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Had Victor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming.net, been born in an earlier, Colder era, he would have made a formidable Russian General. This graduate in laser physics cuts a commanding figure as he sits straight and vigilant in a white leather chair, fists resting for emphasis on the surface of vast, sweaty table. He gestures towards the wall behind, thickly papered with a world map. It's punctuated by a flurry of red dots, each one signifying the location of one of Wargaming.net's global offices. "Right now we are 1600 people," he says in a gloopy Russian accent. "We have bases in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, Berlin, and so on. Probably the only untouched territories remaining are Latin America and Brazil. We are almost everywhere. And, of course, we have further plans." For Kislyi the video game business is war. It's war at every level, in fact, from the virtual battlefields upon which players skirmish daily in his company's most successful game, World of Tanks, to this, the grim theatre of E3, the video game convention where we meet in a stuffy, branded bunker. For the past three years Kislyi has commanded the Wargaming.net campaign to many victories. This much is evident in the numbers: today his game boasts 60 million registered players on PC. But officers like Kislyi are never satisfied unless gaining new ground. Now he is ready to take the war to a new front as World of Tanks prepares to invade a console.
"In the US, the UK and part of Europe the people are mostly playing on the consoles," he says. "So we have to go where the customer is." 18 months ago Wargaming acquired the Chicago-based Day One Studios for $20 million, rebranded the developer as Wargaming West and tasked it with bringing World of Tanks to Xbox 360. 18 months later, the game has trundled into beta on the console, carrying with it both hopes and risks. For Wargaming, it's the company's first concerted assault on Xbox 360's "juicy" 48 million strong userbase, and a chance to greatly swell its player ranks. For Microsoft, the hope is that World of Tanks will be this year's Minecraft, a game that's proven its popularity in the PC wilds and one that's ripe for redoubled success in the living room.
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