Last year, Russians spent 29.5% more on purchasing consoles than in 2023, according to estimates by the retail chain “M.Video-Eldorado.” The company calculated that their total spending reached 31.67 billion rubles.

The Sony Corporation announced upcoming changes in its leadership. Specifically, starting April 1, 2025, Hideaki Nishino will become the President and sole CEO of the gaming division.

Thanks to discounts, Red Dead Redemption 2 often ranks among the top-grossing products on Steam, but this time it climbed particularly high. For the week of January 21 to January 28, Rockstar Games’ title claimed third place overall and first among paid games.

The analytical platform AppMetrica told the news media App2Top that between December 28 and January 8, there were “60 million anonymized identifiers” recorded in games within Russia.

The analytical company InvestGame released a report on the state of the gaming investment market last year. Here’s what it says.

The European Union authorities plan to include PlayStation and Xbox consoles in the next package of sanctions against Russia. This was reported by the Financial Times, citing a statement from Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

“The Walking Dead” is a cult franchise about human survival in a world that has experienced a zombie apocalypse. The American consulting company Owl & Co. calculated that the video games created within this franchise have collectively generated over a billion dollars in revenue.

Throughout December and January, we published interviews in which representatives of gaming teams and related industries reviewed the past year. A total of 68 articles were released. This publication provides a list of all participating companies, grouped by specialization, which influenced the content of the questions.

The Dying Light franchise has turned ten years old: the first part of the series was released on January 27, 2015. In light of this, the Polish company Techland has shared fresh data about its sales figures.

Phoenix Labs has announced another wave of layoffs — the fourth since May 2023. This time, the company has decided to part ways with the majority of its staff.

Ubisoft has announced the closure of its Leamington division. Ubisoft Leamington, originally known as FreeStyleGames, functioned as a support studio in recent years, contributing to the development of Star Wars Outlaws, Skull and Bones, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Far Cry 5, and other games.

On January 24, the release of a non-commercial Russian dubbing of GTA: Vice City by GamesVoice studio took place. In light of this, the App2Top editorial team interviewed the team about the initial downloads, budget, and why you shouldn’t expect Russian dubbing for RDR 2 and GTA V.

According to news media App2Top, over 20 employees of Moon Active announced their job search on LinkedIn last week.

During the WN iGaming Summit’24, a presentation was held by the Director of Business Development for Google Ads in Europe, Iordanis Papadopoulos. He shared current information on the service’s policy regarding iGaming resources and gambling-related content.

The service Balancy, which simplifies LiveOps for game teams, is expanding the number of supported engines. It has introduced an SDK for games created on the Cocos Creator engine and in the TypeScript language.

Alexander Zhuravlev is the managing partner of the law firm “EBR” and a member of the working group at the Russian Ministry of Digital Development for video games. He spoke to the newspaper “Kommersant” about the nuances of the bill that regulates the gaming industry in Russia. Below are the key points from the interview.

Xbox will continue to release its games on competitor platforms, Cooking Simulator and Underdose developers suffered a hacker attack, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth became the second most popular game in the series on Steam — here’s a recap of the major events in the gaming industry over the past weekend.

App2Top concludes the summary of 2024 with gaming (or gaming-related) teams and experts. For the second time in this year’s summary, we spoke with Alexander Mikheev for the final installment. This time, he answered questions as the CEO of APRIORI.

App2Top continues to wrap up the year 2024 with gaming (or gaming sector-related) teams. Up next is an interview with Marina Lopatkina, the Business Development Director at the recruitment agency WN Talents.