Summerize this News Article GamesBeat Next unites gaming industry leaders for exceptional content, networking, and deal-making opportunities. Join us on Oct 23-24 in San Francisco. Register Now Elena Grigorian recently took over as CEO of My.Games, the former Russian game company that moved to Amsterdam after a buyout in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Grigorian, previously chief strategy officer, took over from Vladimir Nikolsky, has stepped down from his CEO role at My.Games in September. The company has been through a lot of change. Before the war in Ukraine started, My.Games had a lot of people working for it in Russia. In September 2022, Leta Capital managing director Alex Chachava acquired My.Games from VK for $642 million and proceeded to move it out of Russia. The remaining part of the company that stayed in Russia, including the Warface property, became a separate company dubbed Astrum Entertainment. The new My.Games has most of the core of the old company, with more than 1,500 employees. Nikolsky credited Grigorian with having exceptional management skills, deep experience in international business, strong strategic vision, creativity, and inspirational leadership. Event GamesBeat Next 2023 Join the GamesBeat community in San Francisco this October 23-24. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry on latest developments and their take on the future of gaming. Learn More Grigorian was part of My.Games since its exception, serving first as chief mraketing officer. She has over two decades of experience in gaming, including eight years in a top games position at Disney. She was part of the team that launched 70 games and saw a 14-fold increase in effective marketing investments and four-fold growth in overall business. The company has opened new offices in UAE, Serbia, Georgia and Armenia, and it unveiled titles like War Robots: Frontiers, Little Big Robots, and Hawked. Key existing games include Rush Royale, War Robots, Hustle Castle, Left to Survive, and Grand Hotel Mania. Rush Royale achieved over 63 million installs and generated $230 million in revenue, while War Robots boasts a remarkable milestone of over 250 million registered players and lifetime grossrevenue exceeding $750 million since its launch. I spoke with Grigorian about her plans. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Elena Grigorian is the new CEO of My.Games. [GamesBeat: How is it going?] Elena Grigorian: For the moment my schedule is pretty hectic. I believe that in two or three months it will be a little easier for me. But right now I need to talk with everybody, all the key members of my new team, to align our strategies together and so on. GamesBeat: How many years have you been at the company now? Grigorian: It’s about nine years, very close to that. GamesBeat: How do you see this opportunity as far as what My.Games can do more of? Grigorian: Before My.Games, I was part of the Disney Interactive family. When I had the opportunity to become the CMO of My.Games, I was very surprised at that moment. Marketing wasn’t my key competence at the time, my key expertise. For all these years, though, I haven’t felt one moment of regret about the decision that I made nine years ago. I think about the main reasons why. Nine years ago I believed in My.Games and decided to change my path. It’s a very professional team. I wanted to be a part of it. It was a huge challenge for me, because this wasn’t my key competence, but at the same time, for game companies marketing is a crucial condition for the significant growth of the game business itself. I think you’ve heard the statement that game operations are a direct derivative from productive marketing costs. The role of marketing in the growth of a game company is incredibly high. That’s why I took the role. It wasn’t just a digital marketing role. It was a strategic role to grow our business. That’s why, nine years ago, I believed in My.Games, and that’s my belief still today. Our team has done an excellent job for all these years. We’ve succeeded in growing our business about 10 times within the last six or seven years, from 2015 to 2022. It’s not only a marketing achievement, of course. It’s a combination of our product lineup, our development of a successful team, and the marketing itself. We’ve been able to grow our business internationally, entering different regions and territories. That’s why I think we did an excellent job for all these years. Nine years ago I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I would be successful in this role, but I believed in the company and believed in my efforts. Some of My.Games’ titles. GamesBeat: It feels like marketing has changed a lot, especially in mobile games over time. It’s gotten to be much more scientific, much more technological. It’s more elevated in importance for game companies now. It’s a key differentiator if you do it right. Grigorian: You’re absolutely right. That’s why that CMO role was so important for the company. It was essentially a new position for the company at the time. We had only a small team for marketing with a centralized structure, centralized expertise. The company decided to involve me and new professionals in this area to help My.Games to grow that structure and the total business of the company. GamesBeat: How did you adapt to the difficult transition involved in pulling the company out of Russia? Leaving so much behind. People who couldn’t move, things like that. Grigorian: During this year, and through all the restructuring in 2022, My.Games has ceased all operations in Russia. The company now has no legal entity or any ties with Russia. But it’s not been a key challenge for us. We were already starting to think about the “work from anywhere” setup some years before that, since 2020 and the pandemic time. At the moment more than 90% of our company’s employees have been working outside of the office in countries around the world. We’re investing in a lot of efforts to help our teams work together, preparing working spaces in the teams’ key regions. 2022 and 2023 saw a lot of work for us in that direction. We opened a lot of hubs all around the world to help our people meet each other and work together in one building. We have offices in Amsterdam, in Kyiv, in Cyprus. This year we opened additional hubs in Abu Dhabi, in Serbia, Georgia, and other countries. It’s been a tough task for us, but it’s important for us to provide our employees with high-quality support and high-quality working spaces in the territories where they live. We believe we’ve succeeded. GamesBeat: I talked to Victor Kislyi at Wargaming about doing the same thing. I think he noted that they left about a third of their revenues and a third of their employees behind in their transition. Grigorian: At the moment, our investment in Russia wasn’t so high. We’re at a different stage as a company. For us it was a much smaller presence, and so it wasn’t so significant when it came to our financial matters. Getting by a trap in Hawked. GamesBeat: How many people are at the company now? Grigorian: We have about 1,500 people full time. GamesBeat: Speaking of marketing changes, how do you view mobile marketing after Apple’s big change, focusing on privacy over targeted ads? Grigorian: It’s a very challenging situation for the industry. We’re facing increasing competition for users’ time spent from other entertainment products. The growth rate of time spent in games is lower than the growth rate of time spent in other entertainment products like video and music. But at the same time, game companies need to rebuild our marketing and production strategy due to issues around privacy. It’s time for all of us in the game industry to learn how to work with a mass, non-targeted audience. We need to think about how to reach this audience, how to build our products and how to monetize them. We need to think about how to mix our gaming experience with other forms of entertainment products. My.Games has some important marketing conditions in this case. We have more than 20 products in our portfolio at the moment. It’s a huge portfolio. We have more than 10 games in development at different stages. Also, we have our own…
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