Press F

Over eighteen years, Kanobu's founder built Russia's largest gaming media, lost it, rebuilt it, left for a startup, came back, bought up his competitors — and sold everything.

Gadzhi Makhtiev began his career in the press offices of the Ministry of Print under Mikhail Lesin and of the Internet Education Federation — a YUKOS structure that spent $10 million a year developing a network of training centers across the country. From a structure that burned oil money on digital literacy — to a social network for gamers. On May 21, 2007, Makhtiev registered the domain kanobu.ru. The name stands for 'rock, paper, scissors' in Russian. As it would turn out, he would play all three.

Kanobu started as a blogging platform. By 2011 it had drawn enough attention for Rambler to buy a controlling stake from the Kite Ventures fund, which had invested in the project at the seed stage. In the year after the purchase, the portal's revenue grew from a few tens of millions of rubles to a hundred million, according to Vedomosti. In parallel, at Makhtiev's initiative, Rambler-Igry picked up one of the oldest gaming sites on the Russian internet, AG.ru, from VimpelCom. VimpelCom had been ready to simply shut it down. A non-core asset.

In 2013 Kanobu relaunched from a blogging platform into a full publication with a newsroom. By January 2014 — 3.6 million visits a month. Around the same time, a conflict began with Rambler's new management under Pyotr Zakharov. On February 1, 2015, the holding cut off Kanobu's partner traffic feed. 'They might as well have shut off the water and the electricity,' Makhtiev would comment two years later in an interview with Roem.

By December 2015 the two sides had formalized the divorce. Makhtiev took the media business, Rambler kept the services. 'The decision that we would part ways was effectively made back in 2013,' Makhtiev admitted. Two years between the decision and the exit. In that time Kanobu partly recovered its audience and became self-sustaining without an investor. AG.ru could not be saved — after the purchase the team left over pay cuts, and by 2016 the site had stopped updating.

In May 2017, exactly ten years after registering the domain, Makhtiev left Kanobu. Next move — a startup. RAWG.io, announced back in October 2016, was pitched as 'IMDb for games': a cross-platform database that aggregates player profiles from Steam, PlayStation and Xbox and recommends games based on their history. Seed money — $100,000 from 'family and friends'.

In February 2018 RAWG raised €1 million from heavyweights: Igor Matsanyuk of Game Insight, Zeptolab CEO Mikhail Lyalin, Wargaming, and the AltaIR Capital fund. RBC magazine ran a long profile of Makhtiev. The plans were more ambitious than the money: expand the database to a hundred thousand games and launch a token economy — users earn RAWG tokens for achievements and spend them on partner offers. The ICO was planned for September 2018. The presale brought in commitments of $5 million from two investors.

Both withdrew their money. One — $2 million, the other — $3 million. Independently of each other. The 2018 crypto winter crashed the market, and there was nothing left to put into a gaming startup's tokens. The ICO was postponed to March 2019. It never took place. 'The situation will not affect the development of the service,' Makhtiev told DTF. RAWG kept working on the million euros it had raised, launched a recommendation neural network, and redirected the AG.ru domain to its Russian-language version — a symbolic gesture that turned a dead portal into a shell for a new product.

And then Makhtiev came back to media. In March 2019 he bought Igromania from its founder Evgeny Isupov. The price was not disclosed. N+1 publisher Andrey Konyaev estimated it for Kommersant at up to 30 million rubles. 'By combining Igromania and Kanobu, we plan to create the largest gaming media in Russia,' Makhtiev declared. The stated audience — 11 million people. The managing director of the combined company was Anton Suchkov, Rambler's former director of digital strategy. A man from the holding Makhtiev had divorced four years earlier. The industry is small.

Makhtiev made the combined company the exclusive ad seller for Games@Mail.ru — claiming access to 70% of Russia's gaming audience. The consolidation looked like the final move. As early as November 2019 Suchkov went back to Rambler. Then came February 2022, Western advertisers left, and with them went the business model that fed the whole structure.

In February 2025 Makhtiev sold Kanobu and Igromania to IFSI, owned by Vasily Ovchinnikov. Igromania's third owner in six years. 'My media phase in the industry is over. My phase in the games industry continues.'

In the same interview with App2Top, Makhtiev explained the logic: 'If I had $50 million of my own, I would have started a holding at that very moment. With a 21% key rate, that didn't happen.' The Central Bank's key rate made it impossible to raise capital to scale. Instead — handing the asset to someone who has the resources. 'The few well-resourced people from the old paradigm who stayed in the country are resting on their laurels,' Makhtiev added, without saying whom he meant.

RAWG.io — the startup Makhtiev left media for — remains a niche service for the English-language market in 2026. Not a failure. Not a triumph. Not 'the largest gaming media in Russia'.

Eighteen years. Kanobu — created, sold to Rambler, wrested back, sold to IFSI. AG.ru — bought, lost its team, turned into a shell for RAWG. Igromania — bought, merged, sold. RAWG — built, funded, survived the ICO collapse, still running. Four projects, four cycles, none became what it was meant to be.

Now Makhtiev is announcing a new project — 'reducing developers' dependence on VKontakte and Yandex traffic'. The fifth bet in eighteen years. The previous four did not last forever — but each extended the life of things that would have closed sooner without him. Kanobu survived the break with Rambler. Igromania outlived Igromedia. The question is not whether Makhtiev lost. The question is whether there is a bet in Russian gaming media that can be won for good.

The Komitet publishing house put TJ, DTF and VC.ru on a single engine with a shared ad sales team. Economies of scale worked — until they became a shared vulnerability.

Komitet grew out of Twitter. In 2011 four people — Nikita Likhachev, Vladislav Tsyplukhin, Ilya Chekalsky and Alexander Veremeev — launched TJournal, an aggregator of Twitter posts. In 2012 the project received a $25,000 grant from Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov's Start Fellows program. In April 2014 TJournal merged with Zuckerberg Will Call — the future VC.ru — into the Komitet publishing house. The money came from the Vaizra Capital fund, owned by Lev Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, former co-owners of VKontakte. Tsyplukhin, VKontakte's former press secretary, took charge of operations. Chief technology officer — Chekalsky. VKontakte alumni, with money from VKontakte's former co-owners, building media outside the social network.

In 2014 the combined loss of VC.ru and TJournal was 14 million rubles. The spending, as Yuri Sinodov of Roem remarked, was 'like ten Roems (well, almost)'. The model didn't pay for itself, but it scaled. A shared engine, shared infrastructure, a shared ad sales team — build once, sell three times. In 2016 Komitet bought the dead DTF.ru domain and turned VC.ru's 'Games Market' section into a separate publication. Vadim Yelistratov from TJournal was made editor-in-chief, and Sergey Babayev, former vice president of the Nekki studio, managing partner — he brought gaming expertise to a company that had had nothing to do with games. The core of the newsroom was made up of former Igromania staff — people the gaming press had trained for ten years went to Komitet for the price of a single job offer.

In the same year, 2016, Komitet bought the largest unofficial Steam group on VKontakte and renamed it the DTF group. Tsyplukhin later admitted: mass unsubscribes, a sharply negative reaction. A significant part of the audience stayed all the same. Cheap and crude — but it works.

By December 2017 DTF had passed a million visitors a month. In 2017 user publishing was opened — the audience began creating the content. By 2019–2020 — around three million. In parallel, VC.ru grew as a platform for a business audience: startups, marketing, technology. Three publications under one roof, three audiences, one technology. In 2020 the video service Coub came under Komitet's control. In June 2021 the Bukhman brothers of Playrix and Leviev's LVL1 fund put another $2 million into Komitet to develop the content platform. In March 2025 Leviev became the owner of 51.57% of the company, and in 2026 that stake was transferred to Dubai-based KMTT Advisers FZCO.

The architecture that lowered costs also concentrated risk. When Komitet's ad revenue collapsed after February 2022, all three projects were hit. TJ, blocked by Roskomnadzor on March 14, 2022, saw its audience fall fivefold and had 'been operating at a loss for several years'. The board calculated that costs had to be cut by 30–40%. Triage logic — as in a field hospital. Who gets saved, who doesn't.

TJ was shut down on September 10, 2022. Eleven years and two months. DTF was cut: deputy editor Oleg Chimde was let go, along with regular authors and some of the developers. VC.ru held — a business audience monetizes better than a gaming or news one. According to the platform itself, by 2025 VC.ru had grown to 14 million visitors a month, 85% of traffic from search. A platform built for three publications now serves one and a half.

'We believed that against the scorched field of Russian-language media we were doing something important,' the TJ newsroom wrote in its farewell post. An accurate way to put it. They really were doing something important. The economic model just didn't notice.

DTF in 2026 draws six million visitors and runs mostly on user content. VC.ru — 14 million, a Pro subscription, a working ad sales team. The gap between them isn't about audience. It's that the business publication turned out to be closer to money than the gaming one. Komitet didn't fail. It triaged and chose whom to feed. TJ ended up at the back of the line. DTF — in the middle. VC.ru — at the front. One platform, three fates. Shared infrastructure protected no one — it only determined the order in which the lights go out.

That's how much a Russian gamer is willing to pay for digital media per month. You can't build a newsroom on that amount. A side gig — yes.

The number 129 appears twice, independently. A DTF Plus subscription costs 129 rubles a month, with the first month for one ruble. The average paid subscription on Boosty, home to gaming Telegram channel authors among others, was also 129 rubles in 2022. Two platforms, two different products, the same price point. That's not a coincidence. It's a ceiling — the most the audience is willing to give for content about games, regularly and voluntarily.

DTF Plus is not a content paywall. Articles and posts stay open. The subscription gives functional perks: editing comments, audio versions of posts, an extended profile. Essentially — a donation with privileges. Boosty works differently: authors offer exclusive content, private chats, early access. The model is closer to Patreon — you pay for what isn't publicly available. Both platforms arrived at the same price.

Boosty launched in May 2019 as a Mail.ru Group project built on the DonationAlerts team. In 2024 the assets passed to Cypriot entrepreneur Pavel Kharaneka. In 2022 alone, creator sign-ups on the service grew tenfold. The growth accelerated when international payment systems were cut off in March 2022: Patreon became unavailable for Russian cards, and no alternatives remained. In March alone, sign-ups were four times higher than in February. Over 2022 as a whole, the average donation rose from 450 to 1,920 rubles.

Explosive growth in the number of creators doesn't mean explosive growth in income. Boosty has no feed, no search, no recommendation algorithm — the platform doesn't bring an audience. A creator arrives with their own subscribers or not at all. One blogger told Skillbox that over 18 months Boosty brought him 201,000 rubles — about 11,000 a month, 4–5% of his total income. A nano-influencer with three thousand Telegram subscribers, according to Wowblogger, can count on 10,000–30,000 rubles. To reach the median salary — around 70,000–80,000 — you need roughly six hundred paying subscribers at 129 rubles. For a niche gaming channel, that's a ceiling only a handful ever reach.

Boosty isn't the only source. Many creators sell sponsored posts in their Telegram channels. According to Magnetto.pro, a placement in a channel with 5,000–20,000 subscribers costs 5,000 to 40,000 rubles per post. For a gaming channel with ten thousand, a realistic range is 5,000–15,000. Two to four sponsored posts a month — 10,000–60,000 rubles. The average price of a sponsored post in large Telegram channels rose 38% in 2024. The money is there. The dependence is the same: advertisers in the gaming segment are the same few companies that bought magazine pages ten years ago. When the release season disappears, so do the ads.

Game World Navigator — the only gaming magazine that formally survived the whole era — found a separate model. On Sponsr the subscription costs 500 rubles a month — almost four times the Boosty average. For that money the subscriber gets not digital content but a physical magazine delivered anywhere in Russia. It isn't a subscription to an author — it's crowdfunding for a specific product. A model that works for a loyal core of a few hundred people. It can't be scaled, but it's also hard to kill. Navigator also opened a Boosty page after YouTube switched off monetization: 'YouTube monetization — well, they cut it off.' Two crowdfunding campaigns, YouTube with no income, two or three issues a year. Survival, not a business.

In the West the same model works at a different scale. By March 2025 Substack had five million paid subscriptions. The minimum price is $5 a month, not 129 rubles. Fifty writers earn more than a million dollars a year. Former Kotaku journalists launched the independent, subscription-funded site Aftermath. Patrick Klepek, from the shuttered Waypoint, runs the Crossplay newsletter. The former Escapist team built Second Wind on Patreon. Former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo publishes Game File — one of the most prominent gaming newsletters in the world.

The difference isn't the model. The model is the same: the reader pays the author directly. The difference is arithmetic. A thousand subscribers at $5 — $5,000 a month. A thousand subscribers at 129 rubles — 129,000 rubles, or about $1,300. And gathering a thousand paying readers in a niche Russian-language gaming segment is harder than in an English-language one. Substack has built-in discovery, recommendations, a network. Boosty has nothing. The creator is alone with the audience they brought themselves.

For scale — the upper bound of Boosty as a whole, not just gaming. The DzhoShiza team, which dubs the English-language podcast Trash Taste into Russian, told Partnerkin: 420,000 rubles a month. Six translators, an editor, a video editor, voice actors. 'At the end of the day it's quite enough for me to live on,' the author admits, 'but it's not a sky-high sum.' Four hundred and twenty thousand for a team of ten — and that's one of the platform's most successful projects. Not one author with opinions but a mini-studio with a production pipeline. Gaming media are far from such sums.

129 rubles is neither a verdict nor a failure. It's a fact about the market. The Russian audience plays, reads, watches — and is willing to pay exactly as much as one cappuccino at Vkusno i Tochka, the chain that replaced McDonald's. You can't build a media business on that. You can sustain a creator project as side income to a day job. A profession that spent fifteen years looking for a sustainable business model ultimately found the only thing that works: not a model, but a hobby. With monetization. For 129 rubles.

Dmitry Agarunov built a media empire of more than twenty titles on $700 of seed money. Then he closed everything except one — and that one turned out not to be about games. But he found the business model the gaming press had been looking for for fifteen years.

Agarunov was born in Yaroslavl, in the Bragino district. He started his first business in the early nineties with $700 of starting capital: he bought a batch of Chinese game consoles and began selling them on Novy Arbat, one of Moscow's main streets. One store became a chain. As long as consoles weren't modded and pirated discs hadn't flooded the street stalls, Gameland sold licensed goods and did well.

By 1998 piracy had killed retail. 'Until 1998 I managed to get by thanks to new consoles coming out and the expensive games for them. And then suddenly it became possible to pirate absolutely everything,' Agarunov recalled. That's when he switched to magazines. Strana Igr, conceived as an ad for the store, unexpectedly took on a life of its own: the print run grew from five to 80,000 copies, bringing in $25,000–30,000 a month. Then came Official PlayStation Magazine Russia, then Hacker. Within a few years Gameland swelled to more than twenty titles: from gaming magazines to Total Football, Car Tuning, Your Own Business and I Cross-Stitch. Plus the cable channels Gameland TV and MANTV. In 2007 Agarunov was named Media Manager of Russia in the print category.

The empire stood on two legs: print runs and advertising. When both gave way, everything collapsed. Ad revenue kept falling. Print distribution kept shrinking — newsstands were closing at a rate of more than a thousand a year on average. In 2012 Gameland moved its staff onto 'grey freelance' contracts to cut costs. In 2013 the company wound down its entire magazine lineup. By autumn Strana Igr — the magazine where it all began — had closed. Of more than twenty titles, only Hacker survived.

In parallel, Gameland tried to move online. In 2012 Agarunov bought an IGN license — the brand's second attempt to gain a foothold in Russia after an unsuccessful partnership with Kanobu. IGN Russia went live in 2013 and quietly lasted as a website until 2022 — longer than any of Gameland's magazines.

Then something happened that nobody expected — including the staff themselves. Agarunov decided to try a model that had never once worked in gaming media: a paywall. Instead of print issues — a paid subscription to Xakep.ru articles. 'Hacker would have closed for good if Dima Agarunov hadn't decided to take the risk,' the editors wrote on Habr. 'No one in the newsroom even hoped that we could cover the cost of producing articles through subscriptions. We were very happy to be wrong.'

The subscription worked. Xakep.ru became the largest Russian-language cybersecurity resource and one of the largest in the world. An English-language HackMag.com appeared. Print special editions of Hacker keep coming out — as a collector's product, not as a business. In 2024 the magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary. The model the gaming press couldn't find for fifteen years — paid content for an audience able to pay — was found. In the neighboring niche. Cybersecurity specialists are willing to pay for expertise. Gamers are not.

In summer 2026 a revised edition of Agarunov's book Business in the Style of Zh went on sale. The first version sold 3,000 print and 7,000 electronic copies. The book is about Gameland, about the crises of 1998, 2008, 2014 and 2022, about launches and closures. The man who started with seven hundred dollars and a batch of Chinese consoles now sells the story of how it was all built and how it all fell apart.

From a store on Novy Arbat — to twenty magazines. From twenty magazines — to one. From one — to a paywall that works. Gameland didn't find a sustainable model for the gaming press. Gameland found a sustainable model — and it turned out to lie outside games. An audience willing to pay for text exists. It just reads about cybersecurity, not games.

StopGame is the only Russian gaming portal that survived the entire fifteen-year cycle without a change of owner, without an acquisition and without a sale. Its resilience is not a recipe for success. It's a story about what it didn't do.

In 1999 Rinat Ospanov, a schoolboy from Pavlodar, set up a site on the domain fantasy.pavlodar.kz. A repository of cheat codes, cracks, no-CD patches. In 2001 he registered stopgame.ru — the name meant that with cheats the game 'stops'. Until June 2005 the site didn't have a single review. It did have a pirated-disc store, a dating site, porn Flash games and tabloid ads. 'Personally, I tried almost every direction of monetization on StopGame — gaming, entertainment and ones of the diametrically opposite kind,' Ospanov admitted.

By the end of the 2000s the site had been reborn. The pirated files were removed and the old team was disbanded. New people arrived — former writers from the LKI magazine and the PlayGround portal. Maxim Kulakov became editor-in-chief — the voice of the YouTube channel, creator of SGTV and IgroZor, the man who set StopGame's tone for the next decade. The site became one of the first Russian portals with regular streams. The YouTube channel produced documentary series about games.

The formula turned out to be simple: website + YouTube + streams. Three platforms, none of them owned by a holding. No Rambler to cut off the traffic. No Leviev to decide whom to feed and whom not to. No Isupov to sell the brand. The StopGame trademark is registered to Ospanov. One owner — from 1999 to this day.

That doesn't mean the road was smooth. In February 2022 translator Maxim Solodilov left StopGame — eleven years on the team, a disagreement with editor-in-chief Dmitry Kungurov. Kungurov called it his 'big failure as an editor-in-chief'. In August 2022 Kungurov himself left — voluntarily, after five years in the job: 'Under me authors left and came, and regardless of the reasons and context it was something incredibly hard, like losing part of your family.' In the three years after him there were three editors-in-chief: Gennady Vorobyov (who admitted that 'being editor-in-chief isn't for me'), Maxim Milyazev and, since June 2025, Ivan Loev.

Dmitry Burdukov — Flynn, author of the 'History of the Series' episodes on Unreal and Dead Space and one of the portal's more prominent voices — quietly stepped away. For about two years he took no part in StopGame's life and was moved to 'former authors'. Now he runs his own YouTube channel and Boosty: 'I'm Dmitry Burdukov, and I talk about games. At length, a lot, mostly personally.'

On December 1, 2025, the most notable departure happened. Vasily Galperov — 15 years at StopGame, one of the portal's main writers and voices, host of 'Razbor Polyotov' and creator of 'The History of the Silent Hill Series' — announced he was leaving at the end of the show's final episode. His co-host Semyon Okorokov left with him. Both moved to Ruler, a studio that produces trailers and cutscenes for games. The studio was founded by Dmitry Kungurov — the same former StopGame editor-in-chief. Galperov had already worked on Pathologic 3; his name is in the demo's credits. The staffing loop closed: the former editor-in-chief left media for gamedev, and three years later took with him a key writer of the publication he had once led.

'Besides Loev, there's no one left there,' commenters wrote on EntHub. An exaggeration. But the direction is right: by 2026 most of the old writing team had dispersed — some to their own YouTube channels, some to gamedev, some to other industries. The same route as the writers of Igromania, DTF and everyone else. StopGame didn't avoid the staff migration. It survived it.

Today StopGame draws about two million visitors a month. Not VC.ru's fourteen million. Not DTF's six million. Two. For a gaming portal that doesn't belong to a holding and isn't built on UGC, that's a sustainable result. StopGame has Boosty, sponsored placements, YouTube. None of these sources alone fully feeds the newsroom. Together — it's enough.

StopGame didn't find a magic formula. It found something more valuable — no dependence on a single source. When Rambler cut off Kanobu's traffic, the portal collapsed. When Komitet's ad revenue crashed, TJ was shut down and DTF was cut. When StopGame's editor-in-chief left, the next one came. When a key writer left, the brand remained. Not because StopGame did something special. But because it didn't do what killed the others: it didn't sell itself to a holding, didn't depend on a single advertiser, didn't bet everything on one platform. Twenty-five years. One owner. Five editors-in-chief. And a site that still stands.

The West has the same ruins, just more expensive. G/O Media sold off 12 publications, GameStop shut down Game Informer, announcing it on social media before some of its own staff knew, and Ziff Davis is cutting IGN right now. Russia is not unique. It went through the same cycle faster.

Kotaku launched in October 2004 as part of the Gawker Media empire. In twenty-one years — four owners. Gawker. Univision. G/O Media. Keleops. Every change of hands came with cuts. On July 2, 2025, Kotaku was bought by Switzerland's Keleops — the price wasn't disclosed, and the staff were promised to be kept. A publication that for two decades had set the tone of English-language games journalism changed owners for the fourth time.

Kotaku was the second-to-last sale in the break-up of G/O Media. The company, assembled in 2019 by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners from the remains of Gawker Media and The Onion — for, by media estimates, less than $50 million — began selling off in 2023 and in two and a half years got rid of twelve publications. Lifehacker went to Ziff Davis. Jezebel — to Paste Media. Deadspin was sold to Malta-based Lineup Publishing, with its staff laid off as part of the deal. The Onion, The A.V. Club, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Quartz — went to various buyers. After Kotaku, G/O Media had a single publication left — The Root. A media company whose name stood for Gizmodo + Onion had sold both Gizmodo and The Onion.

In August 2024 GameStop shut down Game Informer — America's longest-running gaming magazine, 33 years in print. Everyone was called to a meeting with the vice president of HR and told they were laid off, effective immediately; one person learned the news while on a work trip. Part of the team learned of the closure after the company had already announced it on social media: 'There are still people on staff who don't know what's happening,' wrote the magazine's video lead Alex Van Aken. Issue 367, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard on the cover, was the last.

In March 2025 Game Informer came back. The rights were bought by Gunzilla Games — a German-Ukrainian studio known for the blockchain shooter Off The Grid. The entire original team reunited. Print resumed in June 2025. Editor-in-chief Matt Miller declared editorial independence. Journalism saved by a blockchain studio — a plot any editor would cut from a script.

Ziff Davis is the largest remaining player. It owns IGN and Humble Bundle, and in 2024 it bought ReedPop's Gamer Network: Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, GamesIndustry.biz. Since then it has cut their staff wave after wave. Digital Foundry — the legendary technical team that had worked with Eurogamer since 2007 — bought back its own independence and left. In September 2026 — another round of cuts at IGN: hosts Seth Macy and Brian Altano, who had worked at the site for years, were let go. The IGN Creators Guild union issued a statement: 'With each successive layoff, core parts of IGN's operation continue to be stripped away.' A paper by Ryan Stanton and Mark Johnson on the state of the profession, published in the journal Games and Culture in 2024, is titled 'You Can't Work for Somebody Who Doesn't Exist'.

Former journalists are going solo. The Kotaku team launched the independent subscription site Aftermath. Patrick Klepek, from the shuttered Vice/Waypoint, runs the Crossplay newsletter. The former Escapist team built Second Wind on Patreon. Former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo publishes Game File. In the West the subscription model works: by March 2025 Substack had five million paid subscriptions, and fifty writers earn more than a million dollars a year. The infrastructure is different. The result for institutions is the same: newsrooms close, writers disperse.

Shannon Liao, a former journalist at the Washington Post's Launcher (closed in January 2023), put it more precisely than anyone: 'That dream job in games journalism just doesn't exist anymore.' Her words echo the title of the academic paper: 'You Can't Work for Somebody Who Doesn't Exist.' You can't work for someone who is no longer there.

Russia and the West took different roads to the same place. In Russia the advertising model collapsed because of sanctions and the departure of Western publishers. In the West — because of falling digital ad revenue and attention flowing to YouTube and TikTok. Russia had no unions, no severance packages and no Substack. The West had all of that — and it didn't help. Game Informer closed after 33 years and came back under the wing of a blockchain studio. Strana Igr closed after 17 — and didn't come back. Kotaku and Kanobu each went through three changes of owner. IGN is being cut, Igromania was sold. The numbers differ. The pattern is the same.

Three owners of Rambler in fourteen years — Potanin, Mamut, Sberbank. For each of them a gaming portal was a line in a portfolio. Kanobu's fate was decided by people who had no time for games.

In 2006 Interros, the holding of Vladimir Potanin — one of Russia's richest men — acquired Rambler through ProfMedia. The portfolio included TV channels, cinemas and radio stations. The gaming portal that Gadzhi Makhtiev launched a year later as a social network for gamers ended up in this infrastructure by inertia: Rambler was buying up traffic, Kanobu was generating traffic. The alliance was arithmetical, not strategic.

By 2013 Potanin had cooled on the media business. The TV channels were sold to Gazprom-Media, and the internet assets were merged with the empire of Alexander Mamut — owner of SUP Media (LiveJournal, Gazeta.ru, Championat). The deal created Rambler & Co: Potanin (worth $14.3 billion according to Forbes) and Mamut ($2.3 billion) each got 50%, with Mamut as the managing shareholder. The portfolio — dozens of products. Kanobu — a row in a spreadsheet between LiveJournal and Gazeta.ru.

Mamut appointed Pyotr Zakharov as CEO. It was this appointment that became the breaking point. 'The decision that we would part ways was effectively made back in 2013 — almost immediately after Zakharov was appointed CEO of the holding,' Makhtiev told Vedomosti. He didn't disclose the details of the disagreement. Zakharov lasted less than a year — in spring 2014 Mamut personally took charge of the company, and Zakharov left. By then the conflict with Kanobu had already gone too far.

In February 2015 Rambler cut Kanobu off from its traffic distribution. 'They might as well have shut off the water and the electricity,' Makhtiev commented on Roem.ru. The portal's revenue, which on Rambler's infrastructure had grown from a few tens of millions to a hundred million rubles a year, was left without a traffic source. Rafael Abramyan, executive director of Rambler & Co, insisted that 'there was no conflict between top managers and Makhtiev'. A phrasing that traditionally means the opposite.

By December 2015 the divorce was formalized. Makhtiev took the media business — the sites, the trademark, the newsroom. Rambler kept the services. There were attempts to find an outside investor: 'Although there were interested investors, for various reasons the sale didn't happen,' Makhtiev said. Abramyan confirmed there had been 'pronounced' interest from 'a major player'. The deal didn't come together.

Rambler itself then went through two more changes of ownership. In January 2017 Mamut bought out Potanin's stake — according to Vedomosti, for $295 million — and became the sole owner. In August 2019 Sberbank entered Rambler Group's capital, investing 11 billion rubles for 46.5% of the company. In October 2020 Sberbank consolidated 100%, buying Mamut's remaining 45%. The new CEO was Tatyana Dobrokhvalova — a Sber senior vice president who had come there from Gazprom-Media.

Meanwhile, even bigger money was entering Russian gaming — bypassing journalism. In 2015 Alisher Usmanov's USM Holdings invested $100 million in the esports holding Virtus.pro. In January 2018 Mail.ru Group bought ESforce — the holding that grew out of Virtus.pro — for $100 million net of debt plus a possible earn-out of about $20 million. The listed sellers were Anton Cherepennikov and the Highland Falls Investment fund, while Usmanov was a shareholder of Mail.ru Group itself, which ran My.Games — Russia's largest game publisher. Usmanov was one of the industry's biggest private investors. Not a single ruble of that money reached the gaming press.

Kanobu, meanwhile, went through its own chain of owners. In 2009 the Kite Ventures fund invested in the project at the seed stage. In 2011 Rambler bought a controlling stake from it — according to Gazeta.ru's sources, for $4.5 million. After the divorce at the end of 2015, Makhtiev himself became the sole owner. In 2019 he bought Igromania, bringing the two publications under one management. In 2025 both assets passed to IFSI, owned by Vasily Ovchinnikov. Four ownership configurations in sixteen years: Kite Ventures → Rambler (Potanin/Mamut) → Makhtiev → IFSI.

Potanin made his money in nickel. Mamut — in banking and LiveJournal. Usmanov — in metals and telecoms. Sberbank — in everything. For each of them a gaming portal was a rounding error in the portfolio. The decisions that determined Kanobu's fate — cutting off traffic, turning down investment, the sale — were made by people who couldn't tell Dota from FIFA. And that is perhaps the main diagnosis of Russian gaming journalism: it always depended on money that didn't care about it.