Victor Kislyi

Victor Kislyi, a native of Belarus, is the founder, co-owner, and CEO of Wargaming.net holding.

30.04.1976

Victor Kislyi created his first online game in 1996. Based on chess, the game worked via email.

In 1998, Victor founded Game Stream and registered Wargaming. The first projects were DBA Online, Massive Assault (2003), Operation Bagration (2008), and Order of War (2009), but these company projects did not meet expectations.

In 2010, Wargaming launched the game World of Tanks. In January 2013, the game set a world record among all games of this genre: on this day one of the five servers of the cluster had 541 players. Now World of Tanks continues to be played by more than 150 million people.

Victor Kislyi managed to turn a startup consisting of five people into the largest developer of MMO games Wargaming. Wargaming has 18 international offices: in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The central one is located in Nicosia.

At the end of 2020, Wargaming Group sold mobile game developer Melsoft to the leader of the world game dev Israeli-holding Moon Active, Samuel Albin. According to expert estimates, the volume of the transaction could be from $500 million to $650 million.

Since 2012, Victor has lived in Nicosia (Cyprus). He is married and has a son.

In 2016, Bloomberg included Kislyi in its “billionaires index”, the total assets of Victor Kislyi are estimated at $1 billion.

Victor is fond of studying military history. He took part in buying out various rarities for the Mogilev History Museum. He is also a co-author of the initiative “We Remember Everything” (pomnimvse.org) –  a joint project with museums of armored vehicles. 

The businessman allocated $1 million from his funds to a British expedition in Myanmar to retrieve 20 World War II Supermarine Spitfire aircraft for a British museum.