise was mostly an art outsourcing shop, so they were experts on 3D modeling and texturing, where we had less discipline. We didn’t need too much of that for turn-based games, so their art department was much stronger than ours. And they had a serious process for art production that became ours. That reinforced our art department big time.
We also had the shared goal of needing to do an MMO of our own. Nobody had time to think, “Am I Arise? Or am I Wargaming?” That big goal was in front of everyone—this big MMO, which presumably would make us rich and famous, or all of us would fail together if we didn’t make it.
Ramsay: Why develop an MMO? They’re expensive. Risky.
Kislyi: Being a traditional single player shop for such a long time, we knew definitely each and every nuance of that business, right? You have to finance a project’s development times two, three, and sometimes even four years; and then you have to sign up with a publisher who controls retail shelf space. There are so many negatives, from just dealing with publishers to piracy to shelf space, that we could see the single-player box product business dying off.
By 2008, as you can imagine, there aren’t any stories left to tell in games. We’ve seen it all in Doom II, Warcraft, StarCraft, Mass Effect, and so on; everything has already been done. There’s no freaking way you can come up with a new story people will like, and customers now expect perhaps 24 hours of campaign content in a single-player box game. It’s tougher now.
There was no hope at all to make another successful single-player box product. So, what was the next thing you could do? You can publish an MMO yourself. You don’t need a box. And then there was the subscription model. For us, 2008 was a year of nonstop analysis of everything online.
And we realized we would need online server technology, so we contacted BigWorld Technology, which is a company that makes an engine for MMOs. We negotiated a license for their technology, although we did not yet know exactly what our game would look like. We flew our guys from Sydney for a week in Minsk to teach our programmers their SDK. We found out that it takes six to eight months just to build out the core technology and tailor that technology to our needs. While the programmers were working, we were looking at World of Warcraft, and Korean, Chinese, and Russian free-to-play games.
The result was World of Tanks because, of course, it was a bright idea to make a world full of tanks! But a lot of things in World of Tanks, like the mechanics, are the result of deep, deep analyses of other games and the market.
Ramsay: At Wargaming, are you just the CEO? Or do you have a hand in development?
Kislyi: Of course, as a founding father, I was designing all of our old games, but I can say that one of my smartest decisions was to not design World of Tanks. I said to myself, “Victor, you can design a good turn-based single-player game, but you’ve never designed a free-to-play action MMO before.” That was new to me.
As we say, I stepped over my pride and let three Russian designers do it. They relocated to Minsk. They were big military enthusiasts, particularly tanks, and specialists in free-to-play games, mostly browser-based games in Russia.
For training, for approximately the eight months after we started working with the online technology, we had made a traditional fantasy game where elves and orcs would shoot arrows and kill each other with swords. When we showed that game to them, they said, “Okay, we won’t pull off fantasy because there are hundreds of fantasy games coming out every year. Hey, let’s do the same thing but with tanks.” I asked, “Are you sure?” They said “yes” and convinced me they could design a game around tank battles.
The concept is simple, but if you play World of Tanks, there are so many elements in the game that had to be designed well and balanced. That was beyond my capability. I would rather concentrate on the business, bringing in more people, securing resources, and thinking about future opportunities. So, I stepped aside and let other people design the game.
Ramsay: Do you play World of Tanks?
Kislyi: Of course, I play World of Tanks fanatically. I have now played more than 11,000 battles. From time to time, bright ideas come to mind, and I let the designers know, but I’m in the same position as any other employee. We can chip in ideas, but there’s a professional game design process. Some ideas go into the game, some are modified, and some of them just don’t.
Ramsay: For World of Tanks, why again return to self-publishing? You had said that self-publishing is expensive, and this time you didn’t know the business.
Kislyi: Well, there weren’t as many free-to-play publishers. There were some new free-to-play publishers, but they were not as big as Sony or Microsoft.
We visited everyone. We met and spoke with Sony Online Entertainment, there was Microsoft, and every big publisher we knew from our single-player years. It took us quite a bit of analysis to understand that the problem with those publishers remains the same developer-publisher relationship. You create a product, put it in a box, ship it, and put it on a shelf; you do one or two patches; and then you start another two- to three-year development cycle.
With an MMO, especially with free-to-play, success is fueled by very frequent updates. If you have a successful launch, it does not mean anything if players consume your content faster than you can produce it. They will need new maps, new tanks, new gameplay modes, and twists in the mechanics pretty much nonstop, and very, very frequently.
So, at the end of the day, consumer wants a particular experience. The consumer doesn’t care where they purchased the game, or whether we made it ourselves, or whether we have a contract with a publisher; consumers want what they want. It was a wise decision to not give the game to a publisher.
Kislyi: In China, you must have a publisher by law. In China, we have a good publisher and our game is definitely a frontrunner for them, so they treat World of Tanks as their main title and that’s good for us.
Ramsay: Where was World of Tanks first published?
Kislyi: We live in Belarus; it’s a small country of ten million, but we speak the Russian language, and we are a part of the former Soviet culture. For us, Russia is our big, home market we understand. We were already one of the biggest and most respected game companies in the former Soviet Union. Our single-player products had tremendous success in Russia, so we decided to first launch World of Tanks in Russia on our own and see how it went.
You need a special understanding of just how many people would be needed to publish one tank game in Russia. Five, 15, 20, and no more? Today, we have 500 people who do only community management, customer support, events, and esports. That’s just for one game. None of the publishers we had met from the MMO segment had that many employees for one game.
And it appears that if your game’s successful, your problems begin. You have to pretty much reinvent the bicycle, and I think we did that. Russia taught us a lot of lessons, and then we expanded to the West.
Ramsay: Would you agree with the statement that the free-to-play business model is hard to get right?
Kislyi: Yes, absolutely. Big, traditional publishers were afraid of the word, and the media in the West was like, “Free-to-play? We’re not touching this. We’re not writing about low-quality Asian stuff.” And publishers had the same attitude, “We don’t see Western people playing these cheap Asian games.” And we said, “World of Tanks is made in Europe!” There was a huge wall, a lot of prejudice toward free-to-play, and you wouldn’t believe how damaging that was for us. We put in a lot of effort to get big media outlets like PC Gamer, GameSpy, GameSpot, and IGN to start writing about free-to-play games.
Ramsay: Why do you think free-to-play faced such an uphill battle?
Kislyi: So, the Asian games traditionally sell battlefields for money, like you buy a big cool sword or a big cool diamond, and put it into your weapon and you become invincible or just dominate the battlefield. That works well in China, but definitely not in the West. How you design your monetization so that people can play for free is very important. There is no one magic formula for free-to-play games though. If the game is for kids, you need a different monetization scheme; they don’t have their own money.
Ramsay: How successful have you been with free-to-play?
Kislyi: Free-to-play is now the only thing we have. We have nothing else to sell. We don’t have any other businesses, so all of our success, which obviously is there, is due to free-to-play.
Ramsay: And now the model is standard. Subscriptions are practically gone, although some developers now offer optional subscription packages.
Kislyi: We proudly think we were successful in breaking the customer, media, and industry perceptions of free-to-play. We were not only promoting and advertising World of Tanks, our product, but also free-to-play as a model, so that other developers could benefit. Back in 2008, they thought nobody would pay and you’d go bankrupt, but now the model is everywhere.
Ramsay: Wargaming didn’t start out to be a business, but now Wargaming is an international conglomerate. Just how big is your company?
Kislyi: Today, we’re at 1600 employees. One or two months, we had 1,500 employees. We have offices in 15 different cities, and we cover pretty much the whole world. In video games, this is a big company.
Ramsay: When you spoke to your grandmother, you had dreamed of selling a million copies of a game. You’ve done that, and then some, to say the least.
Kislyi: The future was definitely much brighter than those calculations I gave to my grandmother many, many years ago. But we don’t feel the journey is over. In this online world, things happen quickly. There are a lot of successful businesses using online, social, and mobile for not only games, and you can see that they rise up really, really fast. Our audience is pretty much seven billion people. We have at least half of that connected to the Internet and now more even on mobile. I think we’re only just beginning. We are very ambitious. There are oceans, literally oceans, to be conquered, and we haven’t done that yet.