A new study from the University of Oxford has revealed that playing video games doesn’t affect a person’s wellbeing.
As reported by The Guardian, the study tracked the habits of nearly 40,000 people.
They were asked to track information such as if they were playing for fun, to socialize, and or to meet goals within the game.
Clear community guidelines and human moderation are key to reducing hate and harassment in online gaming communities.
That's one of the key findings the Anti-Defamation League reported this week out of a study it conducted into hate and harassment in Minecraft.
The group partnered with Take This, Gamersafer and the Middlebury Institute's Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism to assess three months' worth of anonymized moderation actions and chat logs provided by three private Minecraft servers.
Meta's string of VR acquisitions has hit a snag, as the Federal Trade Commission today announced it wants to block the Facebook parent company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring Within, the maker of the VR fitness app Supernatural.
"Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top," FTC Bureau of Competition deputy director John Newman said. "Meta already owns a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, and it had the capabilities to compete even more closely with Within's popular Supernatural app. But Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits. This is an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief."
The FTC noted that Meta already owns the top-selling VR device in the Meta Quest and a leading storefront for VR apps in Quest Store, and a stable of the most successful VR developers including Beat Games, and "one of the best-selling apps of all time" in Beat Saber. All of those properties can be traced back to acquisitions made by Meta/Facebook, dating back to the 2014 acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion.
Internal documents leaked from Roblox have detailed the firm’s early plans to align itself with a number of Chinese censorship rules and laws.
According to the August 2017 documents, which were shared by Vice this week, the company listed several key features necessary for Roblox’s launch in China, and had plans to separate its Chinese user base from other international players.
The company also discussed the potential that its Chinese launch partner Tencent may seek to hack the game, or launch its own 'copycat' version of Roblox.
Microsoft has released its financial results for the fourth quarter of its financial year (three months ended June 30, 2022), as well as its full-year results, showing a slight decline in gaming revenues.
Fourth Quarter
Revenue: $51.9 billion (up 12% year-on-year) Operating income: $20.5 billion (up 8%) Net income: $16.7 billion (up 2%)
Rockstar Games has apparently undergone a significant transformation over the last few years in order to veer away from its history of crunch, staff burnout and insensitive content.
Bloomberg spoke to 20 current or recently departed employees, all under the condition of anonymity, who report the company has new structures in place specifically to avoid overtime and has even reduced the scope of its highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.
In fact, managers have reportedly been promising for four years that excessive overtime will not be required to finish the game.
The UK's premier indie, publishing and investment event will return to London Excel in September.
GI Live: London will feature leading games companies meeting and connecting with developers in a two-day event. The show begins on Wednesday, September 21st and runs until Thursday, September 22nd, with a digital-only meeting day set for Tuesday, September 20th.
Companies set to speak and meet with creators includes Valve, ID@Xbox, Square Enix Collective, Sega, Curve and many more to be announced. Tickets are on sale now.
Capcom has released its financial results for Q1 2022, covering the three month period ending in June 30, reporting a year-over-year decrease in revenue and operating income.
The firm reported net sales of ¥25.2 billion ($184 million), a 48% decline during the same period of the previous year.
Operating income dropped by 49% year-over-year, coming in at ¥12 billion ($87.6 million).
Meta is taking the unusual step of raising prices on its latest VR headset.
The company today announced that beginning next month, the Meta Quest 2 will carry a suggested retail price of $400 for the 128GB model and $500 for the 256GB version. Both represent a $100 mark-up over the current price.
Those who buy the headset at the higher price point before the end of the year will be able to download a copy of Beat Saber at no extra cost.
Wizards of the Coast has announced its new video game studio, Skeleton Key today.
Based-out of Austin, Texas the developer will focus on creating AAA titles.
The company joins Wizards of the Coast's slate of North American game studios which includes Archetype Entertainment, Atomic Arcade, and Tuque Games.
Reginald Cash has purchased gaming and marketing firm 3BlackDot -- he's been serving as its CEO since 2017.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, it's one of the few Black-owned global entertainment firms and is valued at $87 million.
Established in 2014 and based out of Los Angeles, California, 3BlackDot began as a talent-management company with a focus on gaming content creators.
On May 2, 2022, Stephane D'Astous began receiving emails and phone calls from former employees. The shared tone was a request for advice and perspective: What's happening? Is it a good sign, or should we be worried?
These messages, of course, referred to the shock news that Square Enix had sold Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal, plus all the IP the trio of studios collectively held, to Embracer Group for a bewilderingly low $300 million.
Even though D'Astous was surprised by the price tag, the Eidos Montreal founder wasn't terribly surprised at how the studios' relationship with Square Enix turned out, saying the roots of its demise were evident even before he left the company in 2013.
You can enter the GamesIndustry.biz Canada Best Places To Work Awards 2022 from today.
The awards are open to all Canada games companies, including developers, publishers, service companies, retail and media, and you can submit your company through here.The judging period ends on Friday, September 16th.
The main badge winners will be revealed ahead of MEGAMIGS, Canada's premier video games industry event that takes place in Montréal. Meanwhile, the special award winners will be announced during MEGAMIGS itself, with finalists invited to the show.
In the last few years, Supermassive Games has positioned itself as a standout maker of choice-led interactive games that let players write their own story.
With titles such as Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology under its belt, the Guildford-based studio has reached critical acclaim for its narrative design and branching storylines.
The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of cinematic horror stories that Supermassive releases annually, starting with 2019's Man of Medan. The games don't follow one story, the anthology can be enjoyed in any order, with each of the three titles being a standalone story.
A new report from Newzoo today says that the global video games market is estimated to make $197 billion in revenue for the year of 2022.
The market intelligence firm says that the figure represents an increase of 2.1% year-over-year.
Newzoo attributes mobile game consumer spending as the main driver of 2022's total worldwide consumer spending.
A California judge has approved Riot Games' $100 million settlement following the gender discrimination case brought before the League of Legends firm, meaning more than 1,000 women are expected to receive payouts following their mistreatment at the studio.
Axios reports the settlement was approved on Friday, with more details revealed about how the $100 million will be used to address the issues raised by the class action lawsuit.
Payments will range from four to five-figure sums, and will be issued to more than 1,000 women who have worked at Riot Games since 2014. Payouts are also expected for over 1,000 contractors.
Ubisoft has debunked a rumour that it was going to cancel its free-to-play multiplayer title Roller Champions.
In a statement shared on Twitter, the company was very clear: "Roller Champions isn't getting cancelled, and Ubisoft fully supports it."
The rumour of the cancellation came from Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb, who said on an Xbox Era podcast that "Roller Champions is going to be cancelled after Season 3," reading a message he had received the previous day from an anonymous source.
It can be difficult keeping track of the various comings and goings in the games industry, which is why we compile them in semi-regular round-ups.
If you have new appointments or transitions in your company that belong here, please send the names of the appointees, new role and company, and prior role and company to newhires@gamesindustry.biz.
Big Fish Games has named Gary Rosenfeld as its head of business development.
If you're a regular Twitter user and keep up to date with gaming news on the platform, you'll be very aware of the gaming Twitter discourse that happens at least once a month.
At the end of May, indie game coverage (or the lack thereof) was the subject of discourse. The replies from those sharing their thoughts paint a pretty complicated picture, from nuances around the SEO value of indie game coverage to some indie studios lacking the PR resources to get their times out there.
All of this got me thinking about mobile games, which share a lot of the same challenges as indie games when it comes to coverage and representation but have a 60% market share of the global gaming industry, and generate triple the amount of revenue as console and PC/Mac games.
Employees at Los Angeles-based studio Tender Claws have moved to unionise.
According to Polygon, at least 13 full-time and part-time staff at the firm will align with the Communications Workers of America's Campaign to Organise Digital Employees to form a company union.
Staff sent the proposal to the developer's management last Tuesday, seeking voluntary recognition of their efforts to unionise, which was accepted.
A spaceship crashes on a brightly coloured alien world. A mech robot ejects and lands on the surface with a bang. It emerges from a crater with two huge weapons for arms. So far, so very video games.
And then it starts farming.
"We want to push against this constant violence, so Lightyear Frontier is everything except violence and brutality," begins Denis Ferrier, head of publishing at Amplifier Game Invest.
A breach at Neopets may have compromised the data of over 69 million accounts.
According to Polygon, the incident happened last week, with the company then confirming it in a statement shared on Twitter last Wednesday.
Users' email addresses and passwords "may have been affected," Neopets said, inviting players to change their passwords.
GamesIndustry.biz is changing.
Since the start of 2022, we've been working on our first redesign in six years. In fact, you may have caught glimpses of our brand new logo -- our first in 20 years -- around projects like Best Places To Work Awards UK.
Now everything is almost ready.
A newly released Sensor Tower report says that Riot Games' League of Legends: Wild Rift has generated $500 million in global lifetime revenue.
Wild Rift launched in October 2020 as one of Riot Games' first mobile title offerings.
In terms of player spending, China accounts for 72% of the title's revenue at $346.6 million via the Apple App Store alone.
Rober Alan Koeneke, the developer behind rougelike title the Dungeons of Moria, has passed away aged 64.
As reported by PC Gamer, Koeneke's death was announced via his obituary at dignitymemorial.com.
He released Moria, which was inspired by the Lord of the Rings, in 1983 while attending the University of Oklahoma.
Things got very heated this week. Quite literally.
The heatwave that has swept parts of the world, particularly the UK and Europe, saw governments issuing warnings for people to stay home, avoid travelling unless necessary and generally escape the sun as much as possible.
STAT | 40.3C - Highest recorded temperature in the UK on Tuesday, a new record.
Twitch has introduced a new tool that lets streamers share and ban malicious users from more than one community at a time.
The new Shared Ban Info feature lets streamers at Partner, Affiliate or mutual follows share their ban information with one another, which includes users that have been banned from chatting in streams.
This means if a streamer sees a banned user on a peer's information, they can flag that username in case said user appears in their stream. They won't be banned, but will be marked as a preventive measure so that moderators can keep an eye out for any potential bad behaviour.
China has seen the first decline in gaming revenues in over a decade, according to new data shared by the Game Publishing Committee of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association.
Combined revenue for the country's gaming market fell by 1.8%, with the total number of active game users falling from 666.5 million in December 2021 to 665.6 million by June 2022, as reported by South China Morning Post.
The outlet also posted that domestic revenue from Chinese companies dropped by 4.25% in the first half of the year, compared to growth of 8.3% the same period in 2021, and a 30.4% increase in the first half of 2020.
Opera and YoYo Games, the company behind the popular GameMaker engine, have launched a new platform that enables developers to release games on mobile for free.
The two companies have added new functionality to GX.games, their platform for distributing titles to the games-centric Opera GX browser, to ensure titles work on both the iOS and Android versions of the app.
The mobile version of GX.games enters beta today, with the first games expected to be released after the upcoming GX.games mobile game jam.
Say what you like about NFTs -- and with the market around most of them currently in what might charitably be described as a catastrophic collapse, everyone else is certainly saying what they like -- but the technology has, in its short and sordid time in the limelight, achieved at least one quite remarkable thing.
Never before have I seen a technology inspire game companies to scramble to announce that they will absolutely not be using it; this industry is usually relentlessly neophiliac and willing to give a shot to just about every idea that comes down the technological pike, be it good, bad, or indifferent, which makes the growing roster of companies who have made statements publicly distancing themselves from NFTs into an especially unusual occurrence.
At a glance, the statement from Minecraft creator and Microsoft subsidiary Mojang this week belongs broadly in that category. It is, however, a bit more firmly-worded than many other companies' statements, taking the time to make specific arguments against the use of NFTs in Minecraft rather than just briefly reassuring players that there are no plans to implement them, as other companies have done.
The Entertainment Software Association saw a big drop in revenue when the coronavirus pandemic cancelled E3 2020.
Axios has published a review of the trade body's tax filings for the year ended March 31, 2021, which shows the organisation's revenues reached $40 million. That's a year-on-year decline of $10 million or 25%.
The ESA is funded by membership fees -- with 30 members, including giants such as Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Tencent and Electronic Arts -- as well as charges for game ratings by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which the trade body operates.
Original story, July 21, 2022: Ubisoft has released its financial report for the first quarter of the fiscal year, reporting a year-over-year decline in revenues.
For the three months ended March 31, the publisher posted sales of €318.2 million, a 9.8% decrease on the €353 million generated the same period last year.
Net bookings reached €293.3 million, which was slightly ahead of the firm's forecasted target of approximately €280 million, but down by 10% on the €326 reported in Q1 2021.
Activision Blizzard employees are protesting today in response to the US Supreme Court's reversal of Roe vs Wade.
As reported by The Washington Post, currently 450 employees at the Call of Duty maker are participating in person and online.
The walkout is taking place across the states of Texas, California, Minnesota, and New York.
Mattel announced today that it's hired Mike DeLaet as global head of digital gaming.
In his new role, he will oversee Mattel163, the company's partnership with NetEase which focuses on publishing games based on Mattel's intellectual property.
The publisher also said that he will be responsible for accelerating its digital gaming product offerings.
Apex Legends publisher EA confirmed today that FIFA 23 will not feature any Russian clubs or team.
As reported to Eurogamer, the decision was attributed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"EA Sports stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and like so many voices across the world of football, calls for peace and an end to the invasion of Ukraine," the company said in a statement.
UK-based developer Jagex has acquired long-running US games company Pipeworks Studios.
Situated Eugene, Oregon, Pipeworks was actually acquired just two years ago by Sumo Group for $100 million. The group has now sold the company to Jagex for an undisclosed sum.
And it's Jagex's first ever acquisition.
Gearbox today announced that it will be sunsetting its forums at the start of next month.
In a message posted on its boards, the forums admin team said it's "noticed many of [the] community members prefer to engage on other social platforms" over the past year. The post indicated that the "team will continue to receive feedback and concerns" on its dedicated support website, but that the forums themselves would be shut down on August 1.
The discussion boards are already in read-only mode, before they disappear entirely "later this summer." The team said they would provide 30 days' notice to users, and invited them to join their various Discord servers.
76.1 million games were sold across Europe during the first six months of the year, a rise of 13.5% over the same period in 2021 (GSD Market Data).
32 million of these games were physical titles, while 44 million were sold via digital stores. The physical data covers all games sold in a box, while the digital data covers games from mainly AAA game developers (with Nintendo the notable absentee).
The biggest European market for game sales was Germany, with nearly 15.4 million games sold over the first six months of the year (sales up 13.6% compared with the same period in 2021). Followed by the UK with 14.3 million sales (up 2%), then France with 10.2 million (up 12.1%).
Last week we revealed the winners of the UK 2022 Best Places To Work Awards.
There were 17 badge winners, and six special award winners... including our 2022 UK Best Boss. You can read all about those right here. For those interested in how the awards are decided, check out this article here.
We revealed the winners at a special presentation in Brighton last week, with over 100 industry guests in the room.
GamesIndustry.biz is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and the highlight (so far) has been our special anniversary party in Brighton.
Taking place alongside Develop:Brighton last week, the event was held at Horatio's Bar on the city's famous pleasure pier, with hundreds of developers and industry professionals joining us for the evening.
There were video games from 2002 (yes, TimeSplitters is still great), music from 2002 (remember when music was good?), fish and chips, and (of course) cake.