The chess boom continues in Twitch. In February, the hours of views of streams on the chess theme jumped 21 times compared to last year. This was largely due to the success of the TV series “The Queen’s Move” released at the end of October.

At the end of last year, a new publisher of hyper—casual games appeared – Hoopsly. It was founded by Sergey Drozhzhin, CEO 3D.RU , and Nikita Guk, previously responsible for the development of the Playgendary and Pixonic brands. The company has already managed to get a “residence permit” in Dubai and attract $ 5 million. We talked with Nikita about the history of Hoopsly and the features of the hyper-casual market.

The next fiscal year (April 2021 — March 2022) could be extremely successful for Nintendo. According to Bloomberg, the Japanese company plans to sell about 250 million games for Switch during this time. If everything works out, the company will set a new sales record. However, analysts do not share this optimism.

The government is discussing a new measure to support the IT sector. Now, scheduled inspections can be completely canceled for domestic industry companies. It is assumed that this will create more comfortable conditions for the IT business.We are talking about inspections of Rospotrebnadzor, the Social Insurance Fund, fire supervision, labor inspection and other organizations.

It seems that Genshin Impact is very popular in China. A campaign related to the game started in local KFC last week. There were many people willing to participate. So much so that in some cities the police had to intervene.

Blizzard‘s next novelty may be a multiplayer first-person shooter. This is hinted at by the company’s job descriptions. There are few details yet, but the developers say they will have to work on a “really cool” project.

By the end of February App2Top.ru Together with AppMagic, I have prepared a report on the most popular and earning mobile games in the world.

Marketing company AdSide Media shared with App2Top.ru the most effective types of advertising creatives for mobile games.

Sensor Tower analysts have prepared a report on the most profitable mobile games of last month. PUBG Mobile became the February leader at the box office, which together with its Chinese version of Game For Peace earned $ 250 million. Also in the top of the best was the project of the Russian Playrix.

The Russian bagel Loop Hero has performed well in sales. The game has sold over 500 thousand copies sold in just a week since its release.

Not only the Russian authorities can tighten the screws. Already this June, Google is introducing a “tax on bloggers.” We are talking about rules that will oblige all owners of YouTube channels to make deductions in favor of the United States from the income received from American users. This will also affect Russians.

Roblox shares appeared on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. The company entered the market not through an IPO, but by choosing an alternative in the form of a direct listing. Against this background, its valuation has grown to an astronomical $45.2 billion — this is significantly more than that of Electronic Arts ($37.43 billion) and Unity ($27.76 billion).

In recent weeks, the network has been actively discussing non-interchangeable tokens (NFT). They are tied to paintings, 3D models and even memes, earning millions of dollars. Journalist Jason Schreier tried to understand the phenomenon and told what representatives of the gaming industry think about NFT. We have chosen the main thing from the material.

What to do if you need to protect yourself from copying the name of the game and cloning it, — says in his column for App2Top.ru Nika Vartanova, lawyer at VERSUS.legal.

The deal between Microsoft and ZeniMax Media officially ended yesterday. On this occasion, Phil Spencer finally directly answered the question that has been worrying since September: what will happen to the games of the acquired company? He did not open all the cards, but confirmed that at least some of the new games from Bethesda will indeed be released exclusively for PC and Xbox.

A publisher with Latvian roots tinyBuild, known for the Hello Neighbor franchise, has entered the stock market. During the IPO, the company raised £154 million ($213.7 million), and its market value rose to £340.58 million ($472.6 million).

Wanted: creative director-screenwriter at Playrix, producer at Green Pixel and game designer at Deus Craft.

Developer and publisher KamaGames has reported financial results for 2020. The company’s revenue grew by almost 40%, and in terms of profit, last year was a record at all.

Germany is seriously concerned about the problem of loot boxes and their impact on minors. Now the authorities are preparing a special reform that may prohibit the sale of games with similar mechanics to minors.