Game Development

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.

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.

Google has patented a new technology that should help developers test their games using AI. The company believes this system should significantly increase the speed and quality of the QA testing process.

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.

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.

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.

Rob Cooper decided to leave Ubisoft. He managed the company’s business in Northern Europe and the Middle East, as well as helped it enter new markets.

Polish mobile developer Ten Square Games, known for Fishing Clash and Hunting Clash simulators, is preparing to make cuts. The company stated that it was forced to take this step due to high inflation in Poland and the difficult situation in the gaming industry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The girls who accused screenwriter Chris Avellone of sexual harassment refused to claim, and the Russian Defense Ministry said that they were trying to destroy Russia’s values and history with the help of video games — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry this weekend.

Conversion funnels are one of the basic tools for quick analysis of player behavior. What they are and how you can work with them,” said Cameron Hozouri, CEO and founder of ByteBrew, an analytical platform for mobile games.

Women who accused Chris Avellone of sexual misconduct have now dropped their claims. The video game writer will receive monetary compensation as part of a confidential settlement between the parties.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has updated its provisional findings related to Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Due to new evidence, the regulator has narrowed the scope of its concerns.

With a little delay, we tell you how Epic Games introduced Unreal Engine 5.2 during its almost eight-hour presentation at GDC 2023. Let’s mention the key tools and improvements shown by the company.

Resident Evil 4 remake has just been released to universal acclaim. Let’s dive into some launch numbers and brush up on how the original game has changed the genre and influenced game developers across the globe for generations to come.

US Senator Maria Cantwell is alarmed by the situation on the AAA games market in Japan. At the last meeting in the US Senate, she accused Sony of monopoly, saying that the company owns 98% of the market.

VK Group has revised the policy regarding the commission in RuStore. She announced that from April 1, she will reduce the commission from 15% to 0.9%-3.35%, depending on the payment method chosen by the user. The new conditions will be in effect until the end of the year.

The third material, completing a series of articles about the monetization strategy of Belka Games. It is dedicated to the company’s work with advertising, the cultivation of personnel and trends in the niche.

Metacritic has shared its 2022 game publisher rankings. This year’s list has some shakeups, with Sony taking the top spot and companies like Paradox, Focus Entertainment, and Annapurna climbing up.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week they are wanted: a game analyst at ZiMAD, a chief accountant at WN Media Group and a leading game designer at SVMD.The selection was prepared by Marina Lopatina, Director of Business Development of Talents In Games.

Microsoft has been trying for several years to reduce its negative impact on the climate. Now she has announced a new initiative. At the GDC 2023 conference, Microsoft presented a set of tools for eco—friendly game development – the Xbox Developer Sustainability ToolKit.

Atari has announced a new acquisition, entering into an agreement to buy Night Dive Studios. The indie team is best known for developing the upcoming System Shock remake.