Last year, Nikita took a top ranking in Computer Elite’s rating of entertainment software developers. This year, the company is aiming even higher. As it wraps up more than three years of work on its latest game, The Leader speaks with Nikita’s vice-president commercial director, Eugene Lomko, 33, to find out what it takes to succeed in the field.

The Leader: What are your main responsibilities?

Mr. Lomko: Briefly, I oversee the company's business affairs from a strategic and a day-to-day standpoint, excluding certain aspects, like game development.

If I made a list of my activities, it would include arranging for researching target markets, choosing the right partners, recruiting and training personnel, producing and licensing the games, soliciting orders, publicity and generally developing the business.

In addition, I play Nikita games. I study all the game elements to make sure that they are of the highest quality.

The Leader: What is your typical workday like?

Mr. Lomko: It starts at 9:30 a.m. Then suddenly the clock says 11 p.m. Apart from its length, my day is exactly the same as that of any top manager. I don’t even notice the fact that I spend so many hours in the office, because I love my work so much. Every evening I plan my next day and then in the morning I plan it in even more detail. I also reflect on what I did wrong the previous day and try to insure that the present one is better.

The Leader: What are your personal long-term ambitions and goals?

Mr. Lomko: To organize a business model that would give a million people the pleasure of playing our games. To build a hi-tech company and make the maximum profit in the shortest time by selling intellectually challenging products.

The Leader: How did you begin working at Nikita?

Mr. Lomko: Nikita was created in Oct. 1991, when several enthusiasts decided to start their own business — their life’s work. I was the first buyer and seller of their games less than a year after the company’s founding. I really wanted to become a game programmer and was looking for like-minded people. I soon realized that the programming was no longer a priority for me, but producing and distributing the games was.

The Leader: What do you like most about your work?

Mr. Lomko: Probably the opportunity to be a part of creating imaginary worlds, from the moment an idea is born to the rapturous reviews of our fans. Another thing I love about my job is working with enthusiastic and highly educated people creating a completely original product.

The Leader: What are the negative aspects of your work?

Mr. Lomko: Sometimes we lose valuable time while I try to convince my colleagues about the validity of my viewpoint, which may cause an emotional flare-up. I guess they could say the same thing about me.

There was a time when I was seriously hampered by my lack of business education and fluency in foreign languages. Nobody had told me that this was a problem. Therefore many decisions were made by intuition. In principle, my decisions were correct and profitable for the company, but we lost time in playing things too safe and in being too narrow in our approach. Now, I think that Nikita is attaining a good business tempo. However, I think that in a few years I’ll say, "If only I knew then what I know now."

The Leader: What is Nikita working on now?

Mr. Lomko: Currently, our main project is "Parkan. Iron Strategy." It anticipates the future of warmaking, with the player controlling armies of hi-tech war robots. We have finished programming it and it will hit the Russian market in February and the U.S. market in March.

The Leader: How many people work for Nikita and what is your HR policy?

Mr. Lomko: Our basic staff is around 30 people. We have a branch in Rostov, and we also utilize programmers who work on short-term projects on a contract basis. Altogether, we have about 50 people whose average age is under 30.

We try to recruit people who have the ability to accomplish a variety of different tasks but have a specialty. It is a difficult process because these people have to be carefully recruited, trained and given room to grow.

The Leader: What kind of qualities does someone need to work in PR and marketing?

Mr. Lomko: The ability to communicate to two different groups: your target audience and your own colleagues. A PR manager is like a bridge between the company and its clients and partners. A good PR manager in the computer game industry uses his available budget to get a maximum number of positive publications about the company and its games.

Taking into account Russia’s economic underdevelopment, the market manager here has to virtually "live" in his target market. He has to study its tendencies, read the industry’s press, evaluate foreign business models and so on.

The Leader: Have you noticed differences in PR and marketing in Russia and the West?

Mr. Lomko: The ends and means of marketing and PR are the same everywhere. If we just look at the specifics of the computer game business, then we see that foreign markets are much more specialized because of their greater sales volumes. Once, I came upon a list of British PR agencies. It seemed to me that there were more PR companies specializing in interactive entertainment than all the PR companies in Russia combined. I don’t know of a single specialized PR agency in Russia.

The Leader: How competitive can a Russian computer-programming company like yours be worldwide?

Mr. Lomko: I would not stress the "Russianness" of our company. It doesn’t matter if you are Russian or not, it’s all about international market demand, which we meet.

The Leader: Being located in Moscow, how are you going to market your product in the West?

Mr. Lomko: Physically being in Moscow doesn't make any difference. Our goal is to get our message across to the largest target audience possible using the Internet. We try to use marketing and sales techniques that give us the best results — a mix of traditional and novel solutions that allow us to publish information and advertise on the Internet as well as in Western print publications. Without going into too much detail, we have developed an e-commerce solution for distributing games directly to the player without physically moving the product across national borders. All we have to do is learn to integrate this solution into the company’s business model.

The Leader: There is large-scale piracy of intellectual products in Russia. How does your company wrestle with this piracy, and does it significantly affect you?

Mr. Lomko: Wrestling is an Olympic sport. We're not athletes. Furthermore, we can't easily change the consciousness of people who steal intellectual property, just as we can't raise the average wage. These problems have to be solved by the government and that will take lots of time. We work much faster than the government. We have to work at a fast pace, because progress goes very fast. We can’t change piracy in Russia, we simply have to work with it.