Analytics

The latest WN Connect event took place on May 24 in Beijing, China. It was attended by local games industry professionals from NetEase, Perfect World, FunPlus, yodo1, Lilith Games, Cocos, and more.

On May 24, the third Chinese WN Connect was held in the capital of the Celestial Empire. This time, the guests of the event were such companies as NetEase, Perfect World, Lilith Games, FunPlus, Cocos, yodo1 and many others. We tell you about the results of the event.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most discussed topics in recent months. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that against the background of such interest, the generative AI market will grow more than 32 times in ten years.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week they are wanted: a game designer at Airicore, a senior 2D artist at Belka Games and an event coordinator at WN Media Group.

The first season of AI Talks, a series of weekly discussions on AI, is coming to an end with a new episode. Join the talk to get some insights on boosting creativity with new technologies and the potential challenges that come with it.

Almost four years after its release, the mobile game Pokémon Masters EX (formerly known as simply Pokémon Masters) has crossed the milestone of 50 million downloads. This was announced by DeNA.

Today, analytics helps not only to monitor the effectiveness of applications, but also to find specific weaknesses in the technical component or game design. More about this tells Maxim Kozhnov, CRO Azur Games.

It may become easier for Russian developers to release games in Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to discuss this topic with BRICS partners.

Microsoft is now preparing for a summer fight with the UK regulator, as the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has set a timeframe for an appeal hearing. The Competition and Markets Authority failed to convince the court to adjourn the case.

The Romanian antimonopoly regulator suspects that Sony has abused its position in the country’s console market. He launched an investigation into the company.

The first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education, Yana Lantratova, has launched a new initiative to regulate video games in Russia. She suggested introducing rental certificates for the games. Now they are given to films.

Games and Names is a new podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group. The first episode, featuring Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad, is focused on mobile genres that managed to beat the overall market decline in 2022.

Now AppMagic has its own podcast (the service launched it with the assistance of WN Media Group). It’s called Games and Names. It is led by Stas Minasov, Vice President of Product at AppMagic. As part of the first issue, he was joined by Daniel Ahmad, a well-known Asian market expert from Niko Partners, and Kirill Vaganov, business development manager at AppMagic. We publish a brief extract.

CD Projekt has released its financial report for the first quarter ended March 31. The company announced a decline in revenue (but an increase in profit), while also sharing the updated sales figures for The Witcher 3 and providing more context about its development pipeline.

The antimonopoly regulator of South Korea has published its decision on the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft. He authorized the transaction.

WN Media Group has launched WN Game Finder, a new game searching and business matchmaking service. Its main goal is to help publishers and investors filter titles and make it easier for game developers to find funding for their projects.

By using a neural network in conjunction with their own extension, the team at Skywaylab Studio was able to reduce their creatives’ production time from 20 to 2 days. Right now, the studio is focused on preparations for releasing its own tool for creating 2D animations to fit its new pipeline. Aleksey Emelyanov, one of Skywaylab’s founders, told us how that’s going to work.

It has been one month since the global launch of Honkai: Star Rail. Let’s take a look at revenue and other metrics for miHoYo’s latest hit.

Exactly one month has passed since the release of Honkai: Star Rail. We decided to look at the situation with the mobile version of the project and turned to the data of the AppMagic analytical service.

Last year, Russian game developers had difficulties with access to foreign software and a shortage of domestic analogues. The Gaming Association A PRIORI decided to deal with the problem.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week they are wanted: a middle-level narrative designer at Belka Games, an accountant at WN Media Group and a leading UA manager at Dankolab.

The Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC) believes that in 2023 the revenue of the Russian gaming market will begin to grow again. Maria Saikina, the chief analyst of the association, shared this forecast in an interview with TASS.

The humanitarian organization UNICEF wants to increase the number of female game developers. Together with GameLab, the video game development and research laboratory at the Kazakh-British Technical University, she prepared a free course on video games.

AI Talks, a series of free weekly discussions on AI technologies, continues. Today, experienced game and software developer Bjørn Furuknap will explain why he believes that AI won’t replace real people and share his thoughts on the human factor in this area.

The CEO of Focus Entertainment, Sean Brennan, has left his post. He ran the company for only four months.

Review bombing is often considered useless and destructive behavior, but War Thunder players have come out as a united front against the recent monetization changes. Thousands of community members forced developer Gaijin Entertainment to back down and listen to the criticism.

Embracer Group has tumbled in the stock market after releasing its report for the full year ended March 31, 2023. Here are the key takeaways from the Swedish holding company’s financial statements.

Amazon has decided to discontinue the Amazon Appstore in China. It will close on July 17, the newspaper The Paper reports with reference to the company’s letter.

Sony has held a special keynote for investors where it outlined its growth strategy and shared some business plans. PlayStation also revealed sales figures for some of its PC releases and announced a major investment in live service games.

What are the trends of the hyper—casual games market worth paying attention to at the moment, – said Sergey Martinkevich, Publishing Lead at Azur Games.

On the afternoon of May 24, the value of Embracer Group‘s shares collapsed by more than 40%. Most likely, the reason was the failure of the $2 billion deal, which the company reported in its annual financial report.

One of the largest shareholders of the Swedish gaming holding EG7 is dissatisfied with the way things are going. Alta Fox appealed to the EG7 board of directors and recommended that alternative business development options, including the sale of the company, be immediately explored.

Paradox Interactive has held a special event for investors where it opened up about its business strategy and approach to launching games. The Swedish company has also shared some data on hits and misses across its gaming portfolio.

Computer clubs in Russia attract more and more people. According to Vedomosti, with reference to the Langame study, over the period from 2019 to 2022, the number of monthly visitors to clubs doubled to 2.5 million people.

Indie sports titles rarely find success in the market, but this roguelite hockey game Tape to Tape is a welcome exception. Marketing expert Chris Zukowski has broken down how small studio Excellent Rectangle managed to find a perfect niche.

Market intelligence platform InvestGame has issued a new report on deal activity in the games industry for the first quarter of 2023. Here are the key findings from analysts.

Nexters suggests calling creatives, in which funny mini-games are shown instead of core mechanics, an advertisement for non-basic gameplay. What is the reason for this, — Anton Yakovlev, CMO of the company, told in his column.

MY.GAMES is strengthening its position in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa). She announced the opening of a regional hub in the UAE capital.

InvestGame analysts reported that in the first quarter of 2023, the volume of public offerings, private investments and completed mergers and acquisitions in the gaming market decreased significantly. They amounted to $2.1 billion against $15.4 billion in January-March 2022.

Sony has no plans to give up on its strategy of releasing first-party PlayStation games on PC. The time lag between the two versions will remain, but there will be more PS5 exclusives in the future.

While Mundfish is preparing to release the first story DLC for Atomic Heart, we talked to the studio about the design of the game and its individual elements. In an interview with App2Top, the developers talked about creating a combat system, gloves and bosses, and also discussed controversial issues related to the open world.

Extremists actively use video games to promote their ideology. This conclusion was reached by scientists from New York University, who interviewed 1,128 gamers from the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France and South Korea.

The Ministry of Finance of Vietnam has proposed to include online games in the list of goods that fall under the luxury tax. In his opinion, this will greatly increase revenues to the state budget.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week, they are wanted: the head of the UA direction at Dankolab, a product analyst at Playkot and a designer at WN Media Group.

Last year, the analytical company Newzoo revised the forecast for the video game market for 2022 several times, gradually reducing expectations from its global revenue. In reality, everything turned out to be worse than in the most pessimistic version.

A new week, a new episode of AI Talks, a series of free webinars by WN Media Group. Today’s guest Guy Gadney will share his tips on building an AI business from scratch.

Take-Two has published a report for the fiscal year ended March 31. She reported record revenue and announced that she was preparing to release a number of revolutionary games.

Nintendo has revealed the first sales figures for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The game is on track to become the biggest release of the year.

Neogames, which positions itself as a hub of the Finnish gaming industry, has published a report on the state of affairs in the local game development over the past two years. We share the main figures and graphs from it.

Ubisoft has published its financial results for the fiscal year ended March 31. The company posted significant losses and outlined its plans for the future, which include the focus on core-franchises, F2P, and AI adoption.