Alawar Entertainment
 |
|
| Private | |
| Industry |
Computer software Casual games |
| Founded | Novosibirsk (1999) |
| Headquarters |
Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Tomsk (Russia) Alexandria, Virginia (USA) |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Alexander Lyskovsky (CEO, co-founder) Sergey Zanin (co-founder) |
|
Number of employees
|
400 (2015) [1] |
| Divisions |
Alawar Stargaze Alawar North Hamster Studio |
| Website | www |
Alawar is a Russian video game developer, publisher and distributor, founded in 1999. The company specializes in the development and distribution of computer games for a mass audience (users of personal computers, mobile devices, gaming consoles, etc.).
Initially, Alawar had specialized in publishing casual games, but the company is now focused on developing and publishing free-to-play games. As of today, the company has published more than 300 of its own gaming brands. Among the projects are Farm Frenzy, The Treasures of Montezuma and others.
Games from Alawar can be downloaded from such online stores as App Store, Google Play, PlayStation Network and others. Alawar has its own network of online gaming sites. Besides, company partners with online distributors of casual games and provides turnkey solutions for owners of websites willing to create their own gaming sections.
In addition, Alawar includes the following game development studios: Alawar Stargaze, Alawar North and Hamster Studio.
Founded by a group of friends in 1999, Alawar initially developed hard core PC games for the Russian retail market. Eventually, the market became unprofitable, with developers earning only pennies per copy of a game sold. At that time, small computer games sold online via the shareware distribution method were becoming popular, so Alawar shifted its focus to creating these kinds of titles, which would eventually come to be known as casual games. Since making this switch in 2001, Alawar has published more than 200 games.
Alawar began to develop its own distribution platform. The corresponding market in the USA was highly competitive, so it was decided to draw attention to the Russian segment of the Internet. The Russian trading platform for casual games was created on the alawar.ru website. [2]
In those days, almost no one had been using the Internet as a sales channel in Russia, and the company had to spend a lot of time and effort not only to create the mechanisms of distribution, but also to explain the peculiarities of this new type of game to potential customers. In 2003, Western consumers were familiar with shareware games, but Russian users knew virtually nothing about them. Alawar had to translate the collective name for games of this genre into Russian. According to Alexander Lyskovsky, they had discussed several names, including "alawariki," [3] but in the end they chose a calque of the English phrase "casual games" – "казуальные игры".
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Wikipedia