Part IThe Story
Someone in America
The email arrived at night, because night was the only time the Bukhman brothers were connected to anything. It was the summer of 2001 in Vologda, a provincial capital nearly 300 miles north of Moscow, best known, when it was known at all, for its butter and its linen. Igor, nineteen, had just finished his first year of applied mathematics at the local pedagogical institute. Dmitry, sixteen, had just finished ninth grade. Between them they had a Pentium 100 that their grandfather had bought with years of savings, a shared bedroom, and an unlimited nighttime internet plan, which meant that they kept a vampire's schedule: code until dawn, sleep through the day, wake up and code again. It took a month of those nights to write their first game. It was not a good game, and they knew it. You steered a cursor around the screen and cleared the background off a hidden picture while dodging enemies that were, Igor later admitted, "just dots on the screen." The game was called Discovera. They priced it at $15 and uploaded it to some two hundred software directories, and then, presumably, went to bed.
Someone bought it. The notification came by email: a purchase, from America. Three more people followed that month, and the brothers cleared $60.
"I even remember the first person who paid for it," Igor told the Russian outlet Meduza eighteen years later, in 2019, by which point the company those sixty dollars had seeded was booking more than a billion dollars a year. He did not say the name. In none of the interviews I have been able to find does he ever say it. The buyer remains what he was that night: an abstraction at the far end of a dial-up line, a stranger on another continent who had, for reasons of his own, decided that two teenagers in a city he had almost certainly never heard of had made something worth fifteen dollars.
Everything that follows depends on that transaction, and on the peculiar kind of distance it encoded. The Bukhmans would go on to build one of the three largest mobile game developers on earth, a company whose puzzle games about restoring gardens, renovating mansions, tending aquariums, and building small farm towns would be downloaded hundreds of millions of times and played, at the peak of the pandemic, by 180 million people a month. They would move their headquarters to Dublin and their families to Dublin, then Tel Aviv, then London. They would take Israeli citizenship and then British citizenship. They would become, by the reckoning of the Sunday Times in 2025, the tenth-richest people in the United Kingdom, with a joint fortune of £12.54 billion, more than the British monarch and the sitting prime minister combined many times over. And almost none of the people who paid them would know who they were.
"Our games are at the top of the Russian charts," the brothers said in that 2019 Meduza interview, their first long conversation with the press, "but almost nobody knows us as a brand." They said it as a statement of fact. It reads, in retrospect, like a business model, and also like a confession.
By the Numbers
From Vologda to the Rich List
$60Revenue from Discovera, the brothers' first game, in its first month (2001)
$10,000Monthly revenue when Playrix was formally registered (2004)
$0Outside capital raised to finance Playrix
$2.7BPlayrix revenue in 2021, its peak year
180MMonthly active players at the height of the 2020 lockdowns
1,500Russia-based staff relocated after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine
£12.54BJoint fortune, 10th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2025
Butter, Linen, and a Pentium 100
Vologda is nine centuries old. It has a sixteenth-century cathedral dedicated to Saint Sophia and a long, quiet reputation as the kind of Russian place that produces dairy, lacework, and the occasional exile. Leonid Parfyonov, the journalist, was born and raised there; for him, he has said, Vologda is "first of all, Russia" — not the Russia of Moscow's towers or Petersburg's canals but the Russia of the interior, where the winters are long and ambition tends to point outward, toward somewhere else. When Parfyonov sat down with the Bukhmans for his YouTube channel, he opened the episode by standing in front of Saint Sophia and then cutting to St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, founded in the twelfth century. There seems, he says to the camera, to be nothing in common between these two cities. Now there is. The richest residents Vologda has produced "for all nine centuries" of its existence have moved from the one to the other.
The family they came from had no money and no particular expectation of acquiring any. "We grew up like normal kids in Vologda whose families didn't have much money," Dmitry told Meduza. "Our dad was a veterinarian — he taught and worked at a meat processing plant. Mom spent practically her whole life in a ball bearing factory. We lived very modestly, and we went to a totally ordinary school." Two brothers, three years apart, sharing a room. A father who knew animals and slaughterhouses. A mother whose working life was spent among the small steel spheres that let other machines turn. If you were writing fiction you would not dare the ball bearings.
The computer came from their grandparents, and the way it came matters. "Remember how before, all older people lived in a paradigm that you have to save money all the time," Dmitry explained to Parfyonov. Every month the grandfather and grandmother put something aside — the habitual thrift of people who had lived through Soviet scarcity and post-Soviet collapse — and at some point, the mid-1990s, that slow accumulation became a Pentium 100. "This was a turning point for us in life," Igor said. It is worth sitting with the arithmetic: years of withheld kopecks, converted into the machine on which a multibillion-dollar fortune would be coded. The brothers would later build their entire company on the opposite principle — tiny, voluntary payments from millions of strangers, compounding — but the seed capital was the oldest kind there is. A grandparent's savings.
They were not, they insist, obsessive gamers. They played Dandy, the Famicom clone that half of post-Soviet childhood ran on; they played Mario and Battle City, "the same things everybody did." "We're not gamers who have built our whole lives around video games," Dmitry said, and the disclaimer is revealing. The Bukhmans have never presented themselves as auteurs or as fans. They have presented themselves as people who learned to program, discovered that programs could be sold, and then got very, very good at selling them.
Nor did they ever consider leaving — not then. Parfyonov asked whether the family had lacked the money to send them to university in Moscow or St. Petersburg, the default escape route for talented provincial children. "As we grew up, it seemed to us something so incomprehensible, complicated," Dmitry said. "To go somewhere? It was not even considered." So Igor enrolled in applied mathematics at the Vologda State Pedagogical Institute, a teacher-training school, and Dmitry would follow him there. "We were raised to think that only losers don't graduate from college," the brothers told Meduza, and both of them did graduate, even as the side project ate their nights. The irony is structural. Two young men for whom leaving Vologda was unthinkable would build a business whose entire premise was that you did not need to leave. The internet would carry the product out. They could stay put.
Until, of course, they couldn't.
The Arithmetic of Several Dozen
The idea came from a teacher. Somewhere in the applied mathematics faculty there was, as Igor described him, "a progressive teacher" who was already selling his own games online — a man ahead of his time in a city that was not, who mentioned in passing that you could write programs and sell them over the internet. Igor came home and told his brother. "Now, it turns out, you can write some kind of program and sell it," he recalled saying. "We wanted to try." Dmitry remembered it as something closer to revelation: "You can just write something and make money via the Internet, which seemed like something incredible, magical, especially from Vologda."
Especially from Vologda. The phrase carries the whole weight of the provincial imagination — the sense that money, real money, was made elsewhere, by other people, and that the internet had somehow opened a hatch in the floor.
They were clear-eyed about their own limitations. "We had no experience, no business understanding whatsoever — everything we could imagine was writing games," Igor told Bloomberg. And: "We weren't thinking of starting a business. We just wanted to write some code and put it on the Web. We didn't have any genius ideas, so we decided to make a game." The prevailing model at the time was shareware — play for a set number of minutes free, then pay to continue — and they followed it because it was there.
— Igor Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2019We had no experience, no business understanding whatsoever — everything we could imagine was writing games.
What happened next is the part of the story that rewards close attention, because it reveals the mind that would later run Playrix. Discovera settled into about $100 a month — roughly half the average monthly salary in Vologda at the time. Two teenagers, one game, half a salary. The brothers did not respond to this by trying to make a better game. They did a multiplication.
"We thought, 'If one game makes $100, we can write several dozen of them and make a lot of money,'" Igor said.
It is a sentence of almost comic flatness, and it contains the entire company. Not if we make a great game we will be rich — the hit-driven fantasy that has ruined most game studios in history — but if a unit produces a reliable trickle, produce more units. The brothers were students of applied mathematics. They saw a revenue curve and wanted to stack it.
Six months later came the second game, which featured an animated character drawn by an artist they paid from outside — the first time the Bukhmans bought talent they didn't have. It earned $200 a month, enough for a second computer. A third game followed six months after that. They wrote a copy of Tetris, itself a Soviet export, that brought in $700 a month, the best performer they had yet produced, and then they shut it down when they learned the game was protected by a license. The detail is small and tells you a great deal: at an age and in a place and in an era when software piracy was close to a national pastime, they killed their most profitable product because it wasn't theirs to sell.
Then they began buying screensavers from other programmers and reselling them. By 2004 they had released three games and some thirty screensavers, distributed through download portals like majorgeeks.com and download.com, and monthly revenue had crossed $10,000. That was the number at which they decided they were a company. They registered a legal entity — Playrix — hired about ten people, and rented office space in the basement of a book warehouse in Vologda. Somewhere above their heads, presumably, were pallets of paper and ink, the physical goods of an older media business, stacked and waiting for trucks. Below, ten people making products that weighed nothing at all.
The next three years are the least documented and maybe the most important. The brothers moved from the download sites to larger portals like Yahoo! and AOL, where casual games were becoming a real category, sold mostly to adults — and disproportionately, in that era, to women — who wanted something to do for twenty minutes that wasn't work. The Playrix back catalog from this period reads like a library of mid-2000s casual gaming: Royal Envoy, 4 Elements, Atlantis Quest, Call of Atlantis, The Path of Hercules, Brickshooter Egypt, Around the World in 80 Days. And two titles that would matter far more than anyone could have guessed: Fishdom and Gardenscapes. By the end of 2007 the company had released around fifteen casual games and was bringing in roughly $300,000 a month. The basement had become, by the standards of Vologda, a gold mine.
The RBC business daily would later run an interview with the brothers under a headline that quoted them directly: "We have never in our lives taken loans." Not a bank loan, not a venture round, not an angel. Everything that came after the basement was paid for by what the basement produced.
Different DNA
Around 2009, the ground moved. Games were migrating — first to Facebook, then to the smartphone — and the economics migrated with them. Instead of selling a product once, for a fixed price, a developer could now give the game away and charge for what happened inside it: extra moves, extra lives, shortcuts, decorations. Free-to-play. The model terrified a lot of studios that had grown up on the old one, and with reason. It inverted everything.
"It was a major challenge for us to switch to developing free-to-play games — that's totally different DNA," Dmitry told Bloomberg. The brothers began building in parallel, keeping the PC business alive while a mobile operation took shape; a separate studio called WebGames, founded in 2009 with offices in Moscow and Bryansk, would eventually be folded in and rebranded Perfect Play. The first real test came in 2012, when Playrix released Township on Facebook — a farming and town-building game, a little settlement of fields and factories you could grow plot by plot. It became one of the fifty top-grossing games on the platform, with 350,000 daily players. A year later it went to iOS, then to Android. Over the following seven years it would be downloaded roughly 250 million times.
The thing the brothers understood earlier than most of their competitors was that a free-to-play game was not a product at all. It was a service. Dmitry put it with the bluntness that characterizes nearly everything he says in public:
— Dmitry Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2019Free-to-play games aren't games that you develop, release and move on to making another one. They are services that need to be supported constantly as users are waiting for regular updates.
Igor reached for a comparison his audience would recognize. "Successful games have become long-term services similar to Netflix, which manages to retain users by constantly adding new content," he said in 2020. "We are constantly adding new stories, different game mechanics and levels to our games, and people are playing them for years." The industry term for this is live operations, or LiveOps — the endless back-office labor of new levels, seasonal events, limited-time offers, and storylines that never quite conclude. In 2018, Gardenscapes won the inaugural Mobile Games Award for Best Game Management and Live Ops. It is a prize, essentially, for never finishing.
And here the old casual library paid out a second time. Fishdom: Deep Dive arrived on mobile in April 2015. Gardenscapes — a name first used on a PC game years earlier — came in 2016, and was named Facebook's Game of the Year. Homescapes followed in 2017. The formula was the one Playrix would ride to the top of the charts: a match-three puzzle, of the kind Candy Crush had made universal, wrapped around a narrative of restoration. You cleared rows of colored tiles in order to earn stars; you spent the stars to fix up a garden, repaint a dilapidated house, refurnish a room, restock an aquarium. The puzzle was the work. The house was the reward. By the end of 2019, Gardenscapes alone had generated $1.5 billion.
There is something worth noticing in what the brothers chose to sell, whether or not they noticed it themselves. Two boys who grew up sharing a bedroom in a provincial apartment, whose mother worked her whole life in a factory, built a fortune selling the experience of renovation — of taking a shabby inherited property and making it, through patient incremental labor, into something gracious. Homescapes is a game about coming home and fixing it up. Township is a game about building a town from nothing. Neither brother has ever, as far as I can tell, remarked on this publicly. They talk about retention curves.
Consider the player. Julia de Macfarlane-Smith was forty-two, a stay-at-home mother in Gloucestershire, when she clicked on a Gardenscapes ad in February 2020, a few weeks before England locked down. Soon she was playing up to six hours a day and spending about £50 a month to get through levels faster. "It made life indoors not so boring," she told Bloomberg. "I don't know how many hours a day I would be playing if the pandemic had never happened, probably much fewer." There is no villain in her account and no complaint. She is simply the end of the line — the someone in America from 2001, multiplied and updated, a woman in an English village paying a company from Vologda by way of Dublin to let her restore an imaginary garden while her real one went untended outside.
"Investors have perceived games as a risky business, which needs to generate one hit after another," Dmitry said in 2020. "But this is not true anymore. If you made a successful game and operate it properly, you can make money for years." It was the shareware arithmetic again, translated into a new medium. Several dozen games at $100 a month had become a handful of games, each run indefinitely, each one a slow and nearly bottomless well.
Come for the Puzzle, Pay for the Flowerbed
If you have owned a smartphone at any point in the last eight years, you have probably seen a Playrix ad, even if you have never heard the word Playrix. The German marketing publication OMR put it precisely in a 2020 headline: You may not know this billion-dollar gaming company, but you know their ads.
The ads tended to show a puzzle. A man trapped in a room as water rose, a set of metal pins, a choice: pull this pin and the lava drains away, pull that one and the poor fellow is incinerated. The "pin-pulling" genre became so ubiquitous that YouTube filled with compilations of the things, annotated with the exasperation of people who had seen them too many times. And the puzzle in the ad was, frequently, not the game. You downloaded Homescapes expecting to save a man from lava and found yourself matching colored tiles to earn stars to buy a sofa.
On September 30, 2020, the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority issued a ruling against PLR Worldwide Sales Ltd, trading as Playrix. Two ads, one for Homescapes and one for Gardenscapes, were found misleading because they did not represent the actual gameplay. The ruling's language was terse and bureaucratic: the ads "must not appear again in the form complained of." The BBC picked the story up on October 12. Complaints had already been circulating for years on Google's developer forums, where users argued that Playrix's ads broke platform policy.
OMR, in its anatomy of the company, titled one section with an epigram that captures the whole machine better than anything the brothers have said: Come for the puzzle solution, pay for the virtual flowerbed. The ad's job was acquisition. The game's job was retention. The two did not have to be the same thing, and for a long time, in the economics of mobile marketing, the gap between them was not a bug but the point — a bait that cost almost nothing, a hook that kept paying.
This is the cleft in the Bukhman story, the place where the admiring account and the skeptical one cannot quite be reconciled. These are the same men who shut down their most profitable early game because they did not hold the license. They have always insisted their revenue comes from players, not from advertising; ads inside the games accounted for less than 3 percent of income, Dmitry said in 2019, because they "detract from the user experience." They are fastidious, in other words, about the experience of people already inside the house. About the sign on the road outside, they were — for a while, at least — less fastidious.
The machine also explains the most aggressive move of their career, and it was not an acquisition. In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic emptied streets and many companies slashed their marketing budgets, the cost of mobile advertising fell sharply. Playrix did the opposite of what almost everyone else did. It increased its spending, buying attention at a discount while competitors retreated. Monthly players surged 50 percent, to 180 million at the peak. Revenue in the first eight months of the year rose about 60 percent, to $1.75 billion — more than the company had made in all of 2019. In the first three quarters of that year Playrix passed Activision Blizzard, Zynga, and Supercell in mobile revenue. The only company ahead of it was Tencent.
In April 2020, in the middle of that windfall, Playrix paid each of its 2,100 employees a one-off bonus of $650 to help with the strain of the crisis. Six hundred and fifty dollars: almost exactly eleven months of what Discovera earned at its best. It is a strangely precise number, the kind of figure a grandparent might settle on.
The Office That Wasn't There
In April 2013, Playrix moved its headquarters to Dublin. The brothers followed in 2014. The press, then and later, rarely asked why, and the brothers rarely volunteered an answer. Ireland was the European home of Google, Facebook, and Apple, a jurisdiction with English-speaking courts, EU membership, and a corporate tax regime that had made it the preferred address of half of Silicon Valley's foreign income. It was also not Russia. In 2013, that last attribute seemed to most observers like a matter of administrative convenience. It would come to look like something else.
The move to Dublin did not mean the work moved to Dublin. The development teams stayed where the talent was: Vologda, Moscow, Bryansk, Ukraine, Belarus. In 2015, Playrix began working remotely, and by 2016 more of its employees worked remotely than in its central office. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that the brothers "remotely manage about 1,100 employees" — a phrase that would have sounded eccentric before 2020 and would sound ordinary after it. A Russian-language interview from July 2016 carried the founders' own formulation in its headline: "Remote work is the foundation of the company's development."
What the brothers built, in other words, was a company that did not need to be anywhere. The headquarters in Dublin was a legal fact. The developers were scattered across the former Soviet Union. The players were in the United States, China, and Japan, in that order. And the founders themselves were increasingly peripatetic. In 2016, both acquired Israeli citizenship. When Bloomberg interviewed them in the spring of 2019 for the profile that would put them on its billionaires list, the conversation took place in Tel Aviv, where they spent part of their time. The photographer Corinna Kern posed them at Sarona Market, a renovated quarter of old Templer stone buildings turned into a food hall, on March 29, 2019. It was Igor's thirty-seventh birthday. In the photograph they are wearing the casual uniform of software founders everywhere. Nothing in the picture says Vologda.
In 2020 they moved to London. In 2025 both became British citizens.
There is a familiar story of the post-Soviet billionaire: the oligarch who acquires a factory or a mine or an oil field in the chaos of the 1990s, extracts its wealth, and moves that wealth — and eventually himself — to London, where the money is welcomed and the questions are few. When Forbes Russia published its list of the country's two hundred richest businesspeople in April 2020, the top three were Vladimir Potanin of Norilsk Nickel, Vladimir Lisin of the steelmaker NLMK, and Leonid Mikhelson of the gas company Novatek: nickel, steel, gas. The Bukhmans debuted that year at 34th and 35th, $3.1 billion apiece, the only representatives of the gaming industry on the list.
The brothers fit the London pattern geographically and break it in every other way. They never owned anything the Russian state could grant or seize. They did not privatize anything. Their raw material was the attention of strangers, their factory was a basement and then a scattering of laptops, and their export market was the entire world except, in revenue terms, Russia itself. Their wealth was mobile in the most literal sense: it lived on phones. A nickel mine has to stay in Norilsk. A match-three game can be headquartered anywhere a server can reach.
VentureBeat, in November 2016, called Playrix "Europe's quiet giant in mobile gaming." The quietness was not accidental. The brothers gave very few interviews. They did not keynote conferences or tweet. In August 2017, Playrix became the top-grossing mobile game publisher in Europe on Google Play and the App Store; in 2018 it was ninth in the world; in March 2019, a monthly ranking showed it had out-earned Supercell, the Finnish studio behind Clash of Clans, which had been the reigning symbol of European mobile gaming success. Hardly anyone outside the industry noticed. The Bukhmans first appeared on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in April 2019, worth $1.4 billion each, and the headline Bloomberg chose was telling: Russian Gamer Brothers Are the Newest Hidden Billionaires.
Hidden is the word. It was a strategy, a temperament, and eventually a kind of liability.
Not for Three Billion
At the beginning of 2018, the Bukhmans considered selling Playrix.
They have been candid about this, in their way. They met with representatives of Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. "We visited their skyscrapers," Dmitry told Bloomberg — a sentence that, in its faint bemusement, conjures two brothers from a book warehouse basement being shown around Manhattan towers by men in good suits. In February 2019 a rumor surfaced that Playrix could be sold to Chinese gaming companies for $3 billion. The brothers' response, as it was summarized in every trade outlet that picked up the Bloomberg interview, became a kind of slogan: For $3 billion we won't sell.
They also said, with the precision of people who had thought it through, that there was no magic number at which they would. "Some people think that if you have a lot of money, everything changes, everything becomes more interesting and you rush to do some other things," Dmitry said. "But not in our case. We just keep working."
So instead of selling, they bought. In the summer of 2018 the brothers invested in Nexters, a developer based in Cyprus whose games included Hero Wars; Playrix took a 43 percent stake. Nexters had its own founder, Andrey Fadeev, who would remain its chief executive. When the Bukhmans came in, Nexters' mobile revenue was about $0.9 million a month. A year later it was $6.3 million. Forbes Russia ran a feature on the company with a headline borrowed from someone's awed remark: The guys did the impossible. Nexters went public on Nasdaq in 2021 through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, and later renamed itself GDEV. Igor sat on its board and, from April 2023, served as a non-executive director. It is one of the small ironies of the story that the brothers' most celebrated investment went the route — public listing, outside shareholders, SPAC — that they had declined for themselves.
Then came the spree. In August 2019, Playrix invested in Vizor Games of Belarus, maker of Zombie Farm and Klondike. In October it bought Zagrava Games in Ukraine and absorbed the Russian developer Stargaze, renaming it Zefir Games. In December it acquired Eipix Entertainment in Serbia. In 2020 came Plexonic in Armenia and, in June, Cateia Games in Croatia. In March 2021, Boolat Games, another Ukrainian studio. In 2019 alone the company spent roughly $100 million on stakes in European studios; the acquisitions added about 600 people and increased Playrix's headcount by more than half. The deals ranged from 30 percent stakes to outright control, and many of the acquired studios kept operating independently. The brothers had a theory about why they could do this and others couldn't.
"Many firms are seeking acquisition targets to add to their revenue and show growth to investors," Igor said in December 2019. "We don't have this pressure and are taking a more long-term approach — we are helping our portfolio companies to grow. We are sharing our experience and playing a role in their growth."
Map the acquisitions and something emerges that is more than portfolio strategy. Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Armenia, Cyprus. The brothers were building not just a company but a kind of federation — a commonwealth of developers from the former Soviet Union and the Balkans, the regions where engineering education had been rigorous, salaries were modest, and the global games industry rarely went shopping. Igor said as much, in a sentence that would come to read very differently three years later: "We want to grow as big as they are, using developer talent from our region — the former USSR and Eastern Europe."
Our region. Two men who had already left — who held Israeli passports and lived in Dublin and gave interviews in Tel Aviv — still spoke of the post-Soviet space as theirs. Not Russia, exactly. Something larger and vaguer, a cultural and linguistic zone stitched together by shared schooling, shared language, shared childhood memories of Dandy consoles and Battle City. The brothers saw it as a talent pool. They were betting the company on its coherence.
The industry was skeptical, politely. "Capturing lightning in a bottle twice is the true challenge for a creative firm," said Joost van Dreunen, then managing director of SuperData, Nielsen's game research arm — an analyst whose career had been built on counting what other people's creativity earned. "With the popularity of Gardenscapes, Playrix has finally established itself as a force to be reckoned with. However, to build a legacy it will need to repeat this trick." The brothers, for their part, set targets that sounded almost provocative. "Within five years," Igor said, "we are seeking to join the same league as Activision Blizzard or NetEase, but in the European region."
Playrix's revenue peaked at $2.7 billion in 2021, the year the company was valued at €8 billion and ranked fourth in the world among mobile developers. Activision Blizzard was then a much larger company. NetEase larger still. The brothers did not quite catch them. They did something they had not planned for, which was to discover that the region they were counting on could come apart.
February 24
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Playrix had approximately 4,000 employees. About 1,500 of them were in Ukraine. About 1,500 were in Russia.
Hold those numbers for a moment. The company that two brothers from Vologda had stitched together out of the talent of "our region" was split, almost exactly, along the line of the war — as if someone had drawn the front through the middle of the org chart.
Within hours of the invasion, Playrix put its Ukrainian staff on paid leave. In the following days it set up hotlines to help them get out of the country. By February 28 it had paid all 4,000 employees, including the 1,500 in Russia, a bonus equal to a month's salary. On March 11, Hit Games, a Playrix subsidiary based in Ukraine, donated $500,000 to the Ukrainian Red Cross.
And then there was Slack.
In the days after the invasion, Playrix deleted posts in the company's Slack workspace in which Ukrainian employees wrote about the war. On March 3 the company shut down channels altogether, citing what it described as "outbursts of uncontrolled hatred between employees." Ukrainian staff were furious; the story reached Forbes, which published it under the headline Why Russian-Born Gaming Giant Playrix Shut Down Ukrainian Employees' Discussion About War. Igor defended the decision.
— Igor Bukhman, to Forbes, March 2022The only thing we're asking of our employees during this crisis is that they keep our few official work channels solely for business communication.
It is possible to read this two ways, and the honest account requires reading it both. On one reading, it was the reflex of a company that had always treated neutrality as a business necessity — that had built a federation out of people from countries with grievances against each other, and that had kept the federation together precisely by never talking about anything but work. On this reading, the Slack shutdown was triage: a burning room, and a manager closing the door so the fire couldn't spread. On the other reading, it was a company asking people whose cities were being shelled to keep quiet in order to protect the comfort of colleagues in the country doing the shelling. Both readings fit the facts. The brothers, who had spent two decades not being known, suddenly were known, and for this.
Forbes, in its March 31 profile of Igor that spring, framed him as a man navigating "a company in turmoil." The turmoil resolved, eventually, in the only direction it could. Beginning in April 2022, Playrix launched a relocation program that would move around 1,500 staff out of Russia to new and existing offices in Ireland, Cyprus, Portugal, Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. In October 2022 the company announced it would close its offices and development operations in Russia and Belarus entirely, "as soon as possible." The company that had begun in a Vologda basement no longer had a single desk in Russia.
The Times, in a 2024 profile, would headline its piece Meet the billionaire gaming brothers who saw off Putin's police — a phrase that implies an encounter with the Russian state that neither brother, in the interviews available to me, has described in detail. What is clear is the shape of the decision. Nine years earlier, the move to Dublin had looked like a tax-and-talent calculation. In 2022 it turned out to have been the thing that made leaving possible. The company did not have to flee Russia. Legally speaking, it had already left.
In May 2024, the Bukhmans visited Astana Hub, the Kazakh government's technology cluster, to discuss collaboration in gaming technology. Kazakhstan was by then one of the places where Playrix kept offices. The federation had been redrawn — pulled south and west, away from the old center, toward the edges of the region the brothers still, perhaps, thought of as theirs.
Both Names on Every Line
There is a document filed with Companies House, the British registry of corporations, for an entity called Rix Capital Limited, company number 13667544. It lists two "persons with significant control." The first is Igor Bukhman: born March 1982, nationality "British,Israeli," resident in the United Kingdom, correspondence address 10 Norwich Street, London. Nature of control: ownership of shares, more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent. Ownership of voting rights, more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent.
The second is Dmitrii Bukhman — the registry uses the double i — born May 1985, nationality "British,Israeli," resident in the United Kingdom, correspondence address 10 Norwich Street, London. Nature of control: more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent. And again.
The brackets are a feature of how British law requires such stakes to be reported, not a precise accounting. But the symmetry is not an accident of the form. Everywhere the brothers appear together in the public record, they appear as mirror images. They entered the Bloomberg index on the same day, at the same number. They entered the Forbes Russia list in consecutive positions, at the same figure. They moved to Dublin in the same year, became Israelis in the same year, moved to London in the same year, became British in the same year. Each is married; each has four children. The rare exceptions read almost like clerical errors: Forbes Israel, in 2022, ranked Igor sixth and Dmitry seventh among the wealthiest Israelis — the only place I have found where anyone bothered to put one brother ahead of the other.
What we know about the division of labor between them is less than one would like. Dmitry has generally been described as chief executive of Playrix. Igor has more often been the one quoted on strategy, sat on the Nexters board, and spoke for the company during the Slack crisis. In interviews they finish each other's sentences, correct each other's dates. When Parfyonov asked about the first computer, Igor answered; when Parfyonov pressed on the grandparents, Dmitry took over. In the Meduza interview, the transcript simply alternates — I:, D:, I:, D: — as if they were a single speaker breathing in two rhythms.
Rix Capital was formed in October 2021, at the peak of Playrix's valuation, and for its first three and a half years the brothers did not appear on its significant-control register at all. The listed controller, from October 7, 2021, until April 1, 2025, was a man named Yury Labintsev — an Irish national born in December 1980, which is to say a near-contemporary of the brothers, holding 75 percent or more "with control over the trustees of a trust." The public record says almost nothing else about him. His presence is consistent with Bloomberg's report that the firm was set up through Playrix executives, and with the brothers' long preference for having someone else's name on the door. On April 1, 2025 — the year they became British — the trust arrangement ceased and both brothers appeared on the register, side by side, verified.
By 2023, Rix Capital managed about $4 billion of the brothers' personal money, spread across private equity, hedge funds, fixed income, and listed stocks, and was moving into its first permanent office in St. James's, the old London district of gentlemen's clubs and wine merchants and discreet private banks. It had perhaps ten employees. Bloomberg noted that it was now among the larger single-family offices in the world. The brothers had funded it through dividends from Playrix, the company in which they had never sold a share to anyone.
There are earlier traces of their outside investing — a $10 million investment, alongside Lev Leviev, a co-founder of the Russian social network VKontakte, in the hotel-booking service Ostrovok — but Rix is something different in kind. It marks the moment the brothers began converting their fortune from a thing they made into a thing they held. The money that had come in as $15 shareware purchases and 99-cent bundles of extra moves would now sit in bond portfolios and fund stakes, managed from a building a short walk from Buckingham Palace.
The fortune itself kept growing in ways that strained comprehension. The Sunday Times placed the brothers 34th on its 2023 Rich List, 27th in 2024 with £6.3 billion, and 10th in 2025 with £12.54 billion — a single-year increase, by the paper's estimate, of £6.191 billion, the largest rise of anyone on the list. In August 2024, when the Sunday Times compiled its first Gaming Rich List, the brothers topped it; their fortune accounted for more than 70 percent of the total wealth of all thirty people ranked. The second-place entrant, Herman Narula of the virtual-worlds company Improbable, was worth £780 million. In 2025, Dmitry, at thirty-nine, was named the richest person under forty in Britain, his estimated fortune alone accounting for more than a third of the combined wealth of the forty people on the list — ahead of the Duke of Westminster, who had inherited a substantial portion of central London.
Houses, Gardens, Children
In 2019, Igor bought a house in Kensington for more than £45 million. In 2024 he bought the house next door, for around £24 million, and began renovating both. The man whose company sells a game about restoring a mansion is restoring two.
In 2025, Dmitry bought Ahpo, a 115-meter superyacht built by the German yard Lürssen, for a reported $360 million.
These are the facts any profile of a billionaire must record, and they are less interesting than what the brothers chose to do with the rest. In 2023, Igor and his wife, Anastasia, established the Bukhman Foundation. The Sunday Times later told the reason, in a headline: After their three-year-old daughter became seriously ill, Igor and Anastasia Bukhman knew they had to act. In 2025 the foundation pledged £100 million to fund research toward new treatments and a cure for type 1 diabetes. That same year it gave $1 million to the National Portrait Gallery in London, where Anastasia — described by the Art Newspaper as a Russian-born collector — had become a patron. A family from Vologda, writing a check to the institution whose entire purpose is to decide whose faces count as British.
In 2024, Dmitry and his wife, Daria, established Bukhman Philanthropies. Its three focus areas are neonatal and maternal health, the mental health and wellbeing of children and young adults, and literature. In its first year it committed $10.5 million to Duke University's Center for Child and Family Policy, $10 million to Stanford University School of Medicine for global child mental health, and more than $6 million to UNICEF for a longitudinal study of childhood in the digital age.
One does not have to strain to see the tension in that last grant. The Bukhmans' fortune was built on the engineering of attention — on puzzles tuned to keep players coming back for years, on ads designed to win the click, on a woman in Gloucestershire playing six hours a day. And here is one of the brothers funding a study of what digital life does to children. It would be cheap to call it hypocrisy and naïve to call it nothing. The brothers' games were made for adults, and the research is about children, and the line between the two is real. It is also, in 2026, thinner than anyone would like. Perhaps the most generous reading is that a man with four children, who has spent his life in the attention business, knows better than most what the machine can do.
And then there is literature. In 2026, Bukhman Philanthropies became the supporting funder of the International Booker Prize in the prize's tenth anniversary year — the award for fiction translated into English, for books that cross from one language into another and find readers far from where they were written. The longlist that spring was announced as "supported by Bukhman Philanthropies." Twenty-two years earlier, Playrix's first ten employees had worked in the basement of a book warehouse in Vologda.
Verified
On February 2, 2026, another filing appeared at Companies House, for an entity called With(in) Studio Limited, company number 15902107. Until that day, its sole controller had been Daria Bukhman, born September 1986, nationality British, who had held 75 percent or more since August 2024. Now she was listed as ceased. In her place were two entries.
The first: Dmitrii Bukhman. Born May 1985. Nationality: British,Israeli. Place of residence: United Kingdom. Correspondence address: 10 Norwich Street, London.
The second: Igor Bukhman. Born March 1982. Nationality: British,Israeli. Place of residence: United Kingdom. Correspondence address: 10 Norwich Street, London.
The form has a field for the month and year of birth. It has a field for nationality, where the two countries are run together with a comma and no space, as though the clerk's software did not imagine anyone would need more than one. It has a field for where a person lives now. It does not have a field for where a person is from. Vologda appears nowhere on the page.
Beneath each name, a line that the registry adds only after a person has proven who they are:
Identity verification status: Verified.
Nature of control: More than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent.
Twice.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract the operating logic beneath the Bukhman story — not the mythology of two brothers in a bedroom, but the decisions that compounded. Some of these principles are admirable. A few are cautionary. All of them are drawn from what the brothers actually did, not from what they have said about themselves, though the two overlap more often than is usual for people this rich.
The principles
- 1.Let the first dollar come from far away.
- 2.Do the arithmetic of repetition.
- 3.Incorporate at proof, not at idea.
- 4.Refuse the money you don't need.
- 5.Treat the launch as the start of the work.
- 6.Buy attention when everyone else is selling it.
- 7.Consolidate the talent you understand.
- 8.Build a company that doesn't need a building.
- 9.Move the headquarters before you have to.
- 10.Stay unknown; let the product be the brand.
- 11.Govern the gap between the ad and the product.
- 12.Make the partnership structurally equal.
P
Decision Timeline
The choices that shaped Playrix, from a $15 shareware game to a London family office.
2001
Discovera released at $15 across ~200 directories; $60 in month one.
2004
Playrix registered at $10,000 monthly revenue; office in a book warehouse basement; ~10 staff.
2007
~15 casual games released; revenue reaches ~$300,000 per month.
2009
Begins building free-to-play games for mobile alongside the PC business.
2012
Township launches on Facebook; reaches 350,000 daily players.
2013
Headquarters moves to Dublin in April; Township arrives on iOS.
2015
Remote work begins; Fishdom: Deep Dive launches on mobile.
2017
Homescapes launches; Playrix becomes Europe's top-grossing mobile publisher.
2018
Brothers weigh a sale, decline, and take a 43% stake in Nexters instead.
2019
Roughly $100M spent on studio stakes; brothers enter Bloomberg's index.
2020
Ad spend rises as prices fall; Playrix climbs to No. 2 behind Tencent.
2021
Revenue peaks at $2.7B; Rix Capital family office formed.
2022
Russia and Belarus operations closed; ~1,500 staff relocated.
2025
Both brothers become British citizens; 10th on the Sunday Times Rich List.
Principle 1
Let the first dollar come from far away
The single most consequential fact about Discovera is not that it earned $60. It is that the first buyer was in America. The brothers did not begin by trying to sell to their neighbors, their classmates, or the domestic Russian market, which in 2001 had neither the payment infrastructure nor the disposable income to reward them. They uploaded the game to two hundred directories at once and let the global internet find the handful of people willing to pay. Distribution came before product quality — the game was, by its makers' own admission, primitive — and distribution taught them something no local market could have: that the size of the addressable audience mattered more than the polish of any individual product.
This orientation never left them. Two decades later, Playrix's largest markets were the United States, China, and Japan. The brothers' own country barely registered in the revenue. They built for the world from a place the world did not notice, and the obscurity of the origin turned out to be irrelevant to the buyer. Nobody purchasing a shareware game in Ohio in 2001 cared where it was compiled.
The deeper lesson concerns where founders look for validation. Provincial founders often wait for the local center — the capital, the hub city, the prestigious accelerator — to approve them before they go further. The Bukhmans skipped the center entirely. They went straight from Vologda to the global periphery of a thousand download sites, and the center came to them later, in the form of Goldman Sachs bankers.
Tactic: Put your earliest product in front of the widest possible paying audience before optimizing it for any single market, and let geography sort itself out.
Principle 2
Do the arithmetic of repetition
"If one game makes $100, we can write several dozen of them and make a lot of money." It is easy to read Igor's line as naïve, and it is the opposite. It is the clearest early statement of the brothers' core belief: that reliable, modest unit economics, multiplied, beat the lottery of the hit. They did not try to make Discovera great. They made more games. When they ran out of their own capacity, they bought screensavers from other programmers and resold them — the first instance of a pattern, buying other people's output and plugging it into their own distribution, that would recur at much larger scale with the studio acquisitions of 2019 and 2020.
The free-to-play era translated this arithmetic from breadth to depth. Instead of several dozen products at $100 a month each, Playrix ran a handful of games for years, each one an annuity rather than a lottery ticket. Dmitry made the logic explicit in 2020: "If you made a successful game and operate it properly, you can make money for years." The unit changed. The mathematics did not.
Founders in creative industries are trained to believe that the work is about the masterpiece. The Bukhmans believed it was about the yield curve. That belief let them treat their business as an engineering problem — a stack of predictable revenue streams — rather than a sequence of artistic gambles, and it is why investors' perception of games as "risky," in Dmitry's words, never applied to them.
Tactic: Before chasing a bigger idea, calculate what happens if you simply replicate your smallest working unit twenty times, and pursue whichever path the math favors.
Principle 3
Incorporate at proof, not at idea
The brothers sold games for roughly three years before Playrix existed as a legal entity. They registered the company in 2004 only when monthly revenue reached $10,000, and only then did they rent an office — in a basement, under a book warehouse — and hire about ten people. The order matters. They did not incorporate to signal seriousness, raise money, or recruit. They incorporated because the business was already real and needed a container.
This is the reverse of the modern startup sequence, in which the company comes first, the funding second, and the revenue some years after that, if ever. The Bukhmans' sequence made each step self-financing. The second game paid for the second computer. The $10,000 months paid for the basement and the payroll. The $300,000 months paid for the move into mobile. Each increment of ambition was funded by the increment before it, which meant no increment ever exceeded what the business could carry.
There is a cost to this approach: it is slow, and in a land-grab market it can mean ceding ground to better-funded competitors. But it produces something rarer than speed, which is a company whose founders have never had to explain themselves to anyone.
Tactic: Set a concrete revenue threshold that must be met before you formalize, hire, or lease, and refuse to cross it early.
Principle 4
Refuse the money you don't need
"We have never in our lives taken loans," the brothers told RBC, and Bloomberg confirmed that they never raised outside money to finance Playrix. When the investment banks came calling in 2018, the brothers toured the skyscrapers and went home. When rumors put a $3 billion price on the company in 2019, they said they would not sell at that number — and, more important, that there was no number at which they were committed to selling. Two years later the company was valued at €8 billion.
Igor articulated the strategic advantage of this independence when explaining the acquisition spree: "Many firms are seeking acquisition targets to add to their revenue and show growth to investors. We don't have this pressure and are taking a more long-term approach." Without outside shareholders, the brothers could buy 30 percent of a studio and leave it alone for years. They could increase ad spend into a pandemic without justifying it to a board. They could close an entire country's operations in a matter of months. Every one of the most consequential decisions in the Playrix story was made faster, and more idiosyncratically, because there was nobody to ask.
Notably, the brothers did not sneer at outside capital in general. Nexters, their marquee investment, went public through a SPAC. The principle is not ideological. It is situational: take money when it buys something you cannot buy yourself, and not otherwise.
Tactic: When outside capital is offered, write down specifically what it would let you do that your own cash flow cannot — and if the list is empty, decline.
Principle 5
Treat the launch as the start of the work
Dmitry's description of the shift to free-to-play remains the most useful thing either brother has said about product: "Free-to-play games aren't games that you develop, release and move on to making another one. They are services that need to be supported constantly as users are waiting for regular updates." The company won the inaugural Mobile Games Award for Best Game Management and Live Ops for Gardenscapes in 2018. Township, launched in 2012, was still among its current titles more than a decade later.
The operational implication is that the most important team in the company is not the one that ships new games but the one that keeps old ones alive. Igor's Netflix analogy is apt: the value is not in any single episode but in the subscription habit, and the habit is maintained by a reliable cadence of new material. For Playrix, that meant new stories, new levels, new mechanics, layered onto the same core puzzle for years.
This also explains why the brothers were unbothered by van Dreunen's challenge to "capture lightning in a bottle twice." They did not need lightning twice. They needed to keep one bottle full. The company's peak revenues came not from a stream of new hits but from the long tail of games launched between 2012 and 2017.
Tactic: Staff and budget your post-launch operations as though they are the product, because for any recurring-revenue business, they are.
Principle 6
Buy attention when everyone else is selling it
In spring 2020, as companies across industries cut advertising budgets, the price of mobile ads collapsed. Playrix increased its marketing spend. The result was a 50 percent jump in monthly players, to 180 million, and a 60 percent rise in revenue over eight months, to $1.75 billion — enough to vault the company from seventh to second among global mobile publishers, behind only Tencent.
The move was not reckless. It was the logical consequence of two prior facts: a business that knew precisely what a new player was worth over their lifetime (because live operations made that value predictable), and a capital structure with no outside investors demanding caution. When the cost of acquiring a player fell below what that player would reliably pay back, buying more was simply arithmetic.
A similar contrarian instinct shaped 2018, when the brothers considered selling and instead became buyers. Both decisions share a structure: when the market's mood pointed toward retreat or exit, they read it as a pricing signal and went the other way.
Tactic: Know your customer lifetime value precisely enough that when acquisition costs fall in a downturn, you can increase spending with confidence instead of fear.
Principle 7
Consolidate the talent you understand
Between 2018 and 2021, Playrix bought or invested in studios in Cyprus, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Armenia, and Croatia. The common thread was not genre but geography and culture: these were developers from "our region," as Igor called it, "the former USSR and Eastern Europe." The brothers understood the engineering education, the salary expectations, the working culture, and the language of these teams in a way that a Californian or Japanese acquirer could not. That understanding was an informational advantage, and they used it to buy talent that bigger players overlooked.
They also structured deals to preserve what made the studios work: stakes ranging from 30 percent to outright control, with many companies continuing to operate independently. Nexters' revenue grew roughly sevenfold in the year after the Bukhmans invested. Igor's stated approach — "sharing our experience and playing a role in their growth" — reads as boilerplate, but the results suggest it was substantive.
The cautionary half of this principle arrived in 2022. A strategy built on the coherence of a region is exposed when that region fractures. Playrix found itself with 1,500 employees in Ukraine and 1,500 in Russia on the morning of the invasion. The brothers' cultural fluency was real, but it could not hold together what the war split apart. Concentrated advantage is also concentrated risk.
Tactic: Acquire where your cultural knowledge gives you an edge over larger bidders, but map in advance what happens if the region underlying that edge becomes politically divided.
Principle 8
Build a company that doesn't need a building
Playrix began working remotely in 2015 and by 2016 had more employees outside its central office than inside it. By 2019 the brothers were "remotely managing" 1,100 people across four countries, with legal headquarters in Dublin and development spread across Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. When the pandemic struck, the company did not need to adapt; it was already shaped for the conditions. When the war struck, the company could relocate 1,500 people to seven countries because no single building had ever been essential.
Distributed organization was not, for the Bukhmans, a lifestyle perk or a cost-saving measure. It was a structural choice that matched the nature of the product. A game that lives on phones worldwide can be built by people anywhere. The founders themselves lived in Dublin, then Tel Aviv, then London, while the business ran without interruption. The company's real infrastructure was its distribution and its live-operations processes, both of which lived in software.
Tactic: Design your core processes so they would survive the permanent closure of your largest office, then test that assumption before circumstances do it for you.
Principle 9
Move the headquarters before you have to
Playrix moved its headquarters to Dublin in April 2013 — nine years before the invasion of Ukraine, a year before the annexation of Crimea, at a moment when a Russian-founded tech company had no obvious urgent reason to leave. The brothers followed in 2014. They took Israeli citizenship in 2016 and moved to London in 2020. When 2022 came, Playrix did not need to flee Russia. It was already an Irish company. Closing Russian operations was an operational problem, not an existential one.
There is no evidence the brothers foresaw the war, and the move had obvious commercial logic on its own terms: proximity to the European headquarters of the platforms Playrix depended on, access to EU markets, English-language courts, a mature corporate legal system. But the effect was the creation of optionality years before it was needed. The brothers' wealth, unlike the nickel and steel and gas fortunes atop the Forbes Russia list, was never anchored to an asset that a state could grant or take away.
The limit of this principle surfaced in the Slack episode. Legal distance from Russia did not mean emotional or social distance for employees in the middle of a war. Igor's insistence on keeping work channels "solely for business communication" was consistent with two decades of corporate neutrality and was experienced by many Ukrainian staff as silencing. Jurisdiction can be moved in advance. The human consequences of where your people are cannot.
Tactic: Establish your company's legal home based on where you want to be in ten years' worst case, not where you happen to be today.
Principle 10
Stay unknown; let the product be the brand
"Our games are at the top of the Russian charts, but almost nobody knows us as a brand." VentureBeat called Playrix Europe's "quiet giant." Bloomberg called the brothers "hidden billionaires." For most of Playrix's history the founders gave almost no interviews, built no personal brands, and let Township, Gardenscapes, and Homescapes stand in front of the company name. Rix Capital, their family office, spent its first three and a half years with another person's name on its significant-control register.
The benefits of this obscurity were real. It kept the brothers out of the political crosshairs that tend to find visible Russian fortunes. It kept competitors from studying them closely. It meant the games had to win on their own merits, with no founder mystique propping them up. And it left the brothers free to make unpopular decisions — declining banks, increasing spend, buying studios — without a public narrative to defend.
The cost arrived when obscurity ended involuntarily. The first story many people outside the industry read about Playrix was about deleted Slack posts. The first story many British readers saw was an advertising ban. A company that has never told its own story has no reserve of public understanding to draw on when someone else tells it first.
B
The Bukhman Approach vs. Conventional Wisdom
Where the brothers diverged from standard founder practice, and how it played out.
| Conventional wisdom | What the Bukhmans did | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Raise capital to accelerate growth. | Never took loans or outside money for Playrix. | Scale Full control through every crisis. |
| Chase the next hit. | Operate existing games for a decade or more. | Scale Township still live 12+ years on. |
| Cut marketing in a downturn. | Increased ad spend as 2020 prices fell. | Scale Rose from No. 7 to No. 2 globally. |
| Sell when banks come calling. | Declined a rumored $3B; became buyers instead. | Try Valued at €8B two years later. |
| Build a founder brand. | Stayed invisible; let games carry the name. | Scan Protected, until crises defined them. |
| Keep ad creative aligned with product. | Ran ads that didn't match gameplay. | Risk UK ASA ruling, September 2020. |
| Concentrate in a single hub. | Distributed across a post-Soviet federation. | Risk Workforce split by war in 2022. |
Tactic: Keep your public profile low by default, but build enough of a documented record that when the press finally arrives, there is a version of your story already written in your own words.
Principle 11
Govern the gap between the ad and the product
The acquisition machine and the retention machine at Playrix were, for years, two different machines. The ads showed pin-pulling puzzles and rescue scenarios; the games were match-three puzzles attached to renovation stories. In September 2020, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled two ads misleading because they did not represent the actual gameplay. OMR's summary of the model — "come for the puzzle solution, pay for the virtual flowerbed" — captures both its brilliance and its fragility.
This principle is cautionary rather than prescriptive. The gap worked commercially; the ads clearly delivered players at a price the live-operations engine could profitably repay. But it created regulatory exposure, platform risk, and a reputational residue that attached itself to the company name precisely because the company had no other public identity. It also sat uneasily with the brothers' own instincts elsewhere — the young programmers who killed their most profitable game over a license, the operators who kept in-game ads below 3 percent of revenue to protect the player experience. The discipline that governed the inside of the product did not extend to the outside.
Growth engines tend to optimize for whatever they are measured on. If the metric is installs at the lowest cost, the creative will drift toward whatever produces installs, regardless of fidelity. Someone has to own the question of whether the promise matches the product.
Tactic: Assign explicit ownership of the gap between your marketing and your actual product, and treat a regulator finding against you as a symptom of an internal governance failure, not a cost of doing business.
Principle 12
Make the partnership structurally equal
On every public register where both brothers appear, their stakes are reported in the same band: more than 25 percent but not more than 50 percent. They entered every wealth list at identical figures. They moved countries in the same years, became citizens of the same countries in the same years, sat side by side in every major interview. Their philanthropy is separate — Igor's foundation on diabetes, Dmitry's on child health and literature — but their business holdings appear joined at every level.
Co-founder partnerships fail most often over asymmetry: one partner's equity, title, or public credit outgrowing the other's until resentment does what competition could not. The Bukhmans appear to have engineered that asymmetry out of the structure. Neither brother, on the public record, controls the other. Every major decision therefore requires agreement, which slows some things down and makes the decisions that do get made unusually durable. A twenty-five-year partnership through shareware, Facebook, mobile, a pandemic, and a war — with no visible public rupture — is rarer than a billion-dollar exit.
There is a family dimension that cannot be generalized. They are brothers raised in a shared bedroom on a grandfather's computer. But the structural point travels: equal ownership, equal exposure, and equal public credit remove the most common fuel for founder conflict.
Tactic: If you build with a partner, design ownership and public credit so that neither can unilaterally overrule the other, and accept the slower decisions as the price of a partnership that lasts.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Igor Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2019We thought, 'If one game makes $100, we can write several dozen of them and make a lot of money.'
— Dmitry Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2019Some people think that if you have a lot of money, everything changes, everything becomes more interesting and you rush to do some other things. But not in our case. We just keep working.
— Dmitry Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2020Investors have perceived games as a risky business, which needs to generate one hit after another — but this is not true anymore. If you made a successful game and operate it properly, you can make money for years.
— Igor Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2019Many firms are seeking acquisition targets to add to their revenue and show growth to investors. We don't have this pressure and are taking a more long-term approach.
— Igor Bukhman, to Bloomberg, 2020Successful games have become long-term services similar to Netflix, which manages to retain users by constantly adding new content.
Maxims
- Distance is not a disadvantage. A product built in a city nobody has heard of can sell to a stranger on another continent the first month it exists.
- Multiply the small thing that works. Twenty reliable $100 streams beat one speculative masterpiece.
- Let revenue sign the incorporation papers. Formalize when the business already exists, not when you hope it will.
- Visit the skyscrapers, then go home. Outside money is only worth taking if it buys something your own cash flow cannot.
- The launch is the first day of the job. In a service business, the team that keeps the old product alive matters more than the team that ships the new one.
- Downturns are a pricing signal. When others cut spending, the cost of attention falls for whoever still knows what a customer is worth.
- Buy what you understand better than the bigger bidders do. Cultural fluency is an acquisition edge, and a concentrated risk.
- Move before you must. Choose your legal home for the worst case a decade out.
- Silence protects until it doesn't. If you never tell your own story, someone else will tell it at the worst possible moment.
- Equal partners last. Ownership that neither founder can override removes the most common reason partnerships break.
