A year ago, James Ohlen announced that he was retiring. After twenty-two years at BioWare, where he was responsible for the design of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Dragon Age and Mass Effect: Andromeda, he wanted to work on something small for himself for a couple of years. The pension did not last long.

The Russian IT giant has reported on the first financial quarter of this year. In January-March, the company earned 20.1 billion rubles ($307 million). More than a quarter of the amount — 6.7 billion rubles (around $ 102 million) — fell on the company’s gaming business.

Wanted: Sales manager at devtodev, game designer at Gaijin Entertainment and 2D artist at Playrix.

The main platform for money for PUBG remains the desktop. This conclusion can be drawn from acquaintance with the financial results of PUBG Corp for the past year.

In March, users spent $8.7 billion on digital versions of games. This is 3% less than it was spent in March last year.

The Playrix company founded by the Buchman brothers has released a new game. So far, however, only within the framework of a soft launch. The novelty is called Wildscapes. And it, like the company’s latest games, is match-3.

Another “prohibitive” news from China. The largest gaming company in the world, Tencent, now does not allow anyone under the age of 16 to log in to games without parental permission. Restrictions apply only to residents of the Celestial Empire.

Apex Legends had a very high-profile launch. And the project got off to a great start. However, the publisher of the game Electronic Arts has not shared the indicators of the game for a long time. And they could have fallen decently.

Mobile strategies continue to earn huge sums. The revenue of King of Avalon and Guns of Glory — both developed and published by FunPlus — amounted to more than a billion dollars.

Within the framework of the Secure Internet Forum, which is taking place in Moscow today, Federation Council member Elena Mizulina spoke about amendments to a number of laws, thanks to which age classification of games can be introduced in Russia.

The situation with the games in China last week became a little more transparent. One of the ministries of the country shared how the process of reviewing games for publication is now structured. Specific bans for games distributed in the country have also been published.

Iraq has followed the example of Nepal and the Indian state of Gujarat: PUBG is now banned in it. However, the country’s parliament went even further and at the same time banned Fortnite.

In early March, disturbing information appeared on the Apple Developer Forum and in the Radug Facebook community. According to it, some iOS developers from Russia have not received their payments from Apple. The topic received a wide response thanks to the media only in mid-April.

Newzoo and StreamLabs revealed the most popular games on Twitch for the first quarter of this year. The leader on the site is still Fortnite. But the competition with the new EA title turned into a loss of views for her.

YouTube Live presents an increasingly serious competition for Twitch. This is the conclusion reached by Newzoo and Streamlab analysts, comparing the performance of the largest streaming platforms for the first quarter of the year.

The role-playing action Pagan Online was released in early access on Steam and Wargaming.net . The developer of the game was Mad Head Games.

Over 10 years, Kickstarter backers have donated a total of $1 billion to gaming projects. Of these, only $236.5 million went to video games (excluding mobile titles).

Sensor Tower analysts estimated the revenue of mobile games received in the first quarter of the year. It grew by 12.3% year-on-year and amounted to $14.6 billion.

The Finnish gaming industry currently employs 3,200 people. A quarter of them work from abroad.