The British developer and publisher Team17 has published a financial report for the first half of 2023. We share the main thing from it.

On September 14, the global release of the mobile AR game Monster Hunter Now took place. A week later, the developers announced that the number of downloads of the title reached 5 million.

The Finnish studio Spectarium, founded by top managers Plarium and Janeious, closed the seed round of financing. She received €5 million from investors. The money will be used to create a mythical RPG called Myths, built on an AI engine.

Mobile marketing and monetization platform AppLovin has launched a new project to help Unity developers switch to other engines like Unreal and Godot. It can already speed up code translation, and tools for asset and plugin migration are also in the works.

Based on the AppMagic data, the App2Top editors have prepared material about the most downloaded and highest-grossing mobile games of the past month.

India is the fastest growing gaming market in Asia in terms of both revenue and the number of gamers. The analytical company Niko Partners predicts that in 2027 there will be 343% more gamers in the country than in 2017.

OpenAI has introduced the third generation of the DALL-E neural network for image generation. One of its key features is integration with the chat bot ChatGPT.

Industry veteran Glen Schofield is leaving Striking Distance, a studio he founded to develop The Callisto Protocol. The game, which was supposed to become a spiritual successor to Dead Space, missed Krafton’s expectations.

The restructuring of Embracer Group affected another subsidiary studio of the Swedish holding. Now layoffs have taken place in Crystal Dynamics, known for the Tomb Raider series of games.

The founder and CEO of Striking Distance Studios, Glen Schofield, has decided to quit. Together with him, the chief operating officer and the CFO leave the studio.

Ubisoft shared the success of The Crew Motorfest. During the debut week, the race sold more copies than the rest of the series at the time.

Re-Logic, an indie studio behind evergreen sandbox hit game Terraria, has commented on Unity’s controversial decision to introduce per-install fees. The team not only condemned this move, but also decided to support two open source engines.

Over the past week, there have been many developers who have decided to abandon the Unity engine and switch to other platforms. To help them, AppLovin has released Unifree, a tool that allows you to transfer the code of games written for Unity to the Unreal Engine, Godot and Cocos engines.

From January to August 2023, Russians spent 135 billion rubles on video games, according to a study by XYZ School. They gave 21% of the amount, or 28 billion rubles, to resellers and intermediary platforms.

Genshin Impact developer miHoYo has undergone some internal reshuffle. Cai Haoyu, one of the company’s founders and its largest shareholder, recently stepped down as its chairman.

Brawl Stars became the fourth Supercell title in which players spent more than $2 billion. This is reported by the analytical company data.ai .

Mortal Kombat 1, the 12th main installment in the long-running series, has just been released globally. Let’s take a look at its launch numbers available right now.

In the miHoYo manual permutations. One of the founders of the company and its largest shareholder Cai Haoyu has left the post of chairman.

Re-Logic studio, which developed the game Terraria, supported the creators of the open engines Godot and FNA. She announced that she had donated $100,000 to each team.

Microsoft has finally commented on major leaks containing its old plans and other data related to its gaming business. Here is what Xbox head Phil Spencer has to say about the situation.

On September 19, the full release of Mortal Kombat 1 took place: before that, the game was available only to those who bought the premium edition. Her peak online on Steam immediately reached 38,129 people.

On September 18, a lot of confidential Microsoft documents appeared on the web, published as evidence in court with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). According to the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, a significant part of them is already outdated.

Two weeks after its global launch, Starfield has hit another milestone. It is now Bethesda’s biggest launch in terms of player count, with the studio calling the numbers “astronomical.”

Bethesda has shared the latest data on Starfield. The company announced that the audience of the space RPG exceeded 10 million people. The figure takes into account Game Pass subscribers.

Among the unredacted Xbox documents, which Microsoft accidentally leaked itself, was a list of third-party games that the company was eyeing as targets for potential Game Pass deals in 2022. Here are some insights into the possible amounts ranging from several to hundreds of millions of dollars.

You will have to fork out a lot for the expansion of the Game Pass library. Microsoft management came to such conclusions, according to a leaked internal correspondence that appeared on the website of the District Court of Northern California.

The anime gacha shooter Goddess of Victory: Nikke has overcome a major milestone. According to Sensor Tower, since its release in November 2022, the game has raised half a billion dollars on mobile devices.

Another week, another data on the top-grossing Steam games. Starfield didn’t manage to stay at the top of the charts, with Baldur’s Gate 3 once again outselling other premium titles a month and a half after its launch.

The total revenue of Honkai: Star Rail has exceeded $ 1 billion since the release of the game in April 2023, the analytical company Naavik estimates. We are talking about revenue from all platforms: both from PC and mobile devices.

The new Unity collection is called Runtime Fee. It got its name in honor of the Unity Runtime library set. The company believes that since libraries are installed on users’ devices along with the game, the developer must pay for it. We talked about Unity Runtime with Kirill Shabordin, the founder of Yerevan Cowboys Games, and Alexey Pechenin, the founder of Infinite Art Solutions.

What is going on in game marketing and what are some trends publishers should pay attention to? Milan Štrba, director of professional services at mobile growth company SuperScale, has discussed the current state of mobile UA, hybridization, and Western devs trying to copy Asian hits like Genshin Impact.

At the end of June, French President Emmanuel Macron blamed video games for the riots that were taking place in the country at that time. Almost three months later, he said that he did not condemn the video games themselves, but the violence that reigned on the streets of France.

A new document released as part of the FTC v. Microsoft case has shed light on more acquisition prospects discussed at the Redmond-based corporation. None of those deals ultimately materialized, but it is another interesting glimpse into Microsoft’s M&A strategy.

In 2020, Microsoft’s gaming division was considering buying Nintendo. This was stated by the head of Xbox Phil Spencer (Phil Spencer) in a letter to top managers of the corporation, disclosed as part of the court on the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

Unity is now in the process of overhauling its controversial Runtime Fee, which caused a revolt in the game development community. Here are the first details about the possible changes.

The new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III may not be able to buy from the largest Russian retailers. The companies admitted that they would not sell the game because of scenes of violence against Russians.

On September 18, Unity shares fell 7.92% to $33.45 apiece. For the company, this is the biggest* daily drop in September.

After Unity introduced a new pricing policy, Massive Monster studio announced plans to remove the Cult of the Lamb game from stores on January 1, 2024. Now she explained that she was just joking.

At the Unity Software general meeting, which took place on Monday, it was announced to employees that the company would abandon the main provisions of the new monetization policy, which was announced last Wednesday.

WN Media Group has shared the data to sum up its latest conference, which took place on September 12-13 in Limassol, Cyprus. The event was attended by representatives of companies such as Google, Apple, Larian Studios, Saber Interactive, Owlcat Games, and Sensor Tower.

Beamdog, best known for remasters of classic RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment, has reportedly been hit with layoffs. It appears to be another victim of the ongoing restructuring at Embracer Grpoup, which acquired the studio last year.

On September 12-13, a conference for game developers and publishers WN Conference was held in Limassol. Its guests were representatives of companies such as Google, Apple, Larian Studios, Ubisoft, Saber Interactive, Playrix, Owlcat Games and Sensor Tower.

GSD analysts estimated that Starfield was inferior in terms of initial sales in the European market to only four games released in 2023.

Layoffs in gaming companies continue. This time it became known about the cuts in the Beamdog studio, which released reissues of classic RPGs like Planescape: Torment and two parts of Baldur’s Gate.

Unity has responded to backlash over its new Runtime Fee. The company claims it will be making changes to the policy, but developers still want per-install fees to be reverted.

The analytical company Sensor Tower looked at how much the mobile games One Piece Treasure Cruise and One Piece Bounty Rush, developed based on the popular manga One Piece, earn. She noticed that their revenue increased significantly in August.

Unity reacted to the massive outrage of developers with the new pricing policy. She said she hears criticism and apologized for the “confusion and anxiety” that arose after the announcement.

More than 190 game—related companies have publicly spoken out against Unity’s new pricing policy, the head of the Actors Guild of the USA called for a vote for a strike against gaming companies, GTA V turned ten years old – we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

It has been a while since Microsoft officially shared the number of Game Pass subscribers. So we can only rely on indirect data to assess whether the service is growing.

The Game Pass audience can exceed 30 million people. This figure was indicated in the LinkedIn account by Craig McNary, senior director of Xbox brand marketing.