The developer and publisher of mobile games Azur Games announced the sale of shares in studios located in Russia (as well as Belarus). The official reason: the desire to focus on other markets.
Horror Hunt
According to the press release, Azur Games has withdrawn from the following companies:
- Ural Games;
- Sibir Games;
- Sarafan;
- Last Level;
- Oasis Games;
- AGB.
Among the latter are developers of projects such as Taxi Run (27 million installations, according to AppMagic) and Horror Hunt (slightly more than 2 million installations).
The studios’ shares were bought out by their management. The size of the transactions (even the orders) are not specified by the publisher’s representatives.
According to Rusprofile, the total revenue of the Russian companies from which Azur Games came out (Ural Games, Sibir Games, Sarafan and Last Level) for 2021 amounted to more than 350 million, and their total value, based on the net assets method (a method for assessing business, which consists in subtracting from the sum of assets of all liabilities of the company), reached 33 million rubles.
Important: the amount of revenue, as well as the value of net assets, says nothing about the real value of the transaction. For example, according to the media, Nexters sold Nexters Studio for 200 rubles, while the latter’s revenue last year amounted to 1.4 billion rubles, and the value of assets — 68 million rubles.
In most cases, Azur Games previously acted as their founder.
The representative of the company clarifies that those teams that took advantage of the relocation program previously proposed by Azur Games “retained the partnership” with the publisher.
Recall that in May of this year, Azur Games launched a program to relocate game studios for a percentage of profits. Then it was reported that the publisher was going to take “a stipulated percentage of the studio project’s profit” for his services.
According to the publisher’s representative, about five teams became participants of the program.
At the moment, Azur Games positions itself as an international company “with headquarters in Larnaca (Cyprus), as well as offices in the UAE, Montenegro, China and other countries.”