The Russian Orthodox Church has written a special prayer service for people who are obsessed with video games. However, it still must be approved by the Holy Synod, Russia’s Ecclesiastical governing body.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation has shared a report on the local IT industry. It lists all tech companies in the country, including the ones making video games.

Sensor Tower has analyzed growth for different mobile genres in the US during 2021. Driven by Genshin Impact, action games saw the biggest increase in player spending with almost 69%.

Consulting firm Games One has shared a list of the highest-paid gaming CEOs. Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick made it to the top-3, earning more than CD Projekt, Ubisoft, and EA leaders combined.

Deep Rock Galactic was added to PS+ on January 4 and managed to attract 6 million new players in the first week. It helped the studio more than double its player base.

Genshin Impact managed to reach another milestone during the first week of January. According to AppMagic, the miHoYo’s hit surpassed $3 billion in lifetime player spending on mobile.

Worlde, a puzzle game that got massively popular online, has spawned numerous clones. One of them called Worlde — The App even managed to generate 12,000 downloads before Apple apparently removed it from the App Store.

Riot Games has announced a new five-year development plan, also making an unusual offer to its employees. Every worker that doesn’t want to embrace the new strategy and decides to quit the company will receive 25% of their annual salary.

Xbox head Phil Spencer has opened up about the company’s relationship with Activision Blizzard amid the ongoing harassment scandal. While not going into a lot of detail, he noted that Xbox won’t publicly shame other publishers.

Amid the new wave of conversations about the cancellation of Days Gone 2, game director Jeff Ross has talked about his vision for a potential sequel.

Media strategist Eric Seufert has shared five trends of the mobile games market for 2022. Among other things, he believes that companies will start creating Android-first strategies for their titles in the wake of the ATT implementation on iOS.

Twitter has summed up the gaming activity on its platform for 2021. Genshin Impact became the most talked about title of the year, while the overall number of game-related tweets exceeded 2 billion.

Apple said it would allow third-party payment solutions in South Korea following last year’s adoption of the law which banned app store operators from forcing their own in-app payment systems.

Developer Benjamin Kobe, founder of Austin, Texas-based indie studio Clutch Dynamics, shared his experience of promoting his game Boris the Sloth on Reddit. He suggests staying away from large gaming and gamedev subreddits for UA purposes.

It was no surprise that Take-Two would like to use Zynga’s expertise to bring its main video games franchises to mobile. However, the company saw its stock fall soon after discussing the deal with its investors.

A team behind city builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom made a post on Reddit at the end of last year. It has gone viral since then helping generate 11,000 wishlists on Steam. So what really worked for the devs?

Mateusz Kanik, who has been working at CD Projekt for 15 years, has decided to leave the studio. He worked on The Witcher 2 and at one time was game director on Cyberpunk 2077.

Roblox had high hopes for its Chinese app as it was supposed to help the company expand into the local market. However, it has been suddenly removed from app stores. While not sharing specific reasons behind the decision, Roblox is now working on the new version.

Take-Two announced a definitive agreement to acquire Zynga, creating “one of the largest publicly traded interactive entertainment companies in the world.” Take-Two will pay approximately $12.7 billion acquiring all of the outstanding shares of Zynga in a cash and stock transaction.