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Attended VK Play Day - a meeting of developers with the VK Play and VK Tech teams. I recorded for you a fragment of a speech by the head of VK Play, Alexander Mikheev, in which he talks about how games will go beyond the boundaries of the site itself.
GoPro has signed a merger agreement with Starman Optical and plans to expand into equipment for AI data centres. A farewell to the action-camera legend — and a lesson in business strategy.
Meta has launched Pocket in the US, an app with an endless feed of interactive content that users create from prompts.
If your studio has been releasing games for several years and has steady revenue, then support measures may seem like something from the world of startups, grants and accelerators. But for an existing business, tax breaks often provide the greatest effect.
WATT Studio has released an orchestral trailer for the action-adventure game TSAREVNA. Age of Tales, featuring Alexander Billion’s “The Tsarevna’s Theme” performed by the Opensound orchestra under Stanislav Malyshev.
Alexey Kalenchuk’s expertise in digital creative industries, game development, VR, and technology ecosystems.
According to Skarred Ghost, Lenovo is shutting down its US XR division and changing course. Instead of corporate VR/AR solutions, the company is going to rely on consumer wearable devices with AI under the Motorola brand.
Palmer Luckey is teasing us again. The Oculus and Anduril founder appeared in unusual glasses and said they offer full AR, a wide field of view, and colour stereoscopic imagery.
The company was the first to announce a specific deadline for phasing out physical releases. Sony fanboys are, to put it mildly, unhappy about the decision. But why did the Japanese company take this step?
On June 26, KRI, Russia’s game developers conference, will take place in Moscow. I invite everyone to a panel discussion that I will moderate. This session is for those who want a clear picture of the market after its recent restructuring—not an abstract debate about its future.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak in Khanty-Mansiysk at the VIII International Conference “Information and Communication in the Digital Age,” which was held as part of the IT Forum and the UNESCO Information for All program.
Pre-orders for the new Steam Machine have opened in Russia at an eye-watering price of almost RUB 200,000. Yet most buyers are likely to use grey-market imports, marketplaces, or friends abroad, just as they did with the Steam Deck.
Private investment in the game industry is difficult to secure, especially on reasonable terms. A group of investors is now seeking operating game companies with revenue and at least a modest profit.
Remind me when the Internet admired Gopnik flying on a magic carpet among Russian apartment blocks? Not even a year has passed since we discussed Genie 3—and now a new hero has entered the scene.
Surveillance cameras have long been part of city life. Now the camera and access to databases are moving directly onto an officer’s face, enabling real-time identification and background checks on the spot.
We predicted Roblox’s return six months ago. However, press releases and public discussion still contain no information about moving its infrastructure to Russia.
Fabula Rasa Dead Man Talking is a VR experience in which you face execution in a medieval square and must convince a witch, bard, executioner, and other characters to speak in your defense.
Every time I read a headline about layoffs at Zuckerberg’s company, I subconsciously expect that the long-suffering VR/metaverse division has been put out in the cold again. This time the cuts are spread across the board: 8,000 people will be laid off, 7,000 reassigned to AI, and 6,000 roles left unfilled.
Congratulations to the team of brave young developers on their long-awaited release! 😏
One of the sessions I moderated at CIPR focused on AdTech and autonomous demand. Here are several figures that are exciting—and may be shocking to some.
In recent weeks, my attention has been focused on the Digitalization of Industrial Russia conference. I will be there to moderate two sessions—one on autonomous demand in AdTech and another on components for the video game industry.
Industrial VR has long had an awkward problem. The vision was an engineer entering a digital factory, finding a fault, and fixing it—but first someone had to spend weeks or months building that factory in 3D.
DeepMind alumnus David Silver raised $1.1 billion to launch a new AI startup, Ineffable Intelligence. An impressive amount will go towards solving a huge task: creating artificial intelligence that can learn without human data.
What is striking about this story is not only the tragedy itself but the logic of the genre—immersive media promises audiences safe risk while the people making it may face very real danger.