The founders of Team Cherry studio described in detail how the indie hit Hollow Knight appeared – from the first ideas to the grueling final testing.

The revenues of the British company Games Workshop, which owns the rights to the Warhammer franchise, increased by 94% over the year. The company receives 96% of its licensing revenue from video games*.

The Skolkovo Foundation proposes to exempt Russian developers from paying VAT for equipping the workplaces of programmers writing software for export.

The affiliate program, which allowed websites with reviews of iOS applications to receive a percentage of purchases in the App Store, will be closed from October 1.

There is also a game dev in Pakistan. It was in this South Asian country that the Cloudcade studio from San Francisco, which developed a casual simulator Shop Heroes, opened its new division.

Founder of the game design blog Deconstructor of Fun Michail Katkoff reflects on why Supercell fails to make a genre-forming project out of Brawl Stars and whether the game will die before it reaches the world release. The article examines in detail what happened to the game in four big updates and where the developers made mistakes.

According to Newzoo, in two years, the revenue of the American gaming market has increased by $6.8 billion and now stands at $30.4 billion.

The free-play role-playing game Fire Emblem Heroes, earned $400 million in a year and a half since its release. Other Nintendo mobile titles bring many times less.

NPD Group specialists analyzed the June indicators of the US gaming market. Compared to last year, sales of gaming hardware jumped by 52%, with the inexpensive retro NES Classic console selling best.

A week later, the indie game Dead Cells will be released on Steam. During the period of early access, 750 thousand copies of it were sold. One of the reasons for the success of the game is the attention of developers to criticism from players and the involvement of the community in the development.

In 2017, the turnover of the Indian market was $890 million dollars – less than one percent of the global total. However, experts say with confidence that India will soon become the new eldorado of the gaming industry.

Now users who purchase questionable products from the Steam Store will receive notifications from the store before the transaction. This is how Valve fights the trade in fake game items.

Japan is the third largest gaming market in the world. Its revenue this year will be $19.2 billion, Newzoo predicts. This is $6.7 billion more than last year.

The recently acquired Microsoft gaming studio Playground Games has hired six experienced developers who previously worked in large companies. All of them will be working on some new PRG — apparently, on Fable IV.

Kotaku editor Kirk Hamilton has compiled a list of five mechanics by which games turn a player’s failure or mistake into a meaningful experience.

Due to a bug in the Destiny 2 multiplayer shooter, the matchmaking system began to select players with different skill levels for fast online battles. Gamers liked this option even more: the battles are now more fun and end earlier.

Action RPG Sample Project is an educational mobile game from Epic Games, which should help designers familiarize themselves with the features of the Unreal Engine on a specific example.

The Abstractism platformer, which could be purchased on Steam, installed Trojans on players’ computers and used them for mining cryptocurrencies. Perhaps it was all some kind of subtle trolling.

Apptopia has published an interesting infographic: in how many days mobile games overcame the bar of 100 million downloads on iOS. Super Mario Run achieved this the fastest.