People have come up with all sorts of nicknames for World of Tanks: “enemy of families,” “Belarusian miracle,” and “breakthrough of the decade.” Its creators managed to do what dozens of companies before them had tried in vain to do, namely, to draw men aged 30 to 45, who are already established in life, into the gaming process on a massive scale. These are people who are not poor and are quite conservative.
It is largely thanks to the support of this age group that the game’s revenues in 2013 alone amounted to no less than half a billion euros. A sum that, just a few years ago, seemed like a dream completely detached from reality to the creators of World of Tanks. And yet, success came: today, there are more than 60 million players and up to a million playing simultaneously. The only fact that somewhat clouds the rosy picture is that the road to triumph took 12 long years. But who said that everything comes at once?
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Background
The history of World of Tanks
Once upon a time, in the vast expanses of Belarus, there was a little-known but quite skilled studio called Wargaming.net. Founded back in 1998, until then it was known only for the fact that it employed people who knew how to fulfill their obligations for reasonable money. The studio had released several games, made improvements for third-party clients, and completed other similar orders.
As it often happens, the wild card came almost by accident: the studio’s development of the AdRevolver engine, responsible for displaying banner ads, attracted the interest of the large Internet advertising company BlueLithium. In exchange for a share of BlueLithium’s profits, the Belarusians provided support staff and a technological platform.
And again, luck was on their side: after a while, the well-known Yahoo bought BlueLithium for $300 million. Wargaming.net received a small but sufficient share of the profits, amounting to several million dollars. It often happens that when people receive a lot of money, they are not ready for it. Fortunately, with Wargaming.net, the opposite was true. They had been waiting for this opportunity for a long time and took full advantage of it.
The creation of World Of Tanks
The fateful conversation about the fate of World Of Tanks (WoT) took place on December 12, 2008, and lasted several hours. The developers were faced with a dilemma that was quite difficult to resolve. So, there is serious money that Yahoo has paid. There was a desire to do something epic and profitable. And, most importantly, a multiplayer online fantasy game was already in development.
So what to do: continue to invest money in a game that already had a billion analogues, or create something truly new and explosive?
As you may have guessed, in the end, a phrase was uttered that dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. I can’t vouch for the exact wording, but the main message was this: to hell with elves and orcs, let’s make tanks! From that moment on, work began on Tankodrome. Yes, that was the working title of the game.
Oh, how many rejections the studio had to hear when it tried to bring in serious investors with whom it could share the financial burden of working on World of Tanks. Many people understood and approved of orcs and elves, but no one wanted to invest in tanks that no one understood the need for. Today, those people are probably kicking themselves, but at the time, Wargaming.net was laughed at and considered to be a bunch of dreamers preoccupied with a doomed and unpromising “project.”
And yet, despite the silly hooting and hollering, Wargaming.net continued to work on World Of Tanks. In April 2009, the game was officially announced, and in September of the same year, alpha testing began, for which there were only five tank models and one incomplete map. Yes, it wasn’t much, but it was a start!