LSE-listed Mail.Ru Group has invested in four Russian gaming companies via Mail.Ru Games Ventures (MRGV), the dedicated investment division it launched last year.
As reported by the Russian media, these companies are Moscow-based Game Garden (Farmdale, Fairy Kingdom), Mobirate (Parking Mania, Dead Ahead, Rovercraft) from Ulyanovsk, Siberia, Red Brix Wall (Battle Arena: Heroes Adventure) and Zillion Whales (Mushroom Wars), both based in St. Petersburg.
Each of these companies generate from $40,000 to $150,000 in monthly revenues, according to industry news resource App2top.
Neither the amount of MRGV’s investments nor the terms of the deals have been disclosed.
MRGV’s first investment, in September 2017, went to Panzerdog, a Finnish-Russian mobile gaming startup. Another one went to Bit.Games, the transaction being followed, a few months later, by the acquisition of a majority stake in the company by Mail.Ru Group.
A dominant player on the Russian gaming scene
Mail.Ru Group opened a game division back in 2007, aiming to unite top Russian gaming studios and teams and become the number one gaming business in Russia. Among the group’s acquisitions at that time were Nival Online, IT Territory, TimeZero, and NIKITA.
These companies were subsequently merged into the Astrum Online Entertainment and ultimately organized as the group’s gaming unit.
In 2016 the group acquired game developer and publisher Pixonic for $30 million.
As a result, last year the group claimed an almost 45% share of local gaming market last year with a portfolio that included more than 50 MMOs, social and mobile games. Among the most succesful of these games are Skyforge, Legend: Legacy of the Dragons, Allods Online, Lovely Farm, Evolution: Battle for Utopia, Jungle Heat, Warface, ArcheAge, Perfect World and others.
The group also intends to introduce a gaming dimension in the e-commerce and social platform which it plans to develop jointly with Alibaba and MegaFon.
