Wargaming company video

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Hello everyone,

most of you have probably already seen (or at least heard of) the Wargaming 15 year anniverary company history video. If there’s someone who has not, here it is in English:

 

 

So, I’ve seen it and…

*deep breath*

It’s pretty good actually. I like it. It’s not a silly “slumdog millionaire” story about guys, who sold crap and suddenly made millions. The company evolved for over a decade, made bad games in the past, made good game in the past and there was a lot of hard work.

What personally surprised me was, how little space did Sergei Burkatovsky (aka SerB) get. I always thought he was like one of the three-four people, who were there in the beginning, but apparently it’s not like that. Considering how iconic he is (at least on Russian server), they should have given him more space, or at least tell “his story”. Also, I haven’t seen Overlord mentioned anywhere, when WoT Blitz was discussed, I thought he’s one of the leading developers of that thing.

Another thing that surprised me was Viktor Kislyi’s brother (was it? or cousin? can’t remember) – I had no idea of his existence, I thought WG USA is led by… well, someone, an American perhaps. No idea why they interview some Human Resources employee (the woman) either. I mean, HR is important, but it’s not game development.

Anyway, judging by the comments, lots of people seem to be concerned by the “propaganda” and “lies”, especially when it comes to “listening to the community”. Despite my often critical position towards Wargaming, I think some people are not fair in this case. Wargaming does listen, at least to reasonable ideas. For heavens sake, there is a daily (!) communication with the lead developers, how many other games have that?

The truth about player suggestion is that overall, players (as a whole) have no idea what they want. Half of the players was angry when they nerfed arty, half was glad arty is not such a menace anymore. Another part of players still thinks that German tanks are underpowered etc. Wargaming can’t listen to everyone, simple as that.

Obviously, I do not condone all WG actions (the Stalin issue handling was probably the worst screwup I’ve seen since I started playing WoT, and considering the other fails, that’s saying a lot), but when it comes to WG listening to player feedback, I think they do it – you know, just right. At least overall (the EU vs RU community is another matter).

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.

72 thoughts on “Wargaming company video”

  1. I believe that it was Serb who wanted little attention in this video, but maybe I’m just wrong :) :) :)

  2. Pretty nice article, good thing you made some points straight here SS

    INB4 massive whine
    “omg lel SS but WG no listen to da playah!”
    “lol wut ? SS u sick, WG do not listen to dem players”
    “Serb sick, SerB sick, die Serb!!!!!!!!!!!111111″
    “WG commie scum they only money, me wants free prem for eternity & unlimited gold ammo cause WoT unplayable!”
    “Dem German tanks shit, russian bias OMG SS y u no see dis?!”
    “Mah E-100 ninja nerf fuk u Wg cause (insert random nerf conspiracy to earn money here)”
    “U shoud buff this in mah Lowe, end dis, end dis, end give 300 mm pene, imma good playa but dis tank shiet and imma genius so listen to me WG, No ? LOL WG y u no listen to community?!?!”

    Man, community is shit, in every popular game it is, but you guys don’t deserve even a half of attention WG gives to you .

  3. Of all the MMO gaming companies I have seen and played games, Wargaming is by far the BEST! With my personal opinion on German tanks as underpowered and their “Russian bias” aside, WG actually does a pretty danm good job on their MMOs. EA is the epitome of being a silly MMO company, Gaijin is terrible too, CherryCredits is greedy, Asisoft is a fucktard asian company, and many more terrible MMO companies. Blizzard is 50/50 good and bad. WG is simply the best!

    More power to WG and I hope they can do well on their future titles.

    • No offence, but:

      Pz 1 C – incredible fun tank
      VK 3601 – beast of a tier 6, one of the best
      Panther – great sniper
      E50/E50M – great tanks
      Leopard P/Leopard – great tanks
      Tiger/Tiger P – great tanks
      Stug 3 – great TD
      Hetzer – great TD
      JPanther – great TD
      Ferdinand – great TD
      Jpanther 2 – great TD
      JTiger – Great TD
      JE100 – great TD
      Tiger 2 – great tank
      E-75 – great tank
      VK4502 A – great tank
      E100/Maus – very fun
      T-25/E-25/JTiger 88/Lowe – very good premiums

      I don’t see the under-powered here…. This was just from the top of my head and I had/have real fun with those tanks, only problem I have is I don’t have the high tier ones, only played them on test server and you know how test server is! I’m not a great player either.

        • 4502A is cool.
          A medium tank with a KT turret, lots of steel bolted to it, carrying a nice gun – what´s not to like?

          Its the follow up that has me worried though…

        • you miss the JagP IV and VK45B in purpose do you? :P…anyway VK45A is very nice tank when played properly..not as heavy but as medium…nice sweet times we have together =)

          • VK4502A Is a mobile heavy with a good gun, very effective, what’s not to like! I learned to play watching HighFlyer15 videos, he’s first lesson was to not get hit! I played the tank on test server and I had fun with it, giving the amount of gold ammo on test servers…

            Jpanzer 4 is fine, not great, not bad, clearly not as bad as people make it look!
            Didn’t play the VK4502B.

            • The vk4502b is just a shocker. Slow like glacier with sides made of cheese and a turret rotation powered by asmatic hamsters. Truly the unloved child of the whole German line.

            • Both the Vk4502′s are briliant tanks. They don’t spoon feed you like so many other heavy tanks out there (ahem, Russians..). Learn to play their unique styles and you’ll find they’re more than a match for any equal tier heavy.

        • When penetration got nerfed, and armor got buffed, the VK4502A got pretty good, actually.

    • I can’t agree with your opinion on Gaijin, but nevertheless, the best MMO company that I’ve seen so far is GGG (Grinding Gear Games) – creators of Path of Exile.

      But it’s true, in terms of game developing, WG is one of the best. You can do everything without paying any real money, BUT they’re failing in a lot of matters. I have friends that quit WoT because WG is promising historical battles for a long long time and again they’ll fail, cause WT tanks will be first so noone who likes historical battles will get back from WT to WoT.
      The developers are ok, the game is ok, but tbh they had no reason to do better without any real competition going on.

  4. Serb is iconic for two reasons: first, he is the one who took responsibility to contact community. You can easily compare him with Ghostcrawler from Blizzard. Both are well knownn, both are playing big part in game design… and both aren’t involved in organization process. And video is exactly about organization.

    Second, SerB is known by himself without connection to Wargaming – he is author of book about modern people get into past WWII time – and it became some sort of referense for whole kind of such literature in russian.

    • I know. But it still doesn’t explain, why they didn’t give him 3-4 mins to tell his story in a 40 minute movie. You know, like “I am Sergei Burkatovsky, I am a writer and a game designer, I came to WG in… etc.”

      Plus, what you mention, his books – they will be known to a part of Russian players, but if we count ALL the players around the world (European, American, Chinese, SEA etc.), I daresay that the majority will have no idea that SerB ever wrote a historical scifi book, or that it sparked the popular genre of “people falling thru time” in Russia.

      Plus, Storm was there (well, a bit), why not SerB? Or for example why not Pavel Myreev? As far as I know, he leads the WoT tank balancing, that’s important.

      • From my point of view, video is about organization. So they show us people who organize the whole process. Appearence of HR manager is very logical in this case. Also Storm is more about to connect people in different projects while said SerB and Myreev are part of developers’ teams.

        SerB was given an appearance just because he is mean part of main franchise – as you have stated. But he aren’t so important if you’ll approach it from bussiness point of view.

    • Blizzard haven’t shut Titan down, they have thrown some/a lot of it away, and started to from that point again.

  6. Nobody noticed the last sentences, talking about a big game which will be developed with WoT, WoWP & WoWS team? =P

  7. >(the Stalin issue handling was probably the worst screwup I’ve seen since I started playing WoT, and considering the other fails, that’s saying a lot)
    meh, does it affect my, yours or anyone else gaming experience? Honestly I’m much more bothered by their handling of those rigged competition, that Stalin issue got overinflated, in part because of your little campaigning…

    • Let’s not get into this anymore. I do believe that those inscriptions could have been returned “silently” without big-mouthed proclamations about historicity. It was WG being blunt that sparked the rage, not Stalin himself.

  8. About “listening to community”: I have screenshots how Storm had changed his mind from “works as intentend” to “we screw it up a little” under pressure of community in less than 24 hours.

  9. “What personally surprised me was, how little space did Sergei Burkatovsky (aka SerB) get. [...]
    Considering how iconic he is (at least on Russian server), they should have given him more space, or at least tell “his story”.”

    How terrible.

  10. Its actaully a really interesting story and the documentary is surpisingly made really really good.

    I was surprised that WoT in general didnt get more space, maybe the wanted to avoid “Wargaming = World of Tanks.” but as i understood it, Serb was THE guy responsible for developement of WoT right from the start.
    Also Storm joined Wg rather late.

    didnt you say somewhrre sometime that Overlord got somehow pushed out of circle of the big boys and put aside for some reasons?

    What made me really lauh was at the beginning when viktor Kisli told about that email game, which was played by a total of 6 players. “one russian, his name was Petr” – then they show this guy as Wg employee…. xD

    all in all, Wargaming made an even more sympathic impression to me than i had before.

    You just dont have to mistake WG Eu fails with Wg in general. Im somewhat jealous the russian dont have to deal with the Eu morons…

  11. “The truth about player suggestion is that overall, players (as a whole) have no idea what they want.”
    And we can safely say that WoT (most of them) players are like women – no clue what they want :D

    • Some of them ARE women. Strangely the women I know who play tanks are not that picky. Maybe its just the small data pool (3) but hey you never know.

  12. Nice to see how wargaiming became bigger. But i never heard of this company before WoT.
    All their strategy games are only average and totaly outclassed by World in Conflict for example.

    Maybe WoWS will become a success too. WoWP already looks like a fail.

    • One does not simply beat plane simulator developers in the first try.
      Im waiting for the clash of Gaijin and WG at the water :D

      • I’ve always thought that one of the main reasons WoWP failed is because WG ambitiously jumped right into a very “mature”(in the sense that flight sims are a very old genre with hundreds if not thousands of games and dozens of very experienced developers) genre and tried to build something huge with no prior experience. Couple that with a poor choice of engine(very important in a flight game), the bad luck of one of those experienced developers releasing a very similar competing game at the same time, and a host of other smaller reasons, and the whole project collapsed.

        On the other hand, WG succeeded with tanks because that’s a more immature genre, not many tank games exist outside of the occasional sim here and there over the years. Naval combat is also pretty immature to the best of my knowledge, so hopefully they’ll do better in that case.

  13. I think Victor wanted to show us WG as a well established company, comparable with the greatest. That’s why we see a lot of variable emplyoees from every department. It’s all Russians – they just want to show off (like golden teeth).

  14. This is LIFE folks. Nice to see how it turned out for them. From that tiny anonymous almost team, to todays big company worth of hundreds of millions of dollars.

    A pure example on how to succeed in LIFE!

  15. The funny part is that the elves and orks from the early WoT teasers were from a serious game project.
    They realy wanted to compete with blizzard and co !

    It was the most epic luck to meet serb at the right time and change it all to tanks.

  16. I thought they designed the orcs and other fabtasy stuff to make fun about WoW and WC3.
    But they were the product of many concept studys…. wft :P

  17. There was a point in the video where SerB is credited with insisting that the controls for WoT simple and clearly this was a factor in the accessibility and success of the game.

  18. SS:”For heavens sake, there is a daily (!) communication with the lead developers, how many other games have that?”

    Well. There is EvE. But it is a very tight community.

  19. Regarding comment right at the end by Chris Taylor. He talked about a fourth game in the series. It will be ‘World of War’ or similar. Combined tanks, planes, boats and infantry/other forces type game. Essential Operation Bagration massively expanded and updated to MMO. You heard it here first.

  20. I kinda want a .GIF of the Orc slaughtering the Elves just to be squished by a tank….

  22. I think the video did well to show how the company grew up and it was not always planned and done smoothly. Like most companies that grow quickly, how that success is handled can make or break you. It showed quite clearly they did not expect WOT to morph into the huge community it is now. They were playing catch up to the needs of the community. They designed a game that was meant to throw usually random groups of 28 people in a fun simple tank battle with cool explosions. Then people began forming clans, competing at Cons etc etc. Initially the tanks were not well balanced, but they are not in real life so it was a small thing compared to actually getting the game designed and working on the scale they needed. As the game has matured, balance is much more of a game requirement. Keeping the different player bases happy is nearly impossible. There are very few issues that the majority of players agree on. I think WG is one of the best at communicating with the players and listening even if they do not choose to act on player issues. They make mistakes but compared to the rest of the large gaming companies they are head and shoulders above them. Now if they could just fix MM to have me be at the top every battle…

  24. I was not surprised by the HR director being a part of the video. Because HR does all the training, employee reviews, hiring, firing, and status reports, they tend to be the natural “historians” of a corporations history.