After 11 years of operation, the French Studio Black Flag has ceased to exist. It is best known for the unreleased game Orphan Age—a grim life simulator about orphan survival in a cyberpunk world.

Canadian studio Red Barrels, known for its Outlast series, has reported a hacking attack. The perpetrators managed to breach its internal network and steal some data.

The Russian retail chain “M.Video-Eldorado” reported a high demand for the advanced version of the PlayStation 5 console. During the first week, pre-orders for the PlayStation 5 Pro were three times higher than expected.

Cloud Imperium Games studio has temporarily shifted to a seven-day work schedule. In an email to employees, the management stated that this is necessary for thorough preparation for the CitizenCon festival, which will take place on October 19.

The company “Rostelecom,” together with the game accelerator Indie GO, plans to establish a fund to support independent developers, reports the newspaper “Kommersant.” It is called Indie GO Start.

On September 26, the indie card hit Balatro was released on mobile devices. As noted by the MobileGamer portal, in less than a week, the game brought developer LocalThunk and publisher Playstack several hundred thousand dollars.

The analytical service VG Insights has shared the latest data on the number of additions of Deadlock to wishlists on Steam. According to their estimates, Valve’s upcoming game has already been wishlisted by 3.4 million people.

Another piece of news from Unreal Fest 2024 — Epic Games announced the release of the early version of Unreal Engine 5.5. It’s available to try out now.

The upcoming “Gaming Industry” conference boasts a very packed schedule. Over the course of one day, there will be three tracks featuring 29 talks and round tables, presented by 47 experts. More details about the program are available in our publication.

Throughout the last year, Epic Games has been restructuring its processes, as shared by its CEO Tim Sweeney at the Unreal Fest 2024 event. According to him, this has yielded positive results.

In March 2023, Epic Games launched the public Unreal Editor for Fortnite, granting players the ability to create their own games directly within the battle royale. The company shares Fortnite’s revenue with creators of such content. To date, Epic Games has paid them $479 million.

Epic Games has announced the Launch Everywhere with Epic program. It is aimed at developers creating games using the Unreal Engine.

A group of former Electronic Arts (EA) employees has founded a studio in Melbourne called The Three Thousands. It is led by Joseph Donoghue — the former general manager of EA’s Firemonkeys Studios, known for mobile games like Need for Speed: No Limits and Real Racing.

About how the team, previously engaged in hyper-casual games, took on the development of “Sparta 2035”, a turn-based tactical game in the style of XCOM for PC — the editorial board of App2Top spoke with Gleb Durnovo, one of the founders of the Lipsar studio.

The Polish publisher PlayWay has resolved its conflict with Titan GameZ, the studio working on the city-building game with real-time strategy elements, Viking City Builder. This was reported by the Puls Biznesu portal.

Recently, Epic Games initiated a new lawsuit against Google and Samsung over a feature that prevents installing apps on mobile devices from unauthorized sources. According to David Kleidermacher, the Vice President of Engineering, Security, and Privacy for Android, this lawsuit could seriously harm users.

The SteamDB service has published a list of the top-grossing products on the Valve store for the week from September 24 to October 1. Among the leaders is the Korean MMORPG Throne and Liberty, which ranked third, just behind EA Sports FC 25 and Counter-Strike 2.

After several months of relative calm, the number of layoffs in the gaming industry has risen again. According to estimates by the monitoring site Game Industry Layoffs, 1009 gaming professionals lost their jobs in September.

The Insider Gaming portal has uncovered the initial sales figures of Star Wars Outlaws. According to their information, by September 30, the game had sold around a million copies worldwide.