The MY.GAMES investment division has invested in American developers from Pizza Club Games. The studio was founded at the beginning of last year by veterans of SEGA, Electronic Arts, NCsoft Glu and Playdom.

There is one more support program for indie developers. Publisher SayGames has allocated $10 million for the publication of hyper-casual games as part of a special SayHero project.

The gaming market continues to consolidate. Electronic Arts becomes the owner of Glu Mobile. The business was valued at $2.1 billion. However, the company accounts for $364 million. So the whole deal will cost electronics $2.4 billion.

2020 has greatly influenced not only how games are developed, but also how publishers find them. Previously, most of the pitches took place at major events with personal communication. The pandemic has made its own adjustments. Bobby Wertheim, director of content at SEGA Searchlight, told about the main ones at WN Winter’21.

The network published the initial XCOM relaunch pitch, which was written about 15 years ago. As it turned out, Firaxis planned to make real-time battles in the game instead of the traditional turn-based system.The document was shared by game designer and creative director of Firaxis Jake Solomon.

Along with the maturation of the mobile market, the introduction of meta-mechanics into casual games is becoming an increasingly common practice among Western developers. As a rule, we are talking about collections, customization, role progression and narrative.

Steam has updated its own record for the number of users who were online at the same time. Yesterday, the peak online in the Valve store exceeded 26 million people for the first time.According to SteamDB, on February 7, 26,401,443 people were on Steam at the same time.

The authors of the NoClip channel traced the entire development path of Hades — from the release of the game in early access to production difficulties and the release of the full version. Recently, the final part of the project was released, the total timekeeping of which now exceeds four hours.

The cooperative survival about Vikings Valheim became the leader of sales on Steam, and the peak online game exceeded 130 thousand users. This is despite the fact that the title appeared in the early access store less than a week ago.

Last week, the authors of Borderlands joined the Embracer Group. According to rumors, Microsoft was interested in buying Gearbox before the Swedish holding. That’s just among the conditions was the resignation of the head of the studio Randy Pitchford (Randy Pitchford).

Sony now owns a small stake in the studio From Software, known for the Dark Souls series. This happened as a result of the creation of an alliance with the developer’s parent company.This became known from the quarterly report of Kadokawa Corporation Holding, which has owned From Software since 2014.

Unity shared the results of Thursday’s fiscal quarter (ended December 31). It turned out to be a record in several indicators at once. The company earned $220 million, and the MAU of applications on its engine exceeded 2.5 billion.Key data for the fourth quarter

What will happen to the mobile advertising market after Apple pulls the switch responsible for IDFA in iOS 14? Tenjin Marketing Director Roman Garbar plans to share the answer to this question at his presentation at WN Winter 2021.

Wanted: creative artist at Matryoshka Games, marketer at ZiMAD, Unity developer at Deus Craft and game designer at WN Media Group.

In the new Indie Cup season, you can win full funding for the game. The judges will be Kefir, CD Projekt Red, Ubisoft, NVIDIA, Wargaming, Humble Bundle and other companies.

Activision Blizzard shared last year’s financial results. The publisher’s revenue during this time exceeded $ 8 billion.  Half of this amount was brought by the Activision division. All thanks to Call of Duty.

Consisting of veterans of the gaming industry, Mountaintop studio has attracted $ 5.5 million in investments to develop its first project. It is headed by the co-founder of Oculus, and the company itself works completely remotely.Mountaintop managed to raise funds from an unnamed group of investors, friends and family members of the developers.

Latitude Studio has attracted $3.3 million in investments thanks to the success of its AI Dungeon text sandbox. All the plots in the game are generated by artificial intelligence, and its creator is confident that the development of this technology will help reduce the budgets of the development of AAA titles by hundreds of times.The main investor of Latitude was the venture fund NFX.

China’s gaming market has overflowed with mobile developers, SCMP believes. Competition in the country has intensified, and Chinese companies have increasingly begun to look towards the West. Titles based on famous franchises like “Harry Potter”, “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones” help to achieve popularity among European players.