1.Diablo Immortal delayed in China after social media account ban

• NetEase and Blizzard confirmed on June 19 that the highly anticipated launch of Diablo Immortal in mainland China will be delayed beyond its planned June 23 date
• The news comes shortly after the Diablo Immortal weibo account was suspended for "violating laws and regulations". While an official reason was not given for the suspension, it is believed the social media account posted a sentence that could be interpreted as negative towards the current regime, which may have triggered an automatic censorship response
• The game had over 15 million pre-registrations in China at the beginning of this month and we anticipate it would be a high revenue generating title for NetEase and Blizzard

2.   Gaming publisher PlayPark announces launch of 4 new games

• The four games -- Elyon SEA(MMORPG)- Ascent Infinite Realm, Dream of a New World SEA(Turn-Based RPG), Tera Classic SEA(MMORPG), and Noah's Heart SEA(MMORPG) -- were announced at the Playpark Launchpad 2022 last June 23 in Pasig City
• Playpark Inc. Is a subsidiary of online game operator Asiasoft

3.   TikTok owner ByteDance generates US$1 billion in annual games revenue

• According to data from Sensor Tower, Bytedance’s portfolio of mobile haves have earned more than US$1 billion worldwide over the past year (Without Third Party Payment)
• Over the past year, the company’s games were downloaded approximately 139 million times
• Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is Bytedance most downloaded game, which accounted for roughly 56% of installs with 78 million downloads. It also accounts for approximately 32% of the company’s revenue with US$317.7 million earned over the past year

4.   Chinese game market revenue down 7% in May

• According to a report by Gamma Data, actual sales revenue of China’s game market US$3.4 billion for May, down 6.74% YoY
• The decline of many prominant mobile games, as well as the poor performance of new releases, have been cited as a large part of this decrease
• Mobile Game revenue falling 2.1% from April 2022 and 10.85% from May 2021
• This marks the third consecutive month that the Chinese game market’s revenue has declined YoY, and the second time this year that both YoY and MoM revenue have declined
• Overseas revenue fall 5.8% to $1.46 billion from the previous month
• Although China ceased granting new games licenses 2021, resulting in around 14,000 studios shutting down, the freeze ended in April 2022, and licenses for 105 new titles (Apr +Jun) have since been granted

5.   Axie Infinity announces closure of play-to-earn version

• Sky Mavis, the parent company of Axie Infinity, has announced that it will focus all its efforts on developing a free-to-play version called Origin
• Sky Mavis is scheduled to close the Axie Infinity Classic (aka Axie Infinity V2) after season 21 of the game, which ended on June 24
• User activity in Axie Infinity has declined significantly; DAU is at 10,000 units, only a fraction of the number of more than 1 million in mid-2021
• Ethereum network, which was hacked and stole a total of $622 million in assets, is he most damaging cryptocurrency attack in history

6.   Tencent's IEG (Interactive Entertainment Group) will start build Extended Reality (XR)"" department, and began to fully develop the concept of the metaverse

• Despite the layoff of IEG user development center, the XR department still open recruitment, with more than 300 employees
• Metaverse is expected to create a new market of US$5 trillion by 2030, of which the impact on the gaming market is US$108 billion to US$125 billion

7.   Meta reveals 4 prototype VR headsets

Meta demonstrates VR headset prototypes with major improvements over the Oculus Quest 2

Meta has developed prototypes to tackle specific challenges with existing VR headsets. If all goes well, Meta will roll all its learnings into a single consumer-focussed VR headset

Moreover, Meta claims to have created the first VR headset that supports HDR