World of Tank Company. Wargaming shares are no longer sold and how much the company earns

The Cyprus Stock Exchange, which previously traded Wargaming securities, suspended this activity due to the fact that the annual report was not submitted on time.

Information update!

A new report has been released showing that WG earned $446 million in 2015. .

We have a Wargaming live earnings monitoring page -

Don't buy Wargaming shares anymore?

Let's start with the fact that they were almost impossible to buy. According to representatives of the CSE (Cyprus Stock Exchange), there have been no transactions with securities for a long time. The Belarusian developer was located there back in 2011.

The reason for the block was the lack of an annual report for 2013 from the World of Tanks developer, but they promise to restore the auction as soon as the problem is fixed.

According to CSE data for 2013, the shares in the company are distributed as follows:

• 38.5% of the shares belong to;
• 25.5% - Vladimir Kisloy;
• 17% - Nikolay Katselapov;
• 17% - to Ivan Mikhnevich.

Thus, up to 2% of the company's shares can be in free float.

However, according to the records, no trades in WG shares were recorded on the exchange.

According to sources in the company itself, the IPO ( Initial Public Offer - the first public sale of shares of a joint stock company) was carried out mainly with the aim of "not relaxing", since this fact imposes certain obligations on the company, including the publication of financial reports and press releases.

How much money does Wargaming make?

The main source of income for the company is still. The game has become one of the most popular in the world in a relatively short time.

• To the point:- find out how much they get per minute!

The company's latest report states that for the first half of 2013:

• company's revenue - $320.4 million;
• profit - $35 million.

Thus, if we take an ideal period of 6 months (this is the period for which the figures were published) and spend very rough estimate, it turns out that Wargaming earned approximately $73 756,91 at one o'clock, of which $8,057.09 went into profit.

The analytical company SuperData made its forecast, according to which the revenue of Wargaming will be:

• $475 million in 2013;
• $506 million in 2014;
• $590 million in 2015.

Wargaming revenue forecast for 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The same SuperData published a report according to which in 2012, on average, each World of Tanks player spent $7.58 per month on the game at the end of the year, which, for comparison, is 6.2 times more than League of Legends:

However, in 2014 this figure dropped slightly and the same analysts claim that players donate an average of $4.51 per month, but World of Tanks is still ahead of the rest in this indicator. But in terms of total revenue, WOT is only in fourth place among free-2-play games.

Approximate average monthly player spending on MMO games.

Sources close to Wargaming say that all these figures are close to real. If the predictions come true, then Wargaming will become the largest publisher and developer of games in the CIS, even overtaking the division of games from Mail.ru!

Wargaming management is increasingly deceiving players. The company is increasingly using its capabilities not to improve its games, but solely for the purpose of extorting money from players. The resounding success of the online game World of Tanks attracted great interest. To date, She is the undisputed leader in its segment and the most popular game in the CIS countries. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people take to the virtual battlefields and take part in tank battles. Although access to the game is absolutely free, Wargaming offers fans of tank battles quite a lot of different "goodies" for real money. At the same time, many players willingly pay for paid products, including premium accounts, inscriptions and camouflages for cars, in-game currency, and special equipment. It is premium paid tanks that are increasingly frustrating fans of the game.

Latest news from the world of World of Tanks

Wargaming is stealthily nerfing Premium Tanks

The developers keep telling us that premium technical schools are never nerfed, because you paid real money for it, we can only upgrade and nerf the upgraded vehicles. Recently it turned out that premium vehicles were nerfed from the players (we reduced the performance characteristics of the vehicles, worsening their hidden characteristics, dispersion, turning speed, mixing...). It always seemed to us that they were nerfing it, but they couldn’t prove it, so one of the English-speaking users of Stallman found out that the premium strv s1 tank destroyer was hidden in siege mode, now there is a message from Anton Pankov “hello ps1 we’ll check, most likely this is a bug display, thanks for the signal” what, of course, what else could we expect from the developers “of course, a bug”, as if it seemed that the premium tank was lowered, but there are proofs. Many users have already been able to verify that update 09 17 to update 0.9.19 of the tank’s performance characteristics changed the turning speed was nerfed by more than 2 times, the transition time to hiking mode was 1.25 hundredths, it became 1.3 the difference was 0.05, and also went to cross-country ability this potential turning speed speed turning on hard ground on medium also resistance undercarriage on hard ground. Now it has become interesting how the developers will get out of this situation, as far as it became known, we open the WOT express site, many of you already know and what do we see here, a lot of players began to demand a refund for the money spent earlier to buy a Swedish Swedish tank, in this case, premium tanks 8 level strv s1. I wonder how it will end, I think it's a pity those who bought strv s1 know you will write in the comments that the developers are finished and you will be completely right.

How can wargaming get out of the situation in this case with the fact that they were finally caught with a big proof, all the data was written out, many will already demand a refund, we are following the course of events.

New World of Tanks balancer

New information about the balancer in World of Tanks, as shown by the latest tests, the new balancer 0.9.18 World of Tanks does not work correctly. We will conduct a test for a series of 20 battles on different accounts, the test showed that players get into the TOP much less often at a low level on a level vehicle, and it was also found that after 20 battles on different vehicles, players get to the bottom of the list or the middle of more than 80% of cases .

Also, map ranking showed an incorrect distribution of repeated maps, although the situation has changed, as it was in the previous patch 0.9.17, from which we can conclude that the balancer works very peculiarly and chaotically. In addition to the fact that the new balancer will throw you into unfavorable teams according to the internal statistics of the server, you will also enjoy not breaking through and not hitting the target.

The balancer works in such a way that out of 100% of battles, and it is possible that you will get into the TOP no more than 15-20%%, all other battles you will spend at the bottom or in the middle of the list, this is clearly seen for vehicles of levels 6 and 8. For vehicles of the sixth level, most often getting into the TOP is when the whole team consists of one sixth level; for level 8, the situation is approximately the same. If you start to win, the balancer solves this "problem" very simply by periodically throwing you into a team where the statistics of your team's players are lower than the opponent's team. You can observe this simply by installing the XVM mod.

Personal reserves

The use of personal reserves as another deception.

It has been noticed that the use of personal combat reserves in World of Tanks reduces the ability of players to fully participate in hostilities, each inclusion of combat reserves leads to a decrease in the dynamic characteristics of any tank in battle, which was established by a special mod that determines the characteristics of military equipment directly when the player enters the battle . As the test showed, on average, the percentage change of 10% of the characteristics of accuracy and information, dispersion on the move, as well as the accuracy of hitting with full information, and some other parameters decreased when using reserves.

As soon as you think that Wargaming has given another opportunity for free to earn combat experience or silver, you are greatly mistaken, since each use of a personal reserve reduces the characteristics of your vehicles in battle.

You will use combat reserves and your win statistics will start to decrease, if you build an elementary graph and analyze the statistics of victories for several days with combat reserves enabled and without combat reserves, you will see that when using combat reserves, the statistics of victories on tanks are much lower than without them enabled. As a conclusion, this means only one thing: when using personal combat reserves in World of Tanks, an artificial problem is created for you so that you cannot create conditions for yourself under which your tank will gain the maximum amount of experience or earn a large amount of silver, since this is primarily unprofitable for companies Wargaming, where the main goal is to make money on the players.

In order to create a visible entourage of sports interest and a competitive moment in the game, the methods of advertising and paid bloggers who stream on YouTube are used. Attracting sports teams that, through sponsorship, create a certain illusion of equality of all players and the possibility of using tanks in the game, but as practice has shown, all this is a hoax, which is just one more proof of Wargaming's dishonesty in relation to all players.

As a result, all of the above clearly shows that Wargaming is not interested in fair fights, the only goal of Wargaming is to extort money from players by any means.

Deliberate scam

Since the recent pros in the World of Tanks community, rumors have begun to circulate about a scam by Wargaming net aimed at programming battle leaks. The essence of the claims lies in the disturbed balance of the game, which carries out deliberate and systematic battle drains, regardless of the skill level of the players.

On our website, we decided to make an article about fraud in the World of Tanks game. In the well-known Patent of Viktor Kisly, of course, nothing is said about getting a player into a losing battle, as well as about nerfing a vehicle that constantly wins. The Patent only mentions a table of vehicle battle levels and the conditions under which a player enters a certain battle level on a particular tank.

One of the bloggers who makes videos on the game and puts them on YouTube devoted a whole series of videos to this problem. The Bee Buzzing channel and its creator urge everyone to stop buying premium vehicles for a while and generally refrain from any monetary investments in the game. The reason for his displeasure was the regular "nerfs" of premium vehicles. The essence of the claims boils down to the fact that the developers of World of Tanks regularly deceive players who invest their own money, reducing the technical characteristics of not only simple tanks, but also those that can only be obtained for money.

Changes in the parameters of all machines in the game occurred constantly. This is due to the constant addition of new nations, development branches and individual machines. However, premium paid tanks were inviolable for a very long time. Now the creators of the game have taken up them. In almost every patch, several new samples of exclusive vehicles are released. Moreover, in order to force players to buy it, the developers are gradually making the tanks that the players already have less competitive. Their speed decreases, armor deteriorates, maneuverability disappears. Accustomed to punching through all opponents, the player suddenly discovers that he has “lost aim”, and the fired shells more and more often fall into “milk”. Moreover, all these troubles instantly disappear when buying a fresh "prem". But he also begins to “sick” after the release of one or two fresh updates. The blogger sees the company's bad faith in this and urges all fans of the game to ignore all paid offers from Wargaming until the developers pay attention to the problem and offer a solution that would suit everyone.

World of Tanks or how Wargaming lies to the players earning millions on them

To make money on a game, it must be popular. And to become such, any game can become only in one case: the players must believe that something depends on them. If for some reason the opposite happens, then any game is practically doomed. After a series of publications in the Western gaming press revealing publications regarding the technologies on which World of Tanks is based, its popularity has significantly decreased. For the CIS countries, this scandal went almost unnoticed. Everyone here is used to thinking that the serious difference between the number of players on European, American and Russian servers is due solely to the fact that they do not understand anything about real tanks and genuine armored prowess there. But it is not so. The reasons are different.

Patent of Viktor Kisly

Shortly after the launch, a number of publications posted on their websites a detailed description of the so-called “Kislyi patent”. Its author Victor Kisly is one of the founders of the company. It was he who developed the technology of "maintaining interest in the game", which the company has been successfully using to this day. The essence of "Sour's patent" is quite simple. All players must regularly both win and lose in order for the overall interest to be kept at the desired high level. For this, a special technology has been created. The system automatically assigns players a special coefficient from 0 to 2. The size of this coefficient depends on the number of victories won in battles. If you are too successful and start winning all the time, the system will automatically start to reduce the characteristics of your vehicle.

The World of Tanks random rules provide that a number of important game indicators can fluctuate significantly. Among them:

Scatter when firing;

The amount of one-time damage;

The probability of a ricochet;

Ability to deal critical damage;

Damage to internal modules;

The ability to break through enemy armor and so on.

balancerfighting in World of tanks

However, World of Tanks fans increasingly began to notice that a series of victories is necessarily replaced by a series of drains. Many people have a natural question: if the outcome of random battles is 99% predetermined, how can you merge it? How is the team assembled, which will lose with a probability of 99%? Even despite the WBR plus or minus 25%. How then can Wargaming program the drain?

Attentive WOT players note the two most obvious ways.

The first way to drain in World of Tanks refers to the maps, respawns and modes chosen by the player. The Patent says that a certain percentage of victories is stored for each level of battle of a vehicle and for each tank. The matchmaker is allegedly only responsible for forming teams and choosing a map, after which he sends both teams into battle. It is also managed by the game server, i.e. the same VBR plus or minus 25%. Therefore, if a weak team, according to all forecasts, is obliged to merge the battle, suddenly begins to actively resist and win, the notorious VBR in every way begins to prevent it from achieving victory.

The second of them concerns directly the balance of teams. This does not mean the total difference in strength points between teams, but the ratio of vehicle types. For example, two teams fight in the Encounter Battle mode. One team is equipped mainly with medium tanks, ATs and a couple of heavy tanks. The enemy team, on the other hand, has predominantly heavy weapons available. If in this situation it occupies a common base, then it will be very difficult for a team with medium tanks to fight with such an enemy. Accordingly, the probability of coordinated actions of a random team and subsequent victory tends to zero.

The main rules of the World of Tanks balancer

Everyone who connects to the World of Tanks server is assigned a certain status, not only to his account, but also to all your equipment in the hangar, the naive think that they are distributed by the balancer only when entering the battle - this is not so! As soon as you enter the game, the balancer knows for which range of maps and in which team by weight and statistics to determine your any tank when entering the battle.

First Battle Rule World of Tanks

As you know, on different maps for the same tank, a different percentage of victories. All cards are divided into two groups for each of your and only your tank in the hangar, the first group is the group of cards on which you have a higher percentage of wins on this tank, in the second where the percentage is lower. When entering the first battle, the balancer determines you on the map where your influence on the game will be below average for this type of vehicle.

Did you think that Wargaming would let you earn two, three or five times experience for free?

Single tank win rule

Account-wide win rule

ruleballistics

Skill balancing rule

The rule of influence on the battle by the level of technology

It is generally accepted that all this is regulated by the almighty VBR or the Great Belarusian Random. However, in reality, everything happens not quite by chance. So, if some players win too often, while others lose too often, the system independently begins to correct all the indicators of their technique. The level of one-time damage, for example, can differ by +/- 25%. All other significant indicators fluctuate approximately in the same range. For “too” successful players, everything “suddenly” becomes unhappy, and now a tank destroyer of the tenth level, in an unthinkable way, cannot hit or pierce a obviously weaker enemy. The shells go into milk or just knock down the tracks of even the lightest and most defenseless tanks, without causing them the prescribed damage. Crooked opponents, on the contrary, start to hit the desired pixel “from the top”. And without fail, producing devastating fires and destroying the internal modules of your tank. Add to this the fact that the system also independently distributes participants, placing them in the TOP or at the bottom of the list in battle. It turns out that very little depends on the skills or skills of World of Tanks players. Everyone will get their fair share of wins from good developers. The main thing is not to forget to donate and pay for premium equipment, preferential accounts and other goodies provided by the "Sour patent".

Taking advantage of the popularity of the World of tanks game and the desire of players to get unique content, scammers seek to lure money from users. Find out about all the possible tricks of attackers. One of the most popular World of Tanks-related scams is offers to buy bonuses and invite codes necessary to receive in-game property, including items that cannot be bought with in-game gold.

Invite code

Invite code - is entered only when creating an account.

Bonus code - can be entered at any time during the game.

Ways to get official bonus codes:

1) At events organized by Wargaming;

2) Together with the official goods of the company and its partners;

3) On the official website during the promotions.

Any other way of acquiring bonus codes is one of the options for fraud.

Fraud options:

Bonus code

1) Offers to buy bonus codes that make it possible to purchase equipment that cannot be bought for game gold.

Such codes can only be distributed by Warganing and its official partners, and the number of these bonus codes is negligible, so it is unlikely that you will be offered a real code. It is worth buying such codes only if it is possible to activate it immediately, with the seller.

2) Sites that sell bonus codes.

In order for the activity of the site to look convincing, comments are published on it confirming that all codes are working. Naturally, they were left by the attackers themselves.

3) Fraudsters introduce themselves as partners or employees of Wargaming, or convince.

First of all, it is worth considering, if the seller is really one of the representatives of Wargaming, why he sells codes, and does not distribute them as a bonus for purchasing their products, or for taking part in an event organized by them.

Thanks to the game World of Tanks, Wargaming has turned into an international corporation with revenues of about $600 million.

Victor Kisly, founder of Wargaming (Photo: Andrey Kovalev for RBC)

“Oh my God, I’m in Wargaming” - about 80% of the interviews conducted by the company began with these words, recalls Anastasia Blokhina, director of the department for organizing events for players in the CIS countries. Commitment to the game of "tanks", as World of Tanks is called by its fans, is cherished by the management within the company. With the hiring of any employee, an account is created in the game and bonus points are credited to it, and each employee in Blokhin’s department must conduct an average of eight tank battles per day and without fail test all outgoing updates.

Since the birth of the idea of ​​a game about tanks in 2008, the number of Wargaming employees has grown tenfold - from less than 100 people to 4 thousand in 15 offices (at the beginning of 2016). One of the largest developers in the world, Activision Blizzard, has about 7,000 full-time and part-time employees in ten offices.

“I feel like a citizen of the world - on almost every continent I have an office where I can go and they will welcome me there. It's exciting, ”Viktor Kisly, the founder of Wargaming, admits in a conversation with RBC. He pronounces some of the phrases in English, then, as if coming to his senses, selects the Russian equivalent. For several years now, Kisly has been living with his family in Cyprus, where the headquarters of Wargaming has been located since 2011.

In mid-April, along with 60 managers, Kisly flew to Stanford University to study a week-long course specially designed for them on leadership “in the face of innovation in a rapidly changing world.” The newly minted billionaire is trying to instill in his offspring the "manners" of an effective corporation and learn how to benefit from difficulties.

First from the CIS

In 2016, Bloomberg included Sour in its “billionaires index” for the first time, valuing Wargaming’s business at $1.5 billion. For comparison, the sale of the cult game Minecraft to Microsoft Corporation in 2014 brought $2.5 billion to the Swedish programmer Markus Persson. Sour is the first billionaire in the gaming industry in the CIS, says the founder of the entertainment Internet portal "Kanobu" Gadzhi Makhtiyev.

Kisly himself is reluctant to talk about the financial side of the business - he is not ready to "reveal all the cards to competitors." He only says that the company's revenue is measured in "hundreds of millions of dollars." According to Bloomberg, Wargaming received $590 million in revenue in 2015, the same amount was calculated by experts from the research company Newzoo. If Wargaming shares were traded on the stock exchange, the developer would enter the top 30 largest gaming companies, says Newzoo marketing director Emma McDonald.

In August, Wargaming will turn 18 years old, but the company made a breakthrough only in 2010, releasing World of Tanks, an MMO game (Massively Multiplayer Online, massively multiplayer online game), to the market. To date, the number of registered players in "tanks" exceeds 110 million worldwide (40 million - from the CIS), of which almost 97% are men aged about 30 years. For comparison: the popular South Korean shooter game Cross Fire (published in Russia by Mail.Ru Group) has about 400 million registered users. At the same time, not a single Russian game has so far reached an audience size of 110 million.

Sour refers to the player as "the main boss and investor". World of Tanks, which accounts for more than 80% of the company's revenue (based on data from Superdata Research), monetizes on a free-to-play basis - the game can be downloaded for free, while the game itself has built-in payments. About a third of fans of tank battles for 550 rubles, or $10, per month (the company has a fixed exchange rate) buy a premium account, which saves the player time and speeds up his development in the game. Most of the revenue comes from payments for premium access. About a third of users pay for additional options - for example, for a premium, that is, a tank that is maximally pumped in terms of characteristics, you can pay from 143 to 2640 rubles.

Now World of Tanks can be played on almost any of the existing platforms - in addition to personal computers on the PlayStation4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles (games were made by different studios that Wargaming either bought or built from scratch) and on smartphones - the World of Tanks version Blitz. The mobile version of the game in 2015 became number one in terms of revenue in Russia, McDonald calculated, without disclosing exact numbers. In terms of mobile revenue, Wargaming is the third highest-grossing mobile publisher in Russia last year, she said.

The success of "tanks" forced Kisly to open representative offices of the company around the world, and, in his opinion, already such a large number of people "make Wargaming a corporation." If at the start entrepreneurs kept all the accounting on their own, now highly paid specialists are engaged in “boring things like paying taxes” at Wargaming, Kisly says. In September 2015, the former COO of Barclays Bank, Andrew Tinney, became the CFO of the company with Belarusian roots. In addition, despite the difference in the salaries of IT specialists in the US and Belarus, the level of training required to create game tanks implies a “significantly higher salary” for Belarusian developers as well.

How "tanchiki" were created

The first office of Wargaming was located in the apartment of Viktor Kisly in Minsk - he and his brother Evgeny moved into one room, the second one was vacated for work. The first online game was developed by students of the Belarusian State University, where Kisly himself studied. It was the turn-based strategy Iron Age, the paper version of which Victor and his brother came up with in childhood.

For the first time, Victor saw a computer in the laboratory where his father worked: a simple game on a gray-green screen amazed him. “I realized that this piece of iron is smart, it plays against me and makes me think,” Kisly recalls. Prior to the launch of World of Tanks, his company released the games DBA Online, Massive Assault, Operation Bagration, Inhabited Island. In December 2008, Sour and his associates decided to make an MMO game about tanks - there were no popular products in this niche. About a year before that, the company had been working on an online fantasy game that was supposed to compete with the already hyped World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment's orc and elf role-playing game. Since the beginning of 2009, designers and programmers began to actively work on the future World of Tanks, and in May of the same year, the first video of the game was released, in which orcs fight with elves, and they are run over by a tank. A few months later, the first test of the game took place, in which familiar Wargaming employees participated. In the spring of 2010, World of Tanks switched to open beta testing, and in August the game was officially launched in Russia.

But last year, Sour realized that a large number of people is not only the key to success, but also a problem. The company developed quickly and not always efficiently, the founder of Wargaming admits, so since 2015 the management has approved a restructuring plan. In February, a new head of HR department joined the company - Jerry Prohazka, former director of talent for the American Riot Games, the creator of the League of Legends game. According to Makhtiev, Riot Games has a “mirror approach” to hiring people compared to what Wargaming has so far adopted: the number of interviews for a candidate often exceeds a dozen, and the head of a company’s office in a new country can be searched for within 2.5 years.

From the end of March, Wargaming is switching to the so-called distributed development structure - employees from different regions can work on one project, and as a result, separate "pieces" of the game are created in different parts of the world. The founder of Wargaming compares the game World of Tanks with the Airbus A380, which is assembled in Toulouse, and parts are brought to it from all over the world - wires from China, chairs from Italy, etc. In game construction, it looks much the same: finding a video director or artist of the “right level” is easier in California, where Hollywood is nearby, than in Eastern Europe. Sour admits that such a business reform will complicate the process of work: employees will need to "become more disciplined" and management will need to look for new ways to manage. Nevertheless, Kisly is determined: given the current scale of the business, restructuring makes sense.

The company does not disclose the amount of profit, but Sour claims that most of it goes to business development: he calls it "harsh reinvestment." In 2010, when World of Tanks "shot" in the market of the former Soviet Union, Wargaming almost immediately took up the development of two more games - World of Warplanes ("World of Aircraft") and World of Warships ("World of Ships"). Creating new games took an average of three to four years and required the efforts of 200-400 people, says Kisly. He does not disclose the amount of investment in these games. Sergey Orlovsky, CEO and founder of the Nival developer company, estimated the amount of expenses by the time World of Warplanes and World of Warships were launched at $20 million and $30 million, respectively.

The strategy of "harsh reinvestment" of such amounts does not always work. Released in 2013, World of Warplanes was not a successful project, admits Sour. “It is natural for a person to walk on a plane or climb a tree at most, but not to fly in three-dimensional space at a speed of 400 km / h and shoot at the same time,” Kisly gives his explanation for the failure. Video blogger Pavel Sukhanov, who reviews World of Tanks on YouTube, explains the “aircraft that did not take off” with historical features: “If a Russian player’s grandfather fought, then most likely he was a tanker, much less often he flew or swam. In England or the USA, on the contrary, grandfathers flew and swam. Therefore, our national mentality is about tanks, and in the world it is about ships.”

The number of registered users in the game World of Warships, which was released in September 2015, reaches about 7 million - "a wonderful pace," Kisly notes. But it is hard for “aircraft” and “ships” in the shadow of an accomplished brother, he continues: one game “eats” another. The audience is so immersed in tank battles that they have practically no time left for other types of battles. But Sour is not ready to close World of Warplanes - this will “make unhappy”, albeit a small, but formed core of players. Global corporations are not always so reverent about their projects: for example, in July 2015, Electronic Arts announced the closure of several games that did not receive due popularity at once - Battlefield Hero, Battlefield Play4Free, Need for Speed ​​World and FIFA World.

Big sport

Over the past three years, Wargaming has spent $32 million on professional esports events.

"Did you see the last fight?" Sour asks. We are talking at the height of the World of Tanks tournament - Wargaming.net League, which is being held for the third year in early April in Warsaw. Behind the back of the founder of Wargaming is a huge screen broadcasting battles. The businessman cannot attend all the fights due to the tight schedule of meetings, but he monitors the changes in the standings.

For the last fight of the finals, Sour still comes to the stadium of the Torwar Hall sports complex and is lost in the crowd of 5 thousand spectators. If you do not look at the stage where the players in headphones are sitting at the computers, what is happening at the stadium can be mistaken for a classic football match: there is a commentator, in between fights, invited experts discuss the tactics of the teams, the highlights of the fights are “scrolled” on the screen. Spectators - mostly men and teenagers - are wrapped in scarves with the symbols of their favorite teams, they meet every hit of a shell on a tank with a loud roar. The name of the winning team - Navi - the stadium is chanting standing up: Kisly himself greeted the champion so loudly that he lost his voice.

In addition to international tournaments, Wargaming organizes local events - in 2015 alone, and only in Russia, the company held about 35 offline events (for example, in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Yakutsk). Players go to such events with their families: while husbands are busy with tank battles, wives in specially equipped areas can do makeup, manicure or visit a hairdresser, and children can draw or play, says Blokhina. The budget for "local" events at Wargaming is not disclosed. Blokhina says that the company’s local tournaments are helped by volunteers that Wargaming has in every city in Russia, and some of the necessary equipment (for example, computers) wanders from region to region.

One of the largest events organized by Wargaming in 2015 was the celebration of Victory Day: the company rented the Olimpiysky sports complex, inviting pilot-cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the Chizh and Co group, and MTV Russia CEO Yana Churikova as a host. “I don’t have much motor skills and reaction speed yet,” Churikova admitted at a press conference, who, while preparing for the event, tried to play “tanchiki” for the first time. Wargaming tries to choose celebrities who are already familiar with the game and are able to joke about this topic to host large events. The budget for the celebration of Victory Day amounted to $300-500 thousand.

How many Russian players Wargaming has and how much they bring in revenue to the company, Kisly does not disclose. But the company never opened a full-fledged office in Moscow. From 2013 to 2015, about 25 people worked for Wargaming in the capital, recalls one of these employees in a conversation with RBC. First of all, they were engaged in establishing relations with museums, government departments and private business. Wargaming cooperates, for example, with the Military Historical Museum of armored weapons and equipment in Kubinka, held joint events with the Ministry of Defense and Uralvagonzavod. In the modern world, everything can be done remotely, especially since Moscow is not the cheapest city, Kisly answers the question of why the company does not have an office in the capital. At the same time, Wargaming has a Lesta studio in St. Petersburg, which develops World of Warships, and full-fledged divisions of the company are open in Tokyo, Chicago, Paris and other large and not the cheapest cities in the world.

Wargaming does not disclose the total budget for promotion. Sour only specifies that this item of expenditure is one of the three largest for the company. Now the businessman is betting on the mobile version of "tanks" and is going to actively advertise it. “Wargaming’s global competitors spend several million dollars a day buying ads and are literally killing all users,” says Kisly. “So even if the game is very good, it’s not enough, you need to have comparable budgets.” In the United States, for example, for several years now, mobile game developers have been advertising during the breaks between matches of the Super Bowl American football final, that is, at the most “delicious” advertising time, and the videos they release are worthy of the Cannes Lions international festival, Kisly says enthusiastically. “We are not yet fully deployed, we are preparing,” the founder of Wargaming promises, without going into details.

Active investments by a gaming company with Belarusian roots will really be needed soon: competitors are not ready to put up with the total dominance of “tanks”.

Fight for the player

"Tanks" greatly expanded the market of gamers - those who had not sat down at the computer for this purpose before began to play, Makhtiev explains the merit of Wargaming.

Kisly's company was the first to make a popular game about tanks: even after six years, competitors do not give up hope of conquering this niche. In September 2015, the game about tanks - Armored Warfare: Project Armata - was launched by the Mail.Ru Group corporation, whose annual revenue from multiplayer games reaches almost 9 billion rubles. Mail.Ru Group made a project about modern tanks, where one of the main “heroes” was the T-14 Armata, the newest tank that first appeared in public at the Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow only in 2015. The mention of "Armata" in the name of the game, the holding had to coordinate with the Ministry of Defense and the manufacturer of the tank Uralvagonzavod.

Games about tanks Mail.Ru Group COO Vladimir Nikolsky refers to the category of slow shooters. “There are many people who want to play, but cannot quickly press buttons, as required, for example, by Counter Strike, and it was for them that World of Tanks was released, and Armored Warfare: Project Armata continued this series Nikolsky explains.

“The entertainment market is designed in such a way that every year new items appear on it, the purpose of which is to entertain and surprise users,” Nikolsky answers a question about competition in the market. In the Armata Project, tanks drive faster and more dynamically, prices for in-game purchases are about 20% lower, the Mail.Ru Group lists the advantages of the new project. Nikolsky declined to name the exact proportion of players that the company plans to pull over from the "tanks" of Wargaming. A high-quality clone of the game, which entered the market within a short period of time after the original, has a chance to drag 10% of the audience of the main project, Orlovsky believes.

More than 5 million players are registered in Armored Warfare, and building up an audience for the company is now more important than monetization, Dmitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.Ru Group, is quoted in the latest holding reports. The Russian company has already launched a massive advertising attack: in one of the issues of the Kommersant newspaper, the slogan Make Love Not WoT took up a whole page. The company translated it as "Make love, not behold". WoT is the usual abbreviated name for World of Tanks, but the Mail.Ru Group insists: we are talking about the stable expression Waste of Time (“Waste time”). A little later, Mail.Ru Group launched a promotion, according to which current World of Tanks players, when registering in Armata, receive game bonuses and have the opportunity to “fight on any Tier 6 vehicle.”

Sour perceives the bites of Mail.Ru Group without any special emotions: “When you do something right, they will definitely start copying you.” The businessman is psychologically ready for the possible loss of part of the audience and for wrong steps. In October 2015, Wargaming announced a major update (patch) "Rubicon", which planned a number of improvements - tanks had to learn how to roll over, acquire a new sound palette, etc. The company was preparing for the launch for several months, but a month later on the Wargaming website Kisly's appeal appeared, in which he apologized to the players "for unjustified expectations." The new update did not change the game in the way that users expected, so the players reacted extremely sharply, Sukhanov recalls.

But in recent years, Sour seems to have learned to turn problems to his advantage.

Fragment of the game World of Tanks

Overseas Markets

In 2013, Wargaming became a shareholder of Hellenic, a Cypriot bank, along with two other major investors. Wargaming and the American investment fund Third Point each received 30% of the shares, paying €40 million each, the Cypriot investment fund Demetra Investment received 15% for €20 million. At the end of 2014, the game developer and Third Point spent another €45 million to buy back 20% additional issue of Hellenic shares.

Circumstances forced Wargaming to become a shareholder of the bank: a financial crisis broke out in Cyprus, the bank froze the money of depositors, the gaming company was among them (it does not disclose the amount of stuck funds). Today, Sour calls the Hellenic acquisition "a good financial investment." Cyprus has shown extreme discipline in the political arena, he continues: all the requirements of the "troika" - the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund - were met, and a few months ago, representatives of these organizations left the island.

“Now we, as a country, look confidently into the future,” Kisly says enthusiastically, by “we” referring to the Cypriots.

Sour decided to bring World of Tanks outside the CIS even before the official launch of the game. In 2010, he packed a set of pamphlets about "tanks" into a suitcase and went to Shanghai. The laws in China are strict: any developer must work through a local publisher, and the game itself almost inevitably has to be modified. For example, instead of the Soviet flag, the Chinese version of World of Tanks uses a visually similar one.

To work in China, Wargaming in 2011 agreed with one of the largest Chinese developers, the publisher of computer and mobile games, KongZhong. When Sour first came to the head of KongZhong, Leilei Wang, he saw that his entire office was filled with tank models: the father of the Chinese businessman was a military man, and he himself turned out to be a great history buff. Wargaming actively promoted its game in China - the company held press conferences in tank museums, and Kisly himself sang "The Internationale" in Russian at one of the events. In 2012, the parties entered into an agreement: KongZhong received the right to be the first to release the developer's future games, and Wargaming received an option to purchase shares in a Chinese company (5 million American depositary receipts at a price of $5.94 each).

Wargaming now owns approximately 10% of KongZhong. “It is believed that we are now brothers for a century: instead of quarrels, it is more profitable to cooperate, and to settle disputes that always arise between a publisher and a developer,” he added. The Chinese market is one of the three largest for Wargaming after the CIS (now it brings about half of the revenue due to the depreciation of the ruble) and Europe, where Germans and Poles show the greatest interest in World of Tanks. Sour does not disclose more accurate data.

Over the past five years, tanks have also appeared in South Korea, the USA, Japan, Europe and Southeast Asia. Global expansion is not only built into the Wargaming development strategy from the very beginning, but also helps to stand firmly on one's feet in times of crisis, Kisly says. Wargaming's competitor, Gaijin Entertainment, the developer of the War Thunder flight simulator, had its share of revenue from Russia in dollar terms reduced in total from 30-35% in 2014 to 10-15% in 2015, Anton Yudintsev, founder of the company, told RBC. In rubles, Gaijin Entertainment's revenues in Russia continue to grow, as does revenue in general: by the end of 2015, by about 20%, he noted, without giving exact figures. Due to the crisis, the company decided to focus on promoting the game outside of Russia - Western markets bring more income, says Yudintsev. Gaijin Entertainment receives most of its revenue from the US and Europe.

The presence in different markets forces Wargaming to adapt to the tastes of local players and working with them is perhaps a key part of the company's activities, Kisly admits. “Americans like to play in a more relaxed way, rather to have fun than to strain and compete. Russian-speaking players, on the contrary, are competitive: they need to get to the tank as quickly as possible and go into battle, ”says Kisly.

When Wargaming opened an office in Tokyo in 2012, its employees got a cat and named it Hellcat - after the anti-tank self-propelled gun that is also in the game. The cat was given special clothes and created an account on social networks to “communicate” with local players. And for Chinese players who easily part with money in World of Tanks, Wargaming has developed, at the request of partners, an exclusive “golden” tank with a record price of $400. This caused indignation among Russian-speaking players, and Wargaming representatives had to explain the difference in mentalities. In Chinese games, for example, you can buy the right to kick players off a team to show off your wealth.

Unreal tanks

A little more than 40% of the tanks in World of Tanks existed in reality, Petr Bityukov, historian and developer of Wargaming, told RBC. Another 30% are prototypes, about 20% were created only on paper. About 5% of cars are completely fictional. It was originally planned that the vehicles in the game would be no older than the 50s of the XX century, but due to the lack of prototypes, the deadline was shifted to 1965. But even so, there were not enough machines to arm all the "nations".

Developers can take a real car as a basis, but modify it, Bityukov continues. This happened with a group of German self-propelled guns, only half of which existed in reality, and the other half - only on paper. One of the settings had to be invented. “This anti-tank self-propelled gun broke the balance of the game so much that it had to be redone several times, and players still remind us that we introduced a miracle Yudo into the game that no one designed,” Bityukov laments. Recently, in the German archives, Wargaming managed to find a project of installation with which it will be possible to replace the invented car, and in the near future it will appear in the game.

As the geography expanded, so did the composition of the top management. If at first there were Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians in the leadership, now only four leaders of Wargaming, including Kisly, speak Russian, among the rest are Americans, a British, a Greek Cypriot, a Frenchman, a Korean and a Finn. Sour calls this backbone "analogous to the board of directors." The businessman himself has not been engaged in operational management for several years, but not a single strategic decision is made without his participation. One of Kisly's personal initiatives is the restart of the space strategy Master of Orion, the rights to which Wargaming acquired in 2013 and is working on in conjunction with the large Argentine studio NGD Studios.

Like Apple, which has been trying to find a new revolutionary product for several years, Wargaming is also looking. The company has a "significant number of ideas" in various stages of development, says Kisly, but whether there is a major and breakthrough "secret project" among them is not recognized. This is what corporations do, although the businessman himself prefers to refer to the laws of show business - before announcing, he must make sure that the new idea will “ignite”. After all, Sour has no right to disappoint the players.