Microsoft has revealed its plans to acquire Activision Blizzard. While details of the deal are yet to be disclosed, it is valued at around $70 billion, which makes it the biggest deal in the history of video games.

Activision Blizzard has been dealing with the workplace misconduct scandal since July. It’s been reported that the company has laid off more than three dozen people and disciplined 40 employees ever since.

Sony Santa Monica Studio creative director Cory Barlog has shared his thoughts on ports in the wake of the God of War launch on PC. He explained why the bad quality is usually not the developers’ fault.

Neko Ghost, Jump! has generated more than 17,000 wishlists on Steam. The game, however, only sold 100 copies on day 1. Developer Victor Burgos tried to figure out the reasons for the failed launch.

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.