Belorussia’s Wargaming.net, famous for its massive multiplayer online (MMO) game World of Tanks, has posted $287 million in revenue during 2012, the Russian business daily Vedomosti reported on Tuesday. The company’s net income reached about $8 million.
World of Tanks is a free-to-play MMO game, where users control different tanks and can pay a fee to gain certain benefits in the game. It was released in 2010 and has even been featured in the Guinness Book of Records.
On January 21, 2013, more than 190,000 players were connected simultaneously to the game’s Russian server RU2, which is a record number for multiplayer online games.
With the revenue posted, Wargaming has become the biggest game developer in the former USSR. Two other significant players — the gaming division of Mail.Ru Group and Game Insight — generated $160 million and $90 million, respectively.
Wargaming.net was founded in 1998 by Victor Kislyi, a physicist and alumnus of the Belorussian State University. Since then, the company has acquired several game developers, including BigWorld, which created the World of Tanks engine.
