Content |
History
2022: Liquidation of the subdivision
On June 8, 2022, Sber announced the closure of the gaming direction "due to external restrictions for Russian developers in the world market." The SberGames division will be liquidated.
 | SberGames stops hiring new employees and launching new projects. It is planned that some of the SberGames employees will go to work in other divisions of the bank and the ecosystem company, - TASS quotes a statement from the press service of Sberbank. |  |
According to Kommersant, citing its source, many of SberGames' 200 employees will be cut. Other interlocutors added that the company planned to develop mobile games, and the number of employees grew very quickly - for the transition from other companies they were offered double salaries.
A Kommersant source in one of the major game studios believes that specialists involved directly in the development of games (designers, programmers, artists, etc.) will quickly find work.
| | There is always a demand for them. Perhaps this is a good moment for some company to quickly assemble a development team and receive state funding for a patriotic project, the newspaper's interlocutor believes. | |
According to him, the demand for top managers capable of launching game projects "by June 2022 in the market is almost zero."
A RBC source associated with the company previously reported that rumors about the closure of SberGames were related to the departure of Alice Chumachenko from the post of project manager in March 2022. Nevertheless, SberGames, according to the interlocutor of the publication, plans to develop further and is considering partnership options with third-party, including foreign studios.
SberGames had problems after the start of the Russian military special operation in Ukraine and the tough sanctions that followed: the company lost the ability to sell games through mobile app stores.[1]
2021
Sberbank bought a domain games.ru
In mid-October 2021, it became known about the sale to Sberbank of the games.ru domain, on which the portal with free online games previously worked. There was also a gaming forum and industry news was posted, now the domain address does not work.
Kommersant found information in the SPARK-Interfax system that Sberbank had registered a domain games.ru. According to the publication, we can talk about a deal of about $1 million. Sber declined to comment at the request of the newspaper.
According to the source of the newspaper in the market, the games.ru domain acts as "a kind of mascot of the gaming industry," which everyone knows. Everyone was appreciated by him, but no one ever bought, the source said. He believes that Sber, having bought the domain, "in a sense closed the gestalt to the entire industry."
| | It is not surprising that it was Sberbank that made this step. The decision is followed by the current logic of ecosystem development. In an ideal universe, the company will be able to make a marketplace and start catching up with Yandex, for which games are a non-core business, and Mail.ru, "the source said. | |
It is assumed that Sber will use the domain to create its own gaming marketplace. The gaming direction can help Sberbank attract a new audience and partners, since gaming content has huge export potential and high attractiveness for investors.
Buying games.ru is one of the largest transactions for the sale of domain in the.ru zone in recent years, says domain investor Pavel Gross-Dneprov.
| | The domain is really top-end - in addition to being one-word, it is also the name of an entire industry that is actively developing. To get such a domain means to claim leadership positions in the game market, just so domains of this level are not bought, - he believes.[2] | |
Buying a stake in voice assistant developer for gamers GOSU Data Lab
In early August 2021, it became known about the transfer of GOSU Data Lab under the control of Sberbank. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Sberbank, a member of the state bank, received 75.6% of the startup, and SberGames CEO Alisa Chumachenko retained 14.6%. Another 9.7% of the shares remained with the co-founder and operating director of GOSU Data Lab Alexander Mikheev. Read more here.
"Sber" entered the market of computer games
On April 28, 2021, it became known that Sberbank was entering the computer games market. The corresponding direction - "Sberbank of the Game" - will be developed by the company "Sberbank."
According to Vedomosti, citing a representative of Sber, during 2021 Sber Games will begin to create a team, a production center, a publishing house, an internal development studio, as well as various near-game services.
Sberbank intends not only to develop games, but also to buy existing developers. The first asset could be Gosu Data Lab., which develops the Gosu Voice Assistant for gamers and the Gosu Data Platform. Sberbank and Gosu Data Lab have entered into a non-binding agreement and are negotiating to acquire the company, the bank told the publication. The further development of Gosu Voice Assistant, according to a representative of Sberbank, will continue in the infrastructure of the credit institution, the voice assistant will also complement the games published by the publishing house.
Founder of Gosu Data Lab. Alisa Chumachenko is expected to lead the Sberbank direction. Previously, Chumachenko was vice president of marketing for Astrum Online Entertainment, she is also the founder of Game Insight, one of the leading mobile game development companies in Europe, according to the Vedomosti publication.
| | Working within the framework of the Sberbank ecosystem will quickly gain an audience and bring new opportunities for game developers on the Russian market, "said Tatyana Dobrokhvalova, vice president of Sberbank, general director of Sberbank. | |
Earlier, Sber announced the launch of a cloud gaming service that SberPlay will allow "running popular PC games on TV without the need to buy an expensive game console or a powerful PC."[3]
Notes
| The site content is translated by machine translation software powered by PROMT. The machine-translated articles are not always perfect and may contain errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. Read original article If you find inaccuracies or errors in the results of machine translation, please write to editor@tadviser.ru. We will make every effort to correct them as soon as possible. |