Game Maker Originating In Belarus Raises $5M For ‘Replaced’ Project

The studio left Minsk due to the war in Ukraine.

Sad Cat Studios raised $5 million to develop its future games. The international company GEM Capital, based in Cyprus, invested in the project, according to VentureBeat.

The Minsk-based studio is working on the retro-futuristic action platformer Replaced, announced in 2021. You play as R.E.A.C.H. - an artificial intelligence trapped in a human body. In 2022, its release was postponed due to the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the forced relocation of the team. This year the release was pushed back to 2024, but this time due to the complexity of development.

Sad Cat co-founders Yury Zhdanovich and Ihar Hrytsai said the investment will help make their game Replaced more interesting.

“We’ve set a really high bar for ourselves in terms of quality and visual style,” Hrytsai said.

GEM Capital believes that Replaced has the potential to “redefine the gaming landscape, captivate audiences worldwide and launch a new strong franchise.”

Previously, the IT industry was the driver of economic growth in Belarus. Everything began to change after the peaceful 2020 revolution when IT specialists began to relocate fearing political persecution for participating in protests. However, the sector suffered a real crisis with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

The negative contribution of IT to GDP growth for seven months of this year is minus 1.2%, companies are firing more employees than they are hiring (over the past year and seven months of this, the industry lost 22.3 thousand specialists). The result is a constant decline in Belarusian exports of services, which were partly provided by the IT sector.