The Russian Foundation for the Development of Internet Initiatives (FII) will undertake investment in the games market. He will start with esports.
This is reported by Kommersant.
The volume of investments will be ₽500 million ($9 million).
The first participant of the program will be an accelerator for esports projects. It is being created in partnership with M19. The latter is an esports organization with lineups for League of Legends and HearthStone.
The accelerator is looking for:
- projects on technology for processing and analyzing data on player behavior;
- platforms for conducting and searching for tournaments;
- services for working with opinion leaders and their audience;
- marketplaces and stores;
- services for scouting players and finding teammates for the game.
Startups that get into the accelerator will receive up to ₽ 5 million ($90 thousand). However, M19 writes that in the next rounds of financing, the amount may rise to ₽25 million ($ 446 thousand).
To participate, the project requires:
- minimally working product (MVP);
- preferably the first sales;
- the team must have at least two people who are ready to work full-time for three months on the site.
The three-month period is specified for a reason. The FRIA hopes that during this time, with the support of M19 (an audience of 4.5 million gamers), the selected projects will become self-sufficient.
The Internet Initiatives Development Fund is a state-owned one. It was established by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives to Promote New Projects (ASI), a non-profit organization launched by the Russian Government. The Chairman of the ASI Supervisory Board is the President of the Russian Federation.
It is not the first time that FRII has invested in the games market. In the summer of 2017, the company invested ₽160 million ($2.8 million) in the PlayKey cloud service. The latter allows you to run modern games on low-power computers, calculating graphics on remote servers (analogous to OnLive and Gaikai).
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