Towards the northern Innova – Newspaper Kommersant No. 234 (7435) of 12/16/2022

The gaming holding My.Games, which VK sold to the managing partner of Leta Capital Alexander Chachava, announced the spin-off of the Russian business. The new company Astrum Entertainment will enter into a joint venture with Innova, an online games distributor, which, according to Kommersant, has been owned by GEM Capital since September. Market participants believe that the development of the joint venture will be done by people from VK, who can attract the holding to distribute foreign games from Innova through VK Play. My.Games itself will completely leave Russia.

The My.Games holding announced the separation of a part of the business that generates revenue in the Russian market and the formation of the publisher Astrum Entertainment on its basis. The new structure will receive from My.Games the rights to publish and operate games in the Russian Federation, the teams involved in working on them, and will also enter into a joint venture with the gaming company Innova.

The My.Games holding itself plans to cease operations in Russia in the coming months and “strengthen work with new partners” from the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The terms under which My.Games exits business in Russia have not been disclosed. Innova will control and manage the joint venture with Astrum Entertainment, its portfolio will include, among other things, games that My.Games developed in the Russian Federation until recently: Warface, Perfect World, Allods Online, etc.

My.Games develops and distributes video games. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, VK, which previously owned My.Games, created a new platform, VK Play. In September, VK sold My.Games to Alexander Chachava for $642 million (see “Kommersant” dated September 27). But My Games LLC still belongs to VK, according to SPARK-Interfax data. VK told Kommersant that the deal “is being registered with the Federal Tax Service,” and the holding is not involved in the operating activities of My.Games.

In March 2021, Innova bought the Swedish Enad Global 7 (EG7), but in September 2022, EG7 announced the sale of an asset to the Cypriot Games Mobile ST LTD for at least €21 million, with the condition that EG7 will receive up to 30% of the proceeds from the further resale of Innova to for five years.

Two Kommersant sources on the market claim that now Innova is actually owned by the GEM Capital fund of the former top manager of Gazprom structures, Anatoly Paly.

As the already former project director of Innova, Ivan Moroz, told Kommersant, a month ago, the company “on the background of rumors about the upcoming change in the development vector, the entire management team left.” Kommersant did not respond to Innova and GEM Capital.

The current management expertise of Innova is “no stronger than that of My.Games”, says the owner of the Kanobu portal Gadzhi Makhtiev: “It is hard to imagine how My.Games and Astrum Entertainment will be able to develop in different directions, management and expertise cannot be cloned.” The strategic ambitions of the parties will become clearer “after the list of operational managers is known,” Mr. Makhtiev added.

The establishment of the joint venture, according to Kommersant’s interlocutor in the industry, is “an attempt to create a monopoly in the distribution of games on the Russian market.”

He believes that the joint venture will deal with foreign online games (bringing to the Russian market, adaptation, maintenance), and distribution will be taken over by VK Play: “It is possible that part of the top management that was in My.Games when the company was part of VK, will appear in the joint venture. With the fact that the joint venture will distribute games through the VK Play platforms, the source of Kommersant, who is close to one of the major game studios, also agrees. “Being formally unrelated to VK, which is now in a turbulent zone due to sanctions, the joint venture will be able to obtain the rights to publish foreign games.”

My.Games, which has more than ten studios around the world, is now “important to distance itself as much as possible from Russia in order to maintain the ability to sell its products abroad and, in general, not to lose the international market,” Kommersant’s interlocutor believes. In a similar way (see “Kommersant” dated November 16) went to Wargamming, which develops and publishes World of Tanks.

Yuri Litvinenko, Nikita Korolev