2011 in review: Efim Voinov, CTO, ZeptoLab

Although released in 2010, ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope - published by Chillingo - was one of the most successful mobile games in 2011.

It's rolled out onto Android devices, as well as receiving additional content in the shape of Cut the Rope: Experiments.

We caught up with Efim Voinov, co-founder and CTO of the small but growing Russian studio, to get his take on the year.

Efim Voinov: There were lots of noticeable and interesting events, so it's not easy to select a single one.

I would say it this way - in hardware world, I would select the release of Amazon's Kindle Fire. Tablet devices are already taking the huge part of the pie from the traditional compact gaming consoles, and with the release of the new Kindle, a new strong player is coming to this field.

In software, the further strengthening of the freemium model and use of in-app purchases is an interesting trend across all popular platforms, that clearly happened during last year.

This year was very exciting for us - we've grown seven times from a very small studio, and though we still have a lot of things to do, we already have something to be proud for.

The most exciting for me personally is that the popularity of our Cut the Rope brand allowed us to step beyond mobile games and start producing merchandising - plush toys, apparel, and many other real world things.

That's like the Pygmalion story came true, but in the gaming industry setting!

My personal preference coincides with Apple - it selected Tiny Tower as the best game of 2011 [best iPhone game from Apple US], and there's a reason for that.

It's a social game and follows the global trend, but it doesn't copy popular concepts, offering original gameplay instead.

We share the same desire for original and innovative games at ZeptoLab. Also, since many of our team members have grown as professionals developing games for low resolution devices, the polished, old school pixel-art style of the game provokes some sort of nostalgia, and looks very cool for us.

As the competition continues to increase, more content will be offered for free, and more efforts will be made by developers to keep users interested. Another consequence of this - the overall quality of the apps will raise.

The whole our team is looking forward to new releases in 2012. While we plan to continue extending Cut the Rope franchise further, we are excited to prepare something absolutely new to our fans. Stay tuned!

As for the industry - in general, we would like to see less fragmentation and more consolidation.

This can be extrapolated on the amount of various app stores, devices with different specifications, and issues and barriers developers face when creating apps for them. When you don't have to struggle with all of this, you have more time to actually improve and polish the game, so both users and developers benefit from that.