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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.

Polish developer One More Level has disclosed the first figures for Ghostrunner 2, a sequel to its commercially successful cyberpunk action game. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

The Chinese holding ByteDance will restructure its gaming division. According to Reuters sources, during it the company will close its largest gaming "daughter" of the publisher Nuverse.

TikTok maker ByteDance has reportedly decided to restructure its gaming business. This will likely affect the Chinese tech giant’s main video game arm, Nuverse.

Team17 has fallen in price by more than 40% in a day, Red Dead Redemption 2 has updated the online record on Steam, there are rumors that Minecraft earns more than $ 100 million a year — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Jason Wilson (aka Jay Gunn) is a developer who was responsible for game design and many other aspects of the original games of the MediEvil series. The other day he put up for sale a statuette of the BAFTA Award, which he received in 2000 for his work on MediEvil 2.

Jason Wilson, co-creator of 1998’s hack and slash game MediEvil, has decided to sell his Game of the Year BAFTA award. Despite his vast experience, he seems to be struggling to find a new job in the industry.

Diablo IV has seen a huge surge in player count on Steam this week. Let’s take a look at how Blizzard’s successful ARPG has been performing on the store since its October launch and compare it to some other releases.

Ubisoft started promoting Assassin's Creed Mirage with pop—up ads in another part of the series - Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The network noticed that banners now appear during the game with an offer to buy Assassin's Creed Mirage at a discount in honor of Black Friday.

Players have found out that Ubisoft has apparently started experimenting with in-game ads. These pop-up banners appear during gameplay, promoting discounts on the latest Assassin’s Creed title.

GDEV (formerly Nexters) has summed up the financial results of the third quarter and the first nine months of 2023. We chose the main thing from the report.

Mass layoffs aside, one of the main elements of Embracer Group’s ongoing restructuring program is a review of all games in its pipeline. Chief strategy officer Phil Rogers has detailed the process and the progress the Swedish holding company has made so far.

Indie publisher and developer Toge Productions, known primarily for the visual novel about the barista Coffee Talk, decided to expand. The company announced that it has joined the Mojiken Studio.

EA Sports FC 24 is the first game in the sports series that doesn’t use the FIFA brand. Here is how its launch numbers compare to the previous title.

The Warcraft Rumble mobile action strategy has brought Blizzard Entertainment $13.7 million in three weeks since its release, according to data from the AppMagic analytical platform. Although this is a good result for the game in its segment, it is far from the starting indicators of the hit Clash Royale.

On September 29, 2023, Electronic Arts released EA Sports FC 24, the first football simulator released after the company ended its partnership with FIFA. Newzoo analysts studied the success of the project in October and compared its starting indicators with those of FIFA 23.

Game production consists of many stages, which may differ depending on the specific company or team. Here is how the process works according to Tim Cain, acclaimed developer and one of the creators of Fallout.

SuperScale has published the report Good Games Don’t Die, which was commissioned by Atomik Research. As part of the survey, analysts spoke with 504 mobile game developers from the UK and the USA.

Niko Partners has updated its China Games Market 2023 Half-Year report, sharing new projections for the full year. The country is expected to see a rise in video game revenue after its first-ever decline in 2022.

Torn Away is an adventure game telling about the journey of a ten—year-old girl from Germany home during World War II. Although the game received 96% positive reviews on Steam and 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, its launch turned into a failure.

The authors of the Stable Diffusion neural network have announced the release of Stable Video Diffusion. This is a model that generates videos up to four seconds long based on an image or text description.

Sony failed to annul a class action lawsuit filed by British gamers in August 2022. The UK Competition Court of Appeal ruled that the company must justify its position at the hearing.

The GameMaker team announced that developers who are not going to make money on their games can now not pay for the engine. The only limitation is that the free version of GameMaker cannot be used for console projects.

RoboCop: Rogue City has been a massive success for both developer Teyon and publisher Nacon. Here are the game’s key achievements since launch.

GameMaker has a special Thanksgiving surprise for its community by announcing major changes to its pricing model. And the team decided to do the opposite of what some other engine makers do.

Shortly after Valve announced the OLED version of Steam Deck, its handheld PC has become the top-selling product on the store. Here are all the notable shifts that have occurred on the charts over the past week.

The company Nacon announced that the release of RoboCop: Rogue City exceeded expectations and became the largest among the games published by it.

The cooperative horror Lethal Company, created by a lone developer Zeekerss, has become a hit on Steam. It took the third place in the chart of the highest-grossing premium products on the site for the last week.

This amount is indicated in the profile of former Fortnite creative director Donald Mustard on the website of AGBO — the production company of directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Anthony, Joe Russo). Mastart left Epic Games in September 2023 and is now listed as an AGBO partner.

Even after the start of its troubles with mobile app stores and legal battles with Apple and Google, Fortnite remains one of the highest-grossing games globally. Here is how much money Epic Games’ biggest hit has generated to date.

This was told by the head of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, during a hearing in the case of Epic Games and Google due to the removal of Fortnite from Google Play.