Nick Kaman, co-founder of indie studio Aggro Crab, discussed the successes of the underwater soulslike game Another Crab’s Treasure in a conversation with GameDiscoverCo.
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M&A and Investment
All news and articles about the financial side of the games industry. Private funding, public placements, VC investments, and M&A deals.
Another’s Crab Treasure, a charming take on the Soulslike genre, has proven to be a huge success for small studio Aggro Crab. Here are some numbers for another indie success of 2024.
The 2022 reboot of the Saints Row series was far from being a commercial success for Embracer, especially given its $100 million budget. According to new information, the game has sold less than 2 million copies.
Following the publication of Sony’s FY23 report, Niko Partners director of research and insights Daniel Ahmad has shared more data about the company’s gaming business and the sales of PlayStation 5 consoles.
How much will it cost to develop a mobile game today and what marginality you should expect from it," Dmitry Yaminsky, co—founder of Azur Games, said in his column.
On the evening of May 6, Hades II was released in early access on Steam and Epic Games Store (EGS). It is not known how things are in EGS, but thanks to analytical services, the situation in Steam is clear. There, the game has already attracted twice as many simultaneous players as the first Hades.
The publisher of Private Division, specializing in low- and medium-budget games, has parted with a significant number of employees. This is reported by GamesIndustry with reference to its own sources.
Metacore closed 2023 with an operating loss of 5.6 million euros. This was announced in an interview with MobileGamer by Mika Tammenkoski, CEO of the Finnish studio.
Indie studio PlayWithFurcifer and publisher IndieArk spoke with gaming expert Simon Carless. They revealed the statistics of the PvP autobatcher Backpack Battles and told how the game managed to succeed.
Atari has suddenly launched a new publishing label under the revived Infogrames brand. And it has already announced its game acquisition.
KRAFTON has invested in the Polish studio Far From Home, known for cooperative survival on the Forever Skies airship. She announced the purchase of a minority stake.
The organizers of the Gamedev conference.World, including indie developer Rami Ismail, presented the Global Games Fund. He will support gaming startups "outside the Western world."
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, has raised $7.2 billion for new investments. She has already transferred $600 million of them to the budget of the a16z Games foundation, which deals with gaming companies.
Red Rover Interactive is a young studio founded last year by former employees of Funcom, Bohemia Interactive and Lockwood Publishing. On April 16, she successfully closed the Series A funding round.
Miniclip bought the authors of PowerWash Simulator
· a month agoThe Swiss publisher of mobile games Miniclip has acquired a non-core asset for itself. The company includes FuturLab studio, which develops games for consoles and PCs and is best known for the PowerWash Simulator.
The difficult times for gaming companies continue. Ascendant Studios, which created the Immortals of Aveum shooter, forcibly transferred most employees to a long unpaid leave. This is reported by the Game Developer with reference to a LinkedIn post by Phoenix Labs Chief Engineer Chris Morness.
The question of how a developer can reserve the right to the game in case of receiving an investment is answered in their column by Irina Gushchina and Vadim Kocheshev, lawyers at Semenov &Pevzner.
At the end of March, SEGA announced the sale of Relic Entertainment, and a week later, the studio underwent massive layoffs. According to producer Robyn Smale, Relic Entertainment has fired a total of 41 people.
Nikolay Katselapov, one of the founders of Wargaming, has opened his own investment fund. It's called Mika Games. He will invest in mobile startups.
Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch in an interview with GamesIndustry discussed the recently completed restructuring of the Embracer Group and the general condition of the Swedish holding company. We have collected the main theses.
InvestGame analysts decided to help game developers, as well as esports and Web3 companies with the search for financing. They have posted a table with specialized funds in the public domain.
RPGs have always been one of the most difficult and risky genres in terms of production. Here is what Owlcat Games founder and CEO Oleg Shpilchevskiy has to say about the challenges posed by rising costs, as well as the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and its impact on the industry.
Vedomosti newspaper discovered in the SPARK-Interfax database that in October 2023 Mikhail Akulov, one of the founders and CEO of the Hobby World board game publishing house, registered Novodel LLC. According to the description, the company specializes in the development and publication of video games.
According to documents published online, it can be concluded (assumption) that, in fact, Saber Interactive bought itself from the Embracer Group.
The Swedish holding company Embracer Group announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell a number of Saber Interactive assets for 2.57 billion Swedish kronor or $ 247 million.
It became known about the new investment of The Games Fund. This time, the venture fund invested $ 1.5 million in the Roar Games studio.
The Resident Evil 4 remake, one of the most successful games of 2023, has reached a new milestone. It has now cemented its place among the best-selling titles in the entire franchise.
Monster Hunter: World has reached a new sales milestone. Six years after its launch, it remains the most commercially successful game in the franchise, which has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.
It’s always great to see indie games succeed in the market. Backpack Battles, an auto-battling RPG with an interesting hook, is doing really well on Steam right now, exceeding the expectations of its creators.
Ori has been one of the most successful Metroidvania series of all time. And Moon Studios probably wouldn’t be in the industry today if it weren’t for the first game’s commercial performance.
As many game companies around the world continue to cut jobs, Capcom has announced its decision to raise salaries for its Japanese employees. The move will impact both current workers and new graduate hires.
Embracer Group might divest another of its operative groups as part of its cost-cutting restructuring. It has been reported that Gearbox Entertainment, best known for the Borderlands series, is close to being sold out.
This happened after 19 years of working as a division of Activision. The information is official. This was announced on the studio's website.
The management of Playtika stopped looking for a buyer for the company and decided to actively take up M&A. At an investor event, Craig Abrahams, President and CFO of Playtika, announced that the company plans to conclude one or two deals per year.
The launch sales of the Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor car scooter exceeded all the expectations of the developers. Funday Games announced that the game has reached the mark of half a million copies sold just a week after it was released in early access.
How the casual game Merge Gardens from the Finnish Futureplay studio managed to enter the top ten most successful merge projects after three years of obscure existence and earn more than $11 million, Belka Labs game designer Ksenia Chursina analyzed in her deconstruction.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance bought 6 million times
· 3 months agoOn February 13, the role-playing action game Kingdom Come: Deliverance turned six years old. In honor of the birthday, Warhorse Studios announced that the number of copies of the game sold exceeded 6 million copies.
Microsoft Corporation has responded to a complaint from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about layoffs in its gaming division, a significant part of which falls on Activision Blizzard. She said that Activision Blizzard was already preparing to cut staff.
The Acquire studio, together with Square Enix, which developed the Octopath Traveler series of games, became part of the Japanese Kadokawa holding. The holding company announced the transaction in its latest financial report.
Epic Games received $1.5 billion investment from Disney
· 3 months agoDisney Corporation announced the purchase of a stake in Epic Games for $ 1.5 billion. Together, the companies want to create a "new universe of games and entertainment" within Fortnite.
Lithuanian Nordcurrent has signed a deal with Starbreeze Entertainment. She bought out the company's portfolio of Cinemaware games, a developer that flourished in the second half of the 1980s.
An update has appeared. Eidos Montreal has confirmed the cuts.
The current head of Roblox Studio, Stefano Corazza, announced that his company has joined the Blender Development Fund.
Game studio RAWRLAB Games has released a toolkit for porting Godot games to the Nintendo Switch platform. The solution is free, distributed under the MIT license. The only limitation is that you need to be an authorized Nintendo developer to work with the code.
Palworld has already been bought more than 5 million times
· 4 months agoThe creators of Palworld have announced that the game has crossed the next millionth milestone. It took three days for the Pokemon action game to sell 5 million copies.
Despite the difficult time for the industry, investments in game studios continue to flow. The venture fund The Games Fund has announced a deal with Obelisk Studio. The latter received $2 million for the development of the first independent product, the AA horror Displacement.
Polish analysts have disclosed the estimated value of the deal between Tencent and Techland. It was the largest M&A transaction of 2023 in the country.
In July 2023, Tencent bought a key stake in the authors of Dying Light. The amount of the transaction was not officially disclosed. According to the Polish consulting company Navigator Capital and the analytical platform Fordata, the purchase of shares cost Tencent 6.3 billion zlotys or $1.58 billion.
ByteDance is reportedly seeking options to sell its video games and other assets related to its gaming business. Chinese tech giant Tencent has been named among potential buyers.
Some of the ByteDance games can be sold to Tencent
· 4 months agoByteDance is trying to sell its games and other gaming assets. According to the Chinese publication LatePost, she is negotiating their sale with several companies. Tencent is on the list of potential buyers.
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There is little talk about games in the Telegram messenger. We decided to fix the situation by talking with Daria Novikova, product director at PlayDeck startup. The latter launched a gaming marketplace for Telegram. In a conversation with Daria, we touched on topics such as user engagement, earnings from leading projects, monetization and, of course, PlayDeck itself.