Anton Bolshakov, founder of game development company AB Games, known for the shareware game Hidden City, said that it has already earned $500 million and has a million active players per month. He also said that AB Games has its own server with the Stable Diffusion AI for creating graphics.
Anton Bolshakov, founder of game development company AB Games, known for the shareware game Hidden City, said that it has already earned $500 million and has a million active players per month. He also said that AB Games has its own server with the Stable Diffusion AI for creating graphics.
Bolshakov told this in an interview with Forbes Ukraine. Before founding AB Games, he, together with Sergey Grigorovich, launched the GSC Game Worlds studio and led the development of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl.
Answering a question about layoffs in Ukrainian game development , he noted that "there is always a shortage of qualified people."
"We need to look at who exactly is being laid off. Perhaps it's juniors or mid-level employees, and the trend is related to the development of AI tools. For example, routine work that was previously performed by juniors is now being done by AI," says Anton Bolshakov.
He added that AB Games has its own Stable Diffusion server (AI image generator) for creating graphics. According to him, “the AI server needs to be trained” on graphics by the studio’s artists, otherwise the AI “just takes information from the Internet” and produces a result that can be very far from the game’s style.
"The creative part is still the work of senior artists, they create the same style. AI helps add variability or detail. For example, working out small details of fabrics, hair, skin, and other textures. Therefore, some people are already disappearing, they need to do more and more creative work, and artificial intelligence is taking over the technical work," says Bolshakov.
The founder of AB Games added that AI could be an assistant that “never complains about how bad it feels, how tired it is,” and could generate an infinite number of options very quickly.
However, he said, AI is not taking jobs away from AB Games employees. Instead, employees are being trained to “do something high-level.”
Anton Bolshakov noted that before the full-scale invasion, the company had 100 employees, now their number has increased to 140. Slightly less than half of them are abroad, in particular in Poland, Portugal and Croatia. AB Games has three offices - in Kyiv, Rivne and Limassol (Cyprus).
Hidden City is a free-to-play (f2p) adventure and puzzle game developed by AB Games in 2016 for iOS, Mac, Android, and Windows, and published by G5 Entertainment. In it, players search for hidden objects, explore dozens of locations, solve challenging puzzles, and unravel the mystery of a hidden city.
According to Bolshakov, Hidden City is a game-service that has brought in about $500 million during its existence.
"If we compare it to cinema, when we talk about the box office of a film, we mean all the money that the audience paid. But there are costs for marketing, distribution, production, etc. It is important to understand that the developer's earnings are lower. But this is a lot even by the standards of the film industry. So many films are released per year that collect $0.5 billion or $1 billion. Therefore, this is a huge success for a mobile game, especially one created in Ukraine," says the founder of AB Games.
He added that Hidden City turned a profit in 2018 and had 5 million players at its peak. It now has a monthly audience of 1 million players.
Anton Bolshakov also said that he “minimally follows” GSC and STALKER 2, but he is rooting for them and wants “everything to fly.” “If everything goes well, I think the game will easily make a hundred or several hundred million dollars. For a AAA game, this is a good amount,” the founder of AB Games believes.
Previously, Maksym Krippa, who became the owner of the GSC Game World studio, replacing its founder Serhiy Grigorovich, gave an interview in which he spoke about the financial success of STALKER 2 , plans for the project's development, and a potential series from Netflix.
