Denis Khamin, co-founder of Allcorrect, spoke with us about the company’s achievements in 2023.
What was the year like for the company? What achievements would you like to highlight?
In 2023, we completed moving our production office to Serbia, a process we started the previous year. We’ve never relocated an office like this, and we spent a long time choosing the country and city. We’re excited to say that we made the right choice—Novi Sad, like Samara, stands on the river; there is an active cultural life, many opportunities for travel, especially by bicycle, and clear labor and tax legislation.
Unfortunately, the general decline of the gaming industry has affected us as well. The forecast for Allcorrect in 2023 is $7.5 million, compared to $8.5 million in 2022, so we have been working on process efficiency for the second half of the year. Now we can handle more projects with fewer people.
In general, 2023 was marked by the introduction of AI, both for us and for customers. We have implemented AI in marketing, sales, and some production processes with varying success. It seems that optimism about simplifying work with AI has turned out to be excessive in some areas. I would compare it to trying to drive a screw into a wall with a hammer; the process is loud and exciting, but not always useful.
The main achievement of this year is that we have turned the direction of game art into profit and made this direction more manageable. In our art direction, we strive to complete all projects on time, much as we do in localization. Judging by many of our clients deciding to expand their cooperation with us, this is the right strategy.
How has the game localization market changed over the past year?
Let’s look at our statistics on languages. The data for 2023 does not include December and all of November, but the overall picture will not change much.
Statistics for 2022
Statistics for 2023
LATAM, the “Latin American” version of the Spanish language, has become established as the basic Spanish language. Turkish and Indonesian are still gaining popularity, while Italian has become less popular. There were more requests for the languages of the CIS countries and Ukrainian, but these are insignificant figures in the total volume of orders.
Has the practice of working with gaming companies changed? How exactly?
We’ve noticed that many gaming companies, especially large ones, have frozen new projects or postponed them until next year. At the same time, some companies have pivoted to new markets—in particular, many companies that used to make mobile games are now releasing projects for PCs and consoles.
We have more small gaming companies and indie developers in our portfolio. This is because indie developers are less afraid to take risks, and the probability of success is about the same for all of them.
Unlike European and American developers, companies from Asia continue to release new games on mobile markets.
What are the company’s plans for next year?
Next year, we want to test two new services to see how interesting they are to our customers and whether we can maintain our usual level of service quality. We plan to return to revenue growth and seek to attract new customers in countries where gaming markets are growing and business activity is still high.
