The owner of itch.io, Leaf Corcoran, provided a detailed comment regarding yesterday’s website outages.

Recently, Rush Royale celebrated its fourth anniversary: the game’s global release took place on December 8, 2020. In honor of the anniversary, MY.GAMES updated the project’s performance metrics.

One of the latest patches for Palworld removed the ability to summon captured creatures by throwing special spheres onto the field. Developers have not commented on the change, but it’s speculated online that it was made due to a legal dispute with the Pokémon franchise owners.

We continue to wrap up the year 2024 with teams involved in gaming or the gaming business. Up next is an interview with Irma Novikova, an international law attorney at Prospectacy.

The Japanese cyber police have arrested a man for hacking and selling modified Pokémon Sun save files for Nintendo 3DS. The hacker offered gamers a version with 800 unlocked Pokémon for $35.

Colin Anderson, the composer of the iconic early GTA games, reminisced about the good old days when a game was fully polished upon release. Nowadays, he notes, developers have become too complacent, relying on day-one patches.

The studio Papergames reported on the initial downloads of the gacha game Infinity Nikki. They announced that the number of downloads worldwide has exceeded 10 million. It took five days to reach this milestone; Infinity Nikki was released on December 5, 2024.

We’re continuing to wrap up the results for 2024 with gaming (or gaming business-related) teams. Up next is an interview with Anton Vinogradov, co-founder of the game porting and publishing studio Samustai.

On December 9, the website itch.io, a digital store specializing in indie games, stopped working. According to the platform’s administration, the domain registrar closed access to it after receiving a complaint from toy manufacturer Funko.

In an article for App2Top, Appodeal Publishing shares three proven user acquisition (UA) strategies to help mobile devs and publishers make the most of the holidays. There’re also insights into how Join Blocks used these strategies to increase installs by 6x and revenue by 300% during Christmas.

Shares of Ubisoft have nearly halved in value since the beginning of the year amidst criticism from both players and investors. Analyst Aldora, Joost van Dreunen, believes that the market would benefit from considering the purchase of the French publisher.

CI Games announced that the overall sales of its games have increased thanks to systematic updates and player feedback. This was reported by the company president Marek Tyminski in an interview with the Polish agency PAP Biznes.

The creators of Marvel Rivals have announced the game’s major success. According to them, the audience for the team-based action game has already exceeded 10 million people.

Path of Exile 2 has entered the top 15 most popular games in Steam’s history, Steam’s online count exceeded 39 million people for the first time, and the studio behind Life is Strange: Double Exposure has conducted layoffs — here is a recap of the key events in the gaming industry over the past weekend.

In recent weeks, the executives and shareholders of Ubisoft have been discussing the possibility of a management buyout. Sources report this to Reuters.

We continue to wrap up 2024 with teams that are gaming-related or within the gaming sector. Up next is an interview with Balancy, which specializes in LiveOps. We spoke with the company’s CEO and CTO — Pavel Ignatov and Andrei Apanasik.

From November 21 to 22, the WN Conference WN Conference for game developers and publishers took place in Southeast China. Participants discussed and exchanged experiences on how local Chinese studios can establish themselves in the international market. 

Path of Exile 2 is launching in a paid early access format on PC and consoles tonight at 10:00 PM Moscow time. According to the developers, the frenzy surrounding the imminent launch has exceeded all their expectations.

The average lifespan of blockchain or Web3 games is just four months, according to a study by the ChainPlay platform. This conclusion was reached after analyzing 3,279 projects in this segment.