In this article Andrei Yarantsau and Alex Shilyaev share a few tips and focus on lessons learned from years working as company executives in the gaming industry, they share their success story at Melsoft – a company that firmly holds a place in the top100 most successful mobile game creators in the world.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Year 2015 was a turning point in our careers. We launched a mobile start-up inside a big corporation. From the very beginning we wanted to have more independence, creativity and responsibility for the results, but less bureaucracy and inefficient management. Within 5 years it was sold to an Israeli strategic investor for 200 times its initial valuation. This was a huge achievement to be proud of! Some of our views on mobile game development have changed dramatically during the past few years, and we’d like to share them with you.

GAMES SHOULD ONLY BE CREATED AND DEVELOPED BY “TWO-PIZZA” TEAMS

In the gaming industry there is a popular idea that a mobile game should only be developed by a small team that can be fed with two pizzas. We followed this rule for our first product, where the team was 8-12 specialists during development and 40-50 after the release.

However, the rule changes once the product becomes successful with substantial sales records. Then you need to change the company structure accordingly and include departments such as Development, LiveOps, Marketing, Business Intelligence and Customer Relations to your business.

With our second product we transitioned from a “two-pizza” team to a large organization, with Development and Operations teams separated, an A/B testing team assigned to ensure conscious implementation of each new feature and a Site Reliability Engineering team assigned to monitor business metrics 24/7.

We now believe that developing and operating a successful mobile game requires a team of at least 200- 300 specialists.

EVERY GAME COMPANY MUST REGULARLY LAUNCH NEW GAMES

As people may think, a gaming company to stay competitive in the industry must launch a brand-new game on a regular basis. In fact, the search for a new breakthrough hit is very challenging. You can make a very creative game and not get the market fit. You can follow the latest trends and be late, or you can copy someone’s product and miss something important. During the past few years, we have tried many different things and finally realised that the business should focus on what it does best! For one company it can be building a strong marketing machine, for another – creating the best-in-class content production. Innovation can be applied to any part of a gaming company, not just making new games.

In our case, the company was able to focus on two products – My Café and Family Island, the prototypes of which were bought on the market. This is a classic business story – the winner is not the person who came up with the idea, but the person who was able to make it work.

‘MANAGEMENT IS EVIL’ – A SUCCESSFUL COMPANY CAN FUNCTION WITHOUT MANAGERS

What we have learned from years working within corporate environments is that company structures should have minimum number of managers to avoid developing ‘toxic’ environments due to miscommunication and internal politics. From our experience, in start-ups you do not need middle managers, instead give the responsibility to your specialists. However, as your company grows and becomes “too big to fail”, you need to start considering the high costs of errors, and to avoid these, you need to put in place a new organizational structure that includes professional middle managers. This will support sustainable growth and development of your workforce, with great business results.

WHAT QUALITIES SHOULD A MANAGEMENT TEAM HAVE?

There is a famous quote from legendary management consultant, Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This does not mean that strategy is not important, rather that a strong and empowering culture is the best route to organisational success.

Below there are qualities of leadership team members we found to be very important:
• Caring about employees. Managers put their employees first because a successful business cannot run without specialists.
• Lack of obsession about personal status and titles. For best results, managers should have healthy ambitions without ego.
• Mutual support and understanding of interdependence between managers. This saves decision-makers a significant amount of energy, which is required for innovation.
• The ability to self-recover physiologically and emotionally.

Our adaptability, resilience and agility were put to the test in 2020- 22. Company’s vision and strategic plans changed suddenly a few times, and our leadership team was able to promptly address these changes overnight, whilst keeping our people motivated for business continuity.

HOW TO BUILD A SYSTEM OF FINANCIAL MOTIVATION FOR EMPLOYEES?

We had a profit-sharing system in place at the company for several years. This works very well in a stable business environment. However, when a company requires funds to keep expanding, the profit-sharing system is not favourable.

According to our observations, employees greatly valued unforeseen pay raises of at least 30% and expensive gifts like new smartphones, gaming consoles, branded clothes and wearables. Thus, the ideal system of financial incentives for employees should combine above-mentioned unexpected rewards, a transparent salary and a bonus for meeting company goals.