In China, the publicity department of Haidian District Committee has partnered with the Communist Party’s official newspaper People’s Daily and casual games developer Ohayoo, which is owned by ByteDance.

While it’s been a while since we heard about any blockbusters among word games, 2020 will be a good year for the genre. Sensor Tower predicts global growth in that category driven by its popularity in emerging markets.

Steam named top 20 releases of January. And, separately, top five free-to-play games that came out last month.

Last week Bloomberg reported how manufacturing a PS5 unit now costs $450. From that, the newspaper assumed that the retail price for Sony’s next-get console should be around $470.

TikTok developer is gearing up to seriously expand into the gaming market. Big releases, diversification and competition with Tencent are imminent. ByteDance is going to appoint an executive who will solely focus on running its gaming business.

Saber Interactive will now become part of Embracer Group. It will be the fifth operating company of the group previously known as THQ Nordic AB.

Subscriptions are becoming an increasingly valid model for both platform holders and players. Are they good for developers? There is still a lot of speculation and concern around that. Especially when attempts are made to link developers’ revenues to the time players spend in their game.

Activision Blizzard is gearing up to compete with makers of PUBG, Fortnite and Apex Legends. The publisher will launch the free-to-play battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone.

In May, the creators of the Corona engine will shut down due to the losses incurred. Their product will continue to exist as an open source project.

Sales of current-generation consoles are rapidly declining. In January 2020, the US consumers spent 35 percent less on hardware than in the same period last year.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is planning to release the next version of PlayStation VR.

The exclusive livestreaming deal between YouTube and Activision Blizzard, which was announced last month, is valued at $160 million.

Steam will now use machine learning to suggest games from your backlog. The same algorithm that is used by Interactive Recommender will look at your playtime across various titles and based on that will point you towards similar games.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it had to remove Activision Blizzard title from its cloud-based gaming platform GeForce Now. This happened at the request of the publisher, but no explanation was provided at the time.

Sartori Bernbeck, Executive Director at Entertainment Market Intelligence, the NPD Group, dropped some stats measuring the impact of the Netflix Witcher adaptation across entertainment, including games.

In 2020, Quantic Dream will celebrate its 23rd anniversary.

Sean Shoptaw, senior VP for games and interactive experiences at Disney, gave a talk at the 2020 DICE Summit. He highlighted the company’s new approach to gaming.

Adam Sussman, formerly chief digital officer of Nike, is replacing Paul Meegan as Epic Games’ new president.

A draft version of E3 2020 went live yesterday and was quickly made private. No sensitive information was made public, but this could just be one embarrassment too many for the ESA, E3 organizer, which leaked personal data of about 2000 E3 participants last summer. Anyway, this latest blunder was serious enough for Geoff Keighley to decide not to participate in E3 for the first time in 25 years.