Inside Social Games

Social networks in Russia and Eastern Europe have largely managed to fight off Facebook and as they’ve launched developer platforms, more social game companies have been trying to reach their users.

The latest one is called Drimmi, and the stealth company has just raised a round of funding from European venture firms including Luxembourg’s Mangrove Capital Partners and Russia’s ABRT Venture Fund. The amount is “several million” for minority stakes in the new company, according to the Quintura blog, which offers a few more new details on the market.

The largest game in Russia is Vesely Fermer (“Cheerful Farmer”), a virtual farming game made by a Yekaterinburg developer named i-Jet. The game is generating around $1 million a month on leading Russian social network VKontakte, the report says, and accounts for half of Russia’s overall social gaming revenue. Creating this sort of game costs less than $50,000, the report also says, and more than 3,000 developers in the region have started building social games. There are even Russian-language farming game fan sites popping up, from what we can tell, like this one and this one.

Note: We haven’t heard these numbers before or seen them elsewhere. While Russian social networks haven’t gotten a lot of attention from social game developers in other parts of the world, 6 Waves co-founder Rex Ng recently told us his company has observed considerable growth in the country and region, and may expand there in the future.

Drimmi was founded last September, according to the Quintura blog, by Nikita Sherman and Viktor Zakharchenko. Sherman, the chief executive, has some relevant experience, according to the report: He was previously chairman of school-focused network Odnoklassniki.ru, and CEO of Russian dating site Mambe, where he relevantly introduced micro-payments.

We haven’t heard of too many other Russian social gaming companies getting funding recently; one game developer that apparently did was Nival Network, which said it was closing a $5 million round last November.

Based in Moscow, Drimmi has 20 employees and will use the money to build and launch more games. “Until June 2010 it is planned to produce only 5 products,” according to this Google Translated press release. “Another 10 products planned for release by year’s end.”