We chatted with Philip Molodkovets, executive producer of the game, whose community has more than 30 million players. Transition and adaptation.
Over the past few weeks, at FreeGameTips we have chatted with studios like Tequila Works, Chibig and CremaGames about their adaptation to remote work by the coronavirus. The pandemic that we are still experiencing does not understand borders and, depending on the country, the severity of COVID-19 has been one or the other. This time we spoke with Lesta Studio, one of the Wargaming development studios in Saint Petersburg Russia, responsible for World of Warships, to tell us about the adaptation process of a team of 500 people.
Why manage a free to play video game always connected; that is, where there is no pause for a single minute, it has added difficulties. If it is a game with 30 million registered players, the approach does not seem exactly easy. Philip Molodkovets has been working on the game for more than six years; He started as a community manager and currently serves as executive producer for the global management team.
FreeGameTips: How many people are currently working on World of Warships and how difficult or difficult has it been to adapt the entire template to remote work?
Philip Molodkovets: We have more than 500 people working in World of Warships and we are offering all the necessary services to our players. All these people are divided into different locations: Saint Petersburg, Prague, Austin, Singapore, Minsk, etc. Our game is great in terms of content and, at the same time, we keep updating it month by month, so the overall development of the game and the estimated publication times of each content is very intense.
Philip Molodkovets, Executive Producer, World of Warships
Our team works like a perfectly connected machine, and of course the need to switch to remote work has been quite a challenge. Logistically, the task was based on moving large numbers of employees home with all the tools. Technically, we had to make sure that these people were able to work with the corporate network; and that they could do it comfortably. From an organizational point of view, we have done everything according to local law regulations. And we had to do everything relatively quickly and with the greatest security.
I think that the main factor that has helped us to overcome this whole situation was the preventive measures of adaptation that we take in the company and the disposition of the management to act thinking about the interest of the employees. In the St. Petersburg study, they provided us with the most important face masks, disinfectants, and up-to-date information on how to protect ourselves long before COVID-19 became the main topic of news talk in Russia. And when the government decreed remote work, we had already been working that way for a couple of weeks before. At the time, it may have sounded a bit far-fetched, but now it's clear that the company did exactly what it had to do.
Have you had to fire any of your employees due to the economic impact that COVID-19 may have had on the company? Do you plan to continue expanding the template once the pandemic ends?
The truth is, no. In fact, the reality is that the impact of the economy on industry – at least in the short term – is that people are spending more time playing video games from their homes. We have been able to maintain all of our operations consistently for now; We hire several people remotely to fill some positions. Furthermore, we continue to search for new talents despite current remote work.
How about coordination? Does communication with this new work methodology also become more complex? Have you encountered any difficulties in managing the day to day?
Oh yes, definitely. It has all become more challenging. In fact, I think that now, the more your work has to do with administration or coordination, the more difficult it will be for you to work from home. My personal feeling is that, at first, this situation could be fine: I felt safe, I had necessary access and, in addition, I love my home. But, after almost two months, I got tired of voice calls and emails instead of being able to have live conversations with my team and my colleagues. And I know that many people share this regret, but there are also those who are absolutely delighted with the current state. I suppose it depends to a great extent on the work you have to do and, to a certain extent, on the personality of each one.
Having said that, a really significant part of the job involves communication with the rest of our offices in other countries. And there, almost nothing has changed, since we have been working with them remotely.
Do you have daily meetings with the rest of the teams? How often do you do these meetings?
Of course, that's how we do it. We have held a few meetings to sync here and there with different people immediately after remote work begins. For my team, at a particular level, we stopped doing some of them because after two weeks of relatively normal work it was somewhat redundant. Prevention is better than cure, don't you think? We have continued to do so with others as they were very helpful in keeping you informed. The need to continue working is there, so we could not stop doing them without alternating the production process.
What do you miss the most from working in the office?
I really miss personal contact during work. And of course I miss a lot of friends as we used to do some teamwork activities and more informal activities when we got off work. For example, I used to play board games with some of my colleagues every week; And now we can only play online, which is also a lot of fun, but the goal of having a disconnected hobby … is precisely to socialize.
Since people were told they had to start working from home, have you had problems with the network infrastructure? For example, slowness or collapsed servers.
To tell the truth, at first we had some problems, but mainly because the general infrastructure of the Internet provider in the city was somewhat overloaded. Regarding our internal infrastructure, I can only praise our technical team, as they have handled the transition perfectly. Game servers are fine. We had several problems, but nothing remarkable. Thus, we are well in that regard.
With all that has happened, how many people are playing World of Warships each day? Have you noticed any special spikes in the number of players? Many companies have reported unexpected and exponential growth in their number of concurrent users.
We have more than 30 million registered players worldwide, which translates into a massive daily, weekly and monthly audience. Our efforts to evolve the game were giving us an increase in audience even before the COVID-19 pandemic. When it all exploded, obviously more and more players started to try the game, come back after a hiatus, or just started playing more.
World of warships
In an attempt to help people around the world deal with isolation and estrangement, we have offered 2 weeks of premium subscription to anyone who has claimed it. All platforms and servers are affected, and the timing of each case depends on government action in a country or region. But as I said before, I think the short-term effect on the video game industry doesn't have predictable effects once the pandemic is over. It is not that it drastically affects our plans: we have no choice but to work hard and continue to offer the best possible naval entertainment to our users.
World of Warships is available under a free to play business model on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
