Kanobu Founder becomes Majority Owner of Igromania
One of the most famous Russian gaming publications is changing its owner. The asset passes into the hands of Haji Mahtiyev, who previously launched the Kanobu website and the RAWG service.
The fact that the founders of “Igromania” — Evgeny Isupov and Alexander Parchuk — are selling a gaming publication, currently presented exclusively by the website (the last issue of the magazine was published in November last year), became known in February. Then the faces were not yet named. Gadzhi himself, who by that time held the post of operational manager of Igromania, called the future owners “not indifferent people.”
Today, on March 13, Gadzhi noted on his Facebook page that he bought the publication together with a partner. However, who exactly became the financial partner who will buy out part of TM-media LLC, which owns Igromania, is not reported.
According to the telegram channel The Edinorog, the new owner of the organization in March was Vladimir Adashchik, who previously worked at Nival and in recent months has opened two legal entities — “Games United” and “Work Today”. The address of the latter, according to the channel’s journalists, will coincide with the address of Hobby World.
Recall that Hobby World in November last year was the buyer of another asset of TM-media — the magazine and website “World of Fiction”. Hobby World is also directly related to Mail.Ru Games and Mail.Ru Games Ventures. The top manager of the latter, Ilya Karpinsky, is one of the founders of this network of board game stores.
As for the future of “Gambling”, Gadzhi is going to merge Kanobu and “Gambling” under one legal entity within the next two months (is it not as “Games United”?). The managing director of the new company will be Anton Suchkov, who until January this year served as Director of Digital Strategy and Communications at Rambler Group.
In an interview with Kommersant, Gadzhi noted that he does not rule out the possibility of returning the printed version of the magazine. However, at the moment this is not a priority for the publication. The new management wants to focus primarily on the development of the site and its presence in social networks.
The amount of the transaction is not reported. But in a comment for Kommersant, the publisher of N + 1, Andrey Konyaev, estimated the purchase at up to 30 million rubles.
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