Earlier this month Green Grey, a Russian-founded publisher of mobile games and apps, announced the launch of NPU Games. This new casual games studio offers co-investment opportunities to back the development of casual games.
An initial capital injection of $800,000 was brought by Green Grey itself to develop a pilot project, Cook’s Voyage — a casual game about travelling and fine cooking, scheduled for testing in August. Green Grey has teamed up with industry veteran Grigory Dorogov (Secrets of the Past, Jewel Tales, Mouse House: Puzzle Story), who is set to co-invest in further project development.
“I love the way our partnership has played out so far: it’s really just two partners going into business together, co-investing into a project. It’s not just about financing one game,” stated Dorogov.
“We are already strong in casual games, even though it’s next to impossible to come up with radically new core gameplay or meta gameplay at this point. The current market environment seems to reward something we call variation combinatorics — and we’re really excited about the experimentation we’ll be doing to put all the pieces together. As we move forward with the project, we will be creating and continuously improving the meta gameplay engine while combining it with standard core gameplay options. We don’t want to get bogged down with anything restrictive like Match-3 or something to that effect; we want to stay relevant in the market,” Dorogov added.
Under plans, in the next four to five years, NPU Games will launch a new game every 6–8 months. The new company has already onboarded 12 developers, with Sergey Ishmaev — touted as “one of the best casual game artists in the world” — in charge of graphic design.
In late June 2021, Green Grey made its first investment, putting $4 million to develop MERCS, the debut title of Moscow-based mobile game development company Developers Unknown.
Green Grey was founded just a year ago, in July 2020, by Dima Morozov, an investor in technology and gaming startups, who previously headed BBDO Digital Russia. It has registered its headquarter in Cyprus with another office in Moscow. “We plans to expand further across several countries,” said Natalia Shokina, Head of Project Team, to East-West Digital News.
Even though Green Grey did not attract any external investment so far, the young company has big ambitions. “We are developing Green Grey as a big mobile ecosystem that will be creating new IPs, developing and publishing games, launching applications, doing advertising and developing in-house technology. Our ultimate goal is to become listed on NASDAQ,” Shokina said, underlining her company’s “strong track record track record in creating and launching large-scale projects, managing teams and businesses.”
Displaying IPO goals might be a bit premature for such a young company, but the recent history of Russian-founded gaming companies — from Playrix to Nexters — shows that nothing is impossible in this field.
