The main thing for the weekend (February 17-18)

In 2023, Epic Games Store users spent $950 million on the site, according to media reports, Blizzard Entertainment decided to fire 136 people in Ireland, Capcom may finally raise the price tag of its new games to $70, — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Dragon’s Dogma II

• Epic Games has summed up the results of 2023 for its app store. She said that by December, the number of registered users in the Epic Games Store had reached 270 million people. In total, they spent $950 million over the year, which is 16% more than in 2022. It is noteworthy that spending in games not from Epic Games has decreased. They turned out to be 13% less than a year ago — $310 million. In 2023, 1.3 thousand games were released in the store, and now there are more than 2.9 thousand projects in its catalog. Epic Games also recalled that it is preparing to launch the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on iOS in Europe. The company has already received the necessary Apple developer account.
• Employees of Ubisoft's French offices went on strike after management refused to index salaries above the inflation rate. According to the trade union Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo, 700 people participated in it. How Ubisoft managers reacted to this is not reported.
• Blizzard Entertainment is going to lay off 136 employees of the division, which is based in the Irish city of Cork. This is reported by the Irish Examiner. According to the newspaper, 200 people work in the department in total, so layoffs of this scale will be extremely noticeable for him. Note that Blizzard Entertainment still has an office in Dublin in Ireland, which also employs about 200 people, but nothing is known about layoffs in it.
• Perhaps Capcom plans to raise the price tag of all its next major releases to $70. At a Q&A session with investors, the company said that the first game for $70 would be Dragon's Dogma II. It is possible that others will follow her. "Development costs in the industry have increased, and we consider price changes as one of the options. We will study consumer feedback and take a balanced approach to pricing our games," Capcom explained.
• The car scooter Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, released last week, overtook the original game in terms of peak online on Steam. According to SteamDB, at its peak on Sunday, 56,943 people were playing it at the same time. For comparison, the maximum audience that the first Deep Rock Galactic was able to attract at one time was 46,687 people. The situation pleasantly surprised the CEO of Ghost Ship Games Soren Lundgaard (Søren Lundgaard). He rejoiced at the popularity of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and jokingly wrote in X that "this should not have happened."