The studio that created Wizard with a Gun has closed, Russian authorities have begun searching for developers for a domestic game console, and Banana entered the top 15 games with the highest online player count in Steam history. Here’s what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
Wizard with a Gun
- Founder and president of Galvanic Games, Patrick Morgan, announced the studio's closure. Despite a promising start for Wizard with a Gun, the game's sales were insufficient to sustain Galvanic Games. Morgan thanked the publisher Devolver Digital for their collaboration and sadly noted that his studio was closing after its most productive year. He urged gaming companies looking for new hires to consider the resumes of Galvanic Games specialists.
- The Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade informed the newspaper RBC about the start of the search for creators of a domestic game console. Currently, officials are communicating with potential manufacturers, as well as determining the resources and support measures necessary for the project. "If the relevant decision is made, the process of developing the game console will need to be synchronized with the development or adaptation of games for it," the Ministry added.
- On Sunday, June 16, the peak online player count for the clicker game Banana in Steam exceeded 798,000 people. As a result, the title ranked 11th in the list of the most popular games in the platform's history, surpassing Goose Goose Duck (702,800 people), Apex Legends (624,400 people), and Valheim (502,300 people) in online player count. Note that the online count for Banana continues to grow—at the time of writing, it had reached 830,234 concurrent users. It is important to remember that, according to the creators of Banana, the majority of the audience consists of bots created by users attempting to increase their chances of obtaining rare drops.