The first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education, Yana Lantratova, has launched a new initiative to regulate video games in Russia. She suggested introducing rental certificates for the games. Now they are given to films.

Now AppMagic has its own podcast (the service launched it with the assistance of WN Media Group). It’s called Games and Names. It is led by Stas Minasov, Vice President of Product at AppMagic. As part of the first issue, he was joined by Daniel Ahmad, a well-known Asian market expert from Niko Partners, and Kirill Vaganov, business development manager at AppMagic. We publish a brief extract.

Comcast Telecommunications Corporation, which owns NBCUniversal, may be eyeing the purchase of a gaming company. Geetha Ranganathan, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, thinks so.

The number of game developers in Ukraine has decreased. As the GamedevDou portal found out, in February 2023, 9,074 people worked in the 25 largest gaming companies with offices in the country – in May last year there were 10,395 people.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin claims that the appearance of RuStore has protected mobile applications from sanctions against Russia. He shared this opinion at a meeting with the finalists of the youth entrepreneurship development program “I’m in Business”.

The antimonopoly regulator of South Korea has published its decision on the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft. He authorized the transaction.

On the evening of May 29, the Polish CD PROJEKT group of companies published a report for the first quarter of 2023. Judging by her data, The Witcher 3 has become one of the most successful games in history.

WN Media Group has announced the launch of a service to search for game projects. It’s called WN Game Finder. The service is designed, on the one hand, to facilitate the work of publishers and investors to filter incoming requests, on the other, to simplify the search for finance for projects.

CD PROJEKT has terminated its cooperation with Moonlit, the developer of the Model Builder model assembly simulator. She accused the studio of “gross violation” of the terms of the contract.

The Swedish Sports Union has awarded esports the status of an official sport. The Swedish Esports Association has been trying to achieve this since 2017.

Recently, rumors began to circulate in the gaming community that Sony is in talks with CD PROJEKT about the takeover of the company. In response to the gamers’ questions, CD PROJEKT senior PR manager Ola Sondej said that this was not true.

NetEase‘s gaming division is actively growing. The company announced the launch of a new foreign studio — PinCool.

By using a neural network in conjunction with their own extension, the team at Skywaylab Studio was able to reduce their creatives’ production time from 20 to 2 days. Right now, the studio is focused on preparations for releasing its own tool for creating 2D animations to fit its new pipeline. Aleksey Emelyanov, one of Skywaylab’s founders, told us how that’s going to work.

NVIDIA has introduced a new set of AI—based tools – NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine for Games. It will help developers create more lively non-player characters.

The media reported that Sony suspended work on the multiplayer The Last of Us, Rayark studio was accused of mass dismissal of artists and replacing them with neural networks, sales of The Outlast Trials exceeded 500 thousand copies — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

French publisher Voodoo continues to change its business strategy. In an interview with MobileGamer, vice president of the company Alvaro Duarte said that now Voodoo will choose games for publication much more carefully.

Exactly one month has passed since the release of Honkai: Star Rail. We decided to look at the situation with the mobile version of the project and turned to the data of the AppMagic analytical service.

The Japanese The Pokémon Company has updated statistics in the section dedicated to the Pokémon franchise. In it, the company indicated that as of March 31, 2023, over 480 million copies of Pokemon games were delivered to stores.

NetEase has published a financial report for the first quarter of 2023. She said that the gaming direction generated most of the company’s revenue.