The main thing for the weekend (December 24-25)
Minecraft has become the most popular game in Russia over the past 18 years according to Google users, ArtStation began hiding images with a protest against neural networks, the media learned that Sony does not see a competitor in the Game Pass — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry this weekend.
Political scientist Anders Sundell from the University of Gothenburg has published a video on YouTube about video games. He showed the most popular projects in European countries in terms of the number of requests to Google by month for the period from January 2004 to December 2022. It turned out that Minecraft was most often “Googled” in Russia — in total, the game came in first place in search queries 126 times. Also, the three most popular games in Russia included World of Warcraft and the GTA series — they were the leaders of the regional top for 55 and 12 months, respectively.
▪️Digital Foundry specialists have chosen the games of 2022 with the best graphics. They called Horizon Forbidden West the most beautiful game. The second and third places went to The Callisto Protocol and Portal RTX.
▪️Tom Henderson, citing sources, said that Sony does not consider Game Pass a competitor to PS Plus. According to the journalist, at a meeting with employees, the head of Sony’s gaming division, Jim Ryan, said that over the past two years his company has sold more PS5 consoles than Xbox has attracted subscribers to Game Pass for 6-7 years. Ryan added that now Microsoft‘s service is used by 20 million people, while the audience of PS Plus has reached almost 50 million people.
ArtStation began to hide the works of artists created in protest against neural networks. The site explained that the art violated the rules, but did not specify which ones. ArtStation also noted that she understands concerns about AI and its impact on the industry. In the near future, she is going to talk in more detail about improvements that will allow users to control what they see on the site.
