On April 13, Twitch launched its first game, Twitch Sings. It’s a karaoke game allowing users to stream their performances to their channels.

Apple Arcade budget already exceeds $500 million, according to The Financial Times. Unnamed “people involved in the project’s development” indicate that Apple is spending several million dollars on each of 100+ games for Apple Arcade.

Mike Nichols, Xbox chief marketing officer, shared his thoughts about Google’s Stadia with Telegraph. According to him, Google has the infrastructure for streaming but lacks the portfolio of big titles.

On Thursday, Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) permanently banned the online multiplayer battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Reuters reports.

Chinese market research company Analysis published a report suggesting MOBA’s decline in popularity among Chinese players. Since 2018, MOBA has moved from the first to the third place in the mobile gaming category. Players’ preferences now lie with first-person shooters and simulation games, both of which attract lots of female users.

Gameinformer joins the industry-wide conversation about casualties of unfortunate production practices. Former employees of Telltale Games spoke to the magazine to relate their heart-breaking story.

Wired has found and reported 36 games on Google Play that are rated as suitable for children despite objectionable content. These games feature violence, social casino gaming, and vaguely disturbing imagery like removing a panda’s bad tooth, with pandas, of course, responsible for general child-friendliness.

Tencent continues to solidify its position in the global gaming market with the launch of the game distribution platform WeGame X.

SuperData, a Nielsen’s company specializing in game research across all platforms, has launched Arcade Forecaster. The new tool uses metrics like revenue, monthly active users and in-game spending to evaluate the performance of digital titles. It also provides publishers and developers with a broader picture of the current macro-level trends in the digital market.

A recent study by Newzoo and ACI Worldwide provides interesting consumer insights about the UK game market, which is the world’s sixth-biggest ($5.1 billion revenue). These findings help better understand payment behavior of gamers in the UK in comparison with other countries.

Bethesda’s new mobile title, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, hit App Store a week ago. More than one million iOS users have downloaded the game, Sensor Tower reports.

Yesterday, Jason Schreier, Kotaku’s news editor and the author of BLOOD, SWEAT, AND PIXELS, posted a report that galvanized the gaming idustry. His article literally goes to great lengths to exhaustively explain how Anthem, which should have become the Bob Dylan of video games, ended up a mediocre title with a score of 59 on Metacritic.

Valve’s Index VR Set will be shipping on June 15 according to the information that prematurely popped up on Steam. Valve quickly took the page down, but not before the Twitter users Wario64 and Steam Database took some screenshots.

The creators of Auto Chess announced alpha test qualification for the mobile version of the game. The testing will begin on Android, with the team “actively preparing for the iOS platform”. According to the official website, “the development of the first version of “Auto Chess” is about to finish”.

GDC 2019 speakers from Valve comment on the recent and upcoming Steam features in a video posted by Steamworks Development YouTube channel.

Further cementing the trend championed by Stadia, China’s Tencent launches its very own cloud gaming platform belatedly dubbed “Start.”

Yesterday, March 28, Xsolla launched a new investment platform called Xsolla Funding Club (XFC). The new network helps indie developers self-publish and grow by putting them in touch with investors and industry experts.

On March 27, 2019, CD Projekt released the financial results for fiscal 2018 and shared a number of internal figures ranging from the number of employees to the distribution of The Witcher 3 sales across hardware platforms.

The Internet is still reeling in the wake of the major news from Google and Apple. The close timing between the unveiling of Stadia, Google’s cloud-based video game platform, and the announcement of Arcade, Apple’s game subscription service, seems to have intensified the individual hype surrounding each reveal.