"Key Franchise" Warface Boosted Mail.ru's MMO Gaming Financials For 2019

Russia's Mail.ru published its most recent financial report yesterday, detailing both quarterly figures for the last three months of 2019 and its results throughout the whole year. Of particular interest to us is the performance of the company's MMO gaming segment, headed by My.Games, which operates Armored Warfare, Conqueror's Blade, Skyforge, Lost Ark, and, apparently most importantly, Warface.

It's the last game that gets the most praise in the report, as it "continues to perform well, being our top-3 revenue-generating game." It was called out as a top F2P game on consoles in the U.S., rated by number of downloads, and will continue to be "our key franchise."

MMO growth for the company in the quarter was up 9.5% as compared to Q4 2018, while also being up 20.1% for the year as compared to 2018 as a whole. The total revenue for the year was 27,987 million rubles, or about $424 million.

It's not all rosy for the gaming business, though. Under "Impairment," Skyforge tacked on 630 million rubles (about $9.5 million) in Q2 2019, which was a fraction of Armored Warfare's 1,698 million rubles (about $25.7 million) in Q2 2018. According to Wikipedia, impairment is "the diminishing in quality, strength amount, or value of an asset." In other words, it's not good.

Still, the company is looking forward to 2020, with "a full pipeline of releases" planned for the My.Games launcher. It's currently a top-50 game company in the world, with an eye toward cracking the top 25 "in the medium term under the MY.GAMES brand, in which we will be investing."

You can read the complete financial results on the Mail.Ru site.