Cyprus is home to hundreds of gaming companies generating billions in revenue, yet one of its fastest-growing industries remains largely invisible to the wider public. The island has attracted international players and major investment, but can it turn this growing presence into a globally recognised gaming hub – one that creates opportunities, nurtures local talent and builds careers?
We put these questions to Vladimir Nikolsky, CEO of Utmost Games, a gaming industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience. Having founded IT Territory and MY.GAMES, the company behind global hits such as War Robots and Rush Royale, Nikolsky now runs his investment business from Cyprus.
In this interview, he discusses the island’s untapped potential, the challenges facing the sector and why its future should be measured not just by the number of companies it attracts, but by the teams it helps grow and the people who build their careers here.
Cyprus has attracted gaming companies and executives, yet the sector remains largely absent from public discussion. What is preventing the island from turning this concentration of businesses into a recognisable global gaming hub?
Cyprus has already solved the harder problem. About 415 game companies are based here, and they earned more than €3.2 billion in 2025, according to the Cyprus Game Makers Association. Building a games business on the island is easier than in most of Europe. What is missing is a story that people outside those companies can hear.
Games from Cyprus-based companies were downloaded 615 million times on mobile in 2025, yet almost none of those players know where the games were made. Part of it is the companies themselves. Many moved here quietly, and their press releases cover launches and metrics but rarely mention where the work happens. When there is no story, others fill the gap, and Cyprus ends up described as a convenient tax address rather than a place where games are made.
Developers, investors and graduates want to join an industry they can see and hear about. Visibility is what turns a concentration of companies into a hub.
Beyond company registrations and headline revenue figures, what does the gaming industry contribute to Cyprus in terms of jobs, investment, skills and economic diversification?
The most important contribution is the ability to create products locally and sell them globally. A successful games business brings together software engineering, art, design, analytics, marketing and commercial expertise. These are skills that can support a broader technology economy, not just one industry.
Top App Games is a useful example. It generated $29 million in gross turnover in the first half of 2026. That makes its flagship title, Ludus: Merge Arena, the fastest-growing new title developed in Cyprus and illustrates the international scale a Cyprus-based developer can reach. It should not, however, be confused with a measure of its direct contribution to the Cypriot economy.
For Cyprus, the longer-term opportunity lies in the teams, knowledge and businesses that remain after an individual release. The industry’s contribution should therefore be assessed through local employment, training, spending and reinvestment, alongside revenue. The more development and decision-making happens on the island, the deeper that contribution becomes.
What would Cyprus need to change to compete with established gaming centres when it comes to attracting studios, investors and experienced developers?
Cyprus is often seen as an easy entry point: register a company, rent an office in Limassol and benefit from the tax regime. That image undersells what has actually been built here. Wargaming has run World of Tanks from Nicosia since 2011. Nexters grew Hero Wars past 185 million installs from Limassol and listed on Nasdaq. Easybrain, the team behind Sudoku.com, was acquired by Miniclip for $1.2 billion. These companies came for predictable conditions: EU membership, a legal system based on English law that investors and buyers understand, and an IP regime that taxes qualifying profits at around 3%.
Studios, then, are already here. Competing with established centres means attracting the next layer: senior developers and early-stage investors. Their decisions depend on different things.
An experienced developer chooses a career as well as a job. They want to know that if this studio closes or stops growing, there are other strong teams nearby. They also look at practical things: how quickly a non-EU specialist can get a work permit, whether there are school places for their children, and what housing costs. Cyprus is still too small for many people to see that depth. Faster permits and better support for families who relocate would make the decision easier.
Investors need a pipeline. Germany and the UK fund game development directly, and Cyprus has no comparable programme. Mature companies can do without it, but a small team with a prototype often can’t. A co-investment scheme, where public money matches private investment, would bring more early-stage teams to the island and give investors a reason to look here first.
Studios came for the rules. Experienced people and investors will come once they see enough teams and capital to commit for the long term.
Which parts of the gaming industry offer the most interesting opportunities for investment today, and what makes those opportunities attractive despite the sector’s risks?
I see the most interesting opportunities in studios that make games, not in the tools around them. The most risk in games comes from the team rather than the market, and that risk can be managed. I back teams that have already shipped and marketed a game, know their own economics and test with real players early. I invest in stages: a smaller cheque for a prototype, then more once the numbers back it up. And I help with publishing, user acquisition and hiring, so the team spends its time on the game.
Don’t forget about a talent that nobody is using yet. According to CYGMA, only 10 to 40 of the island’s 12,000 to 14,000 annual graduates are ready to join a studio, because universities offer almost no game development training. For an investor, that is an untapped resource rather than a shortage. A studio that runs internships and trains its own juniors grows its team faster than one competing for the same few senior hires. When I look at a team, I ask whether it can develop its own people.
Where do you expect the gaming industry to be five years from now, and what role could Cyprus realistically play in that future?
I would be careful about predicting which genres or platforms will dominate five years from now. In our industry, five years is enough for assumptions that look obvious today to become very much outdated. But I do expect one distinction to become more important: with accelerated production, making a game and building a sustainable business around it will not be the same thing.
It’s true that new development tools, including AI, will make it easier for smaller teams to turn ideas into playable games, fast. However, they will not automatically solve harder problems: earning players attention, keeping players trust, and building a sustainable business that can fund the next project. When more people can make games, good judgement about what to build and how to bring it to market becomes even more valuable.
Cyprus does not need to become the largest gaming center on the map to have an important role in the future. What it could become is a place where experienced founders, developers, publishers and investors build international gaming businesses without worrying too much about complicated bureaucracy or extreme cost of living. For a small country like Cyprus, a realistic ambition will be to offer world-class expertise and connections, rather than the sheer size of the workforce.
Taking all this into account, in five years, the end result should not simply be how many gaming companies are registered here, but how many new teams have grown here, how many people have built careers in the industry here. That would make Cyprus an ever larger and more important gaming hub than it is today.
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