According to the results of 2015, the Russian online games market turned out to be smaller than in 2012

Today, July 4th, Mail.Ru The Group reported that it estimates the Russian online gaming market at 51.9 billion rubles. This is 2% more than a year earlier.

A large share – 29 billion rubles – fell on the MMO market. It grew by 4% during the reporting period – by a billion.

In second place in terms of revenue is the segment of social games. He earned 12.3 billion rubles. This is 12% less than in 2014.

The main driver of growth was the mobile games market. It has grown by 20% – to the level of 10.6 billion rubles.

At first glance, the results are encouraging. We see growth in all segments except social, whose decline can also be explained by a global trend (people are abandoning social games in favor of mobile).

But if you translate the numbers into dollars, the situation changes to the opposite. The weighted average dollar exchange rate against the ruble was 60.9 rubles in 2015. With certain reservations, this means that the Russian online gaming market earned $0.85 billion in 2015. For comparison, according to the same Mail.ru Group, in 2012, the Russian online gaming market earned $0.9 billion.

It turns out that for the last three years, the Russian online games market has been “marking time in one place.” It has not become more interesting or promising for either domestic or foreign companies. Taking into account recent legislative initiatives, in particular, the introduction of the “Google tax” and the “Spring package”, the situation may worsen in the near future.

As for the turnover of the entire Russian games market, according to our estimates, it hardly amounted to more than $1-1.1 billion at the end of last year. Recall, according to Sergey Galenkin, Head of Publishing for Eastern Europe at Epic Games, the annual turnover of the digital PC games market is somewhere in the region of $ 140 million. Console data (digital and retail sales) we don’t, but they are most likely significantly inferior to PC sales.

A source: corp.mail.ru