The main thing for the weekend (March 8-10)

Apple restored the Epic Games developer account on iOS, the Deviation Games studio was closed, the source code of the qdEngine engine appeared in the public domain, on which the quests "Brothers Pilots 3D" and "Dwarf Nose" were created, — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

"Brothers Pilots 3D: The case of garden pests"

• Epic Games will still be able to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS for users from the European Union. The company said that Apple restored its developer account a few days after the deletion. This happened after the European Commission drew attention to the situation. Apple itself, in a comment to The Verge, stated that it had held talks with Epic Games, and she pledged to comply with all the rules of iOS.
• 600 testers from Activision have joined together to form the largest video game trade union in the United States to date. Previously, the ZeniMax Media trade union was considered such — it consists of about 300 people. Microsoft did not oppose the merger and voluntarily recognized it.
• Deviation Games has announced its closure. The studio, founded in 2020 by people from Treyarch, has not managed to release a single game. It is known that she was working on an innovative shooter for Sony. In May 2023, after mass layoffs, rumors about the cancellation of the project appeared in the studio, but the Deviation Games management did not comment on them. Officially, the reason for the closure of the studio is not called. Perhaps the closure is due to optimization in Sony's gaming division, in which the company laid off 900 people.
• Many games that copy the popular Worlde puzzle, in which you need to guess a five-letter word in six attempts, can be closed. The reason is copyright infringement. The publication 404 Media reported that The New York Times, which owns Wordle, sent DMCA complaints to "hundreds" of developers. In particular, the newspaper recently secured the blocking of the repositories of the Reactle game on GitHub — the Reactle source code was used more than 1,900 times to create Worlde clones in other languages and with slightly different mechanics.
• On March 10, Steam's peak online traffic exceeded 35 million people for the first time. According to the SteamDB service, 35,385,530 users were on the site at the same time, 11,155,445 of them were directly playing games at that time. Steam set the previous record for peak online traffic just a week ago. On March 3, the number of simultaneous users exceeded 34.6 million people.
• The K-D LAB Association shared the source code of the qdEngine engine on GitHub. She published all the engine code, with the exception of third-party libraries, under the GPLv3 license. As the association notes, the engine is primarily focused on the development of quests. At one time, games such as "Brothers Pilots" were created on it. The Other side of the Earth", two parts of "Brothers Pilots 3D", "Dwarf Nose", "Adventures of the brave soldier Schweik" and others.