On February 20, the vx-underground organization and insider Tom Henderson reported that Activision was attacked by hackers at the end of last year. Today, Activision in a statement to the media admitted that there was an attempt to hack, but it was not successful.

Microsoft President Brad Smith spoke to reporters on the eve of a closed hearing in the EU about the deal with Activision Blizzard. He said that the corporation would insist on approving the purchase and discuss solutions that would suit regulators and competitors.

FreePlay, specializing in hyper-casual games, announced that its portfolio has crossed a new milestone. To date, the company’s games have been downloaded over a billion times.

On the night of February 20-21, Mundfish Studio released Atomic Heart. According to the SteamDB service, nine hours after the release, the number of simultaneous players in the Steam version of the shooter reached 23,720 people.

Microsoft has signed a contract with Nintendo, according to which Xbox games will be released on the consoles of the Japanese company for 10 years. She also promised to release Call of Duty series games on Nintendo consoles — if the deal with Activision Blizzard is closed.

Mobile publisher SayGames is changing its business strategy. The company will stop working with hyper-casual games and focus on publishing hybrid-casual projects.

The organization Communications Workers of America (CWA, the union of communication workers of the USA) sent a letter to the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager. She asked not to block the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft, as this deal will benefit the labor market in the gaming industry.

Insider Tom Henderson commented on the hacking of Activision Blizzard‘s internal network, which was previously reported in vx-underground. He claims that hackers, among other things, gained access to personal data of company employees.

Chinese giant Tencent has nothing against Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. This is reported by Dealreporter, who has read the responses of Chinese gaming companies to the regional antimonopoly regulator.

In 2022, the British gaming market earned £5.38 billion. According to analysts from Ampere Analysis, this is 1.6% less compared to the previous year. The last time analysts recorded a drop in the local market was in 2012.

In early February, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt, Amr Talaat, expressed support for the gaming industry. He said that the country’s authorities are striving to create an environment that will promote the development of video games.

Izvestia writes about this, referring to Google and Yandex statistics.

In December 2022, hackers using phishing gained access to Activision Blizzard data. This is reported by the organization vx-underground, specializing in collecting malware.

In August 2022, the Chinese company NetEase announced that it was buying the developers of Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain. Insider Tom Henderson found out that this deal cost €100 million.

The Steam administration told what last year was like for the site. We have chosen the main thing.

Several Blizzard Entertainment employees anonymously told the Game Developer portal how the last working meeting organized by Mike Ybarra took place. In short: not very good.

SEGA will pay employees more. She announced that on July 1, 2023, she would increase the average monthly salary by 30%.

For the second time this week, it becomes known that the Public Investment Fund (PIF) from Saudi Arabia is increasing its stake in Nintendo. Now he owns 8.3% of the Japanese company.