The Russian gaming market has been falling in dollars for three years now, and this year it will also fall in rubles,” said the leading analyst Wargaming.net and SteamSpy author Sergey Galenkin in his Twitter feed.
He noted that he was going to highlight this in a separate post on his blog, but then said that “all the figures from the reports are under the NDA,” so he would not write.
On Twitter, Galenkin also noted that free-to-play occupies a large part of the Russian market, which is mainly digital.
According to him, this model is “convenient because players can not pay if they do not have money. So they stopped paying as soon as the money problems started.”
The reason is the crisis: “The financial crisis has affected the gaming industry in Russia. People spend less money on everything, including games.”
At the same time, the decline in the paid games market, according to Galenkin, is due only to the fall in the exchange rate: “in general, they did not buy less.”
Sergey’s statement contradicts the forecasts of Newzoo. In July of this year, the company stated that the Russian market will show a 3% (dollar) growth compared to 2014. Another analytical company, J’son & Partners, insists on growth, according to which the volume of the Russian gaming market will reach $1.76 billion by the end of this year (against $1.63 billion in 2014).