Recently, Novosibirsk studio GBN launched its Smash The Bugs project on the Facebook Instant Games platform. We talked to the company about its experience with the site. In particular, they touched upon the issues of traffic, user retention and problems with advertising monetization. I answered the questions Natalia Yarovenko, head of the HTML5 direction of the studio.

It took seven days for the pixel “bagel” Stoneshard to get $30 thousand on the Kickstarter crowdfunding service. Thanks to this, it became possible to release it as part of early access on Steam this year.

For 9 years Samara Studio MONO has been making INSOMNIA: The Ark, a dark role-playing game set on a giant space station. In March it became known that the publisher of the game will be Kaliningrad HeroCraft. As part of the announcement, we talked a little with Studio MONO CEO Anatoly Nekrasov about the project.

The gloomy first-person shooter Desolate has surpassed the mark of 100 thousand copies sold on the Valve platform. According to its publisher HypeTrain Digital, this has made the game the most successful Russian Steam release so far this year.

Russian IT Corporation Mail.Ru The Group reported for the first quarter of this year. Revenue from the company’s MMO games increased by 28.5% compared to last year and amounted to ₽5.12 billion ($80.8 million).

In 2018, Russian users will download mobile games over 2 billion times. According to the number of game downloads on mobile, Russia will take the 5th place in the world. This is stated in the forecast of the analytical company App Annie.

ZeptoLab, based in Russia, has announced a reshuffle in the staff. The position of the head of the publishing direction in the company was taken by Dylan Tredrea, who was previously responsible for product management at Rovio. Mike Sviblov, who held his position, remains on staff as a consultant for the direction.

Russian IT giant Mail.Ru The Group continues to expand its portfolio of gaming companies. Today, on April 25, the company announced the acquisition of a controlling stake in the Penza studio BIT.GAMES.

The Moscow-based studio ZeptoLab is celebrating the first birthday of the mobile PvP game about seals C.A.T.S.: Crash Arena Turbo. As part of the event, the company announced that the game had overcome the mark of 100 million installations.

As part of the fight against Telegram, Roskomnadzor has officially started blocking IP addresses in Russia. According to unofficial data, 63 out of 600 IP addresses were closed google.com . After that, in an official comment to TechCrunch, Google confirmed that it was affected by the actions of the Russian authorities.

After it became known that Roskomnadzor blocked 16 million IP addresses in pursuit of Telegram, information was received that games such as War Thunder, Fortnite and PUBG faced problems.

The massive blocking by Roskomnadzor of 2 million IP addresses belonging to Amazon and Google affected many gaming projects. Both domestic and Western developments were under attack.

The Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications (Roskomnadzor) has closed 2 million IP addresses. 800 thousand of them use Amazon hosting. The rest are accounted for by Google. The ban is related to Telegram’s attempt to use the capabilities of Amazon and Google to bypass its own blocking in Russia, which began on the part of Internet operators on April 16. The actions of Roskomnadzor have already affected Russian gaming companies.

For this March, the authors of Homescapes and Fishdom have raised more money than the Finnish forge of Supercell hits, famous for Clash of Clans and Clash Royale.

Odnoklassniki has launched a new program to support mobile game developers. It concerns those who make HTML5 projects. The essence of the program is the refusal of the social network from its share of the game’s revenue in the first three months after the release of the title.

The online quiz “Clover” from VKontakte has gained 1.5 million mobile downloads in less than three weeks, the press service of the social network reports with reference to the App Annie service. On March 23, the game set a record for daily downloads in the Russian App Store and Google Play among quizzes, and also became the most downloaded quiz in 2018.

2018 may be the year of Russian RPGs. In addition to Pathfinder and Ash of Gods, INSOMNIA: The Ark will soon appear on virtual shelves. This is a story-oriented role-playing game, reminiscent of Dark Souls and Fallout at once. Kaliningrad HeroCraft is engaged in its publication.

A document appeared on the network, according to which Roskomnadzor closes a large number of Amazon subnets. In total, there are plans to “block the oxygen” of 14 million IP addresses.

March 21 GOSU company.AI, founded by former Game Insight CEO Alice Chumachenko, has announced the closing of a $1.9 million funding round. The main investor was the venture fund Runa Capital.