Online gaming and social gaming are the two biggest blocks of the gaming market in Russia. The market's overall worth has been growing by roughly $20M a year since 2008, reaching $250M in 2010. The 20-30% growth is expected to continue in the following years, estimates RIA Novosti. Between 3-5M people actively play online games, mostly MMORPG client and browser-based games. Even more people - between 10-15M - play social games on local social networks like Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. Large as they might seem, those numbers pale in comparison to the number of online gamers in Europe or US. Russia is lagging behind due to its slowly developing Internet connections (especially in the regions), forbidding price of unlimited data plans and undeveloped online payment systems. At the same time, all of those are changing to the better which is why online gaming market is set to grow to $400M in 2012. Other facilitators of growth include social networks' growing audience together with a growing number of successful online games.

As the number of users grow so do profits of game developers and social networks. However, MMORPG games seem to be more profitable than games on social networks. Average monthly revenue per user in social games is a mere $0,50 while in massive multi-player online role-playing games that number is close to $7 a month. On top of that, developers of online games for social networks have to share between 30-50% of their profits with the said networks. Still there is a great number of game developers who prefer that path.

Social networks' biggest advantage is the number of their users - an estimated 60M. It costs between $30,000-50,000 to develop a game for a social network in Russia, reports The Moscow Times. Almost as much is then spent on servers and advertising, which makes the overall cost close to $100,000. Take the most popular social game today on Vkontakte -  'Slammer'. Out of the social network's 23M-strong audience, more than 5,5M users actively played the game since mid-November. An average of 3% of users pay for the online goods, which means that the overall profit of that particular game so far is close to $330,000.

Nevertheless, social networks are the real winners in that equation. Their audience is big and growing: 28,5M Russians between 12-54 years use social networks at least once a month, 17,9M use them at least once a day. Games are the most popular applications on social networks, which means that a substantially large audience can be quickly mobilized to play a well-promoted game. This makes it very attractive for game developers, whose number has also been growing. As a result, Russian social networks are said to be earning $10,000 a day just from the social games.

Due to the large selection and changing tastes, few social games become truly successful. But if you think that Russian social gaming market is tough you'd need to remember that the competition is even harder in the MMORPG segment of online games. 70% of the market is controlled by Astrum Online Entertainment (part of Mail.ru Group) and local game developing giants like Blizzard Entertainment and Innova Group control another 20% of the market. It's not all fun and games in the Russian online gaming market!

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