Closed beta testing of New World, a premium MMORPG developed by Amazon Games, began yesterday. Already in the first day of online games on Steam exceeded 190 thousand people. Now she is also in the top on Twitch.

GEM Capital investment company has invested $500 thousand in Gameram, a social network for gamers. It was founded by Philip Gladkov, who previously headed the Pixonic studio.The funds were received as part of the seed round.

Ubisoft has published a report for the first quarter of the current fiscal year (ended June 30). All key indicators of the company have fallen compared to last year. They managed to earn only € 352.8 million, while almost all of the revenue was provided by old games.

Polygon has gained fame as an Ethereum scaling platform. Now the company has decided to support blockchain games. To do this, she opened a gaming division and established a special fund for developers in the amount of $ 100 million.The opening of Polygon Studios became known on July 19.

Tencent continues to spend money. This time, together with the investment fund Hiro Capital, she invested in independent developers from Germany Keen Games — they are known for the Portal Knights role-playing sandbox.

Wanted: trainee marketing analyst at Matryoshka Games, tester at WAZZAPPS and user engagement manager at Melsoft.

Tilting Point participated in the first funding round in its history. The publisher raised $235 million. The funds received will be used for the development of the publishing direction, M&A transactions and access to new markets and platforms.The main investor was General Atlantic with the participation of strategic investors Red Ventures and Kamerra.

TiMi Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent, has an office in Montreal. The new studio will develop a multiplatform AAA game with an open world. In the future, based on this project, a full-fledged game metaverse from TiMi Studios may appear.

The International Association of Game Developers (IGDA) has issued a statement on the use of blockchain by gaming companies. Experts called for reducing the use of NFT and doing other ways that require less energy and do not have as much impact on the environment.IGDA published a statement last week, but the network has only noticed it now.

Another deal with Tencent. The Chinese giant has bought a controlling stake in Stunlock Studios, which is known for the isometric desktop MOBA Battlerite. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

Analysts from Sensor Tower told which games were downloaded the most in the second quarter (ended June 30). In Europe and the USA, hyper-casual titles are leading — only some games managed to overtake them in terms of downloads. But in Asian stores, the situation is slightly different from global trends.Hair Challenge

Mobile publisher Scopely decided to support three game studios at once. The company announced an investment of $50 million.

Nexters has become one step closer to entering the stock exchange. A gaming company with Russian roots has reported attracting investments worth $50 million. This makes it possible to talk about the closure of the SPAC deal already in the third quarter.PIPE investments were received from a fund from Abu Dhabi Mubadala Investment Company and VPE Capital.

Nintendo rarely comments on rumors, but this time decided not to leave the situation unanswered. The company denied a Bloomberg report that Switch OLED should become more profitable than the previous model.

Another major Western asset will soon come under the management of Tencent. The Chinese giant announced a deal with the British Sumo Group, known among other things for Forza Horizon 2 and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. The takeover will cost the holding company $1.27 billion.

Apple’s new policy and the release of iOS 14.5 have already had a big impact on the mobile market. They affected not only advertising, but also affected game design and monetization. Joel Julkunen, Vice President of game analytics at GameRefinery, spoke about these trends.State of Survival

New Week — a new Steam bestseller chart. There are almost no titles left in the top ten best-selling games from last week, except Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin. This game became the leader of the rating. Also among the bestsellers was the recently announced Steam Deck.

Glen Schofield, former director of Sledgehammer Games, spoke about the importance of research activities when creating Call of Duty. However, the Kotaku publication compared his work trips with vacations and considered that the head of a large studio had nothing to complain about. Many developers came to Scofield’s defense. They explained why business trips are tedious and difficult work.

In June 2021, Americans spent almost $5 billion on video games, hardware and accessories, NPD Group analysts found out. One of the most popular purchases was the Xbox Series X|S console line — it surpassed other consoles in earnings for the first time.