Talking with the CEO of InnoGames, Hendrik Klindworth

Innogames CEO Interview - headlogo - EN


Innogames is currently one of the most successful developers and publishers of online games, and currently has more than 150 million players registered worldwide. Innogames was born with Tribal Wars, but over the years has created other games that have become very popular in the world of the browser games Tribal Wars 2, Forge of Empires o Grepolis.

Last week we were able to speak with the CEO of Innogames, Hendrik Klindworth, and we are sure you’ll find interesting what he had to say.

InnoGames


  • Thank you to spend some time to answer our questions. Can you introduce yourself to our readers?

My name is Hendrik Klindworth, I am the CEO and one of the founders of InnoGames. I was programming our first game Tribal Wars while going to university. I quit university later to focus fully on game development and creating InnoGames.

  • Now we want to ask you something that we always have wondered: how is the daily life of a CEO?

Each day is different: Typically I start with writing down the most important goals for my day. This helps me to stay focused. As a CEO you get a lot of emails and other inquiries, there is a high risk that you otherwise spent the whole day with just reacting instead of acting.

A lot of time I spend with gathering information. Talking to people, attending meetings, reading reports and looking at player feedback. You need a lot of information for good decision-making.

Playing our and other games is also part of my typical day. :)

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  • It's been 10 years since you founded InnoGames, even more if we take into account when Tribal Wars was released. It has been a really long journey. What do think when you look back? What you recommend to someone who wants to follow your steps?

Great experience and I am thankful I had this opportunity. Sometimes it was hard work to move things forward and sometimes we just had luck that helped us.

To follow I would recommend to look for a nice niche segment as browser games was back then. Grow in that niche and then expand step by step.

  • From the beginning your objective have been the browser games, and over time you have become one of the most important companies in the genre. What is your opinion concerning the current situation of the browser-based games?

Although the mobile market is rising, browser games are still very popular among many players. In fact, many of our long-term fans really appreciated us releasing an entirely new browser-only game this year with Elvenar. What we also see is that a lot of players enjoy the freedom that games like Forge of Empires provide with supporting all their preferred devices, be it smartphones, tablets or on the browser. With so many companies strongly focusing on mobile, we want to strengthen our position in browser as well. I also think there will continue to be players playing mostly in the browser for a long time to come.

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  • So, it is possible that you'll develop more games for mobile devices?

We will definitely continue developing browser-only games in the future, and we will also start publishing mobile-only games from 2016 on. When we start the development process of a game, we like to look at what we want to achieve with it and which specific group of people will enjoy the game. As much as we like cross-platform, it is simply not needed for every type of game, so we will continue to decide game-by-game if we want to include it.

  • What are your plans for the future? Are you working on something? Should we something new for the next year?

We aim at publishing more than one game next year. We won’t share any details just yet, but as said, our first mobile-only games are already in development.

  • And finally: Where do you see InnoGames in 10 years?

In the next 5 years our goal is to become one of the most top 10 developers on mobile platform while keeping our strong position on browser.

Respected by players and the whole industry for high level of game and service quality 10 years is a very long time to estimate, but you can expect us to play an important role on another platform then.

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