Polish Simulator Company Gamers Love to Hate

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PlayWay SA is One of the most bizarre companies in the Polish gaming industry — and also one of the most successful. The company has built an extensive catalog of traditional odd games, such as first-person simulators that allow players to experience professional fantasies. working in a car shop, renovation of houses, or managing a gas station. Although the company’s games don’t seem to be a notable success, they are often at or near the top of Steam’s bestseller list in September, for example, Gas station simulator He debuted in 2nd place.
PlayWay’s ability to generate success from such bizarre topics has made it even more popular among investors as it has increased its market capitalization. $ 751 million (PLN 2,940 billion). This is PlayWay the thirteenth largest company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and the third largest gaming company, behind the developers of CD Projekt Red. Witch series and Cyberpunk 2077, and Ten Square Games, the mobile giant behind it Let’s fish and Fishing Collision. PlayWay to shareholders percentage of return on investment it’s 50 percent better than that Facebook‘s and Alphabet‘s, and in the same vicinity Apple‘s. And it often schedules large dividend payments, including roughly the newly announced distribution $ 3 per share.
Although other major gaming publishers have faced rising production costs and new competition from the mobile market, with release calendars minimizing blockbuster and IP legacy, PlayWay has steadily expanded its production. In the last 12 months, the company released it 28 new titles, and is developing more than 100 new titles. There is a first person president simulator, a Wedding planner simulator, an animal shelter simulator, a drug dealer simulator, a cooking simulator, a truck construction simulator, a crime scene inspector simulator, a gold mining simulator, a football referee simulator, a Paleontologist simulator, an autopsy simulator, a moon colony simulator, a 911 operator simulator, a pope simulator, as well as a Jesus simulator. There are so many games at work, even Krzyysztof Kostowski, the founder and CEO of PlayWay, has trouble keeping up. “Is it from us?” he asked when I mentioned it Dolphin Trainer VR during a visit to one of the company’s offices in Warsaw this summer.
To make this high-volume approach to publishing work, PlayWay relies on a large network of external development studios, many of which are made up of a few people who work remotely. One studio, Baked Games, is currently developing three games with PlayWay in a small residence House On the residential street of Czeladź, one hour outside Krakow. PlayWay is currently collaborating with 120 studios in Poland, more than a quarter of them A total of 440 in Poland today. With this approach, PlayWay has helped maintain its relatively small size (triple A by publishing standards) with 40 full-time employees, mostly QA testers and some financial and marketing managers. For comparison, CD Projekt employs more than Red 900 people, and EA has passed 9,800 employees.
Instead of a thriving marketing campaign, PlayWay uses free demos and independent prefaces to promote upcoming titles with the goal of building word of mouth, providing free samples of a larger game concept that will later become a complete product. (Over the past year, 12 of the company’s 28 publications have been free prologues or demos.) The company nurtures past successes by constantly exchanging new titles in the slots recommended on the Steam store page to attract players to its biggest hits. most recent releases. PlayWay uses the feedback from viewers of these free demos and prologues, especially the number of players who add titles to Steam’s wish list, to decide which games should get funding for promotion and post-release content.
Some players have criticized PlayWay as a kind scheme of the pyramid for attention economy, manipulating players with an endless array of new titles that have never been developed beyond harsh sketches, lists of environments, items, and tasks. In Polish gaming forums, it is sometimes ridiculed as a “trailer company” instead of a game publisher who is interested in producing marketing material rather than finished games. Kostowski discusses that description, stressing that it will release all the games the company advertises. And while there may be production delays, the company says it’s as transparent as possible about schedule changes, with updates from developer blogs and announcements on each game’s Steam page.
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