Market Report: Russia

Well, major titles are pretty successful everywhere, but the best genres are first-person shooters and action games, then strategy titles, RPGs and some racing games. Particular titles that have had good results would include Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed, from Ubisoft. PC versions of console games are popular too - we sold close to 400,000 units of Test Drive Unlimited here in Russia, while Prince of Persia was around 1.5 million.

One of the reasons the PC games sell is because they have low price points here, while console games are pretty much the same as everywhere else. So an A-category PC game would sell for around USD 20 at retail.

It's not bad - a while after release the price drops to USD 20 everywhere, or its equivalent, but here it stays at USD 20 the whole time, there's no price drop later on. The whole lifetime of the product it remains at its starting price. For a B-category game you're looking at USD 12-15 at retail.

Well, the console market here is growing - more quickly than the PC market. It was close to zero about five years ago, but now it's just under 20 per cent.

But when it comes to development here, it's not an easy business - recently Russia's been the oil country, and wages were higher because there was more money coming into the consumer markets. However, in my opinion very few Russian studios can actually create really competitive international titles... but maybe that's like everywhere - 90 per cent of studios create average titles, and only 10 per cent can really make something special.

Yes, that's true. I think there are two major problems for Russian developers - high salaries, especially in cities like Moscow (which is like a big European city now) where people expect good wages. For developers, that's not very good. Ten or fifteen years ago it was possible to make a decent game at a much lower cost than the rest of Europe, for example, but now that's not the case.

The second problem is that we have a shortage of designers here with the expertise of making games that will appeal internationally - in the US market particularly - because of the cultural difference. So if a Russian developer wants to make a game for the US market, they need to hire an American producer.

To an extent, yes, but good professionals cost pretty much the same everywhere.

Well, the economic situation in the last year isn't very good. The retail market dropped twice, and the Rouble was devalued by about 25 per cent. In our sales structure we can see more than 70 per cent of sales are based on international licenses - so we pay for the license in Dollars or Euros... and there's a problem. The fall in the currency has really damaged the business.

Well, we can see some signs of recovery - September was about 35 per cent lower than last year... but that's better than the Summer, which was about 50 per cent down.

In my opinion we'll see a real recovery next Fall, but this year will just be year-on-year drops.

Yes, but that will be mostly development companies - before the crisis it was very difficult to get loans from the banks, so small- and medium-sized developers worked only for money from the Russian publishers.

Now the publishers suffer from a drop in sales, so they don't have enough money to invest in the development - so those smaller companies are closing as a result.

Yes, that's true. Normally in the international media we can see information about the piracy levels of business software - but in games software the piracy levels are much lower, because Russian publishers and distributors are fighting hard, and creating effective models for people to buy games legitimately.

In major cities like Moscow of St Petersburg, the market is probably about 70-80 per cent legal - but in remote regions the situation is the opposite, and the piracy market is at about that level, but that it is improving.