Yandex.Money to Distribute Blizzard Entertainment Virtual Cards in Russia

August 1, 2016

Russia’s leading online payment service Yandex.Money has begun distributing Blizzard Entertainment virtual cards, which provide users with a convenient payment option for Blizzard’s online games: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo.

The cards provide players with cash balance codes that can be activated on Blizzard’s online Battle.net gaming platform. The codes will grant different monetary values to the players´ Battle.net balances, which are redeemable for any product or service available on Battle.net. Gamers can top up their own Battle.net balances, or give the code to a friend.

The virtual cards can be purchased directly on Yandex.Money’s website. Users may purchase the Blizzard Entertainment cards using their Yandex.Money e-wallet or any bank card. This means the cards will be available to the 25 million people who use Yandex.Money e-wallet, as well as those who aren’t registered for the service. Soon, users can purchase Blizzard’s cards via Tinkoff.ru.

According to recent reports from TNS Russia, 19% of Russian internet users, ages 18-55, regularly purchases related to online games.

Yandex.Money is the largest electronic payments service in Russia, according to a 2016 survey by TNS. The service is the joint venture of the search engine Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), and Sberbank. Yandex.Money offers consumers easy, safe, and reliable methods of paying online on its own site and mobile app. The service hosts about 25 million user accounts with about 15,000 new accounts opened daily. Yandex.Money also offers online merchants Yandex.Checkout. The service allows merchants to accept all the online payment methods most popular among Russians: credit cards, e-wallets, mobile billing through the top Russian providers, and cash via over 250,000 cash-acceptance points all over the country. Currently, more than 76,000 online stores across the globe use Yandex.Checkout.