This initiative was promoted by local IT companies, Mail.ru Group and Yandex. Its main goal is to support games that popularize Russian history and culture. However, some industry experts are against it.

MY.GAMES published research of Russia’s video games market. The company estimated its volume for 2020 at 163.4 billion rubles ($2.2 billion).

Mobile publisher Playrix and famous Russian rock singer Zemfira released an animated music video for a new song Austin. It’s inspired by the Homescapes butler of the same name.

At the end of January, US game developer Tilting Point announced the launch of a St. Petersburg, Russia-based studio. We have discussed the new studio and the challenges it’s facing with Samir El-Agili, the president of Tilting Point.

Russian studio Mundfish secured a Series B funding round of investments led by Tencent. Among other investors are Gaijin and GEM Capital.

Fntastic, a studio based in Yakutsk, Russia, announced open-world survival MMO The Day Before. The game is set in a deadly, post-pandemic America overrun by flesh-hungry infected and survivors killing each other for food, weapons, and cars.

Black Caviar Games is a mobile and PC game developer and publisher founded in 2019. Initially, the company didn’t have an office at all, with all employees working remotely. A full-fledged working space only arrived in March 2020, but the lockdown made the devs switch back to WFH.

Russia-based studio Ice-Pick Lodge announced its next project.

Anton Gorelkin, member of Russia’s State Duma Committee on Information Policy, asked Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation to look into yet another policy of Apple’s App Store.

According to Gorelkin, he received multiple complaints from Russian developers that Apple does not allow them to create a developer account in the App Store. Without it, it’s impossible to publish an app in the store.

To verify the identity,

Russia’s State Duma is reviewing a bill on mobile application stores submitted by the Just Russia party.