EA’s Chief Operating Officer, Arjun Balaram, shared key principles that help the company maintain user interest in its service games.

Steam has introduced support for season passes—not for service games, but as bundles of already released and upcoming DLCs for games. This update was highlighted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik.

In the German version of Steam, games without an age rating have stopped being displayed for users.

In the digital store itch.io, not only indie games are sold, but also game assets. The platform’s administration has introduced a new requirement for creators of the latter — all assets created using generative AI must be tagged accordingly.

Supercell has announced plans to develop Clash Royale as a gaming platform for mobile strategies. This was reported by the portal MobileGamer, citing the general manager of Clash Royale, Aleksandar Markovic.

The evening of November 20 marked the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl*. The game launched on PC and Xbox Series, including the Game Pass subscription. Judging by the numbers, its debut on Steam was successful.

The third news of the day about layoffs. Next in line is the studio Reflector Entertainment, which developed the action-adventure Unknown 9: Awakening.

Sony is indeed looking to acquire the Japanese media conglomerate Kadokawa, which owns the studio FromSoftware. In a message to investors, Kadokawa revealed that it has received a letter from Sony suggesting a deal.

In late October, it became known that AppLovin and its subsidiary gaming studio Machine Zone had laid off part of their staff. At that time, the number of employees who lost their jobs was not disclosed, but the portal SFGATE uncovered these figures in a statement submitted last week by AppLovin to the California state authorities.

The British publisher Kwalee recently laid off at least ten employees, according to the MobileGamer portal. Reportedly, the layoffs primarily affected the marketing department.

On November 19, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was released on PC and Xbox Series. Steam users criticized the new flight simulator. Only 14% of the players who left reviews rated it positively.

Bethesda Game Studios has updated the player count for Starfield. The studio announced that the audience for the space RPG has grown to 15 million people.

Google Corporation has summarized the initial results of the outgoing year and announced the best games in its app store for 2024.

Sales of Farming Simulator 25 surpassed 2 million copies a week after its release, reports Giants Software studio. This made the agricultural simulator’s launch the most successful in the series’ history.

The Finnish company Remedy Entertainment held a presentation for investors where it outlined its financial plans for the coming years. It also shared new information about its games.

During the week from November 12 to 19, Farming Simulator 25 earned more on Steam than any other paid game. This allowed it to top the platform’s premium chart, displacing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which held the first position for three weeks.

The venture company Play Ventures, which specializes in investments in gaming startups, has completed its third funding round. During this round, it raised $140 million.

At the end of last week, the GameMaker team celebrated the engine’s 25th birthday: its first version was released on November 15, 1999.

The platform now tracks traffic more accurately. This will enable developers to receive more reliable data on who is visiting the pages of their games.