Ubisoft laid off dozens of employees in Toronto, Steam set a new concurrent user record during its summer sale, Helldivers 2 lost 90% of its audience on Steam — here’s what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

One Piece Treasure Cruise is a mobile RPG developed by Bandai Namco Entertainment, inspired by the popular manga One Piece. In May, the game celebrated its tenth anniversary. On this occasion, analysts from Sensor Tower shared the project’s metrics.

Specialists from the legal company REVERA, Svetlana Gordey and Daria Savko, discussed what “gold farming” is and whether it can be legally combated.

Valve has added a new chart to Steam, which compiles the 100 most popular games on the portable PC, Steam Deck. The ranking considers the number of unique users and whether the game is among the most popular for each specific Steam Deck owner.

Investor optimism towards Tencent is growing, and along with it, the company’s market value is increasing. Bloomberg calculated that since January 1, 2024, the Chinese giant’s market capitalization has risen by 28%, or $91 billion.

Gameloft continues to downsize. A month after announcing plans to close its office in Cluj-Napoca, the company has parted ways with a “significant portion” of staff from its office in Toronto.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot officially revealed the audience size of the free-to-play shooter XDefiant. According to him, the game has attracted over 11 million users.

Metacritic has summarized the interim results for 2024. It published a list of the most critically acclaimed games released in the first half of the year.

The hacker group BlackSuit reported hacking the internal network of Kadokawa, the parent company of the developers of Dark Souls and Elden Ring. According to the perpetrators, they gained access to 1.5 TB of confidential data.

Unions are becoming more prevalent in the gaming industry. This time, developers from Bethesda Game Studios Montreal have announced their intention to create a labor union.

Irish startup LinQ has closed a new funding round. The company received $2.3 million from investors, which it plans to spend on assisting mobile developers in entering the Real Money Gaming (RMG) market.

Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands, a company specializing in Web3 gaming, might become a public company once again. Its co-founder Yat Siu stated that the company is considering an IPO in the second half of 2025.

Shift Up Studio plans to sell their shares at the top end of its set price range during the IPO, sources tell Reuters. They expect to raise 435 billion won ($313 million) from investors after going public.

Recently, Playground Games announced the decision to delist Forza Horizon 4 from online stores. The racing game will no longer be available for sale starting December 15. The announcement shook the community, resulting in the game’s peak online player count on Steam reaching record levels.

The creators of the marine adventure game Dave the Diver are celebrating the first anniversary of the official release. In a birthday video, game director Jaeho Hwang announced that project sales should have surpassed 4 million copies by now.

Hazelight Studios announced that the cooperative adventure game A Way Out has been purchased 9 million times. The game reached this milestone a little over six years after its release: it launched on March 23, 2018.

In mid-June, Turkey hosted the WN Conference for game developers and publishers. The event featured representatives from companies such as Gram Games, Space Ape Games, Ubisoft Abu Dhabi, Unity, Google, and many others.

The popularity of controllers is growing on Steam. According to Valve’s estimates, the average daily usage of controllers has tripled over the past six years — from 5% to 15%.

Valve has introduced a new set of features in Steam. It has added tools to the beta version of the Steam client that allow you to record gameplay.