12 frågor till G5 Entertainments VD Vlad Suglobov, (11 nov 2006)

How long time does a typical mobile game take to develop for G5?
We had mobile projects from 2 to 8 months of development cycle. Our typical blockbuster mobile game project falls within 5-6 months range.

How many percent of the staff is leaving and is replaced per year?
~25% which is ok for our industry and size of the company. Given that we are around 40 people size, it means ~10 people leave and are replaced during the year. So far we want to keep this rotation, as it is very creative industry and we want to enrich the team with the “fresh blood” on regular basis.

Missile Crisis have been successful on Verizon Wireless selling charts, can this contribute so the result will be larger then the forecast for 2006?
The answer is we don’t know yet, but most probably it won’t affect 2006 results significantly because of the delayed remittance of funds from operators to publishers and quarterly reporting. We are yet to receive first royalty report from the publisher.

How well spread in time are the payments (project and royalty) from the customers in general, monthly?
Advance payments are usually tied to the major milestones like contract execution, first playable version, Alpha version, Gold Master, rather than designed to be monthly or weekly. Usually for a mobile project in development we have at least one, sometimes two milestones (and corresponding payments) per month. Typical conditions for royalties are delivering royalty report and remitting funds once per quarter.

When can we expect any information about new contracts?
As soon as we can share such information. We are going to have news very soon.

When can we expect to see casual games for PC and consoles from G5?
We are working on entering this space, and we see progress in this direction. If it continues successfully you will see casual PC games from G5 before summer 2007.

Will G5 self-finance the own produced games for the distribution deals?
The strategy at the moment is to finance own produced games to the playable demo stage and then seek publisher funding and distribution to complete and distribute the game on revenue share conditions.

G5 games are not visible on Nazaras web page, have the deal with them been successful so far?
Nazara is working on porting G5’s games to popular handsets. There are quite a few handsets to cover. Games were not released yet.

There have been some negative press in Russian game forums about Whirlwind of Vietnam, has the launch been successful?
One can rarely see any positive comments from Russian game community after the release of the project, especially simulation one. This is really special about Russian PC games enthusiasts compared to other countries. We are still waiting to see gaming press reviews on the game. The game was designed to be niche helicopter simulation title, and we were realistic with our expectations from the launch. We are yet to see long-term sales.

The publisher IDDK and G5 seams to work very closely with the game community on the PC game T34 vs. Tiger, what are your expectations for that game?
We see certain potential in this product as this niche is underserved in our opinion. We do our best to deliver the best tank simulator available on the market. The primary audience is hardcore players of course but the game will also have simplified controls for less experienced players. Previous releases in this genre did very well in Russia, G5 and publisher want this trend to continue.

Will G5 continue with full price PC games and further develop the game engine “NAPALM”?
We are more enthusiastic about high quality casual PC games where we see interest cooperating with G5 from larger international publishers, rather than local Russian players. We do not build our strategy on full-price PC games development, as this market although dynamic in Russia is stagnating worldwide. Continuing with NAPALM and full-price PC games will be based on whether we see opportunities to do so. The deciding point will be when T34 vs Tiger is released.

Is it a typing error on the G5 webpage or is there any reason why you own one share less then the other two in the management? I’m just curious.
We wanted to have equal shares in the company but there was an even amount of shares to be divided between three of us. Someone had to take 1 share less, and I volunteered. So this was caused only by math.