The analytical firm NPD Group has prepared a review of the gaming market of the United States of America in July 2018. According to the company, the highest-grossing game last month was the Switch-exclusive Octopath Traveler from Square Enix.

The famous Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (Shigeru Miyamoto) appealed to colleagues in the gaming industry with a request not to be so greedy for gamers’ money. According to him, Nintendo partially avoids free—play monetization models precisely for this reason – the company does not want to ruin players. Miyamoto stated this on August 22 during a speech at the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference held in Yokohama.

Business news (and not only) of the gaming industry for August 22.

The head of the Blizzard Entertainment Community Development Department, Saralyn Smith, spoke about the role of the gaming community in the company’s work and ways of cooperation between game creators and their fans. Smith spoke at the Devcom conference taking place these days in Cologne.

The App Annie platform has published an index of the most downloaded and highest-grossing games in July. With an eye on him and the DataMagic service, we note which games were the main breakthroughs of last month in terms of downloads and sales.

Business news (and not only) of the gaming industry for August 21.

Appodeal monetization service has announced a new publishing program. This time together with the Belarusian Gismart. Companies are ready to publish casual and hyper-casual games, as well as music applications.

CD Projekt group, which includes the studio-developer of the Witcher series, announced the formation of a new company. She got the name Spokko. Her main profile will be the development of mobile game projects.

While the industry is waiting for announcements from Cologne, where Gamescom will open tomorrow, we briefly go through the business news of the gaming industry for August 20. 

Game designer Cliff Bleszinski promised to tell the story of the failure of the Boss Key Production studio he founded in his autobiography, which he is currently working on. The creator of the Gears of War game franchise wrote about this on Twitter.

The creative director of the action adventure God of War, Cory Barlog, told how difficult it was working on one of the most successful PS4 exclusives of recent years. At the testing stage, the game was criticized by everyone: from ordinary gamers to the director of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida, who called the Santa Monica Studios project “terrible”.

Tim Cook’s company listens to China’s state media. After the media of China this month accused Apple that it was in no hurry to remove content banned in the region from the app store, at least 4,000 apps disappeared from the App Store.

Recycling is a serious problem of the gaming industry. According to last year’s research, 60% of video game creators periodically work in crunch mode, spending 60-80 hours a week in the workplace. Some justify this trend, others consider it to be a disease ruining the industry. Simon Iwaniszak, Managing Director of the gaming outsourcing company Red Kite Games, spoke about his experience of protecting employees from overtime.

The Information publication told how the relationship between Tencent Corporation and the creators of the popular MOBA League of Legends from the California studio Riot Games, which the Chinese gaming giant has owned since 2011, has been changing in recent years. According to the interlocutors of the publication, Tencent is gradually shifting the focus of development from League of Legends to other projects and studios.

Hi-Rez Studios has announced the creation of three independent divisions: Titan Forge Games, Evil Mojo Games and Heroic Leap Games. Each studio will focus on its own project.

The American mobile publishing and marketing agency Titling Point has founded a new branch in the industrial and business center of Spain — Barcelona. The work of the Spanish branch will be focused on the European mobile games market.

The Austro-Swedish corporation THQ Nordic announced the acquisition from Crytek of the rights to the game portfolio of the Free Radical Design studio. Among other things, the Timesplitters series of shooters, as well as the action adventure Second Sight, became the property of THQ. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

The authors of Unreal Engine continue to aggressively promote their engine. Their new step in popularizing the tool among developers is the launch of a website with free courses on it.

Czech mobile developer Madfinger Games has announced that it has reached the milestone of 200 million downloads of its games. According to the head of the company Marek Rabas, they managed to achieve such figures without multimillion-dollar investments in advertising.