By
Temitope Olatunji
March 28th, 2024
Playrix has a distributed team of over 2000 specialists from around the world, whereby in the past two years the firm has bought a lot of developers to steer forward its winning games.
One of the leading mobile game developers in the world Playrix is posing direct competition to Tencent Holdings Ltd (HKG: 0700) according to a report by App Annie, the industry’s most trusted mobile data and analytics platform.
Playrix has managed to develop hit after hit gaming apps that have listed among the top 50 Grossing Apps for iOS and Google Play since their release. Some of its popular apps include Wildscapes, Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Township, and Fishdom.
Playrix Success and Its Readiness to Be a Competitor to Tencent
The company was founded nearly two decades ago by two brothers, 38-year-old Igor and 35-year-old Dmitry Bukhman.
Their combined fortunes have more than doubled during the pandemic as more people engaged with their apps during the stay at home period. Notably, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire index, the two brothers have a combined fortune of more than $7 billion.
In a strategic reorganization, as the pandemic was at its peak, the two brothers who solely controls the company drastically reduced advertising fees to attract customers globally.
Hereby making Playrix a one stop place for both gaming enthusiasts and also advertisers. Monthly users surged 50% to 180 million at the peak of the outbreak, and sales jumped about 60% to $1.75 billion in the first eight months of the year. As a result, the number of active gamers have stabilized at around 150 million.
“Successful games have become long-term services similar to Netflix, which manages to retain users by constantly adding new content,” Igor said in a Skype interview from London, where the brothers live. “We are constantly adding new stories, different game mechanics and levels to our games, and people are playing them for years.”
Playrix has a distributed team of over 2000 from around the world, whereby in the past two years the firm has bought a dozen developers to steer forward its winning games.
Tencent Games
On the other hand, Tencent Games has four internal game development studios: TiMi Studio, Lightspeed & Quantum Studio Group, Aurora Studio Group, and Morefun Studio Group.
The studios mostly produce browser games and mobile games generally exclusive to the Chinese marketplace.
In 2015, Tencent released its multiplayer online battle arena game Honor of Kings that is exclusively for the Chinese market. Notably, by 2017 it was the world’s most popular and highest-grossing game of all time as well as the most downloaded app globally.
In 2016, Tencent games developed a video gaming console dubbed TGP (Tencent Gaming Platform) Box. A year later, the company unveiled its own flagship gaming platform WeGam. The platform is used to host games, content, and services from all over the world.
Tencent shares were up 36.18% year to date through Wednesday.
