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Industry News November 19, 2020

Unity to teach coding skills to 80K people for free

Unity is launching a new no-cost training program for “anyone interested in coding and breaking into the gaming and tech industries.” The ambition behind the initiative is to reduce unemployment resulting from the covid19-related recession.

Industry News November 18, 2020

Xsolla on budgeting your indie game

In a piece on pitching, Xsolla’s Justin Berenbaum highlights a number of budgeting considerations that indie devs should bear in mind when pitching their game to a publisher.

Industry News November 18, 2020

Apple cuts its commission to 15% for devs making under $1 million per year

Apple has rolled out new App Store Small Business Program that reduces App Store commission to 15 percent for small businesses. Devs can qualify for 15% commission if they earned up to $1 million in revenue during the previous calendar year.

Industry News November 18, 2020

Fantastic beasts and how to draw them with generative adversarial networks

Google revealed a demo of its Chimera Painter, a trained machine learning (ML) tool that automatically renders images of fantastic creatures using a user-generated outline.

Industry News November 18, 2020

Founder’s Kit: pitch deck collection and other info for fledgling devs

Evva Karr, co-founder of Glitch, a global collective providing consulting and early stage funding to innovative gaming startups, launched Founder’s Kit that you might want to bookmark.

Industry News November 17, 2020

How Steam Week 1 revenue compares to Month 1, Year 1-5.

Simon Carless posted the results of the Steam revenue survey, which around 100 developers took part in. The survey asked about the gross revenue generated on Steam in Week 1, and then asked ‘what multiple of that revenue did you have at the end of Month 1? How about Year 1?’

Industry News November 17, 2020

Grand HTML5 Contest winners announced

The winners of Grand HTML5 Contest have just been announced during HTML5 Game Developer Day.

Featured November 8, 2020

Julian Colbus on detective game design problems

Industry News October 30, 2020

Talents in Games conducts Game Industry Salary Survey 2020

Recruitment company Talents In Games is coducting an industry-wide salary survey. If you would like to take part, please fill out this questionnaire.

Industry News October 30, 2020

CD Projekt Red co-CEO Adam Kiciński apologizes for calling Cyberpunk 2077 crunch ‘not that bad’

CD Projekt Red co-CEO Adam Kiciński apologized to employees for saying that crunch at the company is “not that bad — and never was.”

Industry News October 30, 2020

PUBG Mobile fully blocked in India

PUBG Corp. is discontinuing all access to PUBG Mobile in India on October 30. This is despite the company’s decision to withdraw the publishing rights from Tencent in the country. The talks with the local publishers have also failed.

Industry News October 30, 2020

Publisher Annapurna Interactive to start making first-party games

Publisher Annapurna Interactive is opening its first internal development studio. It’s based in Los Angeles, California.

Industry News October 30, 2020

Activision-Blizzard to hire 2,000 after laying off over 1,000 people recently

Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick announced the company’s plans to hire more than 2,000 people to keep up with the future production needs. This is in addition to the 10,000 wokers it employs now.

Industry News October 28, 2020

AI conference takes place in NetEase’s MMORPG Justice

The International Conference on Distributed Artificial Intelligence first launched in Beijing last year. This year, the organizers partnered with NetEase to host the conference in a small palace among bamboo trees… in popular MMORPG Justice.

Industry News October 28, 2020

Brightlobe launches first game made to help children improve mental health amid coronavirus pandemic

UK child health startup and game development studio Brightlobe has launched Kai’s Sanctuary in beta. It’s a mobile game specifically made to help children improve their mental health during the coronavirus pandemic.

Industry News October 27, 2020

Facebook to eventually launch first ad-funded cloud gaming service?

Yesterday Facebook rolled out its own free cloud gaming platform focused on mobile games.

Industry News October 27, 2020

Creative Assembly devs discuss making of Alien: Isolation in new NoClip documentary

NoClip has released a 20-minute documentary on the making of Alien: Isolation. The developers told how they were inspired by the original film by Ridley Scott and made the first prototype in secret from SEGA.

Industry News October 26, 2020

Valve might merge global and chinese versions of Steam in response to China’s tightening regulations

Valve might be gearing up for the merger of the Chinese and global versions of Steam. If it happens, many developers will no longer be able to sell games in China without the approval of the local government (currently only dozens of foreign titles are licensed a year).

Industry News October 26, 2020

SocialPeta — a tool for tracking the effectiveness of advertising campaigns

Another market intelligence tool is increasingly used across global mobile game markets. It’s called SocialPeta. The tool keeps track of your competitors’ advertising data.

Industry News October 23, 2020

Former Assassin’s Creed III Creative Director: streamers should pay devs for games they stream

Streamers should pay a percentage of their revenue to the developers and publishers of the games they stream, according to Alex Hutchinson, the Montreal Studio Creative Director of Stadia Games and Entertainment. His words generated thousands of angry comments, and Google representatives quickly distanced the company from the controversial statements.