In 2017 , the Mail.Ru Group has a gaming investment division — MY.GAMES Venture Capital (MGVC). Since then, it has managed to invest over 6 billion rubles in developers. A third of the amount went to Deus Craft.
Vladimir Nikolsky, co-founder of MY.GAMES and Chief Operating Officer, told about this in an interview with the RBC business portal Mail.ru Group.
We chose the main thing from the conversation:
- over four years, MGVC has invested in 45 studios, having worked out more than a thousand applications. But so far only seven developers have achieved the “desired results”;
- The division invested the largest amount in Deus Craft, the author of Grand Hotel Mania, — 2 billion rubles. MY.GAMES absorbed this studio last October. Note, earlier it was reported that MGVC will transfer $ 49 million to the studio (about 3.2 billion rubles at the current exchange rate) if the monthly earnings of the latter reach $ 15 million;
- as another example of investments, Nikolsky cited SWAG MASHA. Part of the investment in the Belarusian studio amounted to $ 150 thousand. In less than a year after consolidation, the company grew by 1.7 times and began earning immediately after the launch of the game Love Sick: Interactive Stories, returning all investments in a few months.
- according to Nikolsky, MGVC almost always returns the invested funds. In some cases, studio games are not justified and fail even during testing. However, it is often possible to recoup them in about six months;
- MY.GAMES itself also earns quite well. Its revenue for the first half of 2021 amounted to 22.1 billion rubles, which is 18% more than last year.