Playrix
Playrix Holding Ltd., also known as Playrix Entertainment and Playrix Games, is a Russian-Irish developer of free-to-play mobile games behind titles such as "Township", "Fishdom", and "Gardenscapes". The company was founded by Dmitry Bukhman and Igor Bukhman in 2004 in Vologda, Russia. Playrix has been headquartered in Dublin since 2013. As of 2020, more than 2,500 people were employed by Playrix in 25 offices around the world. It is ranked the third-largest mobile game developer in the world in terms of revenue. According to Bloomberg, Playrix was worth approximately $7.8 billion in 2020. History . Igor and Dmitry Bukhman started working on their first game in 2001 on a computer with a Pentium 100 processor. They released "Discovera" later that year, which was similar to the game "Xonix". The brothers sеt its price at $15 and uploaded it to two hundred app catalogs. The game brought in $60 in its first month. Six months later, the Bukhman brothers released their second game, which brought their monthly revenue up to $200 and allowed them to buy a second computer. They released another game six months after that and started selling screensavers that they  bought from programmers. By 2004, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman had released three games and 30 screensavers, bringing their earnings to $10,000 a month. They founded Playrix, rented an office in Vologda, and hired ten employees. By the end of 2007, the company had released around 15 casual games and its first PC game, reaching a monthly revenue of $300,000. In 2009, Playrix became interested in developing free-to-play games for mobile phones while continuing to create PC games. In 2012, the company launched its first game on Facebook — "Township". In 2013, "Township" became the company’s first -ever game to be released on iOS and later on Android. Over the next seven years, the game would be downloaded about 250 million times. The mobile games developer, Perfect Play Studio, with studios in Moscow mainly and Bryansk, was founded in 2009 as WebGames, then changed its name to Perfect Play in 2020. It is a part of Playrix. They first entered the market in 2010, with the name Webgames. In April 2013, Playrix moved its headquarters to Dublin. The company started working remotely in 2015, and by 2016 it had more employees working remotely than at its central  office. At the end of April 2015, the company announced the release of its second free-to-play mobile game — "Fishdom: Deep Dive". Playrix then released "Gardenscapes" (2016) and "Homescapes" (2017). The former brought the company $1.5 billion in revenue by the end of 2019. The company later released two more games — "Wildscapes" (2019) and "Manor Matters" (2020). According to App Annie, in September 2016, the company became the highest-grossing mobile game developer in the CIS and Baltic states region, the second in Europe in terms of revenue, and ranked in the Top 20 biggest mobile game developers  in the world. In August 2017, the company became the leading mobile game publisher in Europe based on revenue from Google Play and the App Store. At the beginning of 2018, the Bukhman brothers considered selling the company but decided to invest in other video game companies instead. In the summer of 2018, Playrix invested in one of the largest European developers, Nexters. In 2018 Playrix became the 9th highest-grossing game publisher globally on iOS and Android. In 2019, Playrix made approximately $1.7 billion. About $100 million was spent buying shares in European game studios. In August  2019, Playrix invested in the Belarusian company Vizor Games. In October of the same year, Playrix bought the Ukrainian company Zagrava Games and integrated the Russian game developer Alawar Games into the company as well. That December, they acquired the Serbian company Eipix Entertainment. In May 2020, Playrix acquired the Armenian studio Plexonic and the Croatian studio Cateia Games that June. As a result of this focus on acquisitions, the company grew at a rapid pace. As of 2020, more than 2,500 people were employed by Playrix in 25 offices around the world. In September 2020, Bloomberg, citing an analysis  conducted by App Annie, reported that Playrix had become the second highest-grossing mobile game developer after Tencent. In February of 2021, App Annie ranked Playrix as the third-largest mobile game developer in terms of annual revenue, right behind Tencent and NetEase. According to the ratings, Playrix rose from seventh to third place, surpassing the American company Activision Blizzard — the developer behind the first-person shooter series Call of Duty. In March of 2021, the company bought the Ukrainian studio Boolat Games. Finances. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Playrix reported an increase in downloads and profits. In response  to the pandemic, in April 2020, Playrix paid each of their 2,100 employees an additional one-off payment of $650 to aid in financial support. In 2020, according to App Annie, "Gardenscapes" and "Fishdom" were downloaded 190 million and 120 million times respectively. As a result, Playrix’s earnings from downloads and in-game purchases increased to $1.75 billion in just eight months. Profits from ads accounted for only 3% of the company’s total earnings. The number of monthly active players also increased to 180 million. In April 2019, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman first appeared in the  Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their net worth was $1.4 billion each. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of September 2020, each brother’s share was worth $3.9 billion. Criticism. Playrix has been criticised for its use of deceptive or false advertisements on mobile advertisement platforms such as AdMob. Advertisements for many of their games like "Fishdom", "Gardenscapes", and "Homescapes" display gameplay that does not represent the actual gameplay of the product in question. For example, "Homescapes" advertisements represent the gameplay as repairing a home by selecting the correct tool, while in reality, it is a match-3 game. In  September 2020, the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that two advertisements for "Homescapes" and "Gardenscapes" were misleading and "must not appear again in the form complained of".