GDEV increases stake in Zombie Miner developer Royal Ark to 57%

• Idle Zombie Miner hits 17minstalls and $23m revenue in H1 2025.
• Royal Ark, founded by veteran Leonid Sirotin, was built from the ground up by a seasoned team.
• Zombie Miner reimagines idle gaming with players acting as CEOs managing zombie workers.

Global games company GDEV has raised its stake in portfolio studio Royal Ark to 57% by exercising a previously agreed conversion option.

The move strengthens Gdev’s 2022 strategic partnership with the developer. The two companies jointly developed Idle Zombie Miner,a free-to-play mobile title that aims to reinvent idle gaming by letting players play as CEOs of gold-mining empires to manage zombie workers. 

Zombie Miner was soft-launched in early 2024 and has since reached over 17 million installs and generated about $23m in the first half of 2025.

Continuous growth 

“I'm incredibly proud of my team and grateful to our partners - together, we made the success of Zombie Miner possible. I’d like to give special thanks to Royal Ark’s game director Andrey Garbuzov and lead producer Evgeny Serpokrylov, as well as to Andrey Fadeev, CEO of Gdev, and Anton Reinhold, CEO of Nexters. 

“And of course, a heartfelt thank you to our players - everything we do at Royal Ark is for you, and we’ll keep working hard to deliver even more”