The PayPal payment system and the analytical company SuperData Research studied the costs of gamers: how much they spend on buying games and game content, how much they donate to game streamers and where they prefer to buy new titles.

Wanted: Special effects designer at Belka Games, lead Unity developer at FunCorp and lead level designer at Azur Games.

Former Ubisoft executive producer Stefan Delacroix (Stéphane Decroix) has been appointed head of game development at the Swedish company Starbreeze. At Ubisoft, Delacroix worked on the Watch Dogs franchise, and at Starbreeze he will be responsible for the development of The Walking Dead, Crossfire, Payday and other titles.

The private equity fund of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest investment banks, turned its attention to the gaming market and invested $200 million in the French developer and publisher of mobile games Voodoo.

The British developer and publisher of video games Codemasters officially goes on the stock exchange this week. According to preliminary estimates, the market value of the creators of the DiRT and GRID racing franchises was £280 million ($373 million).

The net profit of the publisher of the Pokémon franchise in 2017 decreased by 55%, but still became the second largest in the history of the company. This was reported by game analyst Serkan Toto, referring to information from the Japanese government publication Official Gazette.

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.