Late last week, it was revealed that Game Freak, the developer of the Pokémon game series, fell victim to a cyberattack. It is believed to be the largest breach in the franchise’s history. Game Freak has already confirmed the hack, stating that it took place in August 2024.

The newspaper “Kommersant” reported that a new industrial association, the “Association of the Gaming Industry” (AGI), has started operating in Russia.

Former developers of Disco Elysium have opened another studio, Steam has started warning users that they’re purchasing only a game license, and estimates suggest the Until Dawn remake on PlayStation 5 attracted fewer players than Concord. Here’s what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

The analytical company Circana presented a report on the state of the U.S. gaming market for August, highlighting key trends and the best-selling games among American gamers.

Genshin Impact continues to impress with its financial results. According to analysts from Niko Partners, the mobile version of the game has generated $5 billion in China alone since its launch in 2020. Considering international markets, its total mobile revenue could reach $10 billion by 2025.

China is the largest market for Palworld in terms of the number of game users. This was recently mentioned by John Buckley, the community manager of Pocketpair studio, in an interview with the portal Game Rant.

It has been reported that two gaming studios, founded by former ZA/UM developers, have been launched. Both studios plan to create RPGs.

The developer NaturalMotion, part of Zynga, is preparing to conduct layoffs at its offices in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Today, October 11, Metaphor: ReFantazio, a new RPG from the creators of Persona, was released on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. The launch of the project turned out to be extremely successful.

The Russian Ministry of Digital Development has officially abandoned the experiment to create a unified national repository of open source software in Russia. This was announced by Ilya Massukh, Director of the Competence Center for Import Substitution in the Field of Information and Communication Technologies, at the “PROF-IT” conference.

As of September 30, 2024, 99% of LLC “Lesta,” the Russian legal entity of Lesta Games, is owned by the company’s co-founder, Malik Khatazhaev. For the past two years, this share was owned by the Chinese company Lesta Hong Kong Limited.

It’s been a while since we’ve featured content in the “Profession” section. We’re making up for it. This new article in the series is dedicated to the role of a Monetization Manager (specifically, a senior specialist in this area). Irina Bragina from Glera Games shared insights on the nuances of this specialization.

At the Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou, a representative from Game Science Studio revealed the production budget for Black Myth: Wukong. According to him, more than 300 million yuan ($42.4 million) was spent on creating the game.

There are currently no plans to restrict access to the Steam gaming platform in Russia. This information was reported by Roskomnadzor in a statement to TASS.

The CEO of Nexon Games, Park Yong Hyun, in an interview with the 4Gamer portal, mentioned that his team doesn’t heavily rely on market data when it comes to assessing the potential of games.

The witch hunting shooter Witchfire has reached a new milestone. The Astronauts studio proudly announced that the game has garnered over one million wishlists combined on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

On October 8, DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO became available to owners of premium editions. According to the SteamDB service, its peak online players on Steam soon exceeded 91 thousand people.

Cryptic Studios, a subsidiary of the Swedish holding company Embracer Group, plans to lay off more staff. This was reported by Game Developer, citing LinkedIn posts from the studio’s employees.

The indie studio Pounce Light has announced that over half a million people have played the castle-building simulator Tiny Glade. It took the game just over two weeks to reach this milestone, having been released on September 23, 2024.