Lesta Games has announced the launch of a "platform for hosting games." It is called B.A.S.E. It is assumed that in the future the platform will be able to offer players a large-scale catalog of online PC games.
According to Kommersant, the company estimates the upcoming investments in the store at $ 10-30 million. The final amount will depend on which foreign games Lesta Games will be able to attract to the site.
The specified amount will be spent mainly on signing contracts with game copyright holders, localization of products and building infrastructure. The costs of marketing the site and signed titles are not taken into account.
"In the next five years, we expect that BASE will be able to earn up to 20-30% of the turnover of its partner structure — Lesta Games," the company also told the publication.
The first game available on B.A.S.E. was Royal Quest, a Russian MMORPG launched in 1C and Katauri Interactive over a decade ago. This spring, Lesta Games acquired the rights to the project from Fulqrum Publishing.
The second title will be an online team game with elements of Superball football, developed by the Chinese studio Pathea Games. The start of closed testing of the project is scheduled for spring, and the release is scheduled for the fourth quarter of next year.
According to Kommersant, in 2024 Lesta Games plans to expand the library as a whole to six to ten projects. Most of them will feature games from Chinese and Korean developers.
The company sees not only Russia and the CIS as the target market of the platform, but also the Latin American market, as well as a certain macroregion, which is currently not ready to disclose.
Sources of the publication believe that Astrum Entertainment becomes the key competitor of Lesta Games after this announcement. However, the editors of App2Top see that, rather, the developers of the "World of Ships" enter the territory of Innova and 101XP, which have long acted in the Russian market as operators of Asian MMOs.