TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the trending stories in gaming. In today’s news: 55% of UK dev jobs are outside of London and the South East; Atari to open gaming hotels; and USD$10m-plus (£7.68m-plus) contracts for top streamers departing Twitch 55% of UK dev jobs are outside of London and the South East UK games industry trade body Ukie and cultural charity the BFI have released a new report that reveals that 55% of game developers were based outside London and the [...]

CD Projekt Red has delayed the release of its eagerly anticipated sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077. The game will now miss its scheduled April release slot, instead arriving in September 17th this year. That puts it in a very busy slot for new releases, and may mean it competes for attention with the arrival of next-gen consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X; platforms it is not understood to support. A release delay isn’t the most unusual event in the game industry, [...]

PlayStation is skipping on attending E3 this year, just a few months before it plans to launch the PS5. A decade or so ago, that would have seemed like a very peculiar move. E3 has long been the place to announce and launch the biggest games and gaming platforms. It is famed as a media frenzy, where the world’s press amass to collect and share all the key gaming news. Indeed, it was the very first E3 in 1995 that saw one [...]

It’s easy to feel instinctively optimistic about in-game advertising. In recent years there’s been a powerful sense that in-game ads aren’t simply an increasingly valuable means of income for developers and publishers; perhaps they’re now understood and embraced by more consumers and industry figures than ever before. Furthermore, there is an ever more diverse spread of games, markets and consumers where ads are fitting. And now it feels like there are a greater number of platforms, approaches and tools through which [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Team17 picks up Yippee Entertainment; Worldwide Christmas spend on apps tops USD$277m (£209.6m); and Nexon sells off mobile development subsidiary for JPN¥1 (£0.007). Team17 picks up Yippee Entertainment Long-standing UK developer and publisher Team17 has acquired Yippee Entertainment for close to £1.4m. Founded in 2011, Yippee develops own IP alongside end-to-end creation of games on a third-party basis. The company has also served as a digital publisher. Now wholly owned [...]

In our latest guest post Vanessa Goff-Yu, marketing director at in-game advertising platform Bidstack, takes an optimistic look at the sizeable female gamer demographics, the rise of the strong female game character, and the role brands can play in aiding female representation across games. The news that Natalie Portman will take on the lead role in the fourth Thor film in 2021 wasn’t just the start of Marvel’s next phase; it was part of a wider radical shift in female representation [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Qualcomm and Niantic collaborating on new AR glasses; Wildlife Studios raises USD$60m (£45.7m) for mobile portfolio; Gameloft closes UK studio. Qualcomm and Niantic collaborating on new AR glasses The studio behind the phenomenally popular augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO is working with semiconductor and telecommunications equipment giant Qualcomm to develop a new AR headset. While Pokémon GO was pivotal in introducing mobile to the masses, as highlighted by [...]

In this guest post by the CEO of the mobile game insights and market data specialist GameRefinery, Markus Ramark considers a new way to build your targeting, and looks at why understanding player ‘affinity’ with given games might unlock new levels of success.   At its heart, the mobile games industry is a multi-billion dollar battle to find the highest spending, frequently playing, most loyal new players. Top-performing games are supported with marketing spend in the tens of millions, and app stores [...]

Tackling toxicity in online communities is a demanding, nuanced and sometimes thankless task. As communities around single games grow into tens of millions – or hundreds of millions in some cases –  a tiny minority of problematic users can still present a sizeable group, and cause real harm to significantly large audiences. The challenge in meeting, managing and countering toxicity is two-fold. Firstly, as a human craft game moderation can be remarkably demanding on community management staff. The thing is, there remains [...]

Last night was a big night for Xbox. Microsoft hosted its X019 event in London, which was plump with announcements. If one theme dominated, though, it was the delivery of games as a service. Both Game Pass and Project xCloud enjoyed plenty of focus. The former is a subscription service for the Xbox One that adopts the ‘Netflix of Games’ model, giving users access to a library of titles for a regular fee. xCloud, meanwhile, is the coming Xbox cloud gaming streaming [...]