Although GTA VI is not expected to come out until 2025, it is already making waves and smashing records with just one teaser. Let’s take a look at its numbers and compare them to other notable video game trailers.
Active events
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the game teams. Next up is an interview with Ilya Maksimenko, founder of the FlyinDogs indie studio.
Game publishers around the world continue to adjust their regional prices, and Paradox Interactive is no exception. The Crusader Kings publisher will soon raise prices for both its live games and titles that are no longer actively supported.
League of Geeks, an Australian studio with a 15-year history, has made a tough decision to cut over half of its staff. This also affected the entire Jumplight Odyssey team.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the gaming and near-gaming teams. Next up is an interview with Denis Khamin, co-owner of the Allcorrect studio for game localization and outsourcing of 2D and 3D art.
Godot 4.2 was released
· 8 hours agoFive months after the appearance of Godot 4.1, the open source game engine has a full-fledged new version. It includes more than 1,800 changes made by 359 developers.
If three years ago we were tired of writing about investments, then this year it seems that most of the agenda is layoffs. So it is this time. The Australian studio League of Geeks announced large-scale cuts.
Thanks to discounts, some older games have managed to return to the top-selling charts on Steam. However, indie hit Lethal Company still outperforms all others, including evergreen titles like Counter-Strike 2.
Rockstar has finally unveiled the first teaser trailer for GTA VI. As expected, it quickly turned into the industry’s biggest news, generating dozens of millions of views within hours.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the game teams. Next up is an interview with indie developer Vladimir Beletsky from the Morteshka studio, famous for the role-playing game based on Russian fairy tales Black Book.
This year, New World Interactive Studio turned 13 years old. It is quite possible that she will not live to see her next birthday.
tinyBuild appears to be another studio to conduct layoffs. This comes just months after the publisher saw its shares plunge due to weaker-than-expected financial performance in the first half of 2023.
The game publisher and developer tinyBuild has published an update on the state of affairs. It reveals that the company is "actively considering short-term options to strengthen the balance sheet," and also confirms staff reductions.
On the eve of the New Year, App2Top continues to publish a series of "Results" materials, in which it talks with representatives of the gaming industry about how 2023 passed for their company and the market. Next up is an interview with Vyacheslav Utochkin, co—founder and general producer of Geeky House.
On the night of Monday to Tuesday in Moscow, Rockstar Games published a trailer for the next numbered part of Grand Theft Auto. Now it is one of the central news in the industry, judging by the views on YouTube.
In early October, a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the development of the game Vasilisa and Baba Yaga was successfully completed. The game developers from the St. Petersburg studio Baba Yaga Games received 960 thousand rubles from sponsors. App2Top talked to Asya Yurina, co-founder of the studio, about how the campaign was going.
Starfield remains one of the most played games from Xbox’s first-party studios even three months after its launch. So it is no surprise that Microsoft considers it one of its most important releases and has plans for its long-term support.
There have been massive cuts in tinyBuild — UPDATED
· 2 days agoUnofficially, tinyBuild could have carried out a major optimization last week. The company has fired at least a dozen people.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the game teams. Next up is an interview with indie developer Vadim Gilyazetdinov (aka yeo), the author of a series of pixel bitemaps about Japanese Yakuza.
Fun gameplay aside, one one of the factors behind Dave the Diver’s success was its combination of pixel art and 3D graphics. Here is how a small team at Mintrocket managed to create the game’s appealing visuals using the Unity engine and its tools.
Africa has its own criteria for success in the gaming market. However, the situation is changing rapidly. In a few years, the earnings of local gaming companies will become significant by general industrial standards.
This was stated by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in an interview with Windows Central.
December came. The end of the year is rapidly approaching. On its eve, according to the established tradition, App2Top, together with representatives of gaming and near-gaming companies, summarizes the results. The current series of results opens with an interview with Sergey Zanin, co-founder and CEO of Alawar.
Many things about Game Pass and the entire ecosystem around it are still shrouded in mystery. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has now shed some light on the service’s strategy and certain elements of its business model.
The main thing for the weekend (December 2-3)
· 2 days agoThe next cuts — now at Phoenix Labs, Fortnite records (both in MAU and online), the growth of the user base at Starfield - tell us what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
Iwo Zakowski, head of marketing at Supercell, has shared some new data about the company’s games, including its biggest hit — Clash of Clans.
The other day, the RovioCon Google 23 conference was held in Helsinki. One of the reports was read by a representative of Supercell. We share interesting facts from it.
Targeting the right audience for a game is one of the most important tasks for developers. Acclaimed developer and former BioWare producer Mark Darrah has opened up about the decision-making process and who should make the final choice.
On November 30, the Larian Studios blog on Steam reported that 1.3 million people have played the game since its release on August 3. This allows you to give an approximate estimate of the number of copies of the game sold.
We still don’t know the official sales of Baldur’s Gate 3. But Larian Studios has now revealed how many players have completed the game, which opens up room for some napkin math and speculation.
Despite many great releases, 2023 hasn’t been all that good (to put it mildly) for people making games. Here are the prevailing sentiments among developers about the current state of the market and the possible future.
App Store and Google Play have announced the winners of its annual awards. Let’s take a closer look at the best games in various categories.
Lords of the Fallen has been a commercial success for publisher CI Games. The company has now shared its ambitious revenue target for the game.
Google and Apple have summed up the results of the year and published lists with the best games in their app stores for 2023.
In 2019, Activision Blizzard was considering launching an app store for mobile devices: it wanted to make it itself or in partnership with Epic Games and Supercell. The company announced its plans to Google in an attempt to bargain for better terms on Google Play and other services.
The Swedish Embracer Group holding continues to close some subsidiaries and reduce staff in others. The list of studios that suffered from the restructuring of the company included Free Radical Design and Fishlabs.
Embracer Group’s cost-cutting restructuring continues. Free Radical Design and Fishlabs appear to be the latest studios to be affected by the process.
Unity has decided to terminate an agreement with its subsidiary Weta, a VFX studio co-founded by acclaimed filmmaker Peter Jackson. This will result in another round of layoffs for the engine maker.
Unity has announced new large-scale cuts. This time the reason was the termination of cooperation with Weta FX, a special effects studio directed by Peter Jackson. A total of 256 people or 3.8% of the total number of Unity employees will remain unemployed.
On the morning of November 29, trading of CD PROJEKT shares on the Warsaw Stock Exchange began with growth. The value of the Polish company's shares increased by 5% to 113.45 zlotys ($28.9) apiece. This is how investors reacted to CD PROJEKT's report for the third quarter of 2023.
CD Projekt has released its financial report for the third quarter ended September 30. The company has achieved significant growth in revenue and net profit, with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty reaching a new milestone.
In October, it became known that the basis of the new Russian open engine Nau Engine will be a solution from Gaijin Entertainment — Dagor Engine. App2Top talked with Andrey Karsakov, Head of Nau Engine development, about how it happened and what technologies the engine will support.
Three years later, CD PROJEKT closed the issue of a lawsuit from the company's investors, who were not satisfied with the state of the release version of Cyberpunk 2077. The District Court of California finally approved the settlement agreement between the parties.
The focus of the seventh episode of Games and Names is the legal side of game dev. The podcast participants also discussed how developers can defend the results of their creative activities.
Lethal Company continues to gain momentum following its successful launch on Steam. In addition to its chart-topping positions, the co-op indie horror is now the top-rated game of 2023 on the store.
The seventh episode of Games and Names, a games industry podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group, is here. It is dedicated to a really complex yet important topic — the legal side of the games industry and how developers can protect the results of their creative work.
The cooperative indie horror Lethal Company managed to become the most highly rated game on Steam among all projects that were released in 2023. He beat Baldur’s Gate 3, a remake of Resident Evil 4 and Dave the Diver.
Plarium has achieved a new achievement. The total user spending in its games on Google Play and the App Store reached $3.37 billion, according to a report from the AppMagic analytical platform.
Many developers have noticed a surge in positive reviews for their games during the new Steam sale. This is due to a special badge that players can win after completing certain tasks at the annual award event.
Released on October 26, 2023, cyberpunk action Ghostrunner 2 showed a financially successful start. In a notice to investors, the Polish studio One More Level reported that it took several days to recoup the costs of creating the game.
Trending this week
WN Media Group has shared the first details about WN Belgrade’23, the upcoming conference for games industry professionals. The event is expected to bring together more than 400 companies and feature talks from renowned devs like Raphaël Colantonio.