MY.GAMES invests in Espresso Publishing to boost its hypercasual division

2021.03.16.

International video games brand MY.GAMES is strengthening its hyper-casual business unit by investing in Espresso Publishing, a hyper-casual mobile games publisher. As a result of the deal, the company acquired a minority stake in the publisher with an option for control. Thanks to the new investment, MY.GAMES will continue to expand the format of working with the hypercasual segment. Espresso Publishing will base its offer on the current MY.GAMES program with a 60/40 revenue split in favor of developers, expanding it with new technological solutions and allocating a team of specialists for hyper-casual projects. The new publisher will rely on responsiveness, favorable terms of cooperation, an individual approach to solving problems, and will also be open to accepting applications from all hypercasual games developers interested in cooperation.

Espresso Publishing’s mission is to find great ideas for games and offer flexible cooperation options to studios. It has been working with the hypercasual genre for more than three years and offers full-cycle project support to developers including production and marketing expertise, analytics, ASO, localization, financing for marketing, creating assets, and verifying hypotheses.  

Espresso Publishing’s Partner developers can be entitled to up to 60% of profits when jointly launching a first project under a licensing agreement.  The company is also open to providing advance payments to studios for prototyping, offering partners up to $6,000 for prototype development and at least 50% of net profit depending on the product’s metrics. Espresso Publishing also offers financial support to developers, on a monthly basis to help teams meet their targeted metrics. The company will also support the MY.GAMES initiative to launch their own automated developer platform – it would make verifying hypotheses very quick and simple, and provide marketing and product metrics for hyper-casual games. 

"The hyper-casual games market continues to grow — in 2020, it doubled and amounted to $ 3.1 billion. Such a rapid growth of the market, where every day there are interesting projects in the conditions of the highest competition, revealed an acute demand for specialized publishers. The number of applications received in MY.GAMES has already exceeded one thousand. This led to the decision to modernize our approach to publishing hyper-casual games, making the MY.GAMES program available to even more developers through our partners," comments Vasily Maguryan, CEO of MY.GAMES.

“We are happy to join the MY.GAMES hyper-casual division and offer our full-service support to game developers with everything they need to create new hit games”, said Zahar Serebryannikov, Espresso Publishing CEO. “We believe that our common goals and shared flexible approach to working with any hyper-casual partner are key when it comes to bringing success to our projects”, added Yana Vesnina, Director of Business Development at Espresso Publishing. 

In the spring of 2020, MY.GAMES announced the launch of its hypercasual division, which offers publishing services to mobile game developers in the Hyper-Casual, Hybrid-Casual, and Idle genres. Mobile games are the largest revenue generator for MY.GAMES, accounting for 75% of the company’s revenue as of Q3 2020. The brand’s top international markets are the United States, Germany, and Japan.