We continue to reflect on the outcomes of 2024 with teams and experts from the gaming industry. Up next is an interview with Sergey Efremov, COO of Astrum Entertainment.

The Chinese giant Tencent owns significant stakes in many gaming companies worldwide, giving the holding the right to appoint its people as observers or full members of their boards of directors. However, Tencent recently had to forgo this opportunity in the case of Epic Games.

The Sony Corporation has decided not to acquire the entire Japanese media conglomerate Kadokawa. Instead, it has agreed to purchase 12 million of its new shares for 50 billion yen, or approximately $318.5 million, by January 7, 2025.

The analytics company Circana has prepared a report on the state of the American gaming market in November. Below are the main findings.

The Nintendo Switch has become the second best-selling console in the American market ever, reports analyst Mat Piscatella from Circana. Until recently, this title was held by the PlayStation 2.

Released on November 20, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl* has already broken even and started to turn a profit. This was revealed in an interview with Forbes by Maksym Kryppa, co-owner of the GSC Game World** studio.

We continue to wrap up the year 2024 alongside gaming and industry-related teams. Up next is an interview with Denis Khamin, co-owner of the game localization and 2D/3D art outsourcing studio, Allcorrect.

On December 11, the WN iGaming Summit took place in Limassol, Cyprus. This was WN Media Group’s first event dedicated to online gambling.

Simon Carless from GameDiscoverCo calculated how many wishlists on Steam the games gathered from December 12-15, which had their trailers shown at The Game Awards 2024 ceremony.

Gaming expert Simon Carless, using data from his GameDiscoverCo service, has summed up the year. He has compiled charts of the most successful paid new releases of 2024 on the main platforms — PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

We continue to wrap up the year 2024 with gaming (or gaming industry-related) teams. Up next is an interview with the representatives of Door 407, the studio’s founders Oleg Sakharov and Andrey Belousov, as well as its marketing director, Stas Ignatov.

The website Metacritic has published a list of the lowest-rated games of 2024. The shooter Utopia City topped the list, even though it initially came out way back in 2005 but unexpectedly debuted on Steam a month ago.

Nintendo believes that it is possible to create great games without incurring massive development costs. Focusing on the creative side of the process helps save money.

The Marvel Rivals audience is rapidly growing. NetEase announced that 20 million people worldwide have tried the team-based action game in less than two weeks.

The Tales of series is celebrating its 30th anniversary. In honor of this milestone, Bandai Namco Entertainment has revealed the latest sales figures for Tales of Berseria, one of the most recent installments in the series, which was globally released in 2017 on PC and PlayStation.

The Polish company 11 bit studios has decided to shut down a game codenamed Project 8. They had warned about the possibility of this outcome last week when they initiated an audit of the project.

Germany has updated its age rating system for games. The standard list of criteria now includes a category for “risk factors.” This was announced by the German ratings agency USK. 

The service SteamDB has published a list of the top-grossing products on Steam for the week of December 10 to 17. Counter-Strike 2 took the top spot, displacing the former leader Path of Exile 2 to second place.

Among the game trailers showcased at The Game Awards 2024 was Catly — an MMO featuring cats from the studio SuperAuthenti. Online speculation arose that both the trailer and the game might have been created using generative artificial intelligence (AI). However, in a statement to IGN, the developers of Catly claimed otherwise.