"American dad" goes home - Newspaper Kommersant No. 222 (7423) of 11/30/2022

"American dad" goes home - Newspaper Kommersant No. 222 (7423) of 11/30/2022



The gaming holding My.Games, which VK sold in October to Leta Capital's managing partner Alexander Chachava, may sell some of the mobile games that depend on licenses from foreign companies. Some of My.Games projects have already been transferred to the Cypriot structure so that they would not be removed from foreign mobile app stores. In the future, Russian game developers will not be able to obtain licenses from American copyright holders, experts are sure.

A Kommersant source in a large Russian-language gaming studio told Kommersant that the My.Games holding is looking for buyers for part of its mobile games catalog. According to him, we are talking, in particular, about the game “American Dad. Apocalypse Soon" on the animated series "American Dad" of the Fox channel: "Problem in renewing the Fox license." Another Kommersant source in the industry also knows about My.Games' plans to sell the game. Now Russian users cannot download American Dad. Apocalypse Soon" in the AppStore and Google Play. The game's community on VKontakte says that it has been unavailable from Russia and Belarus since July 31, and project support has been suspended. My.Games declined to comment.

My.Games has its own game store and also develops and distributes video games through mobile app stores. Among the projects are Hustle Castle, War Robots, Left to Survive, etc. In total, My.Games portfolio, according to a company representative, includes more than 70 own projects. At the end of 2021, the company's revenue amounted to 43.8 billion rubles. (growth 10.5% year-on-year), follows from the reporting of VK.

VK began looking for a buyer on My.Games just a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, as sanctions could complicate the development and distribution of games (see Kommersant on March 21). However, the sale of the holding for $642 million was announced only in October. According to SPARK-Interfax, the parent legal entity of the holding, My Games LLC, still belongs to VK, My.Games clarified that the asset transfer process has not been completed.

Meanwhile, a number of My.Games mobile games, in particular, Hustle Castle, War Robots and 12 other projects, have already changed their publisher in the AppStore and Google Play app stores: Upwake.me, registered in Cyprus in April, has become it. Upwake.me has two identical sites, in the .in zone and in the .me zone. The first one says that the company's offices are located in Amsterdam (Holland), Limassol (Cyprus) and Dubai (UAE), while the Upwake.in domain, according to whois, is registered to a person from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Kommersant's interlocutor in the gaming industry suggests that a change in publisher was needed in order to continue selling products in the AppStore and Google Play.

Fox owns the rights to the animated series on the basis of which My.Games developed the game, therefore, the company needs a license to remake the original work, Spartak Khulkhachiev, legal adviser of the EBR intellectual property practice, explains: “If it is not renewed, the development of the game will be illegal.” Now for Russian companies whose products depend on licenses from foreign copyright holders, there is no other choice but to sell assets to a foreign publisher, independent expert Vyacheslav Makarov believes: “In general, Western companies tend to comply with sanctions excessively, the Russian market is far from being a key don't want to take the risk." The attitude towards foreign companies with Russian immigrants is better, he notes, "but even in this case, the decision to renew the license is far from guaranteed."

Vasily Ovchinnikov, head of the Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry, believes that in the future My.Games will return to investing in projects, including foreign game studios, but without its own store: “There is no point in developing it on the global market - there is already high competition, for such the fight will not have enough funds.

Nikita Korolev, Yuri Litvinenko



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