TOMSK, Sep 20 – RIA Tomsk. Panzerdog company, creator of
mobile games, is the first developer in the world to receive 800,000 euros from
Mail.ru Games Ventures – the investment arm of the Mail.ru Group; investments
will be directed to the test launch of the first version of Tacticool game, the
head of the Panzerdog Tomsk office Roman Malakhov told RIA Tomsk on Wednesday.
According to Malakhov, the Panzerdog company is developing the Tacticool
game – shooter for mobile phones – since 2016. The peculiarity of the game is
that one fight goes online just a minute, it involves two teams of five people.
The first investor was the Aii Capital fund, which invested about 100.000
thousand dollars. Attracted from Mail.ru Games Ventures 800 thousand euro
developers intend to send for the finalization of the game.
"Now the project is at the stage of closed beta testing, which involves
several thousand players. In November, it is planned to make a test entry to
the market. Then it becomes clear whether the project needs to be finalized,
how much it will cost, what profit we can expect in the future", – Malakhov said.
He added that the game will always be free, it is planned to make money on
in-game purchases.
Malakhov said that the company has two offices: in Kaliningrad and Tomsk.
Tomsk office is developing software modules and interface, Kaliningrad – also
programming and visual part, that is all that is called "art". About
10 people work on the project. Legally, the company is registered in Finland – the founders expected that this would simplify the search of western investors.
© предоставлено Романом Малаховым
Roman Malakhov
"In Russia, it's not so easy to attract investment in a game project,
so we expected to look for investors abroad. But in the spring of this year,
the Mail.ru Group announced that it will invest up to 100 million dollars in
gaming companies. We immediately applied and received funding the other
day", – says Malakhov.
About investors
Mail.ru Games Ventures was created in April 2017 as a profile investment
division of Mail.Ru Group in the field of gaming business. The company reviewed
more than 500 applications from creators of games from around the world. The
project Panzerdog became the first invested.
The Director General of the Mail.Ru Group (Russia) Boris Dobrodeyev calls
the game direction as one of the priority for the group: according to their
data, in 2016 the Russian gaming market grew by 9% – up to 56.7 billion rubles,
revenues of mobile game producers – by 54% (up to 6.3 billion).
© скриншот игры
Tacticool Game