Game industry business news

The storm of gloom that engulfed last year’s Call of Duty appears to have well and truly lifted. This time last year the reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was attracting a record number of dislikes on YouTube. Adding fuel to the fire, the trailer for EA’s Battlefield …

Brazilian esports outfit SK Gaming has won the inaugural Counter-Strike: Global Offensive IEM Sydney title. This win is their second win in three weeks after the team also snagged the win at cs_summit, with the double providing the first titles for the team since they rounded off a Major double …

Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the comfortable winner of the UK Charts in April. The Switch racer pipped Ubisoft’s also very successful Ghost Recon: Wildlands to first place. The ongoing success that is Grand Theft Auto V, which first released way back in 2013 on the now last-gen PS3 …

Nintendo’s Switch racer Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is spending a second week at the top of the UK All Formats Top 40. It retains the crown despite a 71 per cent drop in sales and just marginally manages to outsell Bethesda’s Prey, which debuts in No.2 in its first week …

The global games market will reach $108.9bn (84bn) in 2017, according to Newzoo’s latest quarterly update, showing a growth of 7.8 per cent year-on-year. The vast majority of that figure will come from digital game revenues, says Newzoo, reaching $94.4bn (72.8bn), or 87 per cent of the global market. This …

Former general manager joins with an impressive back catalogue

Almost 20 years after its original release, German gamers can now legally play an unedited version of Valve’s Half-Life for the first time. Polygon reports that the game has finally been removed from Germany’s ‘list of objectionable media’, which is compiled and managed by the Federal Review Board for Media …

A record period of growth for Overwatch has been rewarding for Activision-Blizzard’s finances. Blizzard has seen a 58 per cent jump in their revenue in the last quarter, exceeding analyst expectations with a respectable $441m in revenues. It still hasn’t quite hit the numbers seen by mobile outfit King, who …

Publisher 505 Games has announed former general manager of 2K Games InternationalNeil Ralley as its new president. Ralley, who previously worked at 2K for 11 years and oversaw the international rollouts of BioShock, Borderlands, Mafia, Civilization, XCOM, NBA 2K and WWE 2K, will now use his expertise to take 505 …

It was the surprise hit of late 2013, but DayZ still, remarkably, remains in alpha on Steam Early Access. That’s all about to change, however, with the game’s next patch preparing to take the game into beta. The still PC-only DayZ shifted nearly 1m units and made over 20m in …