PC games publishers need ways to maximise revenue and reach new audiences. With this in mind, we sat down with Vadim Andreev, co-founder and CEO of Rokky, at PG Connects San Francisco last month, and quizzed him about his new platform. 

Rokky is a new distribution platform that connects game publishers with thousands of digital storefronts around the world, with particularly strong presence outside of Europe. The self-funded business now has a team of about 60 people (grown from five people in 2009) with a head office in the UK but outposts in the Netherlands, Eastern Europe and China. 

The company provides technical infrastructure and consultancy services. Our conversation covers several key topics, including alternative distribution channels beyond the frontrunners Steam and Epic; the opportunity to reach untapped markets, particularly in China and Asia; strategies for managing regional pricing and preventing grey market; and other practical insights into global distribution networks.

“In 2009, we started the business of digital distribution for different content. Not only games! We wanted to become like Amazon but for all digital content, games, music, software, antivirus protection, video services,” Andreev explains of his previous company, when asked about the background and ambitions. “Piracy was really high and there were download torrents. We started to change this by cooperating with telcos, with ISPs, developing marketplaces bundled with the telcos.”

From West to East

But then a few years later in America he saw Gaikai, and was impressed. “Cloud gaming – so you don't need to download anything,” he exclaims. “You can just play Assassin’s Creed on your mobile phone. So I went home and sent an email to ask if we could license the technology and sell it to the telcos.” It was this move that launched Playkey, “one of the biggest cloud gaming services in the whole world” – he eventually sold it, and it’s now part of VK Play Cloud.

But all this time, he’s also been thinking about digital distribution, and about those customers who don’t want to use Steam. Many gamers will search the internet looking for the best price of a game they want – they see it on Steam, but then try to find it promoted on other stores.

To serve this community, Rokky has two types of partnerships: with publishers and with stores.

“We get content from publishers, and that's our main client,” explains Andreev. “We deliver them revenue, we do business for them. On the other side, we have stores to sell their games. We connect stores with publishers. Publishers don't have enough resources to work with all of the stores, so they just have one connection with us, and we spread the games to all the partners.

Rokky can also advise publishers on other approaches to promoting and selling games, for instance in China, a market Western publishers can find hard to crack. It’s notoriously hard to promote a game in China. There are no Google ads, there’s a lot of regulation, and like most places in 2025, influencers are key – if you know how to contact them. “A new publisher doesn’t have the resources to go to China,” explains Andreev. “But we have our local partners. We have local marketing agencies in China. We have influencers there, and we can recommend them. We can advertise games in China, which they cannot do [without] a license from the Chinese government. China is a closed market. Most games will never get [an advertising] license. We can provide this because we know how this market works.”

Andreev’s advice for Chinese penetration? “Work with influencers. We work with bloggers, we work with social networks; China is very socialised country.”

Grey market challenge

Regardless of territory, there are issues that all publishers face. One of those is the grey market, as thrifty gamers look for loopholes and ambiguous bargains. 

“Cross border sales. The grey market is the arbitrage of keys, basically from one region to another,” muses Andreev. “That was an eye-opener for me, that it's not retailers that are the grey market; it’s a reseller or the person doing the arbitrage of keys.

“There are lots of situations when some resellers buy keys in bulk somewhere, just to sell it everywhere else. It's like when you go to Walmart and you see a TV costs $100 but on Amazon or eBay the same TV will cost you $500. Why? They were on the promotion, and some resellers bought lots and lots of TV stock just to resell it on eBay. Of course, the manufacturer loses money! This is the same situation. So we want to make this market transparent for the publisher.”

One way is to region-lock a key. And Andreev continues, “Then we recommend publishers work with local price points. For instance, the US is a rich country, but India is not rich. So each has different price points. But you cannot sell really cheap – sometimes you need to increase the price.

Otherwise, all of these cheap game keys will go through the border to richer countries, like the US, and the publisher will lose money. We want to fix that. We recommend the correct region-locked batches of keys to publishers, and sometimes we recommend that publishers increase the price for a specific currency (just a little bit).”

Beyond keys

Looking ahead for the next couple of years, what does Vadim Andreev think the landscape will look like for publishers and distributors? 

“I believe that we should transform the market from key-selling to some kind of silent key activations,” he suggests. “What is a key? You get 12-character code, and you have to copy that and put it into Steam and so on. You don't need that. We have such good technology and we believe that we should develop a solution of time key activation when you buy the game and you activate the game on Steam, Epic or wherever. We want to fix that, and remove all the keys and do silent key activation.”

You can hear more from Rokky’s CEO on our companion site PocketGamer.biz, where he recently contributed to a discussion feature about market saturation. The official Rokky website is rokky.com.

If you are interested in the China market, remember we are helping host PG Connects Summit Shanghai on Wednesday, 30th July. This one-day conference will serve as a gentle introduction to the Chinese market, welcoming 1,000 global games industry delegates to network and share knowledge.