GamesIndustry

Pokémon Go has been downloaded over 678 million times globally since its 2016 release.

According to Data.ai's latest findings, published last week, a quarter of downloads (164 million) came from the United States, Pokémon Go's biggest market. Niantic's title is currently the fourth most downloaded game of all time in the country.

Globally, Pokémon Go is the No. 18 mobile game ranked by all-time total downloads, across iOS and Android.

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2009's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 2012's Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 were two of the best-selling video games in the UK last month.

Both games had their matchmaking fixed on Xbox platforms, and were also discounted in the Xbox Ultimate Game Sale, which sent Modern Warfare 2 to No.5, while Black Ops 2 returns at No.4.

Black Ops 2 was on sale for £11.99 and Modern Warfare 2 could be picked up for £12.49.

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Rockstar Games has announced the acquisition of Cfx.re, a Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 modding team.

In a statement shared last Friday, Rockstar Games explained that the team will be officially part of the company going forward, but the terms of the situation have not been shared.

Cfx.re is behind two servers, FiveM and RedM, focusing on multiplayer role play. FiveM was created in 2015, followed by RedM in 2019.

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Krafton has pledged a further $150 million investment in Indian game startups over the next two to three years.

As reported by TechCrunch, the PUBG company identified India "as one of the premier engines of growth for Krafton globally."

"We continue to hold a long-term view on India and its vibrant startup ecosystem," Sean Hyunil Sohn, chief executive of Krafton India, said. "We believe in the power of Indian IPs and content in making a lasting global impact, and we are excited to achieve new milestones in our journey to unlock the country's full potential as a global gaming powerhouse."

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On 18 July 2023, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced the latest set of guidance on the use of loot boxes in video games, coordinated by trade body UKIE and comes as the result of the Technical Work Group that DCMS convened at the end of last year.

The guidance makes some fairly uncontroversial recommendations around improving transparency standards and information sharing which we expect will not create substantial new compliance challenges for most businesses. However, it also establishes a number of new and more ambitious requirements, particularly on the topic of age-gating and age assurance, which could have more dramatic implications for issues of children's privacy and online safety.

Many of the UKIE's 11 industry principles that form the centre of the guidance focus on improving transparency standards surrounding loot boxes in video games. In particular, these include (among others):

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FIFA was both the first and third best-selling games in Italy during 2022.

FIFA 23 was comfortably No.1 by almost four times the sales of second place, which was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. FIFA 22 in third place was only slightly behind Call of Duty.

Considering the country's love of football, this is not surprising. In fact, FIFA 23 is also the second best-selling game of this year (so far), and only slightly behind the No.1 game -- which is Hogwarts Legacy.

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You ever see something so awful that your first instinct is to show it to someone else, so they can share in how awful it is? Even though you know it's probably just going to make their day worse?

I sure hope so, because that will make me feel a little better about showing you this:

That's from Roblox's latest quarterly earnings report. I have seen companies shade every other line of the tables in their investor relations materials for readability in the past, but I've never before seen someone do it for unreadability. White text on a light blue background? That stands out as much as a GameStop employee who hates their job.

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Patents registered by Nintendo for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have been made public.

In recent months, Nintendo has filed dozens of applications with the Japan Patent Office for patents seemingly related to Tears of the Kingdom, as noted on the blog of naoya2k and spotted by Automaton.

The patent applications cover a variety of gameplay mechanics and technology, such as the limits of Link's Ultrahand ability, or the game's method for calculating the speed and physics of moving vehicles.

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During our time at the First Playable event in Florence, we spoke with nine Italian game developers of all different shapes and sizes.

We met with a bunch of small, independent teams creating artistic, personal passionate projects. And we sat down with larger developers who are part of bigger groups, such as Ubisoft and Embracer.

Stormind doesn't fit into either of those categories. This is a AA game developer with 110 employees that isn't owned by any group or outside publisher. And that's something it's fiercely proud of.

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Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a key part of consumer psychology that just about any businessperson has learned about at some point.

It's the reason why sales and special offers "must end soon"; it's the concept that underlies limited edition products, pre-order bonuses, and every wily form of artificial scarcity this industry has ever cooked up.

Yet, for all that, any businessperson worth their salt knows how to manipulate FOMO in consumers, very few of them are immune to its effects in turn. On the contrary, many managers and executives – especially those in technology or tech-adjacent industries like gaming – are riddled with the fear that they might miss out on the next trend, the next advancement, or the next platform that rockets to the moon.

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Netflix has launched a game controller app on the App Store for iOS devices, suggesting its plans for a cloud gaming service may be taking shape.

The Netflix Game Controller app will let subscribers play games on their TV using a gamepad interface.

According to The Verge, launching a game through the app prompts users to connect their device, but currently displays "Netflix Games on TV are in beta" with potential device support limitations.

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Maple Story maker Nexon has released its latest earnings report and said that during Q2, it hit $649 million, an increase of 12% year-on-year.

Here's what you need to know for the three months ended June 30, 2023.

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Twitch pulled in 1.8 billion viewership hours watched during July.

The figure represents a 5% increase when compared to June's performance, according to StreamElements and Rainmaker. gg's monthly State of the Stream report.

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China has imposed strict game time limitations for minors partly out of concern they could develop addictions, but a new paper published in Nature Human Behavior found no evidence that the rules have had any impact on excessive gaming at all.

The researchers partnered with Unity to examine more than 7 billion hours of playtime and around 2.4 billion Chinese gamer profiles from mid-August of 2019 to mid-January of 2020, a span of time that includes the imposition of an hour-and-a-half daily playtime limit for minors, or three hours on holidays.

"Heavy" gaming was defined as an individual playing for four or more hours a day, six or more days per week.

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Update, August 11, 2023: Altagram has apologized for omitting developers from Baldur's Gate 3 credits, and is committed to adding the missing names.

In a statement posted to social media, the company said it takes "full responsibility for the omission of [its] freelancers' names and [apologizes] for the effects that it had."

Altagram listed seven policies it will adhere to in future, including transparency with freelancers, partners, and clients, and a commitment to IGDA guidelines on game crediting.

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The Tetris Effect writer Dan Ackerman has filed a lawsuit against Apple and The Tetris Company for allegedly adapting his book without permission.

In a complaint issued to a Manhattan federal court on August 8, Ackerman claimed the Apple Original film Tetris had "the same feel, tone, approach and scenes" as his 2016 book The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized The World, including direct adaptation of "specific chapters and pages."

Ackerman accused Apple and The Tetris Company of unfair competition, copyright infringement, and illegally interfering with business relations.

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PlayStation 5 sales continue to accelerate in the UK on the back of its new £399 price point.

The deal started two weeks ago and had an immediate impact, with console sales jumping by 75% in that first week. Now into the second week and sales continue to climb, with PS5 units up 59% (revenue is up 51%). Last week was the biggest week of the year so far for PS5 sales in the UK.

The data is courtesy of GfK.

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The third and final DLC for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope arrives this month, and for developer Ubisoft Milan it involves the return of an old friend.

The DLC is titled Rayman in the Phantom Show and, as the name suggests, sees the return of Ubisoft's limbless platforming star. And this character holds real significance for the team in Milan.

"We managed in some way to go back to where we started," says producer Cristina Nava.

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Telltale has acquired Flavourworks for an undisclosed sum.

The companies' "shared understanding of the convergence of the film and game sector" was cited as one of the reasons behind the acquisition.

Flavourworks CEO Zachary Slatter will become Telltale's managing director for Europe.

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EA will close the servers of some of its older titles by the end of the year.

Three more games have been added to the company's Online Services Shutdown list, including Crysis 3, Dante's Inferno, and Dead Space 2, as spotted by PureXbox.

Crysis 3 will see its online services closed on September 7, affecting multiplayer modes on PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam, and the EA app.

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The Supreme Court has refused Epic Games' attempt to have Apple's App Store rules changed immediately, according to a Reuters report.

It's the latest escalation of the 2021 court case between the two companies. That fight began with Epic's attempt to sell Fortnite virtual currency directly to iOS users without going through Apple's App Store payments processing system, denying the platform its usual 30% cut of revenues.

That case ended with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers siding with Apple on all but one count, and ordering the iPhone maker to drop anti-steering practices and open up the App Store so developers can use alternative payment processors.

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PUBG publisher Krafton's H1 2023 earnings were down 2% year-over-year, reaching $704 million in consumer spending.

Here's what you need to know about the financial earnings from the three months.

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Roblox today reported its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, showing the company continues to grow its revenues at the cost of the bottom line.

In reporting its earnings, Roblox touted its daily active users (DAU) for the second quarter being up 25% year-over-year to 65.5 million, nearly twice what it had in the first full quarter of the pandemic in 2020.

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Xbox’s Jen MacLean is the latest speaker to join the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX.

The event takes place on Thursday, August 31st at the Seattle Convention Center. Tickets are on sale now.

MacLean is the general manager of game creator partnerships at Xbox, working with third-party studios to help them succeed across the Xbox ecosystem. She’s a games industry veteran, and has held senior roles at AWS, the IGDA and 38 Studios. During a fireside chat at Investment Summit, MacLean will discuss her views on the market, what Xbox is looking for from studios, the impact of Game Pass, the potential of game streaming and more.

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Acid Wizard Studio announced that it would go on a hiatus indefinitely, citing a "destructive" work environment as the reason.

Sharing the news on social media, the Darkwood developer said it hasn't "been able to create a work environment that would not be destructive to [the team's] personal lives."

The studio aims to complete its latest update for the 2017 survival horror game before taking said break.

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Reply Games is a studio that's a small part of one of Italy's biggest corporations.

Reply Group provides all sorts of B2B digital services for all sorts of industries, from energy to banking and telecoms to healthcare. It generates billions of euros in revenue and boasts over 10,000 employees.

The group's clients were looking to develop B2B experiences, particularly around VR and AR, and so Reply hired game developers to make some. Over time, this group split into two. One group – Infinity Reply – still creates those sorts of B2B experiences for clients. And the other became Reply Games, a consumer-facing developer behind the 2022 action game Soulstice.

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Content warning: This article features references to harassment, abuse and sexual assault.

Despite the many cases of harassment and abuse exposed in the games industry over the past few years, and the subsequent calls to address these behaviours, fresh reports continue to emerge from each major event, highlighting the systemic roots of the problems.

Many of those roots were discussed earlier this year at a Reboot Develop Blue session, fittingly titled 'WTF, it's 2023: Conversations we (still) need to have about being a woman in the games industry.' GamesIndustry.biz caught up with the panellists shortly after, and they suggested many ways in which men should change their behaviour to not only prevent this harassment from happening, but also better support and protect the women being targeted.

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PlayStation 5 has now sold 40 million consoles worldwide, Sony has announced.

By comparison, PlayStation 4 -- the fastest-selling PlayStation console to 40 million -- achieved the same feat two months quicker. The PS5 was severely impacted by component shortages, which meant Sony was unable to supply the demand for the system during the first two years on the market. The console is now in full supply.

The milestone follows a strong June for PS5 across Europe, with sales up 116% compared with the same period in 2022.

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There’s only two types of people in the world. Those who couldn't imagine growing up without being aware of Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, among the very best of children's literature, and those who have no idea who Tove Jansson even is.

Describing Jansson’s universe to someone who’s never read anything from the renowned Finnish author and artist feels like a difficult task. It’s poetry, it’s melancholy, it's queerness, sometimes it’s darkness and fear — but it’s also unaltered joy, an unbreakable bond with nature, the celebration of one’s self in its entirety, honouring the small things of life. It’s wind howling in the trees, hearing a harmonica in the distance, summer on a small island of the Gulf of Finland, rolling down a snowy mountain without fearing the consequences – but never ignoring the consequences. Jansson’s work — both her children's literature and adult novels — is a must-read that I will never stop recommending to people.

It’s also difficult to explain how much of a cultural phenomenon the Moomin series is to people who are unaware of it. Nine books (translated in 44 languages and having sold over 15 million copies as of 2014, according to the BBC), several picture books, over 20 TV adaptations across Europe and Asia, a theme park in Finland, and more.

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Capcom yesterday released its financial earnings report for its first fiscal quarter. The new release Street Fighter 6 and the Resident Evil 4 remake were the top performers, driving net sales up 74% year-on-year to ¥43.8 billion ($313 million).

The numbers

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A number of big name investors and publishers have signed-up to the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX next month.

It will take place at the Seattle Convention Center on Thursday, August 31st. Tickets are on sale now for as low as $50 + booking fee.

Already, more than 20 game developers have signed-up to the event. They'll be looking to meet investors, publishers and platforms including Agnitio Capital, London Venture Partners, Phoenixx Inc, Skystone Games, Square Enix Collective, TinyBuild, Valve, Whitethorn Games, Ysbryd Games and many more to be announced.

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Valhalla Ventures has unveiled a $66 million fund for gaming and tech.

The firm aims to fund underfunded game projects focusing on social experiences.

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Capcom has acquired Swordcanes, a support studio that recently worked on Street Fighter 6.

The publisher announced today that Swordcanes has been made a wholly-owned subsidiary through a share acquisition.

Having worked on major Capcom titles in the past, the publisher acquired Swordcanes to "substantially bolster its developmental and technological capabilities."

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Iain Garner never expected to be working in the video games industry.

Born in rural North England – "a tiny village between two tiny towns" – Garner spent a lot of time in front of his TV, playing Sonic the Hedgehog on a black and white screen (he says he didn't even know Sonic was blue until he was much older. After completing a degree in English literature and history, he took a year out to teach English in China… well, Garner ended up remaining in the far east for a decade.

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CD Projekt Red is laying off 100 people as it undergoes "several deep transformations" within the company.

Adam Kiciński, CEO of CD Projekt, announced the news in a blog post. After reshaping the development process for its ongoing projects, Kiciński said the developer is "now focusing on refining the shape of their teams."

Having assessed the teams within CD Projekt Red and their "expected contribution to the delivery of their strategy," Kinciński concluded that the developer is overstaffed.

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Xbox revenues remained relatively flat for the final quarter of Microsoft's financial year, showing a 1% increase for the three months ended June 30.

Microsoft's Q4 results show the company's total revenue was up 8% year-on-year to $56.2 billion, although the More Personal Computing segment (which includes Xbox) saw a 4% decline, dipping to $13.9 billion.

Here's what you need to know:

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Ubisoft has allegedly shelved the development of a sequel to Immortal Fenyx Rising.

As reported by VGC, multiple sources familiar with the matter said that Ubisoft Quebec was making the follow-up of the 2020 adventure title.

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The Queen's Gambit Chess launches on the Netflix mobile app today, following in the footsteps of the streaming giant's own IP like Stranger Things and Too Hot to Handle, which already have their own games published on the platform. A key difference, however, is this title is the result of a partnership that had come together before Netflix had even officially announced its gaming ambitions back in 2021.

The game is developed by Liverpool-based Rockwater Studios, the internal development team of publisher Ripstone, which has already carved a niche for itself with the release of premium quality chess titles like Pure Chess and Chess Ultra. It was perhaps no surprise then that its staff were among the 62 million viewers hooked by The Queen's Gambit when the miniseries released on Netflix back in October 2020.

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The state of hiring in the games industry has seen many changes in recent years with more calls for inclusivity and efforts to address the talent pipeline gap between junior and senior roles. Recruitment has become even more vital as mass layoffs have hit the tech and gaming business sectors.

In January, Microsoft laid off 10,000 staffers. In March, Meta announced it reduce its workforce by 10,000 employees before the year's end. Last month, Embracer announced that it was restructuring with studio closures expected. Pokemon Go maker Niantic, closed its LA studio weeks ago. And those are just a few examples.

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