“The market is clearly shifting towards Russian-speaking authors,” says Vladimir Obruchev from Bombora about the results of 2025.

How did the year turn out for the publishing house (gaming division) from a business perspective?

Vladimir Obruchev, "Bombora": The year was challenging for the entire book industry—state regulation of content intensified at the legislative level, which took a lot of effort and resources from our publishing house. This also affected the purchase of books from foreign rights holders, as we now need to coordinate text changes with them, and sometimes the rights holders (or authors) are not prepared to make such edits (even if it's just about removing 1-2 words from the entire book). In such cases, we have to refuse to purchase the publication rights.

Otherwise, the year turned out to be quite decent.

How did 2025 go for Bombora's gaming division in terms of product development?

Vladimir: As planned, we significantly increased our work with Russian-speaking authors. This is due to ongoing issues with acquiring rights to books, and the fact that the experiences of Russian developers are in demand by the Russian-speaking audience. Yes, sometimes such books take longer to prepare for print than translations, but we as a publishing house are willing to proceed with this.

Two of our most notable releases from books about games are "More Gold Needed: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment" (indeed, we continue to name books after memes) by Jason Schreier and the magnificent gift art book "Elden Ring Mythology: Gift of Grace," released at the end of the year in two versions—an expensive gift edition and a super expensive collector's edition.

Additionally, we would like to highlight the book by Semyon Kostin, "Harry Potter and the Gifts of Game Dev," dedicated to numerous games about the boy who lived, another book on the Silent Hill franchise—"Silent Hill: Secrets of the Foggy Town," as well as books on Castlevania, Dishonored, Undertale, and Street Fighter franchises.

Among books related to development in one way or another, several releases stand out. These include the second edition of "I Want to Be in Game Dev! Basics of Game Development for Beginners" by Vyacheslav Utochkin, Konstantin Sakhnov, and Dmitry Tabakov, "Leader in the IT Industry: How to Manage Yourself, Teams, and Projects" by Oleg Dobroshtan, "Community Management and Game Operations: Two Sides of the Same Coin" by Alexander Tolkach, and "The Profession of Level Designer: A Practical Guide to Creating Game Worlds" by Benjamin Bauer, scientifically edited by Vasiliy Skobelev.

We also released a book on tabletop game development—Scott Rogers' "Your Move! A Guide to Creating Board Games."

How did the Russian market for books about games change in 2025?

Vladimir: The major foreign rights holders are still hesitant to sell rights for publication in Russian, and now legislative obstacles have been added regarding book content. The market is clearly shifting towards Russian-speaking authors—the book publishers find it easier and more profitable to discover these authors and negotiate the creation of books on themes and franchises that interest publishers. This trend will remain for at least another year (of course, we hope that publishers like Dark Horse or Titan will change their licensing policies and start working with the Russian-speaking market, but it remains unlikely for now).

What trends in book publishing related to video games do you expect in 2026?

Vladimir: I think the market will increasingly look towards gaming projects from Russian developers. More fiction, comics, and similar types of books related to games created in our country will begin to emerge.

What are the publishing house's plans for the upcoming year?

Vladimir: Our plans, as usual, are broad and ambitious. Here are the most interesting ones.

• Just a few days ago, we announced that Evgeny Peklo is writing a book for us on the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise.
• The publishing house acquired the rights to Sid Meier's autobiography. Yes, we know this book has been released in Russian, but we believe it went largely unnoticed and deserves a second chance.
• We are working on books related to games from the Star Wars franchise (in the style of Semyon Kostin's book about games about Harry Potter).
• Nikita Yentus is working on a book about the history of Bioware, and Sergey Tsilyurik's book about the Final Fantasy franchise is already at the printers.
• For fans of beautifully crafted gift editions, we are preparing richly illustrated books on the game Demon’s Souls and the franchises of Zelda, The Sims, and Sonic.
• In the spring, we plan to release Vasiliy Skobelev’s book "Level Design of Good Taste."
• The work on Vasiliy Ovchinnikov’s book "Innocent Game" is nearing completion, and we also hope to release it in spring.
• Of course, our plans don’t end here—we are in negotiations with authors on various "unannounced projects," so we definitely plan to delight our readers with new and exciting releases in 2026.