A company with Russian founders has created a replacement for Roblox and Minecraft

The company with Russian founders Onlyspace launched the Megamod gaming platform, an analogue of the popular Roblox and Minecraft sandboxes, on the basis of which users themselves can create various games. So far, the platform is in beta, but in the first four months, 3,000 people registered on it and more than 3,000 games were created, a representative of the developer told Vedomosti. Taking into account the fact that Minecraft has closed access to users from Russia, and Roblox has limited the ability to pay with Russian cards, Megamod can compete with them locally, experts say.

The creators of Megamod are Alexey Kostarev and Dmitry Semiryazhko. In the late 2000s, Kostarev was one of the authors of the Happy Farmer game, which was very popular with the VKontakte audience (6.5 million people played it in 2009, Rusbase wrote at the time). Investments in the Megamod project amounted to $1.5 million, a company representative specified. The company is now in talks to raise funds from third-party investors, he added, without disclosing details.

Previously, Onlyspace was engaged in the publishing of NFT games, but after a decline in interest in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, it switched to creating free-to-play online games, a company representative said. In 2022, Forbes wrote that the family office of the founder of Xsolla (a service for accepting payments in online games created in 2005 in Russia. – Vedomosti) Alexander Agapitov’s Hand of Midas invested $ 2.25 million in Onlyspace.

The Megamod platform allows “non-developers” to create various games using the built-in nocode toolkit and share them with other players. The platform has, for example, various labyrinths, monster car races, parkour tracks, ball games, Vedomosti was convinced. According to a company representative, about 2,500 players and 400 team leaders who create new games are now registered on the platform, the company said. Most of the audience is Russian-speaking, these are users from Russia, Ukraine, Belgium, Latvia.

At the same time, any user can apply to become a creator and launch their game individually or in a team. For 30 games, the company pays the author or team about $200, the company said. In the future, Onlyspace plans to make money from the sale of in-game goods and additional game time.

The audience of sandbox games, which include Roblox and Minecraft, is very large, says Konstantin Sakhnov, co-founder of the Vengeance Games studio. In Russia alone, according to various estimates, up to 20 million active players per month played in Minecraft, up to 7 million in Roblox, he noted. At the same time, the total monthly online audience of Roblox in 2023 is about 210 million people, Sakhnov specified.

In March 2022, Minecraft was removed from the Russian Google Play and App Store. This happened after Microsoft (owns Minecraft developer Mojang Studios) announced its withdrawal from the Russian market. The game is also currently unavailable for purchase on Steam.

Monetization of such products is based mainly on subscriptions (monthly payments) or microtransactions (buying low-cost upgrades and visual differences), Sakhnov explains. Monetization of Minecraft, like its closest competitor Roblox, is mainly based on in-app purchases, and due to the refusal of the developers of these games to work with Russia, a giant and very popular niche has formed on the market, confirms independent video game expert Alexander Kuzmenko. Therefore, a new player who can offer a similar product with the ability to pay, can take a significant share of the market, experts agree.

However, despite the fact that the share of gamers from Russia in such games was large, their share in the revenue is not very significant, he continues. The fact is that pirated Minecraft servers were very popular in Russia. Up to half of the entire Minecraft online audience by 2022 was on pirated servers. After disabling the ability to pay with Russian cards, the pirate market began to develop rapidly, Sakhnov explained.

According to him, now sandbox games are no longer as popular as in the pandemic years, however, they still represent a promising segment of the gaming market.