Russian top game developer Playrix buys Ukrainian tech firm

Russian tech behemoth Playrix has acquired Ukrainian game company Boolat Games and rebranded it under the new name Boolat Play, Playrix announced on March 22.

Now the team of 30 Ukrainians based in Kyiv and Poltava, a city 340 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, will develop mobile games for one of the largest game companies in the world.

Valued at $7 billion, Playrix boasts a portfolio of popular mobile games like Manor Matters, Wildscapes, Homescapes and Fishdom. On average, 40 million people play Playrix’s games every day.

Playrix hasn’t disclosed how much it paid for the Ukrainian tech firm, but local investors told the Kyiv Post that the purchase of such a small Ukraine-based company probably didn’t cost much for the Russian tech giant.

Run by its founders Russian billionaires Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, Playrix employs nearly 3,000 people and has offices in Russia, Ireland, Belarus, Serbia and Ukraine. The company employs 800 tech specialists in Ukraine alone.

Ukrainian Boolat Games, founded in 2001, has already worked with Playrix and it “brought the company some profit,” according to its chief executive Alexander Chigorin.

Boolat Games has published nearly 2o video games, including  Lagsters, Topatoi, Harvest Land and Decurse. Chigorin said that he plans to develop further and hire more staff. Dmitry Bukhman said that Playrix will help the Ukrainian firm because the company has money and expertise.

The acquisition is part of Playrix’s plan to become the world’s largest game company, the title that today belongs to Chinese company Tencent. To achieve that, Playrix acquires small game developers across Eastern Europe, including Armenian Plexonic, Serbian Eipix Entertainment and Croatian Cateia Games.

In 2019, Playrix acquired another Ukrainian game developer — Zagrava Games. It cost Russian company nearly $1 million, Ukrainian media Ain.ua estimates.

Both Zagrava Games and Boolat Games are small outsourcing companies that sell their services to big game developers like Playrix. This approach is partly the reason why Ukraine doesn’t have a developed video game industry like Russia, Belarus or Poland, according to Yevgen Sysoyev, managing partner at investment fund AVentures Capital.

Sysoyev said that Ukraine has hundreds of tech companies that work in the game industry and local investors are ready to support them, but there are no large gaming companies in Ukraine yet.

For global game developers, including Belarusian Wargaming, Israelian Playtika and French Ubisoft, Ukraine is only interesting as a place to set up research and development centers and employ cheap labor, according to Sysoyev.