International game marketplaces PlayStation Store and Nintendo are rejecting user attempts to pay for purchases with Russian bank cards. Earlier, the Ukrainian authorities asked these platforms to leave Russia. Now MY.GAMES (owned by VK) has a game store in Russia, there are about 20 times fewer games than on Steam. But experts see no other alternative if foreign stores are blocked.
The digital distribution store for video games Steam (owned by the American Valve) began to reject requests for the purchase of games from users from Russia. Problems arise when paying with Russian bank cards, including those of Sberbank, Tinkoff Bank and others. Similar difficulties are experienced by users of the PlayStation Store (owned by the Japanese Sony, the global number of active users is 111 million people). When you try to buy a game, the message “The company that issued your bank card rejected the request” appears. The Kommersant correspondent tried to pay for the purchase on the PlayStation Store and Steam with a Tinkoff-Bank card, but failed to do so.
Russian users of Nintendo eShop are also experiencing problems, the company itself admitted on March 1. She recommended making purchases through payment cards on the Qiwi website and activating download codes. Xbox users (owned by the American Microsoft, the global audience of the service exceeds 100 million people, according to unofficial estimates, the Russian audience is about 500 thousand people) have not yet reported problems. But on March 2, the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, via Twitter turned to international video game distribution platforms with a request to leave the Russian market. Kommersant did not respond to the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation.
Now in Russia there is no game marketplace that can compete with foreign distribution platforms in terms of the number of games.
For example, the MY.GAMES Store (owned by VK) hosts 2.47 thousand free and 510 paid games. At the same time, there are practically no high-budget projects designed for a mass audience (AAA projects). A representative of MY.GAMES told Kommersant that the monthly number of active users of the service is 13 million people. According to PCGames, over 50,000 games were hosted on Steam at the beginning of 2021, and this figure has grown year by year, with an average daily active user count of 25 million people.
In the spring of 2021, Sberentertainment, controlled by Sberbank, announced the launch of Sber Games, which will develop a publishing house, an internal development studio, a game store, and related services. In the fall, the company bought the games.ru domain, which could cost $1 million, but it has not yet been launched.
According to a preliminary report by MY.GAMES for 2021, 47.2% of Russian gamers prefer PC games, 44.6% prefer mobile games, and 8.2% prefer console games. At the same time, the interest of gamers shifts to the segment of mobile games from year to year, for example, compared to 2020, their audience in Russia has grown by 3.5%.
For international game developers, revenue from Russia rarely exceeded 10% of global revenue. For Steam itself, Russia is far from a priority market, although not the smallest one, says a Kommersant source in the industry: “The popularity of the MY.GAMES Store platform is growing, it has every chance of taking a dominant position in the Russian market in the event of Steam leaving or blocking” .
The maximum losses of foreign sites are unlikely to exceed the share that Russia occupies in the overall video game market – 1.5–2%, that is, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the founder of the rawg.io project Gadzhi Makhtiev believes: “Key market losses RF first of all is that we will be squeezed out of a single ecosystem of developers and gamers. You have never been punished equally as a person who makes games and as a person who plays them (earlier on March 2, it became known that foreign game developers began to refuse cooperation with Russian partners.— “b”)».