The main thing for the weekend (May 6-9)
Nintendo announced a slowdown in Switch sales, Sony decided to close the PixelOpus studio, Redfall became the most popular game in the Russian Game Pass, — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
▪️Valve has updated the Steam search engine. Now gamers can use the quick search bar to find games by category, tags, series titles, developers and publishers. Also, the search has learned to understand typos.
▪️9to5google noticed that Google Play started showing ads in the search bar. Advertising recommendations appear after clicking on the line and are located above the list of recent requests. But as soon as the user starts entering a new query, the ad disappears.
▪️PLAION (formerly Koch Media) has decided to restructure. As part of it, the publishers Deep Silver, Prime Matter and Ravenscourt will unite under the PLAION brand. In addition, now the company is going to release fewer games, but of “higher quality”. It is assumed that the restructuring will last up to 12 months, and publishers will be able to publish games under their old brands for several more years.
Over the last fiscal year, Nintendo sold 17.97 million Switch consoles — 22% less than a year earlier. The Japanese company reported this in a recent report. In it, Nintendo also said that it expects sales of the device to fall next year. According to the forecast, it will be able to ship only 15 million Switch, which is 16.5% less in annual terms. The president of the company, Shuntaro Furukawa, said in a conversation with investors that Nintendo is not sure that it will be able to fulfill the sales plan, but it will do everything possible. Note that Nintendo’s annual revenues have also declined: revenue fell 5.5% to $11.85 billion, operating profit fell 14.9% to $3.7 billion.
The PC Gamer portal studied Activision Blizzard‘s financial report published at the end of April and noticed that the publisher began to regularly earn more on PC games than on console games. The publisher’s revenue from PC exceeds revenue from consoles for three consecutive quarters. Judging by the calculations of PC Gamer, such a long preponderance towards the PC is observed for the first time in the history of Activision Blizzard. Recall that in the first quarter of 2023 Activision Blizzard earned a total of $ 2.38 billion. Of this amount, $666 million was brought by the PC, and $639 by the console.
▪️The administration of GOG told about the results of the store by the end of 2022. She said that last year GOG’s net profit was $1.2 billion. Also, 684 new games appeared in GOG during the year, and the total number of projects in the catalog reached 7.7 thousand (excluding DLC and bundles).
▪️PixelOpus studio, which developed the games Concrete Genie and Entwined, is closing. In a comment to IGN, Sony explained that it decided to close it after checking the projects of internal studios for compliance with the company’s strategic goals. PixelOpus will officially stop working on June 2.
▪️Redfall took the 14th place in the list of the lowest rated games on Steam. At the time of writing the news, only 32% of users rated the game positively.
Nevertheless, this did not prevent Redfall from taking the first place in popularity in the Game Pass in Russia, beating Atomic Heart and Mortal Kombat 11. She was in the lead until May 9, but now she has dropped a little in the ranking. Now it is in fourth place.
▪️Guerrilla Games boasted of the success of the Horizon series. She said that the total circulation of the series exceeded 32.7 million copies, of which 8.4 million copies were released in February 2022 Horizon Forbidden West.
