The story
Founded by Dmitry Bukhman and Igor Bukhman in 2004, in Vologda.1
Founding of Playrix
Before the company Playrix was founded, the brothers Igor and Dmitry Bukhman developed several simple computer games together while they were still students. Their first game was called Xonix, which the brothers developed on a computer with a Pentium 100 processor. The game was released in 2001, after a one-month development period. They released Discovera later that year, which was similar to the game Xonix. The brothers set its price at $15 and uploaded it to two hundred app catalogs. The game brought in $60 in its first month. Six months later, the Bukhman brothers released their second game, which brought their monthly revenue up to $200 and allowed them to buy a second computer. They released another game six months after that and started selling screensavers that they bought from programmers.
By 2004, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman had released three games and 30 screensavers, bringing their earnings to $10,000 a month for the first time. They officially founded Playrix, rented an office in Vologda, western Russia, and hired ten employees. Initially, the company mainly designed simple puzzle games for home computers. By the end of 2007, the company had released around 15 casual games and its first PC game, reaching a monthly revenue of $300,000.
Company growth through mobile games
In 2009, Playrix became interested in developing free-to-play games for mobile phones, while continuing to create PC games. The mobile games developer, Perfect Play Studio, with studios in Moscow mainly and Bryansk, was founded in 2009 as WebGames, entered the market in 2010, and later changed its name to Perfect Play in 2020. It is a part of Playrix.
In 2012, the Playrix launched its first game on Facebook—Township. The game became one of the top 50 grossing games on Facebook with 350,000 daily active users. A year later, Township became the company’s first-ever game to be released on iOS and later on Android. Over the next seven years, the game would be downloaded about 250 million times.
In April 2013, Playrix moved its headquarters to Dublin. The company started working remotely in 2015, and by 2016 it had more employees working remotely than at its central office.
At the end of April 2015, the company announced the release of its second free-to-play mobile game—Fishdom: Deep Dive. Playrix then released Gardenscapes (2016) and Homescapes (2017). The former brought the company $1.5 billion in revenue by the end of 2019. The company later released two more games—Wildscapes (2019) and Manor Matters (2019).
According to App Annie, in September 2016, the company became the highest-grossing mobile game developer in the CIS and Baltic states region, the second in Europe in terms of revenue, and ranked in the Top 20 biggest mobile game developers in the world. In August 2017, the company became the leading mobile game publisher in Europe based on revenue from Google Play and the App Store.
Acquisitions and new developments
At the beginning of 2018, the Bukhman brothers considered selling the company but ultimately decided to invest in other video game companies instead. In 2018, Playrix acquired a 43% stake in Nexters, one of Europe's largest video game developers. In 2018, Playrix became the 9th highest-grossing game publisher globally on iOS and Android.
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In 2019, Playrix made approximately $1.7 billion. About $100 million was spent buying shares in European game studios. In August 2019, Playrix invested in the Belarusian company Vizor Games. In October of the same year, Playrix bought the Ukrainian company Zagrava Games and integrated the Russian game developer Stargaze into the company as well, renaming it Zefir Games. That December, they acquired the Serbian company Eipix Entertainment.
In May 2020, Playrix acquired the Armenian studio Plexonic and the Croatian studio Cateia Games that June. As a result of this focus on acquisitions, the company grew at a rapid pace. As of 2020, more than 2,500 people were employed by Playrix in 25 offices around the world. In March 2021, the company bought the Ukrainian studio Boolat Games.
In 2022, the company announced its intention to withdraw from the Russian and Belarusian markets and subsequently closed its Russian offices, due to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Employees from affected countries were relocated to other regions.
From Wikipedia’s article on Playrix, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5