The billionaire founders of Playrix, which has thousands of employees in both Russia and Ukraine, say they are “literally between two fires.”
As war rages in Ukraine, an internal battle is unfolding at the Russian gaming giant Playrix. Ukrainian employees at the mobile game developer, which is the second largest in the world by revenues—and known for free mobile game apps like Homescapes and Fishdom—say they were shocked earlier this week when their posts about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the workplace communication platform Slack suddenly started to disappear. “In the chat, someone asked how we could help our colleagues from Ukraine,” one Playrix employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Forbes. But the responses that rolled in quickly vanished one-by-one; the company was removing them. “All messages on the topic were deleted, including mine,” the employee said. “I was recording a video of it all. I couldn’t believe it was happening.” A producer with Playrix who was born and raised in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, a recent target of Russian air-strikes, said he was “shaking with anger” as he watched the posts disappear in real-time. He could understand why the company would want to limit testy political discussion, “But it’s one thing when it’s a political opinion, quite another when it’s a war,” said the producer, who also asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions. “They were shutting our mouths.” The employee quit in protest; his last day was Friday. Playrix’s moderation of its employees’ war-related discussions was first reported on Thursday by Forbes Ukraine, an independent, licensed edition of Forbes. Later that night, Playrix’s founders–the billionaire brothers Igor and Dmitry Bukhman (worth $8.1 billion apiece, according to Forbes’ estimates)—told workers that they’d made the decision to shut down some of the company’s mass channels on Slack. Playrix is in a “very difficult situation,” the brothers wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by Forbes (and translated from Russian). “We are literally between two fires. It’s difficult for us to make decisions but we must do it.” Igor Bukhman, who moved from Israel to London with his brother two years ago, said Playrix purging certain messages from the Slack channels was not political. “We have never censored and will never censor the expressions of opinions or the creation of any channels to discuss these opinions,” Bukhman told Forbes. “The only thing we’re asking of our employees during this crisis is that they keep our few official work channels solely for business communication.” He confirmed that Playrix went on to shutter these channels altogether, a decision he said was caused by increasingly frequent “outbursts of uncontrolled hatred between employees.
