In the past year, users’ spending on mobile games in Russia reached $744 million. The leader in revenue was the game “The Great Sultan”.

Last Friday, World of Tanks product director Vyacheslav Makarov said he was going into politics and creating a “Party of Direct Democracy.” The continuation of the story did not take long to wait. Today Makarov announced that he is leaving Wargaming.

World of Tanks Product Director Vyacheslav Makarov goes into Russian politics. He plans to create a party and participate in the elections to the State Duma.

At the end of 2019, Escape From Tarkov took over the top of the most popular games on Twitch. The success was followed by a scandal. What the developer did right and what is wrong — we tell in the squeeze with Polygon.

Last week, a list of the highest-grossing novelties of 2019 on Steam was released. It’s time to highlight titles developed or published by companies from the Russian Federation from it.

In the outgoing year, the game streaming market in Russia and the CIS reached 21.6 billion rubles. In the future, it can grow by 20% annually.

In the coming year, Russian game developers will be able to apply for grants to the state for the first time. The total amount of grants is 3 billion rubles. The contest was announced by the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation Sergey Kiriyenko.

There are no negotiations on a pre-trial agreement with Rambler, Twitch said.

Rambler commented on a lawsuit against Twitch for $2.9 billion. One of the top managers said that Rambler Group does not exclude the possibility of a settlement agreement.

The most important event for the domestic game dev in recent months has occurred in the related industry. The structures of the oligarch Alexander Mamut launched an attack on a successful IT business, Nginx company.

The deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Vasily Vlasov proposed to create a fund for financing game development. According to him, the state should encourage the creation of domestic AAA games.

Yesterday, December 4, the open beta testing of the MY.GAMES Store distribution platform started. It was announced in August.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an ambiguous law that obliges to pre-install programs of domestic development on smart devices. Its wording raises many questions.

SuperData and Wargaming analysts say that the Russian gaming market will grow by 57% in 2019. This will allow it to enter the top three largest gaming economies in Europe.

In the third final reading, the State Duma adopted the law on presets. According to him, Russian software must be pre-installed on smart devices sold in Russia.

Death Stranding is the fastest—selling PlayStation 4 exclusive in Russia over the past two years. In the first week of sales, it sold more copies than God of War, “Spider-Man” and “Life After” in the same period.

This is taking into account pirated retro devices under the Dendy and Sega brands.

Yesterday, in the first reading, the State Duma adopted a bill according to which Russia may ban the sale of any devices that do not have Russian software preinstalled from next summer. We asked the law firm Semenov&Pevzner to comment on the document.

In the first reading, the State Duma of Russia approved amendments to the article “On Consumer Rights Protection”. According to the new version of the article, the sale of computing devices on which Russian programs are not pre-installed will soon be banned in the Russian Federation.