Founder of Wargaming.net has become 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 Victor Sour, the founder of Wargaming.net, the developer of the shareware game World of Tanks . The Bloomberg publication made it to the list of billionaires , estimating a fortune of $ 1 billion, based on an estimate of a registered business in Cyprus of $ 1.5 billion and Viktor’s share of 64%. According to Bloomberg, last year Wargaming.net earned $ 590 million from the sale of premium accounts, etc.

Twenty years ago, avid gamer Viktor Kisly and his brother began working in their parents' apartment in Minsk. Now the hobby has become 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.
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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. It 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. This is understandable: the business is booming, as is the entire free online gaming market. In 2014, the World of Tanks Blitz version for smartphones and tablets was released. The Chicago firm Day 1 Studios was bought to develop versions for Xbox and PS4.

Also released are World of Warships and World of Warplanes for PC. Now the company is actively developing a large Chinese market, so that the number of users can grow several times. True, in China, the strongest MMOG positions are occupied by League of Legends.

Now Viktor Sour has dual citizenship of Belarus and Cyprus. He probably spends most of his time in Cyprus.