Over the weekend, a scandal related to Activision Blizzard’s accusations of discrimination against women developed. Mike Morhaime, one of the founders and former head of Blizzard, spoke about the problem. Some employees stopped working on World of Warcraft in protest, and a number of media outlets announced a boycott of the company.

The analytical company Newzoo has published an analysis of the mobile market of Saudi Arabia. It contains the gaming demographics of the country, the payment habits of local gamers and the most popular genres.

Odnoklassniki launched the direction of hyper-casual games. Developers of such projects will not only be able to launch their games on the social network, but will also receive additional opportunities for monetization.A separate section with hyper-casual games appeared on the Odnoklassniki game showcase.

New World is leading the Steam bestseller chart this week. Thanks to various publications, pre-orders of MMORPG from Amazon Games took the first two lines in the rating at once.

In 2019, a gaming company with Russian roots Panoramik received investments from Playrix. This helped to significantly improve the financial performance of the studio. Today it became known that since the beginning of 2020, Panoramik’s profitability has increased 10 times.Mighty Party: Heroes Clash

The conflict between Epic Games and Google continues to develop. Fortnite developers have updated their lawsuit against the corporation, adding several new proofs of Google’s monopolistic behavior.

The lack of large offline tournaments has not prevented the growth of esports. According to analysts from Niko Partners, last year the turnover of this market amounted to almost $ 1 billion. At the same time, more than half of all revenue came from Asian countries.Key data from the report

Unity has announced the purchase of Interactive Data Visualization. The company is best known for the SpeedTree package, with which developers can simulate plants and the environment. The size of the transaction is not disclosed.

On July 22, Electronic Arts held a presentation of EA Play Live. It also showed a sandbox mode for Battlefield 2042 and announced a remake of Dead Space. We tell you how the stock market and the gaming community reacted to the event.

Fans of World of Warcraft decided to draw attention to the accusations against Activision Blizzard related to discrimination against women and harassment at work. To do this, they staged a protest right in the game and demanded that all references to the former creative director be removed from it.The online action was organized by the guild Fence Macabre, according to the publication Polygon.

The launch of Warcraft III: Reforged turned into a failure, and the game itself has not yet been brought into an acceptable state. An investigation has been released today, which sheds light on the development problems and the causes of their occurrence. Activision played an important role in this, which changed Blizzard’s internal culture and began allocating money only for potential hits.Jason Schreier published a big investigation on Bloomberg.

Microsoft has decided to share its game development kit. The company published it for free on GitHub, but with the condition that you can use it without a license only for studying.

Mobile card battlers are on the rise right now. According to Sensor Tower, they became the fastest growing category in the strategy genre in the second quarter. And the highest-grossing title of the first half of the year turned out to be Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links.The main thing from the report

Zoom is expanding. The company has added the Zoom Apps app store to its video conferencing service. Among other things, it has games that you can play right during a video call.

Activision Blizzard was accused of discriminating against employees based on gender. According to the lawsuit, the company intentionally does not promote women in the service and understates their salaries. They complain about harassment and compare the atmosphere at work with the atmosphere of a fraternity. However, the company itself denies such accusations.The lawsuit was filed on July 20 in Los Angeles Superior Court following a two-year investigation.

Xsolla has introduced a new gaming investment platform, which is called the Game Investment Platform. On it, indie developers can get additional funding without having to share the rights to the game with investors.

The first quarter was not the most successful for Ubisoft in terms of sales. However, the company is going to compensate for this by attracting a new audience to its popular franchises. It’s about motivating users of free-to-play projects to buy premium AAA games in the same universe.Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet spoke about the new strategy.

There is a replenishment in the Epic Games family. It was joined by Sketchfab, a platform for publishing interactive 3D models. The size of the transaction is not specified.

ByteDance decided to compete in video games not only with Chinese giants Tencent and NetEase, but also with international companies such as Nintendo and Activision Blizzard. She announced plans to become “a global gaming company that can remain popular for decades.”World of Warcraft