In the first half of 2020, the British studio Codemasters earned £80.5 million ($104.2 million). This is twice as much as at the same time a year ago.

Developers continue to use celebrities to promote mobile games. Next up is the Chinese studio Lilith Games, which invited Elijah Wood to advertise the AFK Arena mobile tile.

Microsoft has found a way to circumvent Apple’s restrictions on cloud gaming. xCloud streaming service will appear on iOS next year as a browser application, bypassing the App Store.

Embracer Group has completed the issue of 35.6 million new shares. The issue of securities brought SEK 5.75 billion ($648 million) to the holding. The company is going to spend the proceeds on the purchase of new game studios.

A free online course “Business of Mobile Gaming” has opened. Its author was a Chinese developer and publisher Yodo1.

Behind many of the events that we are witnessing, there is first of all a game PR, attempts to solve both obvious and not so obvious tasks with its help. In the new issue of “Industry on Thursdays” we tried to reveal exactly this topic — gaming PR. We are talking about him and not only with Nikolai Borzov, co-founder of the FatPony PR agency.

App Annie has published a report on the state of the mobile market for the third quarter of 2020. During this period, Russian users spent $ 244 million on games, and the Brawl Stars project was in the lead both in downloads and revenue.Results of the Russian mobile market for the third quarter

InvestGame analysts have calculated the volume of investments, public offerings and M&A transactions in the gaming market over the past nine months. Spoiler alert: they are equal to $20.5 billion.

Igor Bukhman gave a great interview to the Russian Forbes. The co-founder of Playrix spoke about how the studio managed to become the world’s second gaming company after Tencent, as well as about potentially entering an IPO.The impact of the pandemic on the company’s activities

A new deal in the Russian video game market. MY.GAMES company has announced the takeover of the Russian mobile developer Deus Craft. The maximum amount may approach $50 million.As part of the consolidation, MY.GAMES will receive a controlling stake in Deus Craft (51.6%).

While the entire gaming business is growing by leaps and bounds against the background of the coronavirus, esports does not justify the hopes of experts. Newzoo has been lowering its forecast for its final revenue for the third time this year.

The new trial between Epic Games and Apple will take place two months earlier than planned. The date of the next hearing is May 3, 2021.

Yesterday Baldur’s Gate 3 went into early access and has already shown impressive results. During the day, the peak online project exceeded 70 thousand people, and Larian Studios even joked that they “broke” Steam.

The House of Representatives of the US Congress accused Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple of monopoly and recommended dividing them into many small companies.

As a result of last week, Genshin Impact became the best-selling mobile game in the world, not counting Honor of Kings. In the period from September 28 to October 4, she earned $60 million in the App Store and Google Play.Key revenue data

Wanted: C++ programmer at Playrix, game analyst at Gaijin Entertainment and senior game designer at Royal Ark.

The cooperative VR horror Phasmophobia got into the top ten best-selling Steam games. This is the debut project of the indie studio Kinetic Games, which has only one developer on its staff.

Tokyo-based studio Thirdverse, which develops VR games, has raised $8.5 million. In the future, the company also plans to create entire virtual worlds using blockchain technologies.Thirverse received money as part of Round A, which was led by JAFCO, Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures and Incubate Fund.

Activision Blizzard has taken on serious cuts. The company is closing a branch in Versailles, France, where about 400 people worked at the beginning of 2019.