We continue to wrap up the year 2024 with gaming (or gaming industry-related) teams. Next up is an interview with Vera Velichko, the CEO of the outsourcing company OWL studio.

The Google team has compiled a list of the most popular search queries of the outgoing year. In the “Games” category, the leader was Connections—a word puzzle from The New York Times, where you need to group words by meaning.

The Drucker Institute has published its annual ranking of public companies in the United States with the most effective management. Among them is a number of companies related to gaming.

We continue to wrap up the year 2024 with gaming (or game-related) teams. Up next is an interview with Anton Mikhaylov, the creative director of the indie studio Tortuga Team.

Enish is a Japanese mobile studio known for games like De:Lithe Last Memories and 進撃の巨人 Brave Order. The company decided to give its employees an unpleasant New Year’s gift by cutting part of its workforce.

Dauntless reached its release on Steam five years after the original launch. Users greeted it, to put it mildly, coldly. Currently, Dauntless has an “overwhelmingly negative” rating on Steam with only 14% positive reviews.

The latest achievement from Grinding Gear Games is another milestone. Path of Exile 2 topped the list of the best-selling products on Steam for the week ending December 10th.

The owner of itch.io, Leaf Corcoran, provided a detailed comment regarding yesterday’s website outages.

Recently, Rush Royale celebrated its fourth anniversary: the game’s global release took place on December 8, 2020. In honor of the anniversary, MY.GAMES updated the project’s performance metrics.

One of the latest patches for Palworld removed the ability to summon captured creatures by throwing special spheres onto the field. Developers have not commented on the change, but it’s speculated online that it was made due to a legal dispute with the Pokémon franchise owners.

We continue to wrap up the year 2024 with teams involved in gaming or the gaming business. Up next is an interview with Irma Novikova, an international law attorney at Prospectacy.

The Japanese cyber police have arrested a man for hacking and selling modified Pokémon Sun save files for Nintendo 3DS. The hacker offered gamers a version with 800 unlocked Pokémon for $35.

Colin Anderson, the composer of the iconic early GTA games, reminisced about the good old days when a game was fully polished upon release. Nowadays, he notes, developers have become too complacent, relying on day-one patches.

The studio Papergames reported on the initial downloads of the gacha game Infinity Nikki. They announced that the number of downloads worldwide has exceeded 10 million. It took five days to reach this milestone; Infinity Nikki was released on December 5, 2024.

We’re continuing to wrap up the results for 2024 with gaming (or gaming business-related) teams. Up next is an interview with Anton Vinogradov, co-founder of the game porting and publishing studio Samustai.

On December 9, the website itch.io, a digital store specializing in indie games, went offline. According to the platform’s administration, the domain registrar closed access to it after receiving a complaint from the toy manufacturer Funko.

In an article for App2Top, Appodeal Publishing shares three proven user acquisition (UA) strategies to help mobile devs and publishers make the most of the holidays. There’re also insights into how Join Blocks used these strategies to increase installs by 6x and revenue by 300% during Christmas.

Shares of Ubisoft have nearly halved in value since the beginning of the year amidst criticism from both players and investors. Analyst Aldora, Joost van Dreunen, believes that the market would benefit from considering the purchase of the French publisher.

CI Games announced that the overall sales of its games have increased thanks to systematic updates and player feedback. This was reported by the company president Marek Tyminski in an interview with the Polish agency PAP Biznes.