The winners of the annual Dstars Awards have been announced today. Italian developers have voted for their colleagues across categories like Game of the Year, Management Star, Best New Studio, and Industry Star.

It’s been a few weeks since Yacht Club Games announced its new game Mina the Hollower. The studio, known for indie hit Shovel Knight, has already raised over $1 million on Kickstarter, which is more than three times the sum it originally requested.

Nintendo has announced that both 3DS and Wii U eShops will be permanently closed in March 2023. Although players won’t be able to buy and own digital copies of old games anymore, the company apparently is not interested in preserving its classic titles.

The AI revolution is in full swing, and modern artificial intelligence methods for learning, planning, and optimizing have begun changing the rules in many industries, from advertising and social media to mining or manufacturing. But not video games. Or at least, not yet. AI academic and modl.ai co-founder Julian Togelius has examined how these technologies will alter video games in the coming years.

What does the $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard mean for the industry in the long term? Will Activision games become exclusive to Microsoft? How will Sony and Nintendo respond? Is the race on to conquer the Metaverse? Analyst Joost Rietveld is here to explain.

Developers have gotten into a heated discussion about thousands of indie games launching on Steam every year. While some think that these projects shouldn’t exist because they have zero value, the rest are convinced that everyone should have the right to express themselves through any art form.

The digital content industry has been steadily rising even before the pandemic and the global market size is expected to reach $38 billion by 2030. In this post, Tachat Igityan, founder of the platform for streamers destream, breaks down the financial aspects of blogging and content creation.

The most ambitious gaming companies focus on the biggest genres — in terms of their audience and their cumulative revenue. Here is where the money lies, at least for those who dare play big. AppMagic founder Max Samorukov shared handy conclusions based on the most important changes that happened in the Western mobile games market in 2021.

Gamera Interactive CEO Alberto Belli has joined us to discuss what the Italian studio managed to achieve in 2021 and what to expect from it this year, including the launch of RPG Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms.

Do you need to trademark your game’s name? Is it safe to release without a trade mark? What to do if a fellow dev accuses you of infringing their rights? We caught up with Tim Repa-Davies, games lawyer at media and technology law firm Sheridans, to discuss how game developers can navigate the often intimidating realm of trade marks.

Wrapping up our “2021 in Video Games” series is Piotr Gnyp, Chief Marketing Office at indie games developer and publisher Movie Games.

Joining us for another episode of the “2021 in Video Games” series is Guillaume Jamet, Vice-President and Head of Publishing at Plug In Digital.

Joining us today for a quick recap of 2021 are Ice-Pick Lodge’s narrative designer Anna Pimonova, game / narrative designer Dana Kirilenko, and studio head Nikolay Dybowsky.

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.

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.