Five months of solo development. A launch on a single web platform. Daily revenue roughly equal to the price of one cup of coffee. At that point, Denis Fomenko, the developer behind BMG: Ragdoll Car Race, was seriously considering leaving game development for another industry.
Instead, he gave it one more try — this time with a publisher — and chose Playgama. Within two months of release on YouTube Playables, the game had surpassed 10 million gameplays and its revenue had grown twentyfold. Here’s how that happened.
Crimson Games: a solo developer learning by trial and errorÂ
Crimson Games is a one-person studio. Its founder, Denis Fomenko, first tried his hand at development at the age of 12, when he put together his first project in Unity. What began as a hobby gradually turned into a career. His early releases on PC and mobile never found commercial success, but they gave him his grounding in game development.
The turning point came when he launched a TikTok account to promote one of his games, the drift racer Drift Challenge. Millions of views turned into installs, installs turned into his first ad revenue, and for the first time a project he had built was reaching real players at large. Looking through the data, Denis saw one pattern clearly: his game was popular among kids and teens.
Following that audience meant moving to the web — and the first wall Denis hit there was his own toolset. He had been building in a visual scripting tool, and his projects fell apart under the asset compression that web distribution requires. So he learned to code properly — not from textbooks, but by shipping.
With that behind him, the Crimson Games founder turned to HTML5 games, and to Yandex Games in particular, as a way to keep building for a young audience. The platform brought constraints of its own: hard limits on build size and demanding requirements for file compression and optimization. After a couple of failed attempts, Denis spent two weeks building a Minecraft-style block shooter — his next commercial success. That release peaked at around 15,000 players a day and, together with the platform’s ad and in-app economy, produced income on a scale none of his earlier work had come close to. Three months later, though, the traffic had faded, and the releases that followed earned very little.
By then the skills were finally there. What was left to solve was getting a game in front of enough people — the same wall BMG: Ragdoll Car Race would run into next.
What is BMG: Ragdoll Car Race?
BMG: Ragdoll Car Race is an arcade racer where the cars come apart. You drive, you drift, you collide, and the vehicles deform and break into pieces on impact. The reference was Mafia 2 — semi-casual physics, forgiving enough to throw the car sideways into a corner on purpose.
Another inspiration was Turbo Dismount, where cars split into individual parts as they’re launched down a track. The scripted crash runs didn’t interest Denis — the free mode, where you actually drive the car, did. As far as he could find, nobody had built that combination for the HTML5 market yet. So he did.
Getting there took work in three areas:
- The car controller. Unity’s built-in Wheel Collider didn’t give the handling Denis was after. Ready-made assets would have provided the physics he needed, but their size and performance cost were too high. Instead, he built his own controller on top of the Wheel Collider, drawing on years of building racing games.
- The destruction. Making crashes look spectacular without wrecking the racing itself meant tuning physics materials and weight distribution, plus a long list of smaller details.
- The AI. Opponents follow waypoints and pick an appropriate speed for each section of track — deliberately simple, but reliable and fast to work with when creating new races.
Before launch, Denis ran tests through Poki Playtesting and found an average session length of about 2.5 minutes. Watching how people actually played, he started simplifying — then simplified much further. The physics became more casual and far friendlier to first-time players, and average playtime climbed to 4 minutes. BMG: Ragdoll Car Race was ready. What it needed now was players.
Initial release, and revenue worth a cup of coffee a dayÂ
Armed with his playtest results, Denis submitted the game for review to Poki Games. A week later, the answer came back: rejected. He turned instead to a platform he already knew — Yandex Games — where BMG: Ragdoll Car Race finally launched.
The numbers were bleak, and the income with them: by Denis’s own description, about the price of one cup of coffee a day. Average playtime held at around 8 minutes, but the game was drawing only 500 to 1,000 players a day — and by the time it launched on Playables, that traffic had died off.
It was the same scenario all over again: playtest numbers showed the game held attention, but almost nobody was seeing it. What didn’t work was everything around it: the channels a one-person studio can reach on its own were limited, and the monetization they offered was thin, and there was nobody to tell Denis which of the two was the real problem. So, on the advice of other developers, he decided to approach a publisher.
“I thought about quitting game development and moving to a different field. But I decided to try my luck one more time and go with a publisher.” — Denis Fomenko, founder of Crimson Games.
Working with Playgama: SDK, portal, and a route to YouTube PlayablesÂ
On the recommendation of other developers, Denis compared several publishers and chose Playgama. The difference showed up before anything had even launched.
“During moderation, I already noticed a different approach — the moderators actually cared. The project had a few small issues, but it still got published on their game portal.” — Denis Fomenko, founder of Crimson Games.
What the collaboration looked like in practice:
- Playgama SDK integration to handle ads and other features across 15+ instant-play platforms.
- Moderation and technical feedback — the minor issues flagged during review were fixed, which cleared the way for wider distribution.
- Publication on a multitude of instant-play platforms, followed by release on YouTube Playables.
- Dev success team with a personal approach. Denis makes a point of saying that his Playgama moderator, Andrew Molodtsov, has been there throughout the whole journey of working with the publisher, helping resolve misunderstandings and smooth out rough edges along the way.
The YouTube Playables release changed the scale of the project in a single month. Over the first three months on web game portals through Playgama, BMG: Ragdoll Car Race had gathered roughly 200,000 players in total — about 65,000 a month. In July, after the Playables launch, it reached 6 million gameplays, and total revenue across all platforms grew twentyfold month over month. By the end of its second month on Playables, the game had passed 10 million gameplays.
Put against Denis’s own track record, those two months brought him three times more players than everything he had built over the previous three years combined.Â
What’s next for Crimson Games
The immediate priorities are straightforward: fix the remaining bugs in BMG: Ragdoll Car Race and keep widening its reach: more third-party platforms such as MSN, Lagged, and Y8, and a standalone version of the game on its own domain through Playgama Wrap.Â
Most importantly, the YouTube Playables launch and the results that followed have given Denis solid ground at last, and the freedom to work on games full time. New projects are already underway.
“Thanks to the release on YouTube Playables and the Playgama team, I get to keep doing what I love: building games. For now, I want to keep making projects that surprise people and let them feel something new right away.” — Denis Fomenko, founder of Crimson Games.
About Playgama Publishing
Playgama helps HTML5 and web game developers get their games in front of players at scale — including on emerging platforms like YouTube Playables.
What developers get:
- Distribution across Playgama’s own web game portal plus 15+ instant-play platforms.
- A single SDK integration that covers monetization and platform features everywhere the game ships.
- Hands-on moderation and technical review, with a dedicated contact who works through issues with the developer rather than sending back a rejection.
- Monetization provided by Playgama Ad, so solo developers and small teams can spend their time building games. Got a game? Submit it here.