On January 18, Microsoft confirmed that it would lay off 10,000 people. As it became known to the media, among others, developers from Bethesda, 343 Industries and The Coalition were reduced.

We continue the series of interviews in which we summarize the results of 2022 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry. This time we talked with Vasily Ovchinnikov, the head of the “Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry” (RVI).

On January 17, the American Xsolla Holding Company became the almost complete owner of the three Perm “daughters” of Xsolla. As RB writes.RU with reference to data from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, she now owns shares in the amount of 99.99% in LLC “Ixolla”, LLC “System Projects” and LLC “Ixolla Games”.

We continue to summarize the results of last year together with the top managers of the gaming industry. Next up is an interview with Oleg Beresnev, founder and CEO of Beresnev Games.

The European Federation of Game Developers (EGDF) has published an appeal in which it expressed support for the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft. She said that the deal will bring more benefits to the gaming industry than harm.

On January 17, Blizzard Entertainment announced that it had asked NetEase to temporarily extend the partnership, but was refused. Soon, the Chinese company issued a response statement in which it criticized the terms of the deal and the developers themselves.

VK has added a new type of monetization to RuStore. Paid applications have become available in the marketplace.

Unity is also making cuts. She announced that she would lay off 284 people.

Sky News, citing sources, reported that Microsoft plans to cut 5% of the corporation’s staff. It is assumed that the dismissals will be announced in the near future.

Apple must pay a fine of $17 million or 1.17 billion rubles in Russia. The fine was imposed by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation (FAS), — the agency was not satisfied that Apple was imposing the App Store payment system on developers.

AppMagic analysts have published a report on hyper-casual games. They listed the 10 most popular games in the fourth quarter of 2022, and also shared key trends.

In 2022, China’s gaming market earned $40.1 billion, which is 10.3% less than the previous year. As noted by SCMP with reference to the data of the Association of Audio-Video and Digital Publishers of China, previously for two decades the market revenue only grew.

Blizzard Entertainment wrote on Weibo that it tried to extend the agreement with NetEase for another six months, but without success.

On January 16, The Callisto Protocol stopped selling on Steam to residents of Russia. Neither the publisher Krafton nor the developers from Striking Distance Studios have publicly announced the suspension of sales, but the page with the game no longer opens in the region.

Mobile Vampire Survivors is popular. Portal MobileGamer.biz With reference to the data, AppMagic reported that in the period from December 8 to January 16, the game collected 1.47 million downloads on Google Play and 1.68 million downloads on the App Store.

At the beginning of the month, the Insider Gaming portal reported that the American studio Motorsport Games has not been paying employees from Russia since October 2022. Then the developers said they were going to go to court. But it seems that recently one of them decided to move to more aggressive measures.

From December 14 to 28, a charity event was held at Solitaire Cruise — Belka Games promised to donate all proceeds from it to research on the treatment of cancer in children, as well as support for the sick and their families. Now the company has summed up the results of the event.

Game distributors LLC “Company Soft Club” and LLC “1C-Softclub” are now directly owned by the Russian 1C. According to Kommersant, at the end of last November, it acquired them from the Cypriot DM Investments Multi Ventures.

Liu Wei, one of the founders of miHoYo, spoke about the studio’s ambitious ambitions in an interview with the Chinese newspaper The Paper.