In the first half of 2020, German residents spent €3.7 billion on games, which is 27% more than a year earlier for the same period. One of the main reasons is self—isolation during a pandemic. The largest increase occurred in the category of in-game purchases.This is described in the report, which was prepared by the German Gaming Industry Association (Game) based on data from App Annie and GfK, as well as surveys of Germans aged…

Starting this Thursday, we are launching a new format — live interviews on current topics. Our first — today’s — issue is dedicated to the legal news of game dev. Together with Roman Lukyanov, Managing Partner of Semenov& Pevzner Law Firm, we analyzed two cases: a trial between Supercell and GREE, as well as a trial between Voodoo and Rollic Games.

The Riftbreaker game from a small Polish studio EXOR was added to the wishlist on Steam almost 250 thousand times before the release. The co-founder of the company, Pawel Lekki, told Gamasutra about how they managed to achieve such impressive indicators.

Control became one of the success factors of the publisher Digital Bros in the last fiscal year (ended June 30). The Remedy game has generated revenue of $40 million since its release.A major Italian publisher Digital Bros has published a report for the 2019-2020 financial year:

The genre of mobile RPG is the seventh largest at the box office in American stores. In the eight months of 2020, gamers’ spending on it increased by 33% and reached the $2 billion mark. This is the conclusion reached by Sensor Tower analysts in a new report.

The creators of the free-play royal battle Spellbreak, in which players control combat magicians, reported on the first successes. In just 20 days from the release date, the number of players reached 5 million.Proletariat studio also shared other Spellbreak game statistics on Twitter:

A week after the announcement of the sequel Among Us, the developers from Innersloth canceled the sequel. The main reason is the huge popularity of the original game recently.Initially, work on Among Us 2 began due to problems with the original code, which was not intended for large-scale updates.

SuperData summed up the results of last month in a new review of the digital gaming market. Among other things, analysts talked about the success of the PC versions of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Last week, the award for gaming HR specialists “Game Dev HR Awards” was held. At it, the participants of the event — various gaming companies — told and defended the HR projects that they had implemented.

Wanted: QA-lead at Belka Games, C# programmer at Targem Games and technical designer at Playrix.On the basis of the job search service and the Talents In Games recruiting agency, product manager Marina Lopatina has prepared a selection of the most interesting vacancies for the week.

The third highest-grossing genre in the American App Store is strategy. They account for 13% of the revenue of the regional store. However, more than half of the revenue collected by iOS strategies in the States goes to China. The analytical company GameRefinery told about this in its latest report.

Mike Morhaime, who ran Blizzard for 27 years, founded a new company, Dreamhaven. It will include two subsidiary studios — Secret Door and Moonshot.Dreamhaven will be the publisher of their projects.

The sexist statements of the CEO of the studio that develops Black Myth: Wukong, forced attention to this problem in China. The South China Morning Post interviewed women from the industry who faced sexism during work or matches in online games.

Over the past two years, Saber Interactive has been increasingly heard about. In 2019, a company with Russian roots celebrated the successful launch of World War Z and the Switch port of The Witcher 3. This year Saber joined the Embracer Group, and then became the owner of 4A Games. The news about her did not stop there. For example, the Crysis remaster she created was released just the other day. Against the background of…

The authors of the Core game creation platform have raised $15 million in a new round of funding. Epic Games became the leader of the round. According to the companies, they want to jointly create an “infinite gaming metaverse”.

The influence of the Steam algorithm on the sales and popularity of games periodically causes controversy among developers. Former game designer Simon Carless analyzed the mechanisms of his work, based on direct comments from Valve employees.He was contacted by investor Jason Della Rocca, who recently spoke with Valve about Steam.

A new gaming unicorn has appeared in the industry — Playco. It was launched by Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron and one of the creators of the HTML5 websocket Michael Carter. The company will be engaged in instant social games, “which will be played by billions of people.”

Voodoo has won in court over competitors from Rollic, which are owned by Zynga. The French publisher accused the company of plagiarism and now hopes that this case will set a precedent in the field of hyper-casual games.Voodoo sued after Hero Games studio released an update for the Wood Shop game (Rollic is the publisher).

The developer and publisher of mobile games Scopely is negotiating a new round of financing. The company is going to raise $200 million. As part of the transaction, the total value of the company “on paper” will be $3 billion.