The main thing for the weekend (January 13-14)
According to analysts, Baldur's Gate 3 became the highest-grossing premium new product on Steam in 2023, Fortnite was the leader in MAU on consoles in December, layoffs took place at Lost Boys Interactive — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
Baldur’s Gate 3
- The year 2023 was a record year for Steam. The VG Insights analytical platform estimated that over the past year premium games earned over $9 billion on the site, excluding microtransactions. Also, during the year, Steam users purchased 580 million copies of games (both premium titles and free-to-play). The top 5 novelties of 2023 by gross revenue are Baldur's Gate 3 ($657 million), Hogwarts Legacy ($341 million), Starfield ($235 million), the remake of Resident Evil 4 ($159 million) and Sons Of The Forest ($116 million). The top 5 new products of 2023 by the number of copies/downloads sold are Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Lethal Company, Overwatch 2 and Sons Of The Forest.
- In December 2023, PlayStation and Xbox console owners played Fortnite more actively than any other games. By the end of the month, Fortnite took the first place on these consoles in terms of the number of monthly active users (MAU), Ampere Analysis analysts reported. In addition, Fortnite surpassed the last Call of Duty, EA Sports FC 24, GTA V/Online and Roblox combined in terms of the number of hours played in a month. In total, console gamers spent 1.6 billion hours on Fortnite in December.
- Embracer Group's restructuring has now affected Lost Boys Interactive, a subsidiary studio of Gearbox Software that helps other companies with game development. In particular, she has worked on Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Diablo IV and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Several former studio employees wrote on LinkedIn that they had recently been laid off at Lost Boys Interactive. It is not known exactly how many people lost their jobs, but there were "a significant number" of them — before the cuts, the studio had 400 employees. The layoffs affected all departments and all levels.
