MY.GAMES is a company we’ve spoken about a number of times in the past. The developer and publisher, formerly known as Mail.Ru, is pushing across several fronts. From driving forward in ‘AAA’ games to expanding the reach of their popular mobile and console titles, the company is always looking to expand into Europe and America. Recently, the company has announced a partnership, Game Drive, with Google to help certain promising mobile game studios and projects.
This partnership and the resulting accelerator programme, Game Drive, will allow developers to submit a project up until the cut-off date of January 8th. A panel will select the most promising projects from both MY.GAMES and Google and will be invited to a demo day on the 28th of January, leading to further support that includes but isn’t limited to:
- Expert assessment of a project and analysis of its business potential.
- Consulting and recommendations for product improvement.
- Networking and access to the MY.GAMES ecosystem and the company’s internal training projects.
- Google experts’ evaluation of the project, focused on launching in international markets.
- Opportunity to be considered for investments by MY.GAMES.
Specifically, the evaluation from each side includes:
MGVC:
Comprehensive project evaluation covers all aspects of game development, including product analysis (audience and business metrics), game design, monetization, interface design, launch and promotion strategy. Experts will tell you what elements developers should pay attention to. Also, during the evaluation process, the MGVC team will analyze the most important product and marketing indicators of products (Retention Rate, % PU, ARPPU, LTV, CPI) and share market benchmarks that will allow you to objectively assess the current state of the project.
Google:
Top selected gaming titles (“soft launch” stage passed) and their studios will be eligible to receive one of a kind, tailored 360 degree title review conducted by Google experts. This includes evaluation of game content and mechanics, business metrics as well as users’ audience and developer team capabilities in order to enable global launch success. The program does not cover any type of commercial promotion or preferential ranking on Google platforms
As a partnership between MY.GAMES and Google, the support from each side will no doubt be valuable to any prospective applicants. Google, of course, is acutely aware of the date behind games, the things that make games successful. MY.GAMES, on the other hand, have published many successful mobile titles, such as War Robots, Hustle Castle and Left to Survive. Ilya Karpinsky, the Managing Director of the My.Games Venture Capital side of the company had this to say:
Mobile game development is an extremely competitive market and an idea alone is often not enough to acquire users. By launching this accelerator and building a partnership with Google, we hope to provide an unprecedented programme for mobile game developers across Europe by providing support and expertise from two of the largest players in the market. This is the first stage of our partnership and we hope to announce more initiatives in the future.
This programme is available to entrants from Western Europe, the CIS region, Russia, Turkey and the Middle East. As 2021 progresses, both MY.GAMES and Google are aiming to expand the scope of this programme internationally. Those wanting to read the terms and conditions, and those interested in submitting a title, everything can be found on this site.