By John Meyer, finance and business consultant. Eurasia Business News, September 27, 2022

The Russian tech company VK announced the sale of the gaming division of My.Games for $ 642 million.

The buyer is the managing partner of LETA Capital Alexander Chachava.

As stated in the press release of VK, the transaction includes all the assets of My.Games, including the company’s studios and gaming products.

At the same time, VK will continue to develop its own gaming services under the VK Play brand (the playground was launched in April 2022, combines a catalog of games, cloud gaming, the VK Play Live streaming platform, the tournament platform and news media).

As a result of the transaction, My.Games co-founder Vladimir Nikolsky will continue to develop the project and will leave the post of vice president of the gaming direction of VK. Vasily Maguryan, CEO for MY.GAMES (Mail.ru Group’s Games Division) since 2017, became the new head of VK Play.

The fact that VK is considering the possibility of selling My.Games was reported in March by the Russian daily Kommersant, citing its own sources. Then VK denied plans to sell the gaming division.

In March, press sources reported that VK began to actively look for a buyer a week after the start of the military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, on February 24.

One of the reasons was called the fact that My.Games is the main source of foreign exchange earnings, and the sanctions imposed on VK CEO Vladimir Kiriyenko threaten the company.

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My.Games develops and publishes games for PC, consoles and mobile devices (it has more than 150 games in its portfolio), and also sells games through its app store. My.Games has 12 regional offices and representative offices in Russia, Europe, the USA and Asia.

In 2021, the VK gaming segment (it was the results of My.Games were implied) grew by 10.5% to 43.8 billion rubles, EBITDA – by 63%, to 10.4 billion rubles.

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