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On March 28, the WN CEO Summit took place. This time it was held in the capital of Great Britain. It was attended by 100 high-ranking employees of gaming and IT companies from 15 countries of the world.

Krafton has decided to acquire a 10% stake in People Can Fly. The deal will also help the Polish developer finance its updated business strategy.

It is difficult for smaller mobile devs to avoid problems that can affect the development and lifecycle of their games. ZiMAD M&A manager Yana Vesnina discusses the key challenges and shares some professional tips in an article for Game World Observer.

A publisher with Latvian roots tinyBuild shared a report for 2022. Below — briefly about the main thing from it.

Polish studio People Can Fly has announced that KRAFTON will soon become its shareholder. The companies agreed that after People Can Fly issues new shares, 60% of them will be bought by the PUBG developer.

CD Projekt has released its financial report for the full year ended December 31, 2022. Thanks to strong sales of Cyberpunk 2077, the company recorded its second-best year in terms of both revenue and net profit.

The creators of Midjourney announced that they are suspending access to the free trial version of the neural network. Now those who want to use it to generate images will have to pay from $10 to $60 per month, depending on the selected plan.

Gaming companies from Russia want to obtain licenses for the release of games in China, bypassing the queue, according to sources of Kommersant. They asked the government to negotiate with the Chinese regulator to grant them 50 special licenses each year.

On March 30, CD PROJEKT reported for 2022. The Polish group of companies said that from the point of view of finance, it was the second best year in history for it.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has announced that the E3 exhibition will not take place in 2023.

Yana Vesnina, M&A Manager at ZiMAD, told about the challenges facing young mobile game developers in her column.

The remake of Resident Evil 4 was released on Friday, March 24 and immediately became the best-selling console game of the week in Japan. According to Famitsu estimates, by Monday only the owners of PlayStation consoles had bought it 175 thousand times.

Atlus can start using neural networks at the stage of forming the concept of games. Kazuhisa Wada, producer of the Persona series, told about this in an interview with SEGA ASIA.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week they are wanted: a middle-level product analyst at Azur Games, a game producer at Playkot and a game designer at Airicore.

Developer Steve Moser noticed a hint in the Netflix code about the company’s plans to release games on televisions. Now they can only be run on mobile devices.

Circana (formerly the NPD Group) has released a new report on the best-selling games, consoles, and accessories in the US for February 2023. PlayStation 5 drove growth in the hardware segment, with Hogwarts Legacy dominating the game sales charts.

Australian MPs continue to speak out against gambling video games. This time they suggested assigning a rating of 15+ to games that have paid loot boxes, and a rating of 18+ to all other games with gambling mechanics.

Electronic Arts is preparing to lay off hundreds of employees as part of its announced business restructuring. The company plans to only focus on areas that contribute to its long-term growth.

Google has applied for a patent for a technology that allows you to test games using artificial intelligence. The corporation expects that it will significantly accelerate work on games.

The PS VR2 headset showed a weak sales start. Bloomberg, citing IDC data, reports that in the period from February 22 to the end of March, Sony sold 270 thousand devices.

Electronic Arts (EA) is preparing for restructuring. As part of it, the company plans to lay off 6% of employees — that’s about 775 people.

The first edition of the continuation of the book “Kojima Genius” (in the original The Kojima Code) has been shipped to Russian retail, ” Bombora publishing house reports. It’s called “Genius Strikes Back” (in the original A Stealth Game). The author is the same — Canadian blogger Terry Wolfe, who became interested in amateur theology after video games. As for the book, it is devoted to a speculative theory about possible competition between Hideo Kojima…

Many have been wondering what happened to CD Projekt RED veteran Jason Slama after he was first appointed as the game director of the next Witcher project. It turns out that he is now working on a new NFT title at Pixelcraft Studios.

It has been a few months since Blizzard games went offline in China. A new report sheds light on why NetEase and Activision couldn’t agree on a new licensing deal, leaving millions of players on the sidelines.

On March 29, a number of Russian media with reference to Gadzhi Maktiyev, the founder of Kanobu, reported that Mundfish studio received $7 million for the release of Atomic Heart on VK Play exclusively for users from Russia and the CIS. In addition, the shooter allegedly has already earned $ 10 million on the site.

The PC version of The Last of Us Part I has been released in a very poor technical state. This has already resulted in one of the worst AAA launches on Steam in terms of player reception in recent memory.

The Future of Life Institute has published an open letter calling for suspending work on neural networks that are smarter than GPT-4 for at least six months. Experts believe that such technologies can pose a serious danger to humanity.

The head of Activision Blizzard in a letter to employees admitted that he was disappointed with Sony. He doesn’t like the way the company behaves when discussing a deal with Microsoft.

Capcom announced that the remake of Resident Evil 4 took only two days to sell over 3 million copies.

In his traditional newsletter, Simon Carless, for a moment, the former editor-in-chief of Gamasutra, as well as the former vice president of GDC, who runs the GameDiscoverCo agency today, spoke about the main trends in the PC and console games industry. We have a careful translation of his assessment into Russian.

data.ai has published a report on the state of the mobile games market in the first quarter of 2023. Here is some data on player spending, installs, as well as the highest-grossing and most downloaded titles.

Gamers are still spending more on mobile games than they did before the pandemic. As the analysts found out data.ai in the first quarter of 2023, users worldwide left an average of $1.63 billion a week in mobile games – 28% more than at the beginning of 2020.

Team17 investors were not happy that Debbie Bestwick is preparing to step down as CEO. After the announcement of the management reshuffle, the company’s share price fell by 10% to 400 pence apiece.

On March 12, the Sensor Tower analytical company published a large-scale study on the situation in mobile gaming by the end of 2022. We have already written about him briefly. Time for detailed material with key calculations from the study.

Last year, the French spent €5.5 billion on video games, consoles and gaming PCs, according to the SELL association. They spent more only in 2020 and 2021.

Debbie Bestwick, an experienced gaming executive, has decided to step down as CEO of Team17. But first she will find herself a suitable successor.

Debbie Bestwick intends to leave the post of CEO of Team17. She will do it right after she finds a successor.

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) has reviewed Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. According to the regulator, the $68.7 billion deal won’t reduce competition in the market.

The Fair Trade Commission of Japan announced that it does not object to the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft for $68.7 billion.

Last week, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell accused Sony of monopolizing the “high-end console market” in Japan, saying that the company owns a 98% stake. Now 10 more members of the US Congress have joined her accusations.

Valve has announced that from January 1, 2024, the Steam client will no longer work on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems.

A group of Ubisoft Paris employees anonymously complained to NME about working conditions in the studio. According to the developers, during the creation of Just Dance 2023, they were forced to work overtime regularly.

New game development studio, Lighthouse Games, has been formed by Playground co-founder Gavin Raeburn. The team is now working on their debut AAA title.

Independent game designer Sam Barlow has commented on the upcoming remake of Silent Hill 2. He also expressed optimism about the direction Konami is taking the series in.

Game designer Sam Barlow, who once worked on Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, said in an interview with PCGamesN portal that he does not envy the position of the Bloober Team. In his opinion, developing a remake of Silent Hill 2 is a very difficult task.

The French authorities have recognized a number of entertainment applications as a threat to cybersecurity. Among the dangerous applications were TikTok, Netflix, Twitter and Candy Crush.

Microsoft threatened Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo, Neeva and other search engines should be denied access to Bing search results if they train chatbots based on this data. This was reported by Bloomberg with reference to sources.

Tractor manufacturers are now looking to the Farming Simuator series as a powerful marketing tool. Developer Giants Software gets so many requests from companies that it is enough to cover development costs.

The official announcement of Apple‘s XR headset may take place in the near future, according to Bloomberg sources. According to them, last week the company showed the device to 100 top managers, and also disclosed the price and sales forecast.

Manufacturers of tractors and other agricultural machinery actively use Farming Simulator to promote their products. In an interview with The Guardian, the developers from Giants Software said that they are now signing so many contracts with companies that this allows them to cover all the costs of supporting the game.