Embracer Group’s shopping spree continues. The Swedish holding has acquired five companies, including publisher Dark Horse and Perfect World Entertainment. The latter will become a part of Gearbox Entertainment in a deal worth $125 million.

Dozens of key developers who worked on Ubisoft’s main AAA franchises have left the company over the last year and a half. Employees cite low pay and the misconduct scandal among reasons for their departure, calling this mass attrition “the great exodus.”

Joining us for another episode of the “2021 in Video Games” series is Roman Garbar, Marketing Director at Tenjin. Headquartered in San Francisco, Tenjin offers a single, comprehensive platform for mobile app analytics, attribution and ad network data aggregation.

All 30 employees have been laid off at mobile developer Pictolabra. The studio’s management seems to lay the responsibility on MGVC, an investment division of MY.GAMES, which has pulled the funding Pictolabra relied on. The fund, however, controlled less than 1% of the company and claims it had no say in the matter, while the studio knew about the termination of funding well in advance.

To kick off the Christmas week, Lexi Sydow, Head of Insights at App Annie, joins us for another episode of our “2021 in Video Games” series.

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal agency responsible for censorship in media, has offered to develop an AI-based solution to search for banned content in video games. However, this initiative caused debate among industry professionals.

Supergiant’s hit roguelike Hades has become the first video game ever to win a Hugo Award. The Hugo Awards have traditionally recognized the best science fiction and fantasy works, but the award was extended to video games last year with the introduction of the Best Video Game category.

Tencent has managed to partly settle its tensions with the Chinese regulators. Although the tech giant will be able to release updates for several mobile apps from its catalog, it is unclear whether the restriction on the release of new products will remain valid.

Game marketing consultant Chris Zukowski has shared data on wishlists developers usually get in the first two weeks since launching their Steam page. He explained what numbers should be considered normal, and why poor performance is not always a death sentence.

Embracer Group has entered into negotiations to acquire French publisher Asmodee, which distributes board games and their digital versions. If the Swedish holding successfully closes a €2.75 billion deal, it will become the biggest gaming group in Europe.

CD Projekt has managed to finally settle a class-action lawsuit over Cyberpunk 2077‘s controversial launch. The company will pay investors only $1.85 million, while they will relinquish all claims against the Polish developer.

The first North American video game union has been established at Vodeo Games, a developer of turn-based action-adventure title Beast Breaker. The studio’s management voluntarily recognized it and supported the employees.

Clash of Clans developer Supercell has announced the launch of a new studio in North America. This move signals the company’s expansion beyond mobile as it plans to make titles for other platforms as well.

Sony might be planning to improve its relationship with indie developers and publishers. According to the global partner survey’s results, the company wants to fix some of PlayStation’s problems, including bad communication and poor discoverability.

Joining us today for a quick recap of 2021 is Mátyás Csernák, CEO at Grand Beats Production. Grand Beats Production is an audio production studio specializing in video game SFX, music, voice overs, and audio implementation.

Boss Fight creative director Damion Schubert has shared a great thread about the dark side of AAA games’ economics. Players often complain about big companies raising price tags and still releasing titles with loot boxes, but in reality, producing games with nine-figure budgets these days is way more complex than that.

Discoverability expert Simon Carless has shared his thoughts on how developers can quantify their game’s success on Steam based on the number of user reviews. According to his calculations, only 1.5% of new titles released in October 2021 sold at least 40k units in week one.