Role-playing hack and slash from the creators Dead or Alive sold two million copies on Playstation 4 and PC, despite the failed launch of the desktop version.

As part of White Nights, a round table on esports will be held in St. Petersburg. Wargaming, Epic Games, ESforce, VKontakte and BuzzGuru will take part in it. We suggest that they come up with questions related to esports and the development of esports games. Two authors of the best questions will receive a premium ticket to the conference.

The creators of PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS have filed a lawsuit against Epic Games. South Korean studio PUBG Corp. accuses the authors of Fortnite of encroaching on their intellectual property — they believe that Fortnite Battle Royale is too similar to PUBG.

Apple’s senior vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller explained why Valve’s app for launching games on mobile devices from Steam was not allowed in the App Store.

The mechanics of loot boxes cannot be recognized as a form of gambling, and their legal prohibitions limit the possibilities of the game industry to test new business models, said Mike Gallagher, president of the American Association of Software and Games Manufacturers.

The founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, believes that casual genres are losing leadership on mobile platforms. In his opinion, gamers have outgrown the fascination with simple titles and expect a more comprehensive experience from mobile games. This trend is one of the main reasons for the success of Fortnite’s “battle royale” on mobile.

Canadian indie developers Spearhead Games explain what they have to save on in order to create games quickly and without compromising quality.

Gaming urbanist and level designer Konstantinos Dimopoulos is preparing a book Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities — the first atlas of its kind and a guide to cities from famous video games.

According to a survey among users playing Spells of Genesis, a mobile freeplay with blockchain—based monetization, only 44% of players bought or sold game items through the blockchain. Others consider this technology too difficult to understand or do not have enough money.

Recently, Novosibirsk studio GBN launched its Smash The Bugs project on the Facebook Instant Games platform. We talked to the company about its experience with the site. In particular, they touched upon the issues of traffic, user retention and problems with advertising monetization. I answered the questions Natalia Yarovenko, head of the HTML5 direction of the studio.

A new regulation on user data protection, the General Data Protection Regulation, came into force today. Serbian Game Studio Nordeus has made a selection of solutions with which market participants can fulfill the GDPR requirements.

For ten years, a full-fledged narrative games market has emerged in the industry: they have their own specific audience and special requirements for game design. The author of the hit What Remains of Edith Finch, Ian Dallas, explains how the expectations of players and their feedback allow the genre to develop, but at the same time they also slow down its development.

Torn Banner Studios has removed the online action movie Mirage: Arcane Warfare from Steam and announced the imminent shutdown of game servers. The developers explained the closure with the entry into force of the European data protection law — GDPR, but even before it, the Torn Banner project was far from flourishing.

The head of the Pocket Gems studio, Michael Dawson, told why interactive novels for mobile are such a success. The flagship title Pocket Gems is the Episode interactive stories platform, which has gained more than 125 million downloads.

The VKontakte app for iOS now supports Direct Games is an HTML5–based gaming platform where games can be run without downloading.

On May 25, a new law called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the general data protection regulation, came into force in the European Union. GDPR provisions should strengthen the protection of personal data of residents of all EU countries, but, according to experts, the new regulations will complicate the lives of developers and publishers of video games.

First Person is a series of short videos from Google Play, where authors, developers and even voice actors talk about their work on popular mobile games.

Owners of Apple mobile devices will not be able to play titles from the Steam library on them through the Steam Link streaming application. Apple has not allowed Valve to place the Steam Link in the App Store, according to the publication Venture Beat.

Analysts from SuperData summed up the April results of the gaming market: in a month, users spent $9.09 billion on games distributed in numbers. Console games showed the greatest dynamics due to the success of Fortnite and the new God of War.