The main thing for the weekend (February 23-25)

25 million people played in Palworld, Suicide Squad did not meet the expectations of Warner Bros., the Battlefield game director left Electronic Arts, - we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

• Pocketpair studio reported that 25 million people got acquainted with Palworld during the month of early access. Most players chose to buy the title: sales of the Steam version amounted to 15 million copies. The remaining 10 million people played Palworld with a Game Pass subscription.
• Skull and Bones is not doing so well. According to insider Tom Henderson's sources, by the end of last week, the pirate action game attracted 850 thousand players. This number includes both those who bought the game and those who tried the free eight-hour version. In a conversation with Henderson, one of the developers of Skull and Bones noted that weak sales are largely due to the high price. Ubisoft's decision to sell the game for $70 is criticized not only online, but also within the company: "I think we all understand that it costs $ 30-40 at best. But we cannot influence the price," the developer said. However, Skull and Bones has a fairly high engagement rate. On average, users spend about three to four hours a day playing the game.
• Sales of the Balatro poker "bagel" exceeded 250 thousand copies. The title took this mark three days after its release on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. "We don't have enough words to express how grateful we are to you for supporting the game," wrote LocalThunk studio in X.
• Analyst Mat Piscatella from Circana has published statistics on the US gaming market by the end of January 2024. According to his data, in a month Americans spent $5 billion on the purchase of video games, gaming hardware and gaming accessories. This is 15% more than in January 2023. The best-selling games were Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Tekken 8 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
• Warner Bros. has recognized Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as a failure. At an investor event, the CFO of Warner Bros. Discovery Gunnar Wiedenfels reported that the game did not meet the company's expectations. As a result, due to the unsuccessful release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the financial performance of the company's gaming division in the first quarter of 2024 will be worse than a year ago. Then Warner Bros. released Hogwarts Legacy, the best—selling novelty of 2023.
• In 2021, one of the creators of Halo, Marcus Lehto, founded Ridgeline Games studio as part of Electronic Arts, which, under his leadership, began developing the single-player part of the next Battlefield. In February 2024, he suddenly quit. The network also noticed that Leto recently deleted the mention of Battlefield from his social media profiles (although LinkedIn still says that he worked on Battlefield). Why Leto decided to leave Ridgeline Games and Electronic Arts is unknown.
• There have been layoffs at the American indie studio Disruptive Games. According to rough estimates, at least 15 people lost their jobs, including producers, screenwriters and artists. Founded in 2009, Disruptive Games specializes in outsourcing game development. She helped create titles such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 and Diablo II: Resurrected. The studio is currently working with Amazon Games on a kind of "secret project".