The Chinese microblogging service Weibo has published a list of games, hashtags with the names of which most often fell into the trends of the site in the first half of 2023.

The court seized the bank accounts of the management of Game Insight, Ubisoft removes inactive accounts of gamers along with purchased games, Blizzard responded to criticism of the patch for Diablo IV, — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

The Independent Federation of the European Video Game Industry (aka ISFE, aka simply Video Games Europe), presented a report on the state of the PC and console games market in the region for the first six months of 2023.

The first fiscal quarter of 2024 for Ubisoft fell on April-June 2023. It turned out to be unsuccessful for the company.

Officially, the amount is invested by the federal agency Screen Australia. The money is distributed through its funds — Games: Expansion Pack and First Nations Games Studio.

Last week, it was reported that an indirect 28% tax on companies engaged in online games and esports was approved in India. Now it turns out that it will apply only to those who trade bets for real money.

ChinaJoy, Asia’s largest gaming exhibition, and WN Media Group, an international organizer of events for video game developers and publishers, have announced a partnership.

In the first half of 2023, the demand for gaming specialists in Russia decreased by more than a third compared to the same period last year.

A new box office hit has appeared on the Chinese mobile market. The game is called Justice Mobile (逆水寒). According to the analytical platform Diandian, its iOS version earned $23.3 million in the first five days of sales.

According to Vedomosti with reference to the XYZ School survey, most of the players from Russia use pirated versions of video games.

In the Blizzard studio, despite record revenues (it received a net $ 1 billion for the first time in the quarter), cuts began. 50 people who specialized in esports lost their places.

A small revolution in the digital PC distribution market. Blizzard will start posting its game titles on the Valve platform.

In just four months of sales, the Resident Evil 4 remake made it into the top 15 best-selling Capcom games.

SberMarketing, Check Index and Rambler &Co conducted a survey of 90 thousand users from Russia regarding video games. We share some figures from it.

In total, in April-June 2023, the company earned $2.2 billion. Of this amount, $520 million is revenue from games, and the remaining $1.6 billion is from micropayments and subscriptions. The company’s net profit for the quarter totaled $587 million.

The reason is the capture of Deputy Minister of Digital Development Maxim Parshin red—handed when handing over a bribe of 3.5 million rubles last Friday.

On July 18, the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard was supposed to be completed. However, the merger was decided to be postponed in light of negotiations with British regulators. Now the papers must be signed no later than October 18.

Yandex Games has published “Igrotok” in mobile stores without an official announcement. This is a game library of hyper-casual games, whose principle of operation resembles working with content on TikTok. The key difference is that the swipe does not launch a new video, but a preview of the game or the game itself (depends on the platform).

A little more analytics about the European market. But this time from another company — from GSD. She estimated that over the past month, 15.5 million games from major publishers were sold in Europe in digital and physical retail.