Sberbank closes the game unit
- Jun 10
Sbergames gaming company will close Sberbank due to Western sanctions.
The ambitious unit designed to break the bank to the bank on the market of video games and mobile entertainment did not exist for 1 year.
The Sbergames brand appeared on the market in April 2021. The company worked about 200 employees. The business was hoped to invest up to $ 100 million in the coming years.
However, the company hit American and European sanctions. Due to the connection with the application bank, its projects could be removed from the App Store and Google Play, which made the existence of the game company meaningless.
Although there was an option to divide the structure into two businesses - for the domestic and international market. Previously, I did VK, having introduced the VK Play service in parallel with the My.games project.
Sbergames employees are now looking for a new job. Specialists of this profile in the market are in demand. There they expect a coming of large amounts of state funds to develop national gaming projects, one of which will be Action-RPG called "Troubles" about the 17th century of the history of Russia.
Initially, Sbergames included a publishing platform, an internal studio and a production center for third -party projects. For the company, they even purchased an expensive Games domain in the Russian zone.
The company was headed by Alexander Mikheev and Alisa Chumachenko. Both have already left the enterprise.
Sbergames was going to focus on mobile games, develop new projects in Russia and publish in the West. Now, in order to release Russian games abroad, you will have to clearly segment business on internal and external, not legally interconnected in order to circumvent sanctions.
The development of mobile games in the domestic market limits the absence of their application store. Apple does not allow third -party publishers to its system, and Google Play is preparing to tighten the possibility of third -party Android installations in the coming years, so the import substitution of applications stores may not work without the appearance of a Russian operating system for smartphones, which will take years.
Mobile games can also fall under secondary restrictions if their creator is connected with companies from the sanctions list.
Sbergames has not yet managed to find partners and gain a foothold in the foreign market to be saved by rebranding. Thus, the OKKO online cinema, belonging to Sberbank, quickly got rid of the references to the relationship of the companies and went under the control of the little-known LLC.
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It is likely that after the abolition of sanctions, the bank will restore control of the OKKO online cinema, but the game unit will not return it, and the employees will scatter at another job by that time.
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