Five years ago, hyper-casual games were already released. Then one of the first studios in this market was St. Petersburg AYA games. In 2015, she worked with Ketchapp. Today the studio creates hits with Voodoo. Collected 30 million installations in March-May Draw Joust! — one of them. We talked with its founders about how the market and the studio itself have changed over this period. By Artem Merenfeld and Yaroslav Rudakov.

In March, the developer Star Theory Games closed. Before that, he lost his contract with the publisher Take-Two. The studio went bankrupt after the publisher poached half of its staff.

The Black Lives Matter movement affected the schedule of gaming events in June. Companies are massively canceling and rescheduling events as a sign of support for the protests in the United States.

Humble Bundle joined the gaming companies that supported the protests in the United States. Stor will launch a $1 million fund to publish games from black developers.

The top ten best-selling Steam games of last week were topped by the DLC pack for Civilization VI. PUBG and No Man’s Sky returned to the chart.

Publisher 11 bit Studios has sold 1 million copies of Moonlighter in two years. At the same time, the number of users of the game exceeds the sold circulation by 3.5 times.

French Dontnod Entertainment, known for Life is Strange, is expanding. The developer has opened a branch in Canada.

Game designer Cliff Bleszinski found the culprit in the failure of the online shooter LawBreakers, followed by the bankruptcy of his studio. In his opinion, the publisher Nexon failed.

Publisher Square Enix has opened a new division. It will deal with AI developments not only for games, but also for “new forms of entertainment”.

COVID-19 has brought the moment when games will no longer be sold at retail. This opinion was expressed by Frontier Developments CEO David Braben.

Ratings have reached the Celestial Empire. One of the members of the People’s Political Consultative Council of China (CPPCC) proposed to introduce a compulsory age rating system for the games.

An article about Playrix was published on the pages of the Financial Times. There are no new facts there, but there are some interesting quotes about traffic, investments and the stock market.

On May 22, 2020, it was exactly 40 years since the public debut of Pac-Man. It was in May 1980 that the game first appeared on arcade machines.

Construction simulators about amusement parks continue to be in demand. In less than six months, Taikun Planet Zoo achieved sales of one million copies on PC at a base price of $45.

The Nutaku gaming platform, which deals with the operation of erotic content games, has announced a new milestone. The number of its registered users has reached 50 million people.

Tencent continues its active expansion in foreign markets. In a few days, it became known about three steps of the company aimed at developing outside of its native Chinese market.

Four prominent business development specialists in the Russian-speaking segment announced the creation of a new gaming consulting agency. Along with the natural interest, the announcement also caused criticism from part of the audience. As a result, this is now the most discussed event of the domestic game dev in the last couple of months. We are sorting out what happened.

83% of workers in the USA are mobile players. Of these, more than half spend their work breaks not on coffee, but on their favorite game.

The authors of Candy Crush Saga have changed the license type of one of their technical solutions. Since today, the “sources” of the Defold engine have become available to developers.