Today it is difficult to satisfy the personnel hunger of domestic gaming companies. Their global success requires significant scaling, which is impossible if only specialists from game dev are involved.

We continue the mini-series of interviews in the framework of the WN Dev Contest. In them, the jury of the competition shares tips on working in the games market. This time we talked with Ivan Nikitin, the product manager at Sensorium Galaxy.

American Bungie decided to expand. The company plans to build a large new headquarters, open its first foreign division and engage in games not only on Destiny.

Producer Egor Vasiliev wrote a lot of material about the experience of cloning a game in the genre of “spot the difference”. He talked about budgets, difficulties during development, softlonch, release and first results.

We have prepared a video in which we talk about the brightest upcoming releases from domestic developers on “big” platforms.

On the night of February 17-18, for the first time in a long time, Nintendo held a large-scale broadcast of Nintendo Direct. The show was held in the already standard online format and gathered about three million people at the screens at the same time. We have chosen the main thing from the reviews of players and industry experts.

Tonight, Playrix and Zemfira presented an unexpected collaboration. The singer, who rarely releases new material, has published a new track and video “Austin”. It is dedicated to the eponymous butler from the game Homescapes.

The MY.GAMES brand conducted a large-scale study and studied the mental health of users of online games. It turned out that Russian gamers began to feel much better during the pandemic. In part, video games helped them in this — with their help, every third person did not notice the lack of live communication.

This year, the Clash Royale League tournament has undergone significant changes, abandoning team competitions. This forced the esports organization Team Liquid to disband its membership in the game and switch attention to content creation.Team Liquid told about this on its official website.

In early February, Google decided to close the internal development studios of Stadia, but their employees did not know anything about the company’s intentions. Just a few days before, the management praised them for their progress and promised to share their plans for 2021.This was reported by Kotaku with reference to four sources familiar with the situation.

Microsoft has updated guidelines that will help developers make games more accessible to people with disabilities. Studios will be able to submit their projects for PC and Xbox for review and receive feedback on their improvement.This was stated in the official Xbox blog by senior project manager Brannon Zahand (Brannon Zahand).

The other day, the famous indie activist Rami Ismail wrote a big Twitter thread criticizing the shooter Six Days in Fallujah about the war in Iraq. Last night, the developer’s account was deleted from the social network.

Saudi authorities are paying more and more attention to video games. In the fourth quarter, the state-owned Public Investment Fund invested over $3.3 billion in the gaming industry. However, only three companies got the money.

Today, on February 17, the Liftoff platform announced the launch of the Post-IDFA Alliance. This is a coalition of services and platforms that is designed to solve the problems associated with the restriction of IDFA by Apple. The association includes, in addition to Liftoff, companies such as Fyber, Chartboost, InMobi, Vungle and Singular.

Indie artist and developer George Zarkua wrote a big thread on his Twitter page about the structure of the hyper-casual games market. He spoke about the history and development of the genre, relations with publishers, filling the market with money and the trend towards wholesale borrowing of other people’s ideas. We share material based on motives.

Recently it became known about the relaunch of the controversial shooter about the Iraq war Six Days in Fallujah. Two days ago, the creators of the game, in an interview with Polygon, said that their project would not become a political statement. The interview caused a strong reaction on Twitter. They also talked about whether the games should even touch on political topics.

Wanted: game analyst at MYTONA, motion designer at Playrix and product manager at VK Games.

Supercell remains a profitable company, but its EBITDA fell by 21% last year. Ilkka Paananen, CEO of the company, acknowledged the problem of supporting games as services, spoke about the results of the launch of Brawl Stars in China and possible corporate changes.Paananen’s comments appeared in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

At the end of January, the American game developer Tilting Point announced the launch of a Russian division. We talked about the new studio and the challenges it faces with the president of the company, Samir El-Agili.