WG looks toward $200 bn industry revenue

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Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/

Victor Kislyi urges the industry to change public perception and reach new heights of financial success. Wargaming’s Victor Kislyi has set the games industry a goal of $200 billion in total annual revenue by 2016.

Speaking at DICE Europe today, Kislyi pointed to the industry’s current $75 billion annual revenue as evidence of unrealised potential. The games industry, he said, is in the entertainment business, and so its revenue shouldn’t be viewed in isolation, but in the context of the combined revenue of every entertainment industry – all of which are in the business of, “killing time.”

Kislyi outlined a number of ways the industry could reach this goal. Hit mobile games like Clash of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons earn enough daily revenue to entice new investors to the industry, while the borderless nature of digital media has made it possible for much smaller western companies to explore markets beyond the traditional gaming strongholds in North America and Europe. He also suggested the possibility of big games – League of Legends and World of Tanks, to use Kislyi’s example – sharing data and insights through popular social platforms like Facebook, each reinforcing the other’s success.

“We are going to use these things smartly to change people’s view and perspective on games,” he said. “We have to change the perception of games in pretty much the whole population. We have to bring games inside people’s lives.”

Kislyi beseeched the crowd to use their time for the good of the industry, rather than just their own products or companies – by making contact with local and national government, by making contact with educational authorities, by working in the local community, and so on.

“Ask yourself a question. In the last seven days, how much time did you spend making the industry – not just your games – look better? … We need to go out. We need to push it. We need to take this information to the [outside] world. We need to become missionaries.

“If you do this, I think that $200 billion revenues will be very small compared to what we have in a few years time.”

Wargaming is one of the most dynamic companies in the industry today, both acquiring and opening studios over an impressively productive last 12 months. The company’s success has been built on its runaway online hit World of Tanks, which is due to be one of the first free-to-play games to hit Xbox Live.

54 thoughts on “WG looks toward $200 bn industry revenue”

  1. 200 billion in revenue, and yet we’re still stuck with Telia, and non-destructable terrain.. riiiiiiiiight.

    Oh, and bring the Donkey.

    • 200bn is for the entire industry…

      World of Tanks i don’t consider free to play on XboX because you have to pay for Live Gold

      • Please….. just do at least some research before re-posting PR crap.

        EverQuest Next – FULLY destructible terrain and multi-level world. MUCH more than WoT will ever need. Don’t forget that it is also a huge world, ALL of which can be destroyed.

        And to be honest this “goal” is kinda scary. To get such a revenue, devs will turn to even more casual crowd. Anyone thinks that most of games today are bland and are not challenging? Don’t worry, tomorrow games will become even easier.

        • Company of Heroes has some sort of destructible ground IIRC, buildings being destructible too and I had it running on 1.8ghz Athlon 3000 and even on Sempron 2800 (not sure about that name) which was even weaker (1.6Ghz? 1.7 Ghz?); with Radeon 9800Pro 128mb;

          I know it is really different from WoT, but perhaps it is doable if we do not want it to be too complex and it may work even on some of the weaker computers WoT players have, especially if servers took some of the load. We will see.

        • First thing: everquest is not live yet (we’ll see how things actually work after getting our hands on the live game, not a developer demonstration…), and even after launch, I highly doubt that their servers will support a hundred thousand players. (The only game that is comparable to WoT in terms of sheer player volume on a single cluster is EVE Online)
          Mate, how many players does a minecraft server has to serve at once?
          Also, most of minecraft is about terrain alteration, no need to calculate 30 shells angle of incidence, tank armor specialties, tank spotting calculations, speed of tanks, and doing it for hundreds of thousands of players at the same time, whilst making sure they do not “alter” their client (as in, they do not hack).
          A Battlefield server for instance has to deal with destructible terrain, some shell trajectory, and a way simpler hitbox system, and thats it.
          The maximum number of players on a server is what, 80, or 120? And the servers can be dedicated servers (i.e.: hosted by players), with an optional, basic anti-cheat system, but most of the time, live moderators who get rid of such players.
          Most of the eye-candy in a frostbite game comes from client side processed effects.
          Please compare these to a world of warcraft, world of tanks or league of legends…

          • And you seriously think that WoT cluster is anything different then big number of virtual servers for each combat?

            • Also, minecraft is bad example, as it’s 100% java app, it’s simply not made for massive amounts of players.

              EQN server will support 10-20k per server and unlike WoT server, it will have to support them in single environment, something completely different from sessions on limited amount of maps.
              If you look further, EQN offers not only destruction, but also creation.

            • They will do instancing and sessions, just like in any mmo.
              Of course clusters are made up from a bunch of blades, but if you think such an infrastructure is even comparable to a battlefield server..

    • 200 bn per year? Only if GTA VI or VII gets released in 2016 (I’m expecting GTA V to hit the 2bn mark once it get’s released on PC, if not already before that, I mean, they made 800 million on the first day and 1bn after 3 days of release)

      • Destructible Terrain: Because Arty needs to be Really Truly OP.

        Also, comparing WoT to FrostBite games is silly because most of their logic runs on the client-side, whereas most of WoT runs on the server. This makes cheating and hacks harder but also makes things like destructible terrain literally a cost-benefit calculation for WG with a high cost in terms of needing more servers and a low real benefit (Not having destructible terrain does not “break” the game)

          • Mate, how many players does a minecraft server has to serve at once?
            Also, most of minecraft is about terrain alteration, no need to calculate 30 shells angle of incidence, tank armor specialties, tank spotting calculations, speed of tanks, and doing it for hundreds of thousands of players at the same time, whilst making sure they do not “alter” their client (as in, they do not hack).
            A Battlefield server for instance has to deal with destructible terrain, some shell trajectory, and a way simpler hitbox system, and thats it.
            The maximum number of players on a server is what, 80, or 120? And the servers can be dedicated servers (i.e.: hosted by players), with an optional, basic anti-cheat system, but most of the time, live moderators who get rid of such players.
            Most of the eye-candy in a frostbite game comes from client side processed effects.
            Please compare these to a world of warcraft, world of tanks or league of legends…

            • —-They will do instancing and sessions, just like in any mmo.
              Of course clusters are made up from a bunch of blades, but if you think such an infrastructure is even comparable to a battlefield server..

              And this is where you are wrong. EQN will have no instances or mirrors. It’s a main feature of the game, free open world.

              I’m pretty sure that WoT servers act like a big cluster of virtual session servers and main hub is only responsible for the storage of stats and chat.

    • He’s talking about a multi-billion dollar world wide industry revolution, and you suggest they re-implement a few tanks in one game… way to completely miss the point of the article.

    • /facepalm moment.

      This would go 180 degree AGAINST what VK said. I share his dream though. i wish gaming industry would be as dominant as that of Movies and music.

      • It already surpassed movies in budget, the gaming industry as a whole is more worth in $ than movie industry.

  4. I got a strong impression that Kisly is starting to fall in to megalomania.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s good he has an ambitions for entire industry but he seems to be way too forward…. especially when talking about any kind of cooperation with League of Legends and Riot. I’m kinda skeptic for Riot to shake hands with WG. They both rose on success of F2P format but… they still have a different philosophy.

    I mean WG is strong in game concept and design of gameplay but is lacking in tech department (red screen, bad compatibility with mobile GPU’s, inefficient CPU usage, bugs for particular system specs)

    While Riot is strong in tech department (srsly, anyone of you who played LoL ever encountered any technical problems?) but their game concept is… well…. proven but dull in the long run , they didn’t introduced anything groundbreaking or essentially new since LoL itself was released ( and LoL is based on DoTa mod for Warcraft 3 so there goes their creativity), they are also one game company so that says alot about their creative capacity.

    • What are the groundbreaking features which WG introduced since closed beta?
      Riot are riding the esports wave and also reaping rewards from adding competitive game, which anyone can participate in and, in theory, contest with best of the best.

  5. “Ask yourself a question. In the last seven days, how much time did you spend making the industry – not just your games – look better?”

    Well, looking at WG’s PR “successes,” and SerB’s attitude, I’d say fuck all in their case. Pot kettle black.

  6. “Kislyi beseeched the crowd to use their time for the good of the industry, rather than just their own products or companies – by making contact with local and national government, by making contact with educational authorities, by working in the local community, and so on”

    LOL, like he could even get his own company to do at least half of those things…
    srsly – fix your own home, before you set out to fix the world.

  7. GTA V made 800 million dollars on first day….

    WG C.E.O? WTF, the game industry become an Oil company with Oligarchs, i don’t think so… it’s too complicated to manage.

  8. If all game companies steal like his company does, they could take even 300$ billion revenue.

  9. Its sounds a bit off for me, like guy who won a lottery would be saying “everyone go win a lottery!”. WoT is a fun game and it grew to incredible levels, but its only one of few games WG published and, even tho i heard they are were pretty good, no other made them so much money. In addition, I dont think World of Warplanes and Battleships will be such a success – they will gain some popularity riding on WoT train, but they wont be as big and they would never get so big as a standalone (as in – published before WoT for example).

    Maybe Im wrong, but success of WoT seems like an “accident” to me, and they wont be able to do it again with other game – hence, them trying to “lead” the industry just seems a little show offish, like a kid who got better bike than his friends and now hes bragging about it.

    • completely right
      and to WGs face comes WarThunder from their own back yard to punch them

      WG is losing a lot of old-timers, so they introduced missions to keep the current player base interested

      WoWp, a total flop – there are maybe 200k active players right now (globally), once the game goes live .. things will get even worse
      why. because there is no incentive to play it; now, people play it for tokens that will convert into premium time to use in WoT

      WoWs .. they have refused to show gameplay footage time and time again
      I suspect they’re waiting for Gaijin to make their move

      • afaik
        1) from the forum posts on the ru community (or, rather, communities) a lot of people think wt failed – they’re just waiting for wg to fail in the same zone
        2) wowp will get abit more players (mostly from pr and commercial succes, obviously) but it won’t (it physically can’t) be as successful as wot (variety of reasons on that one, without remembering wt)
        3) same thing here, wobs (world of BS, lol) was planned before wowp (makarov or serb mentioned it, can’t remember who) but they got into a few problems, and suddenly wowp is getting developed
        wobs is pretty dry and highly unplayable atm (no CAT up, though i’m waiting) from most of the comments, even from the devs, which does actually seem like a valid reason NOT to show game footage – they don’t want a wot-like outbreak of “you promised but didn’t implement it”, that shit comes out a lot on wot-ru, even if the devs said that they’re not 100% sure

        sure, i ain’t saying that wot ISN’T winning a lottery – but it’s still a bit more than pure luck, while wowp isn’t really there)

        • agreed, Gaijin failed with WT in player’s ability to earn credits past a certain tier and is absolutely forced to buy gold

          what they did right is their engine

      • WoWs HAS NOT EVEN HIT ALPHA
        .
        Stop panicking about WoWs it will NOT be hitting even open BETA tell sometime late in 2014.
        .
        It takes 1-2 MONTHS to make a Destroyer
        It takes 2-3 MONTHS to make a Cruiser
        It takes 3-4 MONTHS to make a Carrier or Battleship
        .
        That likely a team of 2-4 people working every day on just drawing and coloring and editing a single ship.The ships are as complicated to draw and design as the real ships as the original blueprints are used in drawing the ships and are effectively copied in the process to a digital copy. Please hold yourself together and just wait it out. It will not be out this year and IF we are lucky it will be out around December 2014… But I don’t expect it tell 2015 and the rough plan so far is 2015 when its out of open Beta.
        .
        NEMO.

        • panicking? I don’t even have hopes for it

          aside from very few press members who signed NDAs, no one has even saw gameplay footage .. well, except WG and their testers

    • Agreed. WG has made fail games for a whole decade. Their only success is WoT. And WoT’s success has depended very much on the engine, which is not made by WG developers. They were mostly just lucky. With a different engine, the game would have been hacked to shit in a week and it would be ruined by cheaters. With that said, not all sorts of games can use this engine. Figure what would happen if you would try to make a racing game, when servers are having trouble to handle slow tanks already. WoT is a very fortunate accident for them, a slow paced and heavily server-sided game. It adds to the success that it has tanks and there are not many tank games. There are many companies that have ONE successful product and they suddenly think they know everything, but the truth is that they have failed many times with their other games and only this has become a success. They have yet to show that they can repeat it.

  10. son.. I got 200 bil dollars, and none of them are going into fixing the broken mechanics in 8.8 :)

  11. Am I the only one that got cold shivers when I read this:
    <>

    I mean, it is obvious that’s what we’re doing with games and movies and such, but just saying it bluntly like that … we’re killing our time and these people are making money out of it. What do we have that’s more precious than time ?

    Small philosophical lapse. Ignore and carry on.

    • The quote was
      ” The games industry, he said, is in the entertainment business (…) all (industries) of which are in the business of, “killing time.” “

    • Better than twats like woody allen, cruise and that bunch of pervs pretending that their films have “serious and historical meaning”…

      Arse
      Own
      Up it….

  12. We are talking about the ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY instead of just random game-budget.

    All I see is stupidity of people comparing game-engines and games. Only a few comments have realized the whole picture of what the article is about. If you rip a random part out of the context, you can’t even point your opinion.