"Increased the active audience of Days After by 30%," Nikita Matsokin from MGVC on the results of 2024
We continue to summarize the results of 2024 with game-related teams and experts. Next up is an interview with Nikita Matsokin, Executive Director at MGVC.
How did the year 2024 turn out for the company? What achievements and successes would you highlight?
The year 2024 can be described as a year of changes and new opportunities for MY.GAMES Venture Capital. This year, we launched the MGVC Publishing division and signed four publishing deals that are already showing results.
The format of publishing partnerships is relevant in the market, allowing us to leverage the full experience of our MGVC team and MY.GAMES infrastructure, as well as providing the opportunity to collaborate with a larger number of independent studios.
For example, we are working on the Battle Prime project in partnership with Press Fire Games. The project has been in operation for over four years and has a large audience. Through our collaboration, we managed to increase the game's monthly revenue by almost four times.
Battle Prime
Additionally, in October, we launched the global release of the merge3 game Fable Town by Reef Games, which attracted an audience of over 500,000 players in its first two months and earned its first million dollars.
Fable Town
In collaboration with ReactGames on the survival game Days After, we increased its active audience by 30% and improved the project's financial results.
Days After
How has the market for gaming venture capital changed for those ready and willing to invest in the gaming business?
In 2024, the gaming venture market continues to stabilize. The results of the first three quarters of 2024 are slightly lower than the same period in 2023 in both the number of deals and their volume, according to InvestGame data, but this decline is not as significant as after the pandemic boom in 2022.
We see that many gaming VCs are shifting their focus from content (gaming studios) to technologies—services and solutions that allow developers to more effectively manage project development and operations.
Among the trends, I also note the emergence of an increasing number of direct-to-consumer (D2C) payment collection services, the relevance of the web games segment, and the active development of application infrastructure for Telegram. Of course, AI has also been developing actively!
As for game development, VCs are focusing on experienced teams developing premium projects for PC and consoles.
We also observe continued cautious attitudes of VCs towards mobile gaming studios in the context of trends that have been much discussed over the past two years—fierce competition and low success rates of new launches, challenges in UA marketing, the growing level of player quality expectations, and others.
On the other hand, such market conditions allow investors willing to take risks to invest in the most efficient teams at favorable valuations.
Has anything changed in the investment plan for studios looking to attract funding?
Game investors remained conservative in 2024. For studios, this means that it is difficult to attract investments at early stages for projects on all platforms.
Investors expect studios to confirm the market viability of their projects. For example, a quality playable version and a large number of wishlists on the Steam page, if we're talking about PC, or the presence of a soft-launch version with high initial retention and monetization metrics, if we are talking about mobile.
In this context, seeking funding to achieve initial results is one of the most challenging tasks. Here, angel investments can primarily be helpful. The founders' network plays a decisive role in tackling this task.
Moreover, speaking of mobile, funding development is only the beginning—high budgets for project promotion are required. Considering the market conditions, scaling the project is a significant challenge for studios. In this context, a publishing partnership may become the best solution since the publisher uses its funds to scale the game and is also ready to bring its marketing expertise.
What investment trends do you expect to strengthen or emerge in 2025?
We anticipate the continuation of 2024 investment trends:
- gaming technologies;
- AI services for development and operations;
- premium games for PC;
- web games and their infrastructure.
In 2025, we expect increased investments in D2C (webshop services) and intense competition among D2C startups for revenue from mobile gaming studios. Perhaps, D2C startups with large funding rounds from investors will offer advances to game studios for webshop integration? We'll see!
What plans does the fund itself have for the coming year?
We plan to continue the development of MGVC Publishing and support our partner studios, with which we have previously joined as a strategic investor.
We aim to develop the current four publishing projects we are already working with. Each project is a strong player in its genre. We will continue to apply our publishing solutions and infrastructure to increase their growth.
We are open to new publishing partnerships—both for games at the soft launch stage, ready for monetization tests, and for released projects where effective ROI marketing and our set of publishing solutions will lead to new levels of success.
