Victor Kislyi Q&A

Victor Kislyi, leading WG since 17 years ago, gave an interview to the Vedomosti newspaper. Here is the important stuff:

-We have an big audience, and it is distributed 50%-50%: Half of the players come from Russia and the former Soviet Union (Seb: vodka pls, & kvas) and the other half from the rest of the world.

-The average WoT player pays 25$ per month.

-25% of our players are paying for in-game stuff, it is a lot better compared to other games.

-Wargaming plans to compensate the revenue drop by growing in international markets, making new projects and promoting E-Sports.

-Are gold iPhones popular in China? And about the gold Type 59 we made at the request of Chinese workers, our workers told us that it is not good at all. Such a tank spoils our reputation, which is very important. We will not do stuff like this again. (Seb: Well until you run out of money, that is!)

-The Seattle office creates a new, unannouced project.

-We possibly (Seb: no, most certainly) hurried with the WoWP project and it came wrong in some areas. We are now studying it and we are trying to correct the game (Seb: pffft, copy WT and ALL players will love the game). WoWS is very good in all aspects.

-We still have room to grow in Europe and the US. In Russia there is already a market saturation. Everyone in Russia heard about World of Tanks, maybe without the guys from the taiga.

-Minsk was and remains the heart of Wargaming (Seb: this sounds so romantic), so talks about moving our HQ are not true.

-WG earns profits of hundreds of millions of dollars, but because of the fall of the russian ruble, our dollar profits have stagnated and they are not rising. As far as the currency rised again, it is not very important.

-Last year we released a new version of World of Tanks, in which we made some technical mistakes: there were lots of draws. We released some vague historical battles that did not meet the user expectations. Those factors immediately affected our player bases, reducing the active users number in 2 months by 20%.