You might know Playrix as the company that entered market segments dominated by King (Candy Sagas) and Supercell (Hay Day) only to beat both at what they are great at. But this write-up is not about Playrix's ability to out-execute rivals. Instead, we’ll be talking about how Playrix outperformed most of the games industry in their ability to work from home efficiently and at scale.

What makes the case of Playrix so interesting is that they embraced remote work already a decade ago. The goal was to solve the difficult talent problem. The company was founded in the city of Vologda, Russia. With a population of 300,000 and located far away from the bustling cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the company was unable to attract key talent to relocate to Vologda. And the founders didn’t want to leave their hometown either.

Thus they began contracting talent from outside their city, a remote work practice the game industry has been employing for decades. And as contracting paid dividends, Playrix began to employ remote talent, likely as a way to secure key contractors.

This led to drastically better access to a broader range of talent together by significantly decreasing office and relocation costs. Over the past decade, Playrix has not only embraced remote work but arguably mastered the setup better than any other games company.

To understand how they are able to succeed due to remote work rather than despite it, I sat down with Playrix’s c-suiter, Maxim Kirilenko to talk about how Playrix has evolved their remote work approach over a decade, the role of culture, tools, and processes as well as how Maxim himself is dealing with the negative aspect of remote work, such as the risk of burnout. 

You can watch or listen to the full conversation on your preferred podcast platform below!

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Playrix is the third largest mobile game maker in the world

You likely know Playrix from its hit titles Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Fishdom, and Township. But what you may not know is the size of the company: With over $2 billion in annual revenue, Playrix is bigger (on mobile) than Supercell, Playtika, NetEase, Roblox, and miHoYo, the makers of Genshin Impact. In fact, the company is the third largest mobile publisher in the world with only Tencent and Activision/Blizzard/King (soon Microsoft) ahead of them.

But you’re not here to read how the company grew to 3,500 full-time employees. Nor will we be dissecting Playrix’s ultra-impressive revenue growth or how they bounced back from IDFA deprecation back to all-time heights this year. You’re here to read about how they’ve achieved their success while embracing remote work long before the rest of us even had the chance to try it.

Culture over tools and processes

As it stands today, according to Maxim Kirilenko:

“It's up to our employees how to schedule their day. We don't have any rules in our company (regarding schedules). Every single employee, despite their title or seniority, can decide for themselves when and where to work from. What matters to the company is performance and ability to deliver results.”

In our conversation with Maxim, he painted a picture of Playrix as a non-hierarchical company that puts culture over policies and focuses above all performance management.

When it comes to specific remote working tools, Playrix doesn’t have access to any proprietary technology or software. They use the same video call services along with Slack, just like the rest of us. But where they differ is, according to Maxim, how they choose to use these communication tools.

Instead of using a calendar to schedule meetings with colleagues, Playrix encourages employees to imagine themselves in a very large virtual office space. And just like they’d be in a physical space, if you have something to ask, you simply walk to that person or group and have an impromptu conversation. In a virtual space, where most people are remote, this means calling without searching for an open calendar spot.

The approach of removing meetings from a calendar is a stark contradiction to pretty much all the other companies that approach remote work by having more meetings in the calendar to compensate for the lack of ad hoc conversations.

On one hand, this sounds messy. I can imagine being distracted countless times a day by various people and product problems, which would make focused work impossible, and thus lead to days where you don’t get much done. It can also lead to siloed communication, where few people discuss a thing via call and those who were not in talks feel like they’ve been left without context and say.

On the other hand, it could be logical and agile. Employees’ calendars are not getting filled with meetings, which gives them time to concentrate on their work. And if you’re online and haven’t muted Slack, that means colleagues can call you out of the blue - just like they would walk up to your desk in a physical office space. It’s a breath of fresh air to endless calendar puzzles where you’re trying to set up a meeting with people.

These same call-me-anytime rules apply to everyone in the company. In practice, this means that anyone can, and has called the leadership of the company directly and out of the blue to discuss a matter they deem important.

I have no proof that the above statement is true, so if you work(ed) at Playrix, feel free to reach out and either verify or rebuke the claim. But what I can say is that over the years, folks from Playrix’s leadership team up to the founders have always been accessible and gotten back to me rather quickly on all of my questions. Something that I can’t, unfortunately, say about leaders of much smaller companies.

The right work culture is vital for succeeding at remote work

According to Maxim, there’s also a misconception that Playrix, with most of its employees from CIS countries (former Soviet Union countries), is very hierarchical. 

“Playrix is not hierarchical. It's actually pretty flat. Sometimes there are less than two levels between a junior employee and the company's founders. Sometimes even just one level. In a way, you could argue we’re ahead of many Californian companies in terms of transparency, flexibility, and simplicity of processes.” 

I have no reason to doubt Maxim’s statement on the company’s level hierarchy. But what I think is a more important point to drill into is how homogeneous in terms of employees' cultural backgrounds Playrix is.

In current and former CIS countries the work culture is different compared to Europe. The demand for work-life balance and job security is less pronounced as the cultural norm is to work hard not only for 8 but sometimes 10 or 12 hours a day. Again, I don’t know if remote working has increased working hours at Playrix, but based on my conversations with Maxim, it has intensified the work. Maxim himself was openly talking about his own workload management to avoid constantly looming burnout.

And while many of you likely imagined applying to work at Playrix, at least half of you are now perhaps off put by a company that values hard work and long hours (when needed). And in many ways, that is by design. Because arguably, if you advertise remote work as an option to enjoy beach life as a digital nomad, you’ll likely attract talent that puts much more effort into being at the beach than succeeding at their work.

Maxim points out that in order to have a successful remote working culture, individuals need to be self-motivated to deliver day in and day out. In a remote setup, the ability to build social capital is limited due to a lack of face time. This means that employees are measured purely on their performance. And as we all know, pure performance measurement is brutally efficient with modern project management technology and a culture of aggressive goal setting.

The company’s role, on the other hand, is to take away any obstacles for an individual to perform, whether those obstacles are related to work (ex. equipment or software) or personal life (ex. relocation, taxation, or daycare).

As an employer or a manager, if there’s one thing I feel you should take away from my interview with Maxim, it is that remote work should be about reducing distractions, not Introducing them.

The Playrix model is not for everyone

Playrix is one of the few companies that truly dominate due to their remote work culture rather than despite it. And there are no magic bullets, secret sauces, or proprietary technologies on which they are able to do it. It all boils down to a shared culture, common language, and work ethic that overvalues performance.

What’s most fascinating is that in our conversation, Maxim makes it all sound very straightforward and easy to implement. The approach of viewing the company as one virtual office space, having a low hierarchy, and calling colleagues without calendar invites makes sense.

But I still question whether other companies, especially those in Western Europe (an area most familiar to me), could adopt this model.

1. Firstly, Europeans in general are not incentivized to work longer hours (Europeans Are Working Even Less, and Not by Choice). Over the decades we’ve built gigantic welfare states that discourage working with steeply progressive taxation, union-protected job security, and generous unemployment benefits.

2. The average individual is arguably for the better with a combination of the policies and structures that lead to a preference for free time over earnings. Yet according to economists and economic data, the same approaches that benefit individuals in Europe lead to below-average growth and a lower level of innovation, which in turn make this model unsustainable (Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing). 

3. Europeans are very diverse in terms of culture and language, which can be a great source of creativity. But the diversity also leads to challenges in communication, which is only emphasized in remote work setups. It’s a problem that Playrix, with nearly all employees speaking Russian as their first language or second language, doesn’t face.

4. Of course, as Maxim points out, the fact that the company is so homogeneous makes it also harder for employees who don’t speak Russian to join. This sets a limit for the company’s talent growth. And while former Soviet Union countries are diverse in terms of cultures, languages, and ethnicities, they are arguably less diverse than countries within the European Union.

I do see Playrix’s remote work model working better in the culturally homogeneous USA, where hard work and top performance are supported by at-will employment policies. Should North American companies choose to adopt Playrix’s proven model, the key is to make sure that performance is the only criterion to hire and retain talent. This is sometimes not true for especially the largest employers in the market.

In my experience of working both in the US and in US-based companies, American managers are prone to prioritize their individual career progression over the good of the company. This can be seen as excessive meetings as managers aim to raise their stature by overcommunicating and forcing the spotlight on themselves.

My point is not to elevate the Playrix model above others. Nor am I trying to push down how we work in Europe or the US. I think all of the approaches have their merits, as we can see from the success of the companies hailing from all the regions mentioned.

I just want to highlight that simply adopting the processes of another company with a very different culture is likely to fail. We saw countless studios of all sizes try to be like Supercell throughout the decade. Yet despite having the public playbook, none of these studios succeeded. And I believe, having seen some of these failures from close up, it was due to inherently different cultures of not only the companies but the people in the leadership position (Supercell leadership was very homogeneous during the first decade of the company)

Overall, I recommend listening to the podcast and extracting your own takeaways. No matter how you approach it, Playrix has repeatedly bottled lighting in terms of the games they operate and the organization they’ve built.

by Michail Katkoff