1C's games boss Nikolay Baryshnikov

We'll still experiment bringing new ones. We'll not bring, you know, ten completely new titles a year, obviously, because one day we only had IL-2, then we had Soldiers [Heroes of World War II] and then [gestures widely with hands.] We will maybe try to have one new IP a year, but every year it's getting harder and harder and harder to come up with a property that would be an interesting proposition. Unless you put millions of dollars in marketing in. It's very sad that current market isn't only about games- almost any consumer product, it's about marketing money. The quality of product is not the main decision for the consumer. It's in all the channels, my friend's brought it, I have to buy it... That's crazy, how we have to compete not against great ideas, great graphics, great storyline but against spent money.

We are still in risky zone, on one hand yes we make great games and we can make innovative games because it costs a bit less money than America. But then the market is less accepting new things. My biggest fear is actually it's a problem of time. That our lives our changing, that we talk and talk and talk when there are important things to do, there's not enough for specific entertainment the way we are working.

I think for me social games are little bit like another platform. At one point there was SNES and Megadrive, and then there's an Xbox... I think it's just another platform. I think those games are young, we'll see more sophisticated games in some years' time. To me social games look like the industry would have in the late 80s, early 90s, simple games... In fact, the majority of those games are actually stolen from the old titles. It's another platform, competing for time - somebody's going to play iPhone, somebody's going to play Xbox, somebody's going to play Facebook. I'm waiting with great expectation for Civilization on Facebook, because I believe this could be one of the few first games that will actually show there is more complex gameplay than putting something on your farm.

It's hard to say. Basically, we are a privately held company, which basically means that we have to be profitable, so we need to pay salaries, have enough money in the bank, support our business. We need to present an idea, say we're going to spend $100 and it's going to make $200, and will take x amount of time... If we present something and say the risks are mitigated by that, the projected profits are like this, the extra problems are like this but we're in the black, shareholders say 'well, we trust you as managers to work in business, it looks like reasonable plan, we'll do it.'

If we say 'oh, we have unproven concept, great idea, we have no idea how it's going to work', then probably it will be much harder. So it's more like in any other company.

I might sound stupid but my honest belief is that, in the games industry, nobody has a clue, why that product is successful and that product is a failure. You can do everything right, you can have a proven IP, you can have a great marketing budget, a great game – but nobody buys it. Or you can have a game which the press say is worst game ever, has 10 per cent rating and sells like hundreds of thousands of units, day one.

Yeah, we try to analyse our sales and successes, we try to get what are the trends... That's one of the things of the games industry, we have to make the game now but it sells in two or three years' time. So that's the problem.

I believe that 80 to 90 per cent of gamers, they don't really care where the game was developed, who was the developer etcetera. To me, like a consumer of yogurts or movies... you ask me who was the director of that movie, I have no clue. Whether that was the same studio as Universal Studios or Warner Brothers... Except maybe movies like Star Wars, the Matrix, when it's so highly-marketed that everybody knows that this is the producer, this is the director. So I feel that most gamers, they want gameplay, they want experience, they're not people will say 'oh, made in Russia!'

That's one thing, nobody cares. Then whether our games are different... I agree that our games are different, they tend to be a bit more complex and the difficulty level is higher. So I have a big internal battle, I'm always trying to tell the producers 'make it easier, make it easier, make it easier.' But these studios when they make these games, they play these games, maybe they make them for a number of years, they think 'oh, it's so easy, maybe we should make it more complex.' So I think that is eternal problem. But the industry is young, not many studios have proper staff or experience. It's problems of being young.

We have to be safe, so that's why we have sequel and sequel and sequel, but we're still making pretty much new IPs and new games. Even if we make Men of War 4 or 3 or whatever, it'll be our decision if it has to be on Mars or it has to be in Afghanistan, or somewhere else. So there is a lot of creative risk even in a proven property. So we had a big experiment by making IL-2 Sturmovik on consoles, and we were quite afraid that consumers would not get it. But a few hundred thousand people bought it, and many gamers actually entered the simulation genre on console. Many hardcore simulation fans said 'I am buying an Xbox because there's no other way to play it.' That was an experiment, so I think we can do something else. So I was talking to another publisher, they were saying 'we love Men of War, we believe it has to be massively online to be much more successful.' Well, okay – talk to us, explain to us why.

Overall, I believe that multiplayer is becoming much more important component. Some don't even have a singleplayer and are very successful. Sometimes these heavy story, great graphics, great dialogues games don't sell much, because the consumers say 'I spent 50 bucks and that's it.'

We'll see, because one of the upcoming Men of Wars, Assault Squad, is heavy multiplayer, is like Battlefield-type game, it's an interesting twist. We've got some players saying 'Men of War: Red Tide was singleplayer only, what the hell?' Ok, so this one will have almost no singleplayer, so we'll see.