On October 27, “Road of Life” will be released on Steam — a free game about a truck driver on an icy route in besieged Leningrad. Sergey Gimelreich, the head of the Iskra studio, told App2Top how the team received support from the Internet Development Institute (IDI), how they balanced the budget, and how they created a game from “driving on flat ice.”

We continue our weekly YouTube interview series. The guest of the new episode is Dmitry Beley, co-founder of the game studio Solarsuit Games.

The European rating organization PEGI has begun revising the age ratings of previously released digital games that contain loot boxes and other mechanics involving the purchase of random items. Now, such projects will receive a PEGI 16 rating, even if they were previously marked PEGI 3, PEGI 7, or PEGI 12.

From November 2022 to October 2026, salaries in the gaming industry have decreased on average by 13%. This conclusion was reached by Amir Satvat, a partner at the venture fund 1Up Ventures.

Steam users are displeased with the large number of games featuring AI content at the October Steam Next Fest. Some have called on Valve to add a filter to the platform that would allow these projects to be hidden from recommendations.

Supercell has completed the full acquisition of the Finnish company Metacore, gaining 100% of the developer behind Merge Mansion. The parties officially announced the closure of the deal on October 19.

Analysts from the GameDiscoverCo service continue to survey Steam users. This time they decided to find out on which devices gamers usually play — not just titles from their Steam library, but video games in general.

TinyBuild’s achievements were boasted about on the social network X by the company’s CEO, Alex Nichiporchik.

The Department for Combating Illicit Use of Information and Communication Technologies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia reported this on its Telegram channel.

In France, the Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) of licensed operators in the online gambling sector reached nearly one and a half billion euros in the first half of 2026. It grew by 11% compared to the previous year, reported the local regulator ANJ.

Recently, investors have been generously investing in Turkish mobile studios.

This year, the editorial team at App2Top.ru is hosting its own gaming awards. It’s called the App2Top Awards and it recognizes the achievements of gaming teams from the CIS. The editorial team invites its readers to select the nominees.

Horror games represent a market with steady demand, a relatively low entry barrier for developers, and established rules. In our new report, we aim to examine how attractive this niche remains from a commercial perspective. As always, we include plenty of tables, data, and interesting observations.

The German studio Fishlabs announced on LinkedIn that it has been forced to part ways with some of its employees.

Starting January 2027, the so-called “IT Patent Law” will come into effect in Russia, which will expand the possibilities for software patent protection. According to the head of Rospatent, Yuri Zubov, the innovations will also apply to game developers—for instance, they will have the opportunity to patent skins.

American Congressman Ritchie Torres is preparing to introduce the Power to the Players Act bill. Its goal is to protect gamers’ rights and prevent situations where publishers revoke access to purchased games.

The developers from Wych Elm shared this information on social media.

Valve decided to introduce another round of changes to its digital store’s functionality. This time, it focused on upgrading its game achievements system, currently available only in the beta version of the Steam client.