The New Zealand government has introduced a tax break for local game studios. It will reimburse them 20% of the costs incurred during the development of games.

On the night of June 1-2, Blizzard released Diablo IV for early access. TwitchTracker estimates that 941,488 people on Twitch watched the launch of the game at the same time.

On June 2, the release of Street Fighter 6 took place. The game immediately set a record, beating all the fighting games online on Steam.

Layoffs continue in the gaming industry. According to Kotaku Australia, Electronic Arts (EA) is going to cut two-thirds of the employees of the Australian Firemonkeys Studios.

The recent announcement of Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered for the Evercade portable console caused discontent among players. They noticed that the images in the advertisement were created by neural networks, and criticized the publisher of the remaster for disrespecting the project. Blaze Entertainment has already apologized for the incident.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most discussed topics in recent months. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that against the background of such interest, the generative AI market will grow more than 32 times in ten years.

Studio BonusXP, known for the games Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game, has begun the liquidation process.

The founder of the company “Achivka” Yasha Haddazhi no longer runs the Nintendo division in Russia. Haddaji managed it for 12 years.

We are publishing a new list with gaming vacancies. This week they are wanted: a game designer at Airicore, a senior 2D artist at Belka Games and an event coordinator at WN Media Group.

Vampire shooter Redfall has become Arkane‘s worst project in terms of critics’ and players’ ratings. Journalist Jason Schreier talked to the developers from the studio and found out what went wrong.

Game designer Eric Covington believes that he was unfairly fired from Blizzard. He claims that the company did this after noticing the lines he wrote for the Greedy Goblin character from World of Warcraft, ridiculing the behavior of greedy corporations.

Japanese Vanpool announced the dissolution of the studio. The reasons for the closure are not given.

The Tokyo District Court held the third hearing in the case of Yuji Naka, accused of insider stock trading. On it, the prosecutor’s office requested that the former head of Sonic Team be sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and a fine of 172.5 million ($ 1.2 million).

Ubisoft is closing a store on the Chinese Tmal l platform, where it sold merchandise and other paraphernalia for its games. It will stop working on June 7.

Activision Blizzard was ready to acquire the Time Warner media holding (now operating under the name WarnerMedia) if the deal with AT&T had collapsed. This was stated by Bobby Kotick in an interview with Variety.

Firaxis Games has massively reduced its employees. According to 2K, the parent company of Firaxis Games, this was necessary to increase the efficiency of the studio.

The former design director of Cyberpunk 2077, Mateusz Kanik, together with several other CD PROJEKT RED veterans, has established a new game studio. It’s called Blank.

The Finnish forge of blockbusters is gaining momentum. Immediately after the second public beta test of Squad Busters (it took place from May 22 to May 29), the company announced and brought a new title to the beta test. We talk about it and Supercell‘s new practice of working with games in development.

Almost four years after its release, the mobile game Pokémon Masters EX (formerly known as simply Pokémon Masters) has crossed the milestone of 50 million downloads. This was announced by DeNA.