Skolkovo is ready to invest 5 million rubles in gaming middleware

The Skolkovo Foundation told App2Top.ru , which will give a grant of 5 million rubles to the winner in the nomination “Technologies and tools for creating games” within the framework of the upcoming investment competition/forum Web&Tech Ready 2015.

In addition to money, the fund will also provide mentoring support and will allow the winning company to receive tax relief.

In connection with the announcement of the grant, we talked with Grigory Leshchenko, Senior Project Manager of the Skolkovo Foundation about the grant and the reasons for the foundation’s attention to the gaming industry.

Why did you decide to pay attention to the gaming segment of the market?

Grigory Leshchenko
The main task of the Skolkovo Foundation is to develop new technologies and promote the commercialization of research.

The gaming market is an environment where many interesting technologies are born and applied – from graphical visualization and highly loaded server solutions to virtual reality and an interface based on voice, vision and gestures.

Why only development tools, and not the product itself?

In the gaming segment, we focused on tools, since they are the embodiment of technology, and games are content. Tools are a kind of “shovels” that are used by “prospectors for gold mining”. The support of tools and technologies allows us to cover a wider segment of the market and reduce investment risks.

Will 5 million be distributed among all the prize places or awarded to the main winner?

To search for new technologies, Skolkovo holds a competition in the Web&Tech Ready framework. In the nomination “Technologies and tools for creating games” there will be one winner who will receive a grant from the Skolkovo Foundation

Who will choose the winner?

The organizers of the competition are recruiting an independent expert council, which includes 40-50 people and will carry out the first stage of project selection. In the final, the winner will be chosen by a jury consisting of 18 people. The task of the expert council is to select semi-finalists from the whole set of applications received. Then the semi-finalists participate in an educational program where members of the expert council can act as mentors, the purpose of the program is to prepare projects for performance on stage during the finals. At the very final on October 20, an exhibition of semi-finalists will be held in the Skolkovo Hypercube in the morning, which the jury members bypass and evaluate the projects after personal communication, then the jury confers and determines the finalists to perform on stage with presentations.

Thanks for the interview!