On October 27-28, 2010 in Business centre “Japan House" the second annual event - the All-Russian Conference on Game Industry (ACGI) occurred. It was organized by the Russian association of developers and publishers of game industry and interactive technologies (RADIT).

Crytek company became the gold sponsor of ACGI for the second time. Сrytek GmbH is one of the world’s leading independent development studios for interactive entertainment well-known for its own 3D-technology CryENGINE®.

Level 3 Communications company became the silver sponsor of ACGI 2010. Level 3 Communications is a premier international provider of fiber-based communications services.

Progrestar Inc. company is also the sponsor of ACGI 2010. Progrestar is the leading full-cycle online applications developer for social networks.

General media sponsor of the event is MAIL.RU company. Mail.Ru is the leading player in online-communication and entertainment spheres in Russian and Eastern Europe.

ACGI partners: Socialist (by Gameland), European Games Developer Federation (EGDF), AIOMI, Dubai World Game Expo (DWGE), IVDC, Pockett Videogames, 178 Games, BYTEmag.ru, StartupPoint, Navystavke.ru and others.

This year ACGI was devoted to the questions of online games and social games business and was focused on attracting the heads of companies and top-management.

Over 150 people visited the event: the heads of the leading Russian, Western and Asian development companies, publishers, consulting companies, the representatives of financial-investment and banking sector, services suppliers, localization companies, expert communities and others.

ACGI 2010 was held in the several formats: conference, pitching of start-up projects and business matching.

The event was opened by the speech of Vsevolod Leonov, Vice-president on international business development, MAIL.RU. Vsevolod spoke about the perspectives of games publishing in Russian social networks. He estimated the volume of Russian market of social games at 70M USD, total number of gamers reached 60M.

The following questions became the priority themes of the speeches on the conference: the specific of releases of Russian IT products in Russian social networks and abroad, the issues of search and communication with publishers, the questions of monetization, the importance of technical support, the specific of Asian IT products adaptation on the Russian market etc.

The projects’ pitching was carried out on the second day, October 28, and was organized jointly with ACGI 2010 partner – community of startup teams and investors - “Startup Point”. The projects for social networks were presented within the traditional format “Elevator Pitch” and were valued by the leading experts of Russian game industry.

Business matching also caused the interest among the attendees. The conference organizing committee gave an opportunity to arrange meetings online and hold negotiations in special hall during all 2 days.

The visit of delegation from Taiwan became one the key events at ACGI this year. The members of the delegation were the representatives of the leading development companies of online games, games for social networks, console projects (XPEC Entertainment Inc., Unalis Corporation, International Games System Co., Ltd., Gamania Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd, Keystone Game Studio) as well as the representatives of Taiwan Computer Association (TCA) and Game Industry Promotion Alliance (GIPA).

The main aim of Taiwanese guests visit became the participation in Russian - Taiwanese forum which was hold out within ACGI 2010 on October, 28. Mr. Aaron Hsu, Chairman of GIPA and CEO of XPEC Entertainment Inc was the main speaker from Taiwanese side. The Representative (Head) of the Representative Office for the Taipei-Moscow Economic and Cultural Coordination Commission (TMECCC) Mr. Antonio C.S. Chen became the special guest of the forum. Mr. Antonio C.S. Chen had a speech in whitch he spoke about the perspectives of collaboration between two countries in game industy and multimedia fields.

The companies Nival Network, Progrestar Inc, i-Jet Media took part in the forum from the Russian side. Konstantin Popov, the President of Russian association RADIT was the forum’ moderator.

As a forum result the solemn signing of the memorandum about collaboration between Russian association of developers and publishers of game industry and interactive technologies (RADIT) and Association GIPA has taken place.

Attendees’ feedbacks about ACGI 2010:

"We spent a lot of time waiting due to the traffic in Moscow, however, when the conference officially launched, it was worth the wait. If Russia can work more closely with Taiwan's game industry in terms of exceptional people, projects and creativity, I believe Russia's game will be as famous as Russia's vodka and caviar internationally in no time."

Aaron Hsu, Chairman at XPEC Entertainment Inc.

“Today the Russian market of social applications is under development and forming. For market further growth it is very important for Russian companies to have strong communication and share the experience not only with each other but also with the representatives of foreign development companies and publishers. We would like to thank the organizers of the All-Russian conference on game industry and interactive technologies 2010 for providing the professional platform for realization of these aims and goals. On ACGI we met not only our partners and friends but also renewed many business contacts and established new business connections. We will attend the next year event with pleasure”.

Andrey Fadeev, CEO and founder of Progrestar Inc.

“Making decision on attendance at ACGI 2010 first of all we were guided by the necessity to hold as much negotiations with professional community as possible. Analyzing the experience of last year conference (ACGI 2009) we understood that calm business environment that was provided by the organizers this year is the best format for fruitful work. Besides, the fact that the representatives from South-Eastern Asia attended the conference was very important. This market is one of the key ones for our business.

The suggested format of the conference has not been used in Russia before. The format allowed to have your own meeting place and to book meetings during the day.”

Dmitry Guseff, Marketing Director Deputy at StarForce Technologies

"I really enjoyed taking part in the ACGI conference this year. The conference gave me a very usefully and good insight view as well as a lot of information about the status quo of the Russian games industry. In addition I learnt a lot about the Taiwan games industry due to the partnership between the two countries. The conference was very well organized and the business matchmaking event allows me to get in direct touch with game companies from Russia and Taiwan. I'm looking forward to the next ACGI event in 2011."

Frank Holz, Managing director at IEM Consulting

“Thanks for the invitation for the conference and an opportunity to share our ideas about modern market of social games. It is great that not only Russian developers but also colleagues from Europe and Taiwan could come for the event. I would like to note the contribution of Association RADIT to the development of game industry in Russia and to express the hope on further collaboration including the question of promotion of Russian social games on international markets”.

Oksana Loginova, Commercial director at i-Jet Media

“I was glad to attend ACGI 2010. During 2 days of the event I had an opportunity to listen to the interesting presentations as well as meet many conference attendees and discuss different topics in the field of game industry. It was a pleasure to talk with the representatives of known Russian, European and Asian companies. I would like to thank the organizers very much and would be glad to take part in ACGI 2011”.

Roman Kupchikov, Account Manager at i-Jet Media

In the nearest time the presentations of the speakers and videos will be available for the registered users of our website. From the side of the organizers we would like to thank all the attendees, sponsors, media partners and invite everybody on ACGI 2011!

Detailed information about the Conference: www.acgirussia.ru
Contacts:
Anastasia Barkhatova
E-mail: a.barkhatova@radit.ru
Tel.: +7 (499) 615 86 82

Mail.ru became a main information sponsor of ACGI 2010.

Mail.Ru is the leading player in online-communication and entertainment spheres, among its assets:
- One of the top leading service provider of a free mailbox in Europe, leading among CIS countries and Russia
- Leading Russian instant-messenger Mail.Ru Agent
- National social network Moi Mir@Mail.Ru

And more:
- Navigational services: search system Search@Mail.Ru, social search Answers@Mail.Ru, toolbar Satellite@Mail.Ru, project Maps@Mail.Ru etc.
- E-commercial resources: benchmarking system for prices and services Goods@Mail.Ru; leading projects, devoted to tourism and real estate – Travels@Mail.Ru and Property@Mail.Ru; payment system Money@Mail.Ru;
- Media-projects: Auto@Mail.Ru, Lady@Mail.Ru, Afisha@Mail.Ru, Health@Mail.Ru, Kids@Mail.Ru, Hi-Tech@Mail.Ru, etc.;
- Mobile services – portal (m.mail.ru), mobile versions of Mail.Ru Agent and client Maps@Mail.Ru
... and much more

The portal monthly audience exceeds 24 mln users in Russia (TNS), active registered accounts reach 80 mln worldwide.

Mail.Ru also steps out as a leader in online gaming. The company issues over 100 online projects in Russia, Asian and European countries, including such popular games of their own development as "Legend of Three Kingdoms”, “Legend: Legacy of the Dragons”, “Allods Online” and profitable international licenses, “Perfect World” and “Lord of the Rings Online”, to name but a few. Portfolio Mail.Ru contains both client-side and browser versions MMO (totaling over 30 projects), and the largest games for social networks (over 70), in particular, “Lovely Farm”, “SuperCity”, “Legend: Legacy of the Dragons”, “Bubbles” and many others. Total attendance of client-side and browser games exceeds 45 mln users, social games – 70 mln users.

Besides, Mail.Ru owns 50% of NIKITA.ONLINE.

Sergey Orlovskiy, president of Nival Group, will talk about how to make a Russian Blockbuster, that will be popular not only in Russia, but worldwide.

Sergey Orlovskiy
President, Nival Group

Sergey Orlovskiy is the President of Nival Group and one founding fathers of Russian video games industry. He managed the production of more than 15 internationally recognized games and franchises, including Blitzkrieg, Silent Storm, Heroes of Might and Magic V and Allods Online. Sergey was a founder of Astrum Nival (aka Nival Online) which was recently acquired by Mail.ru. Now he is the President at Nival Network, a leading Russian online gaming and social media company.

Alisa Chumachenko, Founder & President of Game Insight company, will talk about past, current and future tendencies of social games.

Alisa Chumachenko
Founder & President, Game Insight LLC

Alisa Chumachenko is one of the most respected specialists in marketing, promotion and advertising of online games, casual games and games for social networks in Russia, Eastern and Central Europe.

Alisa Chumachenko
Founder & President, Game Insight LLC

Alisa Chumachenko is one of the most respected specialists in marketing, promotion and advertising of online games, casual games and games for social networks in Russia, Eastern and Central Europe.

In 2004 Alisa has joined a young but ambitious company called IT Territory, which developed and launched the game "Territory". This game set a new quality standard for browser-based MMORPG at that time. Moreover, IT Territory launched a range of other browser-based games, each of which showed the highest results. In 2006 IT Territory launched a superproject «Legend: Legacy of the Dragons". Alisa played a key role in the promotion of this game, which then became the biggest event on the browser-based MMORPG market, reaching an unprecedented commercial success and winning the hearts of many millions of players both in Russia and abroad.

In 2007 Alisa Chumachenko took up a position of the Vice-President for Marketing and Advertising in a holding company Astrum Online Entertainment. AOE includes such companies as Astrum Nival, IT Territory, Time Zero, Nikita Online and Dark Joker Games. AOE is a recognized market leader, which runs tens of browser-based and client MMOG and casual games. Alisa Chumachenko formes the best professional marketing team in Russia, the results of which are a steady growth of financial indicators of Astrum Online, a dozens of launched projects, marketing, advertising and PR successful support of projects of the holding company. Among them are such games as Allods Online Legend: Legacy of the Dragons, Perfect World, The Lord of the Rings Online, Last Chaos, Silkroad Online, Three Kingdoms, Heroes: Rebirth, ParaPa: City Dance, Piratia, Granado Espada and many others.

In December 2009 the holding company Astrum Online Entertainment affiliated the Internet company Mail.Ru. Alisa Chumachenko decided to set up her own business and left the position of the Vice-President of AOE for Marketing and Advertising. She founded a company called Game Insight and became its President. Nowadays Game Insight is a key player on the market of developing and publishing games for social networks. There are more than a dozen projects of Game Insight running in the world's largest social networks such as Vkontakte, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, Odnoklassniki and others. The user number of Game Insight's games exceeded twenty millionth mark and continues to grow steadily. More recently Game Insight has announced the launch of another great project - club of the players called Funzay.com. Announcement has become one of the main events at the Conference Sociality Rocks in October 2010 in Kiev! Once again this event has demonstrated the highest level of Alisa Chumachenko as the trend setter and a specialist in marketing and promotion of online games.

At ACGI on the second day of the event, October the 28th, the Russian - Taiwanese forum on game industry for the first time will be carried out. The representatives of the leading companies from Taiwan and Russia will attend it.

Within the forum the “round table” will be held on which the current state and prospects of online and social games in Russia and Taiwan will be discussed as well as the collaboration between two countries.

From the Russian side the following guests will take part in the “round table”: founder of Creara company Akshin Dzhangirov, founder and president of Game Insight company Alisa Chumachenko, CEO and founder of Progrestar Inc. Andrey Fadeev, president of Nival Network Sergey Orlovsky, vice president of international business development Mail.RU Vsevolod Leonov and others.

From the Taiwanese side the following guests will take part in “round table”: Chairmen of GIPA and Chairman of XPEC Entertainment Inc. - Aaron Hsu, executive assistant to CEO Gamania Charles Ho.

As the end of the forum the ceremonial signing of the contract on collaboration between associations RADIT and GIPA will be held.

Demonstrating the latest CryENGINE 3 toolset in the context of Crysis2

With its all in one game production middleware CryENGINE, Crytek offers a solution for game studios to produce cutting edge quality games on multiple platforms, simultaneously. The focus of this technology is on fast iteration, real-time world creation. No pre-computation of any kind is needed to show the final quality of assets, in the production environment Sandbox, and developers’ work is playable on console simultaneously during editing. This presentation will show the latest tools in CryENGINE 3, using Crytek’s latest in-house project Crysis 2 to demonstrate how AAA games are made and played in parallel.

Speakers: Benjamin Peters, Scott Fitzgerald

Benjamin Peters

Senior Sales Support Engineer – Crytek GmbH

Benjamin Peters is Senior Sales Support Engineer at Crytek. Benjamin joined Crytek in 2007 to enforce the growing engine licensing team in the task of building an infrastructure for delivering CryENGINE to game developers, as well as to support their technical needs during game production.
He is responsible for running support and administration of the Crytek Knowledge Network at CryENGINE’s developer home www.mycryengine.com, as well as for further developing backend licensing and support systems.
Benjamin started his profession in Computer Science by studying at the University of Saarland, specializing at CG and AI. During the studies he worked at the German Research institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), in developing multimodal user interfaces and visualizations. After gaining a Masters degree in Computer Science, Benjamin entered the gaming industry by joining Company Xaitment in developing AI middleware for gaming and simulation markets.

Scott Fitzgerald

Technical Designer – Crytek GmbH

Scott Fitzgerald is a Technical Designer as part of Crytek’s dedicated support team for the award winning CryENGINE. He is responsible for training CryENGINE licensees; adapting the engine features to the wide variety of licensee games, as well as developing technical and game demos for prospective and existing clients. He also provides support directly to CryENGINE licensees, while designing and maintaining their workflows, pipelines and development techniques.

Scott joined Crytek in 2010 after gaining considerable experience in the UK games industry as a Level Designer on AAA titles. He is an avid gamer with previous modding experience on most commercial engines.

Gamers don’t follow the rules of life as we know it. In one hour, they can launch an assault on their deadliest enemies, romance a goddess and narrowly escape a fiery inferno. There’s no need to eat or sleep; there’s just enough time to decide the next move. In virtual worlds that move as fast as these, subtle changes in speed or quality can make or break your die-hard audience’s gaming experience, and make or break your business.

We will tell you how we deliver the highest level of online gaming performance, the most reliable downloads and trailers, and save costs by reaching worldwide audiences directly.
With experts who have been in the industry since gaming went online, and one of the fastest and most connected global IP networks in existence, we can make a difference.

We will share with a case study with Funcom.

Speaker

Maxim Akinin
Account Director. Level 3 Communications

More than 15 years experience on IT and telecom markets, including 7 years in systems integration and 5 years in global telecommunications vendors Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel. I have been working on promotion of new technologies for broadband Internet access and new services platforms like IPTV, Unified Communications etc. Participated in one of the first IPTV projects in Russia, took part in number of strategic consulting projects for Russian telecom operators. At the moment responsible for Sales in Russia and CIS countries at Level 3 Communications.

Progrestar is a leading social application full-cycle developer, setting the standard of quality and dynamics for the whole industry. This leadership position has been established and attained over the last two years in the extremely competitive environment.

Owing to this invaluable asset Progrestar released almost 15 projects, highly appreciated by users of the most popular social networks - vkontakte.ru, mymail.ru, odnoklassniki.ru, facebook.com. Progrestar projects have over 20,000,000 registered users from over 100 countries around the globe. Subscriptions are growing by 2000,000 monthly
Every single project release creates a tsunami across the social networks, taking top positions in the ratings in the first weeks following the release. Having accumulated a vast database, the company is capable to create new products appealing to specific habits and desires of various segments of the audience. The company employs over
50 highly professional developers in its offices in Moscow.

In 2010 Progrestar've launched the game 'Digger' in three main Russian social networks (vKontakte.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru and MoiMir@Mail.ru) having a million users in the first two weeks. Recently the company
decided to launch this multilanguage game within Facebook, aiming at the global market. Progrestar was the first Russian developer to implement Facebook credits as a payment system and became the fastest growing Russian developer on Facebook. 8th place in Top Gainers Games.

It's not easy to make a good game, let alone a mega-profit-generating hit. Not in last year’s Russian market at least. For developers, expansion in terms of business and geographical presence of your company is a must. How do you get access to European networks and which games should you offer? What is the cost of expansion? Who will be your competitors? We are ready to share our experience and secrets.

Speaker

Oksana Loginova
Head of Distribution Department, i-Jet Media

The master of economy, the graduate of the Russian-American institute of economy and business of the Ural state university and matematiko-mechanical faculty UrGu.

With 2004 for 2007 Oksana headed marketing group in the Russian IT company EastWind. Since 2007 it worked in the company of special design bureau the Contour - one of leading software developers for accounting sphere. In 2010 Oksana Loginova has passed to work in i-Jet Media where operates distribution department. Under its direct management i-Jet Media conducts active expansion in the European and Asian markets, coordinates assistance to the Russian developers in start of games worldwide and to the foreign companies in advancement of their products in Russia.

i-Jet Media today is the largest social games publisher and distributor in Russia and Eastern Europe, and a leader in a segment of 'games with friends'. To date, 60 million users of 30 social networks all over the world play 70 applications published by i-Jet Media. There are all top social game brands in the portfolio of i-Jet Media. Nowadays, i-Jet Media is developing European and Asian markets, and mobile social games services.
Investors estimate the current market capitalization of i-Jet Media at USD $100 million.
Offices of i-Jet Media are situated in Silicon Valley (CA, USA) and Beijing (China) as well as Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil and Ozersk (Russia).