Zynga had a record-breaking second quarter, generating $720 million in revenue. On top of that, the company also announced an acquisition of Chinese studio StarLark, known for its mobile hit Golf Rival.

Award-winning studio Fullbright, known for games like Gone Home and upcoming Open Roads, is now going through an internal crisis. Toxic environment and Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor’s controlling behavior eventually led to a once close-knit team losing its female employees and essentially falling apart.

At the end of June, Unity updated parts of its licensing rules with no public announcements. The update changed the way smaller developers create games for closed platforms. For example, it requires a Pro license to launch a title on Xbox.

Swedish holding Embracer Group has bought eight more companies. The list includes 3D Realms, CrazyLabs, and Ghost Ship Games. The whole deal cost the company $213.8 million.

Aleksandr Agapitov, CEO and founder of Xsolla, held a press conference and explained that the mass layoffs are due to the fact that the company has stopped showing 40% growth.

Despite some mixed reviews from critics, players met The Ascent with generally positive reviews. And the game has already surpassed $5 million in revenue, which is a record for publisher Curve Digital.

Russian payment services company Xsolla has fired 150 employees at once. What caused controversy wasn’t the staff reduction itself but the CEO’s letter, in which he tried to explain the reason behind this decision.

It’s never been a secret that Epic Games has been losing tons of money from launching games exclusively on its store. Now we might have some exact figures dated 2019.

Following the news of Blizzard president J. Allen Brack’s departure from the company, Activision Blizzard announced that Jesse Meschuk, Blizzard’s senior vice president of HR, also left (and took his Twitter account with him).

Tencent is continuing its acquisition spree, with the latest report claiming that the Chinese company is ready to buy 1C Entertainment. The Russian-founded and Poland-based company is best known for reinventing the iconic King’s Bounty series.

Mobile publisher Playrix has announced the results of its annual nonprofit contest, which lets employees request finances for a charity of their choice. The company allocated a total of $115,000 for this initiative.

Corentin Selz, Publishing Manager at Voodoo, discusses how the publisher is transforming its existing portfolio of hits into hybrid-casual titles in order to meet the increased demand from users for more in-depth gameplay.

In just 24 hours, shares of the Chinese tech giants like Tencent and NetEase dropped drastically in the wake of the state newspaper comparing games to drugs.

On August 3, Blizzard Entertainment announced that J. Allen Brack is stepping down as the leader of the studio. After his departure, Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra will co-lead the company. They will share responsibilities over game development and company operations.

Last week, a listing for Half-Life 2: Remastered Collection was spotted on the Steam Database. While it’s not an official remaster from Valve, insider Tyler McVicker claims the project has “Valve’s consent.”

The share of Linux users on Steam has historically been pretty low. However, it has now reached 1% for the first time in years soon after the Steam Deck announcement.

Plarium, known for mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends and Vikings: War of Clans, has entered the Finnish games market. The Israeli company acquired local studio Futureplay for an undisclosed sum.

According to InvestGame, the gaming segment in H1’21 saw “a vast 4x growth vs. H1’20 on all fronts,” with $32.7B (vs. $7.7B in H1’20) deal value across 267 deals, including $20.4B in M&As (+486% YoY), $2.8B in private transactions (+367% YoY), and $9.5B in public offerings (+157% YoY).

There is still a lot going on around Activision Blizzard. In our latest round-up, we report on Frances Townsend blocking her own employees on Twitter, a story about the so-called “misogyny tax” against the company, and a former Diablo developer urging to create unions.