Mail.ru, the parent company of My.com (which is the global publishing subsidiary) announced their strategy for the now re-branded My.com; My.Games. Mail.ru is the same company that negotiated a publishing contract in 2018 with Smilegate RPG for the Russian version of Lost Ark.
The new My.Games Store is a platform that is similar to Valve’s Steam (but is also based on the company’s publishing of titles across other platforms including Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox). The western version is slated for release in Q4 meaning within the next few months. The following is a quote from My.GamesWest (the western region subsidiary) general manager.
My.Games will arrive stacked with chats, friends lists, achievements and other features for core gamers. While some of them will be available from day one, others will be introduced gradually following the launch.
What is interesting from this article is a screenshot of the combined store/launcher portal which prominently displays Lost Ark. While Smilegate RPG has not announced a western publisher (not surprising given the lack of choices as well as publishers that have the upfront financial means since contracts like this can easily run in the millions of dollars to secure the rights depending on how many regions they plan to effectively cover).
In many regards, (if My.Games has the global publishing rights for Lost Ark) this wouldn’t be much of a surprise because there really isn’t any decent publisher servicing the west that has a portal platform that also directly services those titles. Steam offers a lot of titles as a store front and launcher but for most of those games, the actual publisher handles the business operations including running their own servers and managing customer service.
This is in contrast to My.Games which will be handling those aspects on a portal platform reminiscent of the larger game portals in Asian countries. This is speculation; part of the companies sales pitch to Smilegate (for the Russian publishing rights and possibly for the global publishing contract) may have been this integrated platform. Smilegate has their own STOVE platform in South Korea which they could deploy in the west IF they really wanted to self-publish. They would need to invest capital however in revamping their western operations (Smilegate West in Toronto, Canada) as well as re-establishing a European office. The above makes it less desirable (due to the initial and then ongoing expenses of running those operations) for Smilegate to consider self-publishing.
With that said, I don’t have a very high opinion of what used to be branded as My.com (Revelation Online) and what little that I have played of Skyforge. The cash grab warning sign was flashing like neon lights with their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale heading into the launch of Revelation Online (which had some pretty bad localization during the CBT). So IF the above image was an accidental telegraph regarding their having the western publishing rights to Lost Ark, I don’t have a good feeling about the cash shop monetization (over time especially).
We’ll see though since there really needs to be official confirmation of who the western (or global) publisher of Lost Ark will be.
