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Wargaming grabs Total Annihilation and Master of Orion IPs
Wargaming has ambitious plans for the company's 15th anniversary this year, starting with the acquisition of two well-known IPs: Total Annihilation and Master of Orion. Master of Orion is an acclaimed 4X sci-fi strategy series that began in 1993, while Total Annihilation was a popular RTS from 1997. CEO Victor Kislyi teased the possibilities that these IP pickups represent: "Total Annihilation and Master of Orion are strategy game classics. Although it's too soon to disclose any details, we are more than willing to give a new lease of life to these games most of us grew up playing. It's exactly where our major focus will be." Beyond that, Wargamming announced that it has opened a new office in Austin, Texas to help smooth the flow of communication and production processes between its teams and studios. The team also announced the inclusion of British planes in World of Warplanes, which you can see in the reveal video after the jump. [Source: Wargaming press release]
GDC Online 2012: Flying high with World of Warplanes
Wargaming.net CEO Viktor Kislyi is a busy man in charge of one of the fastest-growing online studios in the world. Since the launch of World of Tanks and its rise to superstar status, Wargaming.net has grown to encompass 1,200 people in 11 offices around the world. Half of these are developers on the studio's three main projects, while the other half run support for the highly lucrative World of Tanks. With World of Tanks under their belts, Kislyi and his team are preparing to press the starter switch for World of Warplanes. If you haven't paid much attention to it yet, perhaps you should, particularly if you're a fan of flight simulators. World of Warplanes covers the early days of air combat from 1930s-era biplanes to Korean War jet fighters. We grabbed a few minutes of Kislyi's time at GDC Online this week to see how World of Warplanes was shaping up and whether there were any new surprises that the team was prepared to reveal at the event. Read on, flyboys and flygirls!
How Wargaming.net launched itself to the top
Wargaming.net got its real start the day IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Viktor Kislyi, Wargaming.net's CEO, came to the conclusion that civilization had moved on and that computers were the future. His first game, made over the course of two years with his brother and played by only two other people on the planet, was Iron Age, a turn-based strategy game in the traditions of Risk and Civilization. After that, Kislyi worked on translating the miniature wargame De Bellis Antiquitatis to the virtual (but still historically accurate) world. After the success of DBA, Kislyi and those around him created the Massive Assault games, Galactic Assault, and Order of War. After that, development for World of Tanks began, although in the early days, it was a drastically different game. The game began as a "fantasy arena style battle game," but circumstances intervened, and eventually World of Tanks as we know and love it was born. Want to brush up on your history? PC Gamer has the full details of the rise of Wargaming.net. There'll be a quiz.
E3 2011: Conquering the world with World of Tanks
The free-to-play MMO is making great strides across the world. And if you were to ask the CEO of WarGaming.net, Viktor Kislyi, he'd tell you his F2P game World of Tanks is bigger in some countries than World of Warcraft, particularly his home nation of Russia. As he told us when we talked to him at E3, "[It] beat the crap out of WoW in Russia." He backed that statement up by saying there are over 155,000 concurrent players in Russia daily for his MMO. With the introduction of Clan Wars earlier this year, World of Tanks appears to be quite literally conquering the world. Kislyi boasts that the Russian server has over 6,000 active clans, and over three million players are actively playing world-wide, which he claims is better than the stats of most of our favorite MMOs. He says if you combine the peak hours of all the servers across the globe, World of Tanks hosts 300,000 concurrent players. That's a staggering number. Pop past the break as we dig deeper into the discussion with Kislyi and find out why this game is storming the world.
