After three years of work on the mobile action movie War Robots, Ilya Smirnov, the producer of the project, leaves Pixonic. His next job is unknown. Smirnov himself plans to rest first.

Mail.Ru Group launches a new type of online advertising targeting. It focuses on the psychotypes of users. This will increase the effectiveness of ads and make them more personalized, Kommersant reports, citing company representatives.

On February 20, the Russian developer Black Sun Game Publishing announced a fundraising campaign for the creation of the game “Corsairs: The Black Mark” (“Corsairs 4”). The next day, Dmitry Arkhipov, co-founder of Akella, the developer and publisher of the first three parts, said that the creators of the new game do not have rights to the trademark of the series. App2Top.ru I talked to representatives of both sides of the conflict.

Microsoft’s Mixer streaming service has an opportunity to buy a game or an add-on while watching its broadcast through the Mixer Direct Purchase function.

Wanted: Unity developer at iLogos, 2D artist at NIKITA ONLINE, and IT recruiter at VALUES VALUE.

Call of Duty: WWII development managers Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield have left Sledgehammer Games studio for executive positions at Activision. Schofield and Condrey founded Sledgehammer in 2009.

In 40% of the most profitable games in the match-3 genre, there is an event in which the player is invited to complete a certain number of levels for a reward. The analytical company Playliner told about this in its latest research.

The main motive for a gamer to continue rather than quit the game is his desire to make progress in it. This is stated in a study by the analytical company Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), conducted in 2017 in North America.

The Finnish studio Small Giant Games has received $ 41 million in investments for the further development of its successful title — a mobile puzzle with role-playing elements Empires & Puzzles.

Last August, the game Flippy Knife from the Russian team Beresnev topped the world charts. The studio’s debut project, which previously specialized in graphics and animation, was downloaded 20 million times, and its revenue amounted to a six-figure sum. We publish a story by the founder of the studio Oleg Beresnev about where the team started and how it achieved success.

Streaming platform Twitch has launched Indie Amplifire — a program to promote the popularity of games from independent developers. As part of the program, Twitch promised to divide $ 175 thousand between the authors of the three best indie titles that users of the service will choose by voting.

The Russian government was offered to create a ministry for the development of new technologies and virtual reality. This initiative was made by Boris Chernyshov, Deputy head of the Education Committee of the State Duma.

The revenue of the mobile segment of the German company InnoGames increased by 62% last year. The developers of the Forge of Empires strategy earned €54.5 million on mobile, according to the company’s 2017 results report.

Polish studio CI Games fired a significant part of the developers, reducing the development group to 30 people. The company explained the reduction by the desire to speed up and optimize work on titles, as well as high competition in the industry.

Outsourcing company Glass Egg Digital Media from Vietnam is in litigation with mobile publisher Gameloft. Glass Egg accuses the French company of copyright infringement, unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Unity Technologies has acquired the ProBuilder tool. ProBuilder is designed to create levels on the Unity engine. The tool was included in the official Unity development kit.

On February 14, the White Nights conference ended. Its winter session was held in Prague for the second year in a row. A quarter of the audience was represented by guests from the USA, Great Britain and Germany.

In February, the PvP shooter PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS faced an outflow of the audience for the first time. Prior to that, the number of PUBG players had been growing continuously for almost a year since the game appeared on Steam Early Access.

February 19 investment division Mail.Ru Games Ventures and developer studio Epic Games have announced the beginning of a joint collaboration. One of the main objectives of the partnership is to find and support promising gaming products. Both financial and expert assistance is planned.