“Playrix managed to add a layer of complexity and ‘meta game’ to the match-3 genre without driving away casual mobile players.” “Playrix is certainly responsible for the first major innovation in the match-3 genre since King Digital Entertainment Plc seemingly had the market locked down with Candy Crush,” said Newzoo analyst Tom Wijman. “This genre variety we introduced-match-3 with meta game-became very successful, and other companies started copying us.” “Austin engages in dialog with you, you help him to select ways to decorate the mansion, you dive into the history of this character and become related with him,” Dmitry said. Playrix succeeded in this transition, achieving worldwide recognition over the past three years with Gardenscapes and its sequel, Homescapes, a new variety of match-3 puzzle in which a player completes rows of at least three elements to pass levels and progress through an animated storyline-in this case, helping a butler named Austin renovate a house with a garden. They are services that need to be supported constantly as users are waiting for regular updates.” “Free-to-play games aren’t games that you develop, release and move on to making another one. “It was a major challenge for us to switch to developing free-to-play games-that’s totally different DNA,” Dmitry said. Ads generate less than 3 percent of revenue, Dmitry said. Playrix makes most of its money from in-app purchases and the brothers mostly shun advertising, which detracts from the user experience. Many of them were available for free, with users paying only for certain in-game features. Then, within the past decade, games started moving first to Facebook and then smartphones. In the early years, they sold casual games through sites such as or, before moving to bigger platforms like Yahoo! and AOL. In 2004, when the business reached $10,000 of monthly revenue, they registered a legal entity, rented space for an office in the basement of a book warehouse and hired other staff to accelerate production. Their copycat of Tetris brought in $700 a month, but the brothers shut that down after learning that the game was protected by a license. Their second game, featuring an animated character designed by an outsourced artist, brought in $200 a month. “We thought, ‘If one game makes $100, we can write several dozen of them and make a lot of money,”’ Igor said. They wrote it during a summer break and generated $60 in the first month and later $100 a month, about half of the average salary in Vologda. The brothers’ first product was a game akin to Xonix in which players must use a cursor to open pieces of a hidden picture before being struck by flying balls. The two remotely manage about 1,100 employees, including personnel at its Ireland headquarters and developers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. is Playrix’s biggest market, followed by China and Japan, the brothers said in a recent interview in Tel Aviv, where they spend some of their time. “We had no experience, no business understanding whatsoever-everything we could imagine was writing games,” Igor said. He decided to try with Dmitry, who was still in high school at the time.
PLAYRIX GAMES SUPPORT SOFTWARE
Their road to riches started in 2001 in the city of Vologda, almost 300 miles (483 kilometers) north of Moscow, where Igor learned from a university professor that he could sell software online. They haven’t previously appeared in a global wealth ranking. Today, each brother is worth about $1.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That makes the company one of the top 10 iOS and Google Play app developers by revenue, data from researcher AppAnnie show, putting Playrix in the same league as Tencent Holdings Ltd., NetEase Inc. and annual sales of $1.2 billion, according to Newzoo. He and Igor Bukhman, 37, are the brains behind Playrix Holding Ltd., the creator of popular games similar to Candy Crush, including Fishdom and Gardenscapes, with more than 30 million daily users from China to the U.S. For now, though, “we are focused on growing the business.” Playrix has met with some of the biggest banks “and visited their skyscrapers,” said Dmitry Bukhman, 34, citing meetings with dealmakers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Wall Street wants a piece of what they’ve built since.
PLAYRIX GAMES SUPPORT CODE
Almost two decades ago, in a remote Russian city best known for its butter and linen, two brothers shared a bedroom and a Pentium 100-powered computer they used to code their first game.