Digital sales for October this year increased by 14%. The growth happened thanks to a series of AAA releases.

The Google Play app store has published international and local lists of games that it considered the most popular in the outgoing 2016. In Russia, the main award went to Clash Royale.

On the morning of December 2, Los Angeles hosted The Game Awards ceremony, an analogue of the Oscar in the gaming industry. The game of the year was named Overwatch, the best mobile game of the year – Pokémon GO.

From January 1, Google Play pays value added tax (VAT) from payments in Russia. In this regard, prices for end users will increase.

The authors of World of Tanks bought the Boomlagoon studio and opened a mobile development office in Helsinki.

This October, the turnover of the Russian market of MMO games for PC increased by a quarter compared to the same month last year.

The heroic fighting game MARVEL Contest of Champions (Kabam) turned out to be the highest-grossing iOS app in North America on November 28, ahead of Game of War (MZ) and Clash Royale (Supercell).

The policy regarding marketing companies and developers encouraging users to leave “false ratings and reviews” is being tightened.

HTML5 developers interested in creating games for the new Facebook platform will be able to get money for it from Big Viking Games.

Over the current year, more than 4,000 games have been published in the Steam digital game store. This is more than a third of the total number of projects on Steam.

A new version of the Unity game engine – Unity 5.5 – has become available to developers. The key innovation is full support for HoloLens.

The authors of Angry Birds have founded a startup that will release a Netflix analogue for mobile games early next year.

The Indie Game Cup Indie project competition has started. The best projects will receive awards and prizes at the winter White Nights, which will be held in February 2017 in Prague.

The authors of “Natives” and “Mysterious House” after the announcement of Instant Games by the social network Facebook said that they invested $ 5 million in games for the new platform, and also acquired the authors of Need a Hero.

As part of the last Casual Connect session, which took place in early November, the best projects were awarded in ten nominations. In light of the upcoming deadline for submitting applications for the next Indie Prize Showcase, we decided to briefly go through the list.

Unity has launched an affiliate program to promote content in the Asset Store. For sales received from external links, commissions will be paid.

Two high-ranking Zynga managers, leaving the company for Scopely, took with them to a new place data about the former employer and several colleagues.

The provider of Tilting Point has launched a fund that will invest in advertising campaigns for mobile games by indie developers.

App2Top.ru continues to post videos from the White Nights Moscow 2016 conference. Next up is the performance of Nizar Romdan from Virtual Arts. In his speech, he talked about creating his own VR studio in Cambridge (UK), which develops games, interactive content and new technologies, as well as how to make a good game for VR.