International News

• 🌍 Bungie laid off 220 employees (~17% of its workforce).
• 🌍 Braid: Anniversary Edition sold terribly according to its creator Jonathan Blow. One of the “OG” indiegames had a recent remaster release, but it sold way below expectations.
• 🌍 Valnet Inc. acquired OpenCritic.com, expanding its gaming portfolio with the 2nd largest review aggregation platform.
• 🌍 Game Informer (owned by GameStop) shut down after 33 years. The magazine’s entire staff was laid off.
• 🌍 Finnish mobile game studio Shipyard Games is closing down due to financial difficulties, despite investment from Supercell.
• 🌍 Meta is closing their first-party Quest studio Ready At Dawn.
• 🌍 Tango Gameworks has been acquired by KRAFTON Inc. (PUBG), as well as their successful new IP Hi-Fi Rush.
• 🌍 Intel Corporation is laying off over 15K employees and will cut $10B in costs. Intel also reported a loss of $1.6B in Q2 2024 due to its Foundry business & investments.
• 🌍 Shigeru Miyamoto gives a tour of the Nintendo Museum, which is expected to open on Oct. 2 in Kyoto, Japan! Watch the tour
• 🌍 Black Myth: Wukong broke Steam records with 2.2 million concurrent players on launch day. It was profitable on its first day and earned more than $450 million in gross revenue over its first three days, selling 10M+ copies. Over 85% of its players come from the country of origin, China, proving that there is more than just a mobile market for games there.
• 🌍 Lots of Steam Updates:
  • Steam launched a new feature that shows when a customer review was written by someone who played primarily on Steam Deck. An icon will be visible next to the review.
  • They also moved demos to a new tab, ‘Trending Free’ in response to the demos pushing out full releases in Popular Upcoming + New & Trending.
  • Steam now supports larger store graphical assets.
  • Steam no longer allows: Links to other websites, embedded imagery that mimics Steam store UI or buttons, and images, links, or widgets pointing to other games on Steam.
  • Lastly, Steam hit a new concurrent users record on Sunday, 26 August, with 37M+ players online.
• 🌍 gamescom 2024 numbers! The event counted 335K visitors this year from 120 countries (up from 320K in 2023). There were 1,462 exhibitors from 64 countries. The Opening Night Live show had over 40M video views—double that of 2023.
• 🌍 Concord, PlayStation’s newly-released live-service FPS which took 8 years to make, launched to abysmal numbers on Steam, peaking at 697 players during its debut weekend. Read more
• 🌍 The ‘Borderlands’ Movie has “only” earned ~$25M globally so far, making it one of the year’s biggest box office busts. The film will likely lose the studio $20–30M.
• 🌍 The VideoGames industry provides approx. 114,400 jobs in Europe, and in 2023 women represented 24.4% of the workforce. More facts & figures

Belgian Games Industry News

• 👉 Cyborn announced their next game: Wall Town Wonders, an AR townbuilder played on your own living room walls! It will launch in November. Check the trailer
• 👉 Hidden Through Time 2: Discovery by Rogueside launched on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS5 & XBOX.
• 👉 Oro Interactive published Murky Divers has sold over $1M in revenue after just 2 months.
• 👉 Video Games Federation Belgium shared the Facts & Figures for the Belgian Games industry in 2023 at gamescom:
  • Overall Turnover – € 73.5M
  • Companies – 163
  • FTE count: 936
  More information here
• 👉 Early Bird ticket sale for UNWRAP | For business ends August 31st.

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