What happened last week (06/22/2015 - 06/28/2015)

About the central events and the main materials of last week.

The main thing that happened last week was, of course, two stellar conferences – Unite Europe 2015 and White Nights 2015. I must say right away, it doesn’t make sense to compare them. They are just fundamentally different.

Unite is more about the engine, about working with it and hanging out around it. White Nights is generally about development and everything related to it, about the entire gaming community, regardless of the tools used by the teams.

A number of final materials related to them are still in the works (including a huge article about the history of Unity through the eyes of its most important employees), but from what came out, we recommend paying attention to the interview with Colossal Order. It turned out to be small, but it seems to us quite curious.

Another interesting piece from Unite is, of course, an interview with John Riccitello, who made an indelible impression on the entire Russian delegation. After the interview with him, every journalist passed by me almost enlightened. A rare figure in terms of energy, charisma and clarity of thought. I hope we managed to convey this at least partially through the material.

There were so many interesting reports at White Nights 2015 that we didn’t know what to grab, what to write about. Because of this, unfortunately, we were not able to cover all of them, but, for example, we did not miss the wonderful performance of Stefano Sandri from Wooga, who told how they were preparing for the release of Agent Alice.

Another excellent report – already about plotting – was from Playrix, which was enough for us for two publications. It was read by the company’s designer Evgeny Danilov.

Traditionally, the announcement was made by the social network Vkontakte, whose mobile gaming platform has now become closer to developers. Recall that now it is enough to integrate the SDK to get into the VK games catalog, and developers will receive 70% of the revenue from the game.

From what took place outside of conferences, but also worth attention: a luxurious article by Adam Telfer about the latest Supercell game, an interview with Orc Work about the second part of Evilibrium and material about how payment services can help with the conversion of players into paying users.

But, by the way, there was one important event that, unfortunately, we shamelessly missed last week. This, of course, is about the scandal with Apple’s removal of historical games with the flag of the Confederate States of America. The scandal is slowly dissipating by now: the Apple company has begun to return some games to the store. But we will definitely talk more about the precedent itself this week.