10 Questions: Natalia Matveeva, EO Russia

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Staff

EO Global

Natalia Matveeva, EO Russia
Head of Business Development, Relore Studios
EO member since 2010

A passionate EO member, Natalia has been developing, publishing and distributing casual and mobile games since 2002. Her company has published more than 60 titles on numerous portals, including Yahoo! Games and AOL.

• Do you have a nickname?
  “My nickname is ‘Dolerona.’ I came up with it myself, and it stuck. It’s named after a French island: Ile D’Oleron.”

• How would you describe Russia’s business landscape?
  “Opportunistic. Fun. Risky. You wake up in the morning and don’t know what new administrative, bureaucratic or legal obstacle/opportunity the Russian government has come up with this time.”

• What excites you the most about entrepreneurship?
  “The ability to make my dreams come true and the feeling that everything—literally everything—is possible if I simply commit to it.”

• What scares you the most about entrepreneurship?
  “That I’m taking too much risk sometimes, although nothing else brings as much adrenaline and fun than my entrepreneurial adventures.”

• What was the last concert you attended?
  “It was of a yet-unknown Russian artist who reads his short stories as songs, which are accompanied by violin improvisations.”

• When did you know you had “made it” as an entrepreneur?
  “When I was 12 years old, and I earned more money in two weekends than my father earned in a single month.”

• What would people be surprised to learn about the online gaming industry?
  “Most online games are free to play, but have in-app purchases (things you can buy within a game). Only about two to 10 percent of all players pay; however, some of them are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to simply place a picture in a game. In 2012, US$13 billion dollars was spent in massive online multi-player games.”

• What’s the most popular game you’ve created so far?
  “The one that’s in development, as I’m confident it will be a huge success. In terms of those that have already been released, it would be ‘Roads of Rome.’ The game and its sequels generate about two million downloads a month from different online and mobile platforms.”

• What’s your biggest strength and weakness as an Entrepreneur?
  “Awfully disorganized and amazingly creative is the most accurate description of me.”

• If money weren’t an object, what’s the first thing you would buy?
  “Happiness for one billion people … but no amount of money can buy happiness, unfortunately.”