At the end of April, Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan announced imminent layoffs at the crowdfunding company. This was to offset the decline in revenue that the platform saw after projects on the site dropped by about 35 percent.

The release of Half-Life: Alyx was expected to get more Steam users into VR. And it did, even if owners of VR headsets still only consititute 1.9 percent of all Steam users.

Mail.Ru Group’s video games division announced its plans to publish hyper-casual titles. Under the new publishing initiative, My.Games will invest $10 million in development and marketing until the end of 2020.

Today, Playrix has globally released their new title. For the first time in a long while, it’s not a match-3 game. It is a free-to-play hidden object title called Manor Matters.

Publisher My.Games has partnered with Polish developer The Farm 51 on the multiplayer military shooter World War 3.

NHS staff can now claim free games or subscriptions from new website Games for Carers. All they have to do is enter their NHS email address and choose from more than 85,000 free games.

In the F2P model, “whales” are players who are willing to spend much more in a game than average players. The terms comes from the world of Las Vegas casinos, where big spenders are referred to as “whales.”

In 2019, publishers and developers received $13.8 billion in mobile game ad revenue. And that figure is growing more than 25% year over year.

Sperasoft, a Keywords studio announced its collaboration with UK developer and publisher Codemasters.

In 2020, extended reality hardware and software revenues will bring in $6.3 billion, according to revised estimates by SuperData. That’s down from $7.7 billion the analytics firm previously projected.

Bethesda announced on its website that it plans to donate $1,000,000 to charities involved in COVID-19 relief efforts.

“A small fraction of the workforce” has been laid off at the mobile analytics firm App Annie. This is coming from gamesindustry.biz.

The head of Xbox Phil Spencer said that shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders brought a “big flood of new people” to games. Specifically, Xbox saw a huge surge in the numbers of “new to Xbox customers.”

DayZ developer Bohemia Interactive shut down its studio in Bratislava.

Rovio earned €66.6 million in Q1 2020, down 6% year-on-year. However, the publisher’s pre-tax profits grew 53% to €11.5 million. This the Angry Birds company achieved by reducing its UA costs.

Sony has updated the release date for The Last of Us Part II, which was previously delayed indefinitely. The game will now come out on June 19.

The WN Hub goes on with more talks and discussions from Google, GameRefinery, Voodoo, and others.

Videos of gameplay, cutscenes, and developer menus from The Last of Us Part II were leaked during the weekend sparking heated debate across the internet.