A new deal on the gaming market of Belarus. GEM Capital, an investment company with Russian roots, has become a partner of Weappy Studio in Minsk. She invested $1.4 million in the authors of the This Is the Police series.
This Is the Police 2
GEM Capital announced the deal App2Top.ru .
At the same time, there are no details on exactly what conditions it was committed (how much the entire studio was valued and, accordingly, what share was taken over by investors).
The studio will use the money received to increase the team. This will allow you to develop several projects at once. Previously, Weappy could only work on one game at a time.
Weappy is expanding, and investments from GEM Capital will help grow a full-fledged second team in the studio to engage in parallel development of two projects.
Co-founder and Creative Director of Weappy
What kind of projects they may be is also not reported. Perhaps one of them will be the yet-to-be-announced This Is the Police 3. This is hinted at by the statement of one of the representatives of the investment company.
The Weappy team has achieved great success by creating the This Is the Police franchise. In the new games, Weappy will send players on adventures outside the police station and show them many new features.
Leader of the GEM Capital gaming direction
However, in September 2019, Ilya Yanovich in a conversation with users DTF.ru he said that the studio’s next game “has nothing to do with the previous ones and is not at all similar to them as much as two video games can be different in principle.”
Anyway, as part of the announcement of the deal between GEM Capital and Weappy, the total sales of the entire franchise were also announced. They currently amount to more than a million copies. Recall that the franchise today includes three products: This Is the Police 1 and 2, as well as a spin-off of Rebel Cops.
All of them are strategy games about the work of police officers in the small American city of Sharpwood. The key features of the series are a well—developed plot in the spirit of noir detectives and a minimalistic graphic style.
Released in 2016, This Is the Police was the debut for the Weappy studio, which at that time half consisted of game journalists (including Yanovich, the former head of the gaming direction of Igromania).
As for GEM Capital, a few years ago it could not be called a profile gaming investor. Until mid-2019, she owned the oil company First Oil. And the founder of the fund is from the extractive industry: Anatoly Paliy previously held the post of First Deputy General Director of Gazenergoset.
However, today, according to representatives of GEM Capital, it is an investor in more than 10 studios that are engaged in games or other entertainment IT products. In addition to Weappy, at least five are publicly known: Mundfish, Owlcat Games, Deus Craft, Game Garden and 110 Industries.