The European Federation of Game Developers (EGDF) has published an appeal in which it expressed support for the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft. She said that the deal will bring more benefits to the gaming industry than harm.

On January 17, Blizzard Entertainment announced that it had asked NetEase to temporarily extend the partnership, but was refused. Soon, the Chinese company issued a response statement in which it criticized the terms of the deal and the developers themselves.

VK has added a new type of monetization to RuStore. Paid applications have become available in the marketplace.

Unity is also making cuts. She announced that she would lay off 284 people.

Sky News, citing sources, reported that Microsoft plans to cut 5% of the corporation’s staff. It is assumed that the dismissals will be announced in the near future.

Apple must pay a fine of $17 million or 1.17 billion rubles in Russia. The fine was imposed by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation (FAS), — the agency was not satisfied that Apple was imposing the App Store payment system on developers.

AppMagic analysts have published a report on hyper-casual games. They listed the 10 most popular games in the fourth quarter of 2022, and also shared key trends.

In 2022, China’s gaming market earned $40.1 billion, which is 10.3% less than the previous year. As noted by SCMP with reference to the data of the Association of Audio-Video and Digital Publishers of China, previously for two decades the market revenue only grew.

Blizzard Entertainment wrote on Weibo that it tried to extend the agreement with NetEase for another six months, but without success.

On January 16, The Callisto Protocol stopped selling on Steam to residents of Russia. Neither the publisher Krafton nor the developers from Striking Distance Studios have publicly announced the suspension of sales, but the page with the game no longer opens in the region.

Mobile Vampire Survivors is popular. Portal MobileGamer.biz With reference to the data, AppMagic reported that in the period from December 8 to January 16, the game collected 1.47 million downloads on Google Play and 1.68 million downloads on the App Store.

At the beginning of the month, the Insider Gaming portal reported that the American studio Motorsport Games has not been paying employees from Russia since October 2022. Then the developers said they were going to go to court. But it seems that recently one of them decided to move to more aggressive measures.

From December 14 to 28, a charity event was held at Solitaire Cruise — Belka Games promised to donate all proceeds from it to research on the treatment of cancer in children, as well as support for the sick and their families. Now the company has summed up the results of the event.

Game distributors LLC “Company Soft Club” and LLC “1C-Softclub” are now directly owned by the Russian 1C. According to Kommersant, at the end of last November, it acquired them from the Cypriot DM Investments Multi Ventures.

Liu Wei, one of the founders of miHoYo, spoke about the studio’s ambitious ambitions in an interview with the Chinese newspaper The Paper.

We continue to summarize the results of 2022. Next up is an interview with Pavel Moseikin, co—founder and CEO of XYZ School.

At the end of 2022, investors began to show great interest in Tencent shares again. As Bloomberg noted, since October 28, 2022, the share price of the Chinese holding has jumped by 96%.

COLOPL, the company that published the White Cat Project and Shironeko Tennis mobile games, decided to support the employees. She announced that throughout the year, in addition to her salary, she would pay a monthly allowance of ¥ 10 thousand, or approximately $78.2.

Last year, Russians rented consoles more often than usual, Kommersant reports, citing data from Avito, Arenter and Pauri services.