The Viking survival Valheim, which recently conquered the Steam charts, has crossed the milestone of one million copies sold. It took the game only one week.

What the product manager (PM) is responsible for, whether his responsibilities depend on the company, what professional qualities are important to him — we talked about this and much more during WN Winter’21 with Chong Ahn, Head of Product Management at Electronic Arts.

The third fiscal quarter of last year was an outstanding one for Ubisoft (it ended for it on December 31). During this time, the company earned more than €1 billion for the first time and increased MAU to 40 million users. The French publisher shared such results in the latest report and during a conversation with investors.

Ubisoft has shared its plans for the next financial year. The company decided to abandon the model in which the main focus is on expensive AAA games. Now the publisher will begin to actively develop freeplay projects and support previously released titles.Ubisoft told about this during a call with investors as part of summing up the results of the third financial quarter (ended December 31).

tinyBuild has announced the acquisition of three studios at once. Among the publisher’s new assets are We’re Five Games, as well as Russian companies Moon Moose and Hungry Couch. The amount and other financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.tinyBuild announced this on its official website.

Sometimes just spending a lot of effort on development is not enough for success. We need to look for other solutions. Which ones,” Diego Diaz, CEO of Koron Studios, told WN Winter’21 online conference.

Wanted: a game designer at Last Level, a project manager at Kefir and a leading level artist to work on a Russian AAA game.

Chinese giant Tencent continues to expand. This time, the company bought a minority stake in the Czech studio Bohemia Interactive, known for the franchises DayZ and Arma.

Blizzard turned 30 yesterday. In honor of the anniversary, the company shares early concepts of its classic games, including WarCraft and Diablo, on social networks.Blizzard publishes archival materials in the official Twitter accounts of World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft and Overwatch under the hashtag #FromTheVault.

The publisher of hyper-casual games SayGames has achieved 2 billion downloads in 2 years of operation, releasing 47 games. At the same time, he works with developers according to a scheme that is not the most standard for a niche. Instead of focusing on CTR, the publisher is looking for strong teams.

On the Cocos Creator game engine, you can now fully work with three-dimensional graphics. The authors of the platform have launched Cocos Creator 3.0, a version of the framework that combines the functions of the company’s previous 2D and 3D products.

The public beta of the Chinese version of Steam, for which the publisher Perfect World is responsible, has become available to local gamers. Now a little more than 40 games are available in the store, including the titles of Vavle itself.Analyst Daniel Ahmad drew attention to this.

The MY.GAMES investment division has invested in American developers from Pizza Club Games. The studio was founded at the beginning of last year by veterans of SEGA, Electronic Arts, NCsoft Glu and Playdom.

There is one more support program for indie developers. Publisher SayGames has allocated $10 million for the publication of hyper-casual games as part of a special SayHero project.

The gaming market continues to consolidate. Electronic Arts becomes the owner of Glu Mobile. The business was valued at $2.1 billion. However, the company accounts for $364 million. So the whole deal will cost electronics $2.4 billion.

2020 has greatly influenced not only how games are developed, but also how publishers find them. Previously, most of the pitches took place at major events with personal communication. The pandemic has made its own adjustments. Bobby Wertheim, director of content at SEGA Searchlight, told about the main ones at WN Winter’21.

The network published the initial XCOM relaunch pitch, which was written about 15 years ago. As it turned out, Firaxis planned to make real-time battles in the game instead of the traditional turn-based system.The document was shared by game designer and creative director of Firaxis Jake Solomon.

Along with the maturation of the mobile market, the introduction of meta-mechanics into casual games is becoming an increasingly common practice among Western developers. As a rule, we are talking about collections, customization, role progression and narrative.

Steam has updated its own record for the number of users who were online at the same time. Yesterday, the peak online in the Valve store exceeded 26 million people for the first time.According to SteamDB, on February 7, 26,401,443 people were on Steam at the same time.