Formally, by the end of August 2019, Playrix, based in Russia, entered the world’s top three leaders in earnings from mobile games. Only Tencent and NetEase are ahead.

Philip Gladkov, who has been the head of Pixonic since 2011, is leaving the company. Officially, the departure will take place in early 2020. Gladkov is now handing over the case to his successor.

Last year, the Russian video game market earned $1.9 billion. At the same time, the film industry as a whole collected $0.7 billion.

Analytical company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has released a large-scale report on the Russian entertainment market. Special attention is devoted to the video game market.

Only half of the population is familiar with video games in Russia. According to VTsIOM, 48% of Russians have never played on any devices, and 33% have abandoned this hobby.

The importance of the gaming industry for the Kaliningrad region was recently announced by its governor Anton Alikhanov.

Last Friday, United Russia deputy Anton Gorelkin introduced a controversial bill. He proposed to identify the most important IT products in Russia and limit the participation of foreign individuals or companies in them to 20%. I was looking into the bill and whether it could affect the video game industry App2Top.ru .

Developers in Crimea have lost paid accounts and private repositories on GitHub. Moreover, repositories are blocked even when temporarily visiting this region.

On July 23, the State Duma will discuss amendments to the law “On the National Payment System” in the second reading. The law prohibits international payment systems (IPS) on the territory of Russia to comply with international sanctions. The adoption of new regulations is highly likely to lead to the withdrawal of Visa and MasterCard from the domestic market.

From the team 101XP.com Ilya Salamatov, Vice President for Business Development, has left. He announced the opening of the publishing label META Publishing.

It became known from the electronic System for ensuring legislative activity that the deputy from the LDPR party Sergey Zhigarev today withdrew the bill submitted by him to the federal law “On Consumer Rights Protection”.

Deputy from the LDPR Party Sergey Zhigarev submitted an amendment to the federal law “On Consumer Rights Protection” for consideration. If it is adopted, Russia will ban the sale of smartphones, computers and smart TVs without pre-installed Russian programs.

In Russia, by the end of 2019, the gaming audience will be 66 million people. Almost half of them — 28.2 million — are paying.

In January-May, sales of Nintendo products on the Russian market for the first time were higher than those of Microsoft. This follows from the report of the group of companies “M.Video-Eldorado” for the first five months of 2019.

Apple may leave the Russian market due to a new project of the Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation. The document assumes mandatory pre-installation of Russian applications on smartphones and tablets sold in Russia.

The creator of the flight simulator Oleg Tishchenko received a year in prison in the United States. But this is de jure. Tishchenko was de facto deported back to Russia.

The head of the mobile publishing house HeroCraft tells how his department interacts with developers.

Russians are spending more and more on video games in retail. At the same time, for those who buy games on physical media, the main platform is Sony PlayStation 4. This was stated in its report for the first quarter of 2019 by the group of companies “M.Video-El Dorado”.

The gaming part of the holding Mail.ru Group — MY.GAMES — has announced its plans to buy a controlling stake in Panzerdog. Earlier, the investment division of the group, MRGV, invested € 800 thousand in the studio.