Yandex has decided to enter the cloud gaming market. She began accepting applications to participate in a closed testing service called “Plus Gaming”.

On March 29, South Korean studio Shift Up released a demo of the futuristic action game Stellar Blade on PlayStation 5 consoles. The game showed excellent results. Analysts from Ampere Analysis estimated that at its peak it attracted almost twice as many daily active users (DAU) as the demo version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at the time.

The difficult times for gaming companies continue. Ascendant Studios, which created the Immortals of Aveum shooter, forcibly transferred most employees to a long unpaid leave. This is reported by the Game Developer with reference to a LinkedIn post by Phoenix Labs Chief Engineer Chris Morness.

The core of the Cartel Tycoon development team has moved to a new independent studio. It’s called Mind Control Games.

The use of artificial intelligence in game development continues to cause heated debate. This time, Champions TCG studio participated in them. She stated that the artwork for her collectible NFT card game Champions of Otherworldly was made using neural networks. They were created by an “AI artist” alone, to whom she paid tens of thousands of dollars.

There is little talk about games in the Telegram messenger. We decided to fix the situation by talking with Daria Novikova, product director at PlayDeck startup. The latter launched a gaming marketplace for Telegram. In a conversation with Daria, we touched on topics such as user engagement, earnings from leading projects, monetization and, of course, PlayDeck itself.

Hurun Research Institute has published an annual ranking of the world’s largest non-listed companies. The studio miHoYo was among the leaders.

Sandrine Caloiaro, who headed Ubisoft’s portfolio management department, has decided to quit. She worked for the company for ten years.

Ubisoft has announced that its South Korean division will cease to exist after 22 years of operation in the country. The branch will close its doors on April 30, 2024.

World of Warcraft, Overwatch 2 and other Blizzard Entertainment games will return to the Chinese market this summer. The company has signed a new publishing agreement with NetEase.

MY.GAMES regularly shares metrics of its games. This time, she published fresh data on Left to Survive.

On April 9, NetEase’s share price rose 4.1% to HK$157.5 (US$20) apiece. Shareholders have reacted positively to rumors that NetEase has agreed to re-publish Blizzard Entertainment games in China.

At the end of March, Embracer Group announced the imminent sale of Gearbox Entertainment to Take-Two Interactive for $460 million. However, she decided to keep a number of assets, among which was a part of Gearbox Publishing — Gearbox Publishing San Francisco. Now this division will be called Arc Games.

Sensor Tower has published a study of the mobile games market. Among the key trends are falling downloads and cash registers.

Released in honor of the first of April, the cooperative horror Content Warning is selling great. The game debuted from fifth place on the chart of the highest-grossing games on Steam, ahead of PUBG in weekly sales: BATTLEGROUNDS, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Russia continues to explore ways to control the market for in-game items. First Deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and state Construction Irina Rukavishnikova told TASS that in May, Russian senators will hold a public discussion on this issue.

Sergey Trukhan, Commercial Director of the Fplus IT holding, spoke at an event for developers of applications for the Aurora mobile operating system. He announced that his company is ready to allocate money to ten teams that will port games to Aurora by the end of 2024.

Journalist Stephen Totilo from Game File spoke with Michael Douse, head of the publishing department at Larian Studios, about the current state of the gaming industry. We chose the main thing from the interview.

On April 4, the global release of Buckshot Roulette took place. This is a horror game from an Estonian solo developer, which immediately resembles the narrative of Inscryption and the creations of Yoko Taro.