Playrix Holding Ltd., also known as Playrix Entertainment, is an international developer of free-to-playmobile games from Russia headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company has 18 offices around Russia, Ireland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Serbia. Since 2018, Playrix has over 2,000 employees working from its offices or remotely.
History
The company was founded by Dmitry and Igor Bukhman in 2004 in Vologda, Russia. Playrix originally specialized in developing casual computer games. Since 2011, the company has been developing free-to-play games for smartphones and tablets. In 2013 Playrix launched Township, its first free-to-play mobile game in the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It later became available on Google Play, the Amazon Appstore, the Mac App Store, and the Windows Phone Store. The game is a combination of city-building and farming. In April 2015, the company announced the launch of its second free-to-play mobile project. Fishdom: Deep Dive, a match-3 puzzle game, was released worldwide in the App Store in August 2015. In August 2016, Playrix released another match-3 game — Gardenscapes. In September 2016, the company became the highest grossing mobile game developer in the CIS and Baltic states region according to App Annie. In the second quarter, Playrix ranked in the Top 20 biggest mobile game developers in the world. In the summer of 2017, the company launched Homescapes — a Gardenscapes spin-off that is also a match-3 game. In August 2017, the company became the leading mobile game publisher in Europe based on revenue from Google Play and the App Store. In 2018 Playrix became the 9th highest grossing game publisher globally on iOS and Android. In April 2019, Igor and Dmitry Bukhman made it onto the Bloomberg billionaire index. Their net worth is $1.4 billion each. In the fall of 2019, Playrix launched a free-to-play game called Wildscapes, a match-3 game similar to their previous titles Homescapes and Gardenscapes. Playrix acquired Armenian mobile game developer Plexonic for an unknown sum in March of 2020, and later purchased Croatia-based publisher and developer Cateia Games, choosing to rebrand the studio as Playrix Croatia and retaining its 40 staff members. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Playrix reported an increase in downloads and profits. According to co-founder Igor Bukhman, from mid-March through mid-May, 165 million new players were recorded downloading Playrix games, double the amount of downloads just two months prior to the pandemic. Additionally, the company claimed a record high revenue from April to June of 2020, seeing a 40% increase in profits, and holding at nearly $1 billion through the first half of 2020. In response to the pandemic, in April 2020, Playrix paid each of their 2,100 employees an additional one-off payment of $650 to aid in financial support.
By the end of 2016, Fishdom was on the Top Trending list according to Google Play.
In 2016, Gardenscapes was listed as one of the best apps in the Best Games category on iPad Russia in the App Store and in the Most Irresistible category on Google Play.
In 2018, Gardenscapes won in the Best Game Management & Live Ops category at the Mobile Games Awards.
Criticism
Playrix has been criticised for its use of deceptive or false advertisements on mobile advertisement platforms such as AdMob. Advertisements for many of their games like Fishdom, Gardenscapes, and Homescapes display gameplay that does not represent the actual gameplay of the product in question. For example, Homescapes advertisements represent the gameplay as repairing a home by selecting the correct tool, while in reality, it is a match-3 game.
