We continue to share video recordings from the St. Petersburg session of the “Game Industry” Conference (GIC), which took place in July. Today, we feature a presentation by Artemiy Bolshakov, the CEO of the game development company DISTORTION. He delivered a lecture on “Investments in Game Projects: How to Speak the Same Language as an Investor.”

We continue our column “Developer/Publisher Wanted,” where indie teams share their stories and projects. Up next is Children Play, which is creating the narrative horror-adventure “Children’s Temple.”

Analysts at Newzoo collected data on the average audience of games released from January 2021 to December 2024. Below are the main figures.

At the end of the week, the capital of Belarus will host the Unicon & Game Expo Minsk 2025 — a large-scale convention dedicated to video games, board games, comics, and series.

The release of Borderlands 4 is just around the corner, and in anticipation, the head of the analytics firm Alinea Analytics, Rickard Linder, has estimated the pre-orders of the title on Steam. According to him, more than half a million people have already purchased the game.

Yesterday, on September 9, 2025, marked the 30th anniversary of the release of the PlayStation 1 in the United States. To commemorate this occasion, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella named the Sony console games that have performed best in the American market in terms of revenue and units sold over the years.

We continue to share video presentations from the St. Petersburg session of the “Game Industry” (CIG) conference, which took place in July. Today’s highlight is the presentation by the editor of RuStore’s gaming department, Yevgeny Mirkin. He spoke on the topic, “Invisible Rakes: Developer Mistakes That Hinder Organic Growth in RuStore.”

The leader in the Steam top-grossing games chart for the week of September 2 to September 9 was unquestionably Hollow Knight: Silksong. It secured the number one spot both in the top for paid games only and in the overall ranking.

PixelAnt Games, which participated in the development of Mortal Kombat 1, Still Wakes The Deep, and numerous other games, has become an independent studio. It had been part of the British holding company Sumo Group since the summer of 2021.

The analytics company Newzoo has released a forecast for the global video game market in 2025. Here are the key points:

The SunStrike team shared with App2Top their case study on implementing AI in the game testing pipeline.

A new venture fund focusing on games and media franchises will also be established.

The release of Hollow Knight: Silksong was extremely successful, reports the analytics company Alinea Analytics. According to their estimates, over 5 million people tried the new game across all platforms in the first three days, including those on the Game Pass subscription.

We continue to share the video presentations from the St. Petersburg session of the “Gaming Industry” conference (GIC), which took place in July. Today’s highlight is the talk by Slava Gris from RedblackSpade, the creator of games such as Reflection of Mine, Catmaze, and Fearmonium. His topic was “AI is changing development. But how is it changing developers?”

This information comes from the GameDiscoverCo service.

Azur Games is entering the game analytics market. The company announced that it is opening access for third-party teams to Azur Games Analytics—its internal platform for evaluating mobile game metrics, as well as working with monetization and creatives.

At the 2025 Roblox Developer Conference, Roblox’s Senior Vice President Nick Tornow shared information about the annual revenue of the most successful developers on the platform. He refrained from naming names but disclosed the average amounts.

The low price of Hollow Knight: Silksong has caused concern among indie developers, SEGA veterans discussed crunch time in the company during the 1990s and 2000s, and the daily active audience for Grow a Garden has reached 60 million people — a brief summary of the main events in the gaming industry over the past weekend.

Hollow Knight: Silksong can already be considered one of the major game releases of 2025. In today’s piece, we provide a detailed analysis of the game’s launch from various metric perspectives and compare it to other Metroidvanias and titles in different genres.