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Olga Voronina, Head of the Ravenage Business Development Department, told about the process of searching for games in publishing houses engaged in launching PC projects.

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.

The New Zealand government has introduced a tax break for local game studios. It will reimburse them 20% of the costs incurred during the development of games.

New details about the drama surrounding Disco Elysium and its creators have emerged thanks to an in-depth investigation by People Make Games. Let’s dive into all aspects of it, from ZA/UM’s shareholder structure and legal disputes to Robert Kurvitz’s creative leadership and his recently registered trademark called “Corinthians”.

On the night of June 1-2, Blizzard released Diablo IV for early access. TwitchTracker estimates that 941,488 people on Twitch watched the launch of the game at the same time.

On June 2, the release of Street Fighter 6 took place. The game immediately set a record, beating all the fighting games online on Steam.

Layoffs continue in the gaming industry. According to Kotaku Australia, Electronic Arts (EA) is going to cut two-thirds of the employees of the Australian Firemonkeys Studios.

The recent announcement of Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered for the Evercade portable console caused discontent among players. They noticed that the images in the advertisement were created by neural networks, and criticized the publisher of the remaster for disrespecting the project. Blaze Entertainment has already apologized for the incident.

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.

Studio BonusXP, known for the games Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game, has begun the liquidation process.

The founder of the company “Achivka” Yasha Haddazhi no longer runs the Nintendo division in Russia. Haddaji managed it for 12 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.

Redfall is one of the most disappointing game releases of 2023 so far, especially coming from an prominent studio like Arkane. Here is what was going on behind the scenes during development, leading to some obvious problems.

Vampire shooter Redfall has become Arkane‘s worst project in terms of critics’ and players’ ratings. Journalist Jason Schreier talked to the developers from the studio and found out what went wrong.

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.

Game designer Eric Covington believes that he was unfairly fired from Blizzard. He claims that the company did this after noticing the lines he wrote for the Greedy Goblin character from World of Warcraft, ridiculing the behavior of greedy corporations.

Japanese Vanpool announced the dissolution of the studio. The reasons for the closure are not given.

Civilization developer Firaxis Games is another studio that has been hit with layoffs. The job cuts come in the wake of the weak commercial performance of its latest game, Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

The Tokyo District Court held the third hearing in the case of Yuji Naka, accused of insider stock trading. On it, the prosecutor’s office requested that the former head of Sonic Team be sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and a fine of 172.5 million ($ 1.2 million).

Ubisoft is closing a store on the Chinese Tmal l platform, where it sold merchandise and other paraphernalia for its games. It will stop working on June 7.

Activision Blizzard was ready to acquire the Time Warner media holding (now operating under the name WarnerMedia) if the deal with AT&T had collapsed. This was stated by Bobby Kotick in an interview with Variety.

Firaxis Games has massively reduced its employees. According to 2K, the parent company of Firaxis Games, this was necessary to increase the efficiency of the studio.

CD Projekt has been reducing the size of the GWENT team for a while now. It looks like the remaining employees will be laid off before the end of 2023, when the game enters the so-called GWENTfinity phase (in other words, the end of content support).

Mateusz Kanik, along with several former CD Projekt RED developers, has formed a new game development studio called Blank. The team is aiming for work-life balance over crunch while working on a post-apocalyptic narrative title based on a new IP.

The former design director of Cyberpunk 2077, Mateusz Kanik, together with several other CD PROJEKT RED veterans, has established a new game studio. It’s called Blank.

The Finnish forge of blockbusters is gaining momentum. Immediately after the second public beta test of Squad Busters (it took place from May 22 to May 29), the company announced and brought a new title to the beta test. We talk about it and Supercell‘s new practice of working with games in development.

Green Hell, an open world survival game by Polish studio Creepy Jar, has reached an important sales milestone. The game has now sold over 4.5 million units globally.

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.

David Gaider, former BioWare writer and one of the creators of the Dragon Age series, has shared his thoughts on using AI in video game writing. He believes that while devs will keep trying, this won’t result in really great quests and narratives.

David Gaider, who was responsible for the scripts of the Dragon Age series of games, does not believe that neural networks can create high-quality dialogues for games. In his opinion, developers will waste a lot of effort trying to use AI technologies.

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.

Game Art Pioneers is a Moscow studio developing a middlepunk RPG with elements of the DISTORTION strategy. She signed a deal with the AVC foundation on phased financing for a period of 14 years.

Nintendo has relaxed restrictions for Russian gamers. She said that starting from May 31, users from Russia can again download previously purchased games from the eShop.

It seems like Kazuhiro Tsuchiya, a prominent Japanese game producer, has left Capcom. He worked there for more than three decades, contributing to some of the company’s most famous brands.

Kazuhiro Tsuchiya no longer works at Capcom. He worked for the company for more than 30 years.

The Competition Court of Appeal in the UK has set preliminary deadlines for hearing Microsoft‘s appeal about the blocked deal with Activision Blizzard. It will take place on July 24 and will last 10 working days.

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.

Comcast Telecommunications Corporation, which owns NBCUniversal, may be eyeing the purchase of a gaming company. Geetha Ranganathan, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, thinks so.

The number of game developers in Ukraine has decreased. As the GamedevDou portal found out, in February 2023, 9,074 people worked in the 25 largest gaming companies with offices in the country – in May last year there were 10,395 people.

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.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin claims that the appearance of RuStore has protected mobile applications from sanctions against Russia. He shared this opinion at a meeting with the finalists of the youth entrepreneurship development program “I’m in Business”.

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

On the evening of May 29, the Polish CD PROJEKT group of companies published a report for the first quarter of 2023. Judging by her data, The Witcher 3 has become one of the most successful games in history.

WN Media Group has announced the launch of a service to search for game projects. It’s called WN Game Finder. The service is designed, on the one hand, to facilitate the work of publishers and investors to filter incoming requests, on the other, to simplify the search for finance for projects.