History
Nexters Studio was established in 2014 by Andrey Fadeev and Boris Gertsovskiy. Before founding Nexters, Gertsovskiy operated his own gaming studio Crazy Bit, while Fadeev led Progrestar, a social games development company renowned for its viral free-to-play game Friend Factory, which attracted over 20 million users. In 2013, Progrestar launched Throne Rush, a strategy game that became one of the top social games on Facebook and VK the following year. [3] [4]
In 2014, after knowing each other since 2010, Fadeev and Gertsovskiy decided to merge their companies. That same year, they made the decision to open a Nexters' headquarters in Cyprus. [3] This led to Nexters' first release, Island Experiment, a casual game for social networks. [3]
In 2016, Nexters released Hero Wars, a free-to-play browser and action RPG, next year a mobile version for Android and iOS was released. [1] In July 2023, Nexters underwent a rebranding, renaming the Facebook and browser version to Hero Wars: Dominion Era and the mobile version to Hero Wars: Alliance. [5] Hero Wars is a midcore game with intense gameplay in short-session cycles, available in over 100 countries. Over the past two years, monthly active users have grown 8.5-fold, reaching six million, according to Nexters. [6] In 2014, the advertising campaigns for the games Hero Wars and Island Experiment on social media attracted regulatory scrutiny in Germany. [7]
The popularity of Hero Wars significantly boosted interest in Nexters and attracted new investments. In 2018, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, the founders of Playrix, acquired the investors' shares in Nexters. According to Nexters, in 2018, the company made $48 million in sales. [6] In November 2019, Nexters entered the Top 10 largest European mobile developers. Already in 2019, almost 95% of Nexters' revenue came from mobile games in international markets, and revenue grew almost 15 times, [8] generated $318 million in bookings and $120 million in free cash flow to equity (FCFE) in 2020. As of 2020, 35% of the company’s net bookings came from the United States, 23% from Europe, and 19% from Asia. [3] [9] Its flagship product, Hero Wars RPG, was downloaded 36 million times in 2020 on iOS and Android. [10]
In February 2021, Nexters announced it would go public on Nasdaq via a SPAC deal with Kismet Acquisition One Corp. [6] [11] Kismet invested $50 million, while Nexters raised an additional $50 million from the Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Investment Company and VPE Capital in July 2021. In August, Nexters completed the merger with Kismet Acquisition One, which valued Nexters at $1.9 billion. [12] [13] [14] Shares started trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbols GDEV. [15] The deal brought Nexters approximately $150 million, which the company planned to use for expansion in the global market. [6] [12] [11]
In 2021, in addition to the released Chibi Island at the end of the year the company soft-launched the new casual game Island Questaway. Nexters plans to launch a match-3-style game, Riddle Island, [3] in 2022.
In January 2022, Nexters announced plans to acquire 100% of Cubic Games, 48.8% of MX Capital Limited (RJ Games), and 49.5% of Castcrown Limited (Royal Ark). The total value of these deals amounted to nearly $100 million. [11]
On February 28, 2022, Nasdaq halted the trading of Nexters' stock due to regulatory concerns as the stock exchange sought more information following economic sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. [16] [17] On March 16, 2023, Nasdaq resumed trading Nexters' stock. [18] [19]
In June 2022, the company launched a global relocation program, moving the vast majority of critical personnel from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to Cyprus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. [20] At the same time, its Russia-based subsidiaries were divested by transferring the gaming business in Russia to local management. [21] [22]
On June 22, 2023, Nexters Global Inc. evolved into GDEV holding company, becoming its largest subsidiary, along with Cubic Games, Game Gears and Royal Ark. More studios are expected to be added in the future. The GDEV gaming holding replaced Nexters as the publicly-traded entity on Nasdaq. [23] [24]
Overall, in 2023, GDEV’s entire portfolio generated $465 million in revenue, 550 million downloads, and over 14 million monthly active players combined. Geographically, 35% of the revenue came from the United States, 25% from Europe, and 23% from Asia. [4] [25]
In April 2024, GDEV successfully launched a mobile game title Pixel Gun 3D on the PC platform. The game quickly ranked among the Top 20 best-selling and Top 50 most-played games on Steam. On its first day, it reached a peak concurrent player count of 25,000 on Steam, and it recouped its PC platform development costs on the release day. [26] In the second quarter of 2024, GDEV recorded $108 million in bookings. This growth came from a $47 million investment in user acquisition, leading to an adjusted EBITDA of $16 million. [27]
