1.    Blizzard plans to acquire Spellbreak studio Proletariat to bolster World of Warcraft

• Blizzard Entertainment said it plans to acquire Spellbreak maker Proletariat to beef up the staff on its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft
• Spellbreak will subsequently shut down the service in early 2023
• Proletariat was founded in 2012 and launched its first mobile game: World Zombination
• The move is the biggest acquisition that Blizzard has made in more than 15 years

2.    XD Inc Plans to leave china

• CEO and co-founder of Shanghai-based gaming firm XD Inc, is making preparations to move abroad due to family reasons and rising opportunities elsewhere
• The development comes on the heels of a nine-month freeze on gaming licenses by Beijing authorities, which has led other local companies to look for opportunities overseas as well
• XD Inc is a Hong Kong-listed mobile game developer with titles such as Sausage Man, T3 Arena, and Ragnarok M. The company has more than 41 million MAU around the globe on its gaming platform, TapTap

3.    Supercell and Warner Bros. Games Offering Third-Party Payment Methods to Avoid Apple and Google Tax

• Supercell, Warner Bros. Games and Scopely lead a new trend of building independent web stores for their games to avoid the high commissions required by the App Store and Google Play for in-game transactions
• Supercell has built its Supercell Store for Clash of Clans, and the players in some European countries and in Japan can now buy the Gold Pass Bundle and Gold Pass or send them as a gift to friends
• Warner Bros. Games has a store for more In-game items for Game of Thrones: Conquest
• Scopely offers a web store for Marvel Strike Force and another title Star Trek Fleet Command. The stores require only a Scopely or Facebook ID
• These new web stores provide convenience for players and developers, but their security remains in question and may bring more costs for developers to manage the ID database

4.    Tiktok Parent Company ByteDance Acquires Chinese Virtual Reality Startup PoliQ

• ByteDance Acquired PoliQ for US$1.5 last week
• PoliQ founder was the former director at Xiaomi’s VR unit
• Bytedance Launched a virtual social app and digital fashion app to explore the metaverse
• PoliQ’s vitural social app Vyou which allowed users to create own avatars stopped running in Mar’ 22

5.    miHoYo, Lilith sues a Chinese trust company for failing to get its money back

• Mihoyo and Lilith, have filed suit against Minmetals Trust for "commercial trust issue”
• Since June of this year, numerous investors complained publicly that they failed to get their money back from Minmetals Trust on schedule. The money was expected to arrive on March 31 after they previously purchased the company's wealth management program via China Merchants Bank
• The wealth management product reportedly manages US$373M in total
• The wealth management product purchased by Mihoyo and other investors have been put in real estate projects, making it troublesome to get back
• In recent years, some financial institutions have been feeling the effects of the housing market crash and the increase in bad debts caused by the Covid-19 pandemic

6.    Naspers unit sells JD.com shares, to let go of Tencent stock

• Dutch Investment company Prosus sold close to US$4 billion of stock in Chinese ecommerce player JD.com that it had received from Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent
• Prosus and its parent firm Naspers will also divest Tencent shares to fund a long-term share repurchase program. Prosus’s stake in Tencent is over 28%
• Tencent Holdings has lost US$7.4 billion in its Hong Kong market value, with major shareholder Prosus recently announcing preparations to cut its stake

7.    Tencent Games revealed 44 products and 26 game updates at SPARK 2022

• Tencent Games released new updates on 26 games which included titles such as League of Legends eSports Manager, Return to Empire(SLG), Code: To Jun Yong(UE5Wuxia MMORPG), Avatar IP based MMORPG and cloud gaming technology solutions START ENGINE along with its very first demo EVOLUTION
• League of Legends eSports Manager is the official mobile game for the League of Legends tournament, and the developer is aiming to launch the first open beta test in the Chinese Mainland market in July
• At Spark 2022, Tencent also announced that it would operate Ubisoft’s AAA-level title Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Tencent plays up 'social value' of video gaming tech as China's regulators continue scrutiny of content the sector creates

8.    Nexters, Unity, Adjust and Applovin,  Niantic, Bytedance joined many tech companies conducting mass layoffs

• Maker of Hero Wars, Russian developer Nexters lays off 235 employees to ‘optimize expenses
• Almost a quarter of total staff have lost their jobs, with this situation affecting people located in Russia, Cyprus, Turkey, and other countries
• Niantic lays off 8% of its workforce, as it cancels four projects; 85-90 staff members affected by layoffs as numerous projects, including a Transformers title already in beta, are shuttered; In an email to staff, CEO John Hanke stated that there was an “economic storm that may lie ahead” and cited the need to reduce costs to prepare for this as the reasoning behind the layoffs
• Unity lays off hundreds to prepare for ad weakness; The layoffs affected at least 150 employees and possibly more
• Adjust and Applovin Lay off 12 per cent of workforce due to economic downturn
• ByteDance has closed 101 Studio, its Shanghai-based game development studio first acquired three years ago; More than 100 hundred staff from the roughly 300 total have been let go
• Vespa recommends resignation of all employees, 105 employees notified of recommended resignation, and most of the founding members were left behind

9.    Kakao Games ups stake in Lionheart Studio to 54.95% ahead of IPO

• South Korea’s Kakao Games Corp. has acquired an additional 30.37% stake or 225,260 shares in Lionheart Studio Corp. for 1.2 trillion won (US$929 million) before going public with the game developer behind its blockbuster mobile game “Odin: Valhalla Rising.”
• Lionheart Studio plans to go public on the Kosdaq bourse within the year, while its enterprise value estimated at 4 trillion won, which is bigger than Kakao Games’ market cap of 3.8 trillion won
• Wemade sold off 22,209 shares in Lionheart Studio for profit-taking for 118.7 billion won

10. The number of mobile game users in Korea decreased by about 2.7 million in one year

• The number of Korean mobile app game users decreased by about 2.7 million in May 2022 (22,920,215) compared to June 2021 (25,624,654)
• By category, the number of role-playing game (RPG) users decreased by 25.9%, revealing the largest decline
• The use of mobile games by genre recorded a decrease in almost all fields such as action, simulation, arcade, casual, and strategy
• ‘NCsoft' had the highest market share of game publishers with 18.7%, followed by 'Nexon' (13.9%). Netmarble , which introduced  <Ni No Ku Ni> and  Marvel Future Revolution , had the largest number of game apps that entered the top 100 top publishers by revenue
• Top mobile game by revenue in Korea in May 2022

1. Role-playing: Lineage W
2. Strategy: Rise of Kingdom
3. Adventure: Roblox
4. Sport: FIFA Online 4 M
5. Action: PUBG
6. Simulation: 갑부: 장사의시대

11.Newzoo Report: More than 500 companies are building the metaverse

• The Key Global trends that are currently shaping the metaverse, blockchain gaming and NFT space

1. Big Tech and Brand involvement: Consumer spend increasingly more time in virtual worlds, and successful brands follow them. As a result, consumer-facing companies will be forced to develop a metaverse strategy to stay connected with their (future) customers and remain relevant
2. Blockchain Games: The early market for blockchain games is overrun by titles that feature rudimentary gameplay without sustainable economies. This is natural, as complex gaming experiences take time to develop
3. The transition from NFT Collections to Global IP: The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is an NFT collection made up of 10,000 cartoon apes. Since its launch, it generated significant interest from celebrities and high-profile individuals (though several celebrities were gifted their BAYC NFTs), being one of the first NFT brands that managed to permeate into mainstream culture through music, events, partnerships, and its dedicated network of individuals. This has prompted an increasing number of NFT projects to extend their scope and become transmedia IPs that span across multiple verticals

• NFTs and blockchain games have experienced a spectacular 2021, a severe drawback in the crypto market along with fears of a global recession have both led to public interest and coin valuations substantially waning in recent months. As a result, this correction will likely end most of the (low effort) endeavors in these areas. Nevertheless, we remain optimistic about the future and remain confident that the top projects will succeed