Founder of Wargaming.net became a dollar billionaire

The first billionaire appeared in Belarus . It's nice that this is not some kind of oligarch, but the 39-year-old programmer Viktor Kisly, the founder of Wargaming.net, the developer of the shareware game World of Tanks . Bloomberg put him on the list of billionaires , evaluating his fortune at $ 1 billion, based on an estimate of the business registered in Cyprus at $ 1.5 billion and Victor's share of 64%. According to Bloomberg, last year Wargaming.net raised $ 590 million from the sale of premium accounts and others.

Twenty years ago, avid gamer Viktor Kisly and his brother started developing their parents in their apartment in Minsk. Now the hobby has turned into a huge subculture of 150 million players around the world.

World of Tanks is not just a game, but a real tank encyclopedia with 400 models of real tanks of the 20th century from the German Panther and the Soviet T-34 to the American Sherman and the British Cromwell. The game immediately became a hit in Russia after the release of the PC version in 2010.

In 2013, World of Tanks was added to the Guinness Book of Records for the largest number of gamers simultaneously connected to one server: 190,541. This is also the most popular game in the world where players control the mechanism, rather than a live character.

Wargaming.net has 4,000 employees on four continents, but the company is constantly recruiting new staff. It is understandable: the business is growing rapidly, as is the entire market for free online games. In 2014, a version of World of Tanks Blitz was released for smartphones and tablets. The Chicago-based company Day 1 Studios was purchased to develop versions for the Xbox and PS4.

World of Warships and World of Warplanes PC games have also been released. Now the company is actively exploring the large Chinese market, so the number of users can grow several times. True, in China, League of Legends holds the strongest position among MMOGs.

Now Viktor Kisloi has dual citizenship of Belarus and Cyprus. Perhaps he spends most of his time in Cyprus.