Appodeal monetization service has announced a new publishing program. This time together with the Belarusian Gismart. Companies are ready to publish casual and hyper-casual games, as well as music applications.

CD Projekt group, which includes the studio-developer of the Witcher series, announced the formation of a new company. She got the name Spokko. Her main profile will be the development of mobile game projects.

While the industry is waiting for announcements from Cologne, where Gamescom will open tomorrow, we briefly go through the business news of the gaming industry for August 20. 

Game designer Cliff Bleszinski promised to tell the story of the failure of the Boss Key Production studio he founded in his autobiography, which he is currently working on. The creator of the Gears of War game franchise wrote about this on Twitter.

A report by Anna Vyugina from Fotostrana. Anna shared the tricks that the company used to work on the match3 game “Caramels” in order to increase payments to a well-paying audience and not lose income from a low-paying one.

The creative director of the action adventure God of War, Cory Barlog, told how difficult it was working on one of the most successful PS4 exclusives of recent years. At the testing stage, the game was criticized by everyone: from ordinary gamers to the director of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida, who called the Santa Monica Studios project “terrible”.

Tim Cook’s company listens to China’s state media. After the media of China this month accused Apple that it was in no hurry to remove content banned in the region from the app store, at least 4,000 apps disappeared from the App Store.

At the end of June, Robin Hood Legends was released. This is a new game by the Belarusian studio Neskinsoft. The game is published by Big Fish. The novelty is a puzzle in which the authors mix the principles of classic match-3 fritupley with the mechanics of Triple Town.

Recycling is a serious problem of the gaming industry. According to last year’s research, 60% of video game creators periodically work in crunch mode, spending 60-80 hours a week in the workplace. Some justify this trend, others consider it to be a disease ruining the industry. Simon Iwaniszak, Managing Director of the gaming outsourcing company Red Kite Games, spoke about his experience of protecting employees from overtime.

The mobile PvP action movie Brawl Stars by Supercell has been in the softlonch for more than a year. It is still unclear whether he will get to the official release or not, but in July, the title’s revenues increased 7 times compared to the previous month and reached $ 1.3 million. The project’s revenue growth coincided with the expansion of the softlonch geography: the game was released in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore.

The Information publication told how the relationship between Tencent Corporation and the creators of the popular MOBA League of Legends from the California studio Riot Games, which the Chinese gaming giant has owned since 2011, has been changing in recent years. According to the interlocutors of the publication, Tencent is gradually shifting the focus of development from League of Legends to other projects and studios.

The authors of Angry Birds shared their financial results for the quarter and half of the year. Both reports show significant negative dynamics. The only thing that the company still consistently earns is classic games about angry birds.

A report by Alex Moukas from wappier. The speaker spoke about how to reduce the outflow of users and increase revenue from existing customers.

The international advertising mediation platform Chocolate has published the results of a study on the attitude of mobile developers to their advertising revenue. According to the survey, 69% of the creators of games and programs for mobile are not satisfied with the proceeds from advertising.

There are many tools for organizing and planning work in a game project. The Game Career Guide web edition analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of 8 popular project managers used by game developers.

Nikita Zatsepin’s report from BlueStacks. In his report, Nikita spoke about the latest trends in the mobile-on-PC games market, about the difficulties faced by both developers and midcore+ players, told how the company assesses and solves these difficulties, and why PCs are increasingly becoming the preferred choice of users for mobile competitive games.

The developer of Candy Crush Saga has released a free-to-play mobile role-playing game Legend of Solgard for iOS and Android. It became not only the first role-playing title in the King portfolio, but also the first project focused on the midcore audience.

The global strategy of Crusader Kings 2 by Paradox Interactive has received an unusual promotion at the state level. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia wrote

Hi-Rez Studios has announced the creation of three independent divisions: Titan Forge Games, Evil Mojo Games and Heroic Leap Games. Each studio will focus on its own project.