February 2023

More than just ports: VR devs on bringing PSVR 1 titles to PSVR 2

1 year 2 months ago

With less than a month until the launch of PlayStation VR2, there's a nervous anticipation.

Early impressions with the hardware itself have been positive, but it's hard to shake concerns over the expensive price tag, and the fact that only two titles out of the 37 confirmed for its launch window – Horizon: Call of the Mountain and The Dark Pictures: Switchback – are actually new and exclusive to the platform.

Among the existing ports coming to VR2, some are remasters of games already available on PSVR1, including Song in the Smoke: Rekindled, Moss, Moss: Book II, Pistol Whip, After the Fall, Tetris Effect: Connected, as well as that platform's original launch title Rez Infinite. Of course, remastering older titles for new hardware is nothing new, but it also feels like a repeat of the first year of PS5 and Xbox Series X|S where the dearth of new exclusive releases meant developers were sprucing up their existing titles to take advantage of new hardware features.

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Author
Alan Wen

Blizzard terminates WoW Classic co-lead over protest against employee ranking policy

1 year 2 months ago

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A Blizzard manager has been fired following a dispute with the company over its employee evaluation system.

World of Warcraft Classic's co-lead developer Brian Birmingham confirmed he no longer works at Blizzard via Twitter, following a Bloomberg report that he was terminated after refusing to lower an employee's ranking.

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Author
James Batchelor

GDC details 2023 format, COVID precautions

1 year 2 months ago

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The organisers of the annual Game Developers Conference have shared more details on what to expect from this year's conference.

Speaking to Axios, the team said this year's speakers will all appear in person with no plans to enable virtual attendance via livestreams. Instead, GDC will hold a separate virtual event later this year.

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Author
James Batchelor

Microsoft subpoenas Sony to prepare for FTC trial

1 year 2 months ago

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Microsoft has issued a subpoena to Sony Interactive Entertainment as part of its preparations for facing the Federal Trade Commission in court this summer.

A new filing in the case reveals the Xbox firm served the subpoena on Tuesday, January 17 with an initial response deadline of Friday, January 20.

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Author
James Batchelor

Mac Walters leaves BioWare

1 year 2 months ago

Mac Walters has left BioWare after nearly two decades with the studio, the developer announced in a post on LinkedIn this weekend spotted by Eurogamer.

"As some of you already know, at the end of last year I decided to leave BioWare," Walters said. "These past 19 years have been a life-changing experience to say the least, and it made the choice to go very difficult.

"I've worked with so many wonderful people and had the privilege to be a part of the most amazing teams and projects. It's hard to fathom it all, and I know I'll be reflecting on it for years to come."

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Game Changers | Laila Shabir, Girls Make Games

1 year 2 months ago

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GamesIndustry.biz Game Changers is a series of profiles on the groups and individuals going the extra mile to make the games industry a better place. These interviews encompass folks from around the world helping to improve conditions and attitudes towards diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, mental health and more. You can read more Game Changers interviews here.

Laila Shabir isn't quite our usual Game Changer. In fact, she might even be the opposite.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

Skybound Entertainment announces public investment campaign

1 year 2 months ago

Skybound Entertainment has announced the launch of a Regulation A+ campaign, seeking investment from the general public.

The equity crowdfunding campaign has already raised $11 million since it went live privately at an undisclosed date.

Investments starts at $500, the announcement said, with Skybound saying it's planning on "special perks" for various investment tiers.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

The Last of Us Part 1 sales jumped 238% after TV show launch | UK Boxed Charts

1 year 2 months ago

We have our first new No.1 in the UK Boxed Charts, and it is Nintendo with its turn-based strategy RPG Fire Emblem Engage.

The title's launch sales are 31% lower than what its predecessor managed (2019's Fire Emblem Three Houses). The new game has a more anime-style look to the graphics, which may have limited its Western appeal slightly. Yet even so, it is still the second biggest launch for the series in the UK, ahead of cult 3DS hit Fire Emblem Awakening.

That means FIFA 23 drops to second place after a 21% fall in sales week-on-week, while God of War Ragnarok is down a place to No.3 with a 26% drop. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe holds No.4 with a 3% sales increase week-on-week, while rounding up the Top Five is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is down two places after a 29% sales slide.

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Author
Christopher Dring

The Last of Us credits snub has Bruce Straley re-thinking unions

1 year 2 months ago

Bruce Straley, game director on Naughty Dog's 2013 action game The Last of Us, is not credited on HBO's recent live-action adaptation of the series, and he's not happy about it.

In an LA Times story this week that described his relationship with Naughty Dog as strained, the Wildflower Interactive founder said the show's lack of acknowledgement for his contributions has him re-thinking the debate over unionization in the industry.

"It's an argument for unionization that someone who was part of the co-creation of that world and those characters isn’t getting a credit or a nickel for the work they put into it," Straley said.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Google laying off 12,000

1 year 2 months ago

Google is joining Microsoft and Amazon in instituting a wave of mass layoffs, as the company this morning said it would be cutting 12,000 jobs.

As reported by CNBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a Friday morning memo that the cuts would begin immediately in the US, while other countries would take longer "due to local laws and practices."

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai said. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

AI and the problem of "doing more with less" | This Week in Business

1 year 2 months ago

AI is a touchy topic.

Last year, I went to Montreal for a Haven Studios presentation on how the PlayStation-owned developer is working to apply machine learning and generative AI technology to games.

After the presentation, I had a group interview with Haven's Jade Raymond and Leon O'Reilly along with PS5 hardware architect Mark Cerny. I wanted to follow-up on something he said during the presentation about how the technology might lead to reducing dev team sizes and companies making their games with fewer people. Cerny rankled at this.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Game Changers | Gonzalo Banki Martínez

1 year 2 months ago

GamesIndustry.biz Game Changers is a series of profiles on the groups and individuals going the extra mile to make the games industry a better place. These interviews encompass folks from around the world helping to improve conditions and attitudes towards diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, mental health and more. You can read more Game Changers interviews here.

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Like so many nations worldwide, Uruguay has a burgeoning games development scene striving for recognition from the rest of the world. In recent years, that scene has become more organized and prominent, with more support offered to developers — thanks in no small part to Gonzalo Banki Martínez.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

Riot Games lays off 46 staff as part of "strategic shifts"

1 year 2 months ago

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Valorant and League of Legends firm Riot Games joins the growing list of companies to have made redundancies in the past few weeks.

The layoffs were first revealed by esports reporter Jacob Wolf via Twitter, before Riot confirmed the news in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz sister site Rock Paper Shotgun.

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Author
James Batchelor

GameSpot and Giant Bomb latest affected in wave of media layoffs

1 year 2 months ago

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GameSpot and Giant Bomb are the latest media publications to be struck by layoffs.

The news emerged last night, with various members of both teams announcing they were now unemployed via social media. Kotaku reported the layoffs were announced to staff during an unscheduled company-wide meeting led by Perkins Miller, CEO of the sites' parent company Fandom.

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Author
James Batchelor

Nintendo reportedly planning to increase Switch production in 2023

1 year 2 months ago

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Nintendo is reportedly planning to ramp up Switch production in the next fiscal year.

Sources close to the matter told Bloomberg that the platform holder has already told suppliers and assembly partners it expects to manufacture more units of its console than in the current financial year. It has not told partners of a specific target.

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Author
James Batchelor

The EU sets its sights on game regulation | Opinion

1 year 2 months ago

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The news that the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to adopt a report by MEP Adriana Maldonado López calling for tighter regulation of video games and their business models does not exactly make for relaxing headlines for the games industry.

Many people in the industry have a knee-jerk reaction to the prospect of any kind of regulatory oversight, and for good reason.

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Author
Rob Fahey

Playtika tries to buy Rovio

1 year 2 months ago

Playtika is looking to acquire Rovio, as the mobile publisher and monetization outfit today announced it has made a €9.05 per share all-cash offer to Rovio's board of directors.

That price represents a 55% premium over the Angry Bird maker's Wednesday closing price of €5.82.

That would put the total offer close to €751 million, or roughly $813 million.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

GDC Survey: 53% of devs support unionization efforts

1 year 2 months ago

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The Game Developers Conference published its annual State of the Industry Survey today, showing continued support by respondents regarding unionization efforts.

Of the more than 2,300 developers who answered the survey, 53% responded that the video game industry should unionize. Meanwhile, 24% said maybe, 13% objected, and the remaining 10% didn't know if the business sector should form unions.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

YouTube Gaming viewership jumps 25% in December

1 year 2 months ago

Twitch repeated its November performance as its December 2022 viewership hit 1.6 billion hours, according to StreamElements and Rainmaker. gg's monthly State of the Stream report.

The streaming platform could not reach two billion hours watched throughout the year as it did back in January 2022.

Facebook Gaming saw a decline of 2% in December as it hit 405 million hours watched.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

Sound design essentials for updating live service mobile games

1 year 2 months ago

With the growth of live service games, game development has taken on an increasingly iterative creative process. These beloved escapes are often sustained through the introduction of new content (e.g., season passes, DLC expansions, and new chapters) to keep the experience feeling fresh but familiar for their dedicated player bases. And the bigger these games become and the longer they are supported, so too do the needs for creative resources behind them change and grow.

Whether you've just joined a studio team in ongoing development or you've been tapped as an outsource audio producer for a game expansion or update, you'll find you have different needs and expectations to consider than when creating a game's audio from scratch.

Here are some crucial considerations that we as an outsource audio studio recommend for sound designers who are tasked with expanding and upgrading sound assets for games that have a majority of their groundwork already laid.

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Author
Jon Ruse and Elliot Callighan

Lawfirm considers false advertising suit over Diablo Immortal

1 year 2 months ago

A lawfirm specializing in class-action suits is looking into a potential case against Activision Blizzard for false advertising in Diablo Immortal.

Migliaccio & Rathod LLP says the "Blessing of the Worthy" legendary gem changes its effect in detrimental ways to the player is it is leveled up.

The firm says that at level two, the gem has a chance to deal damage equal to the player's maximum health whenever the player is injured. But at level three, that switches to damage equal to the player's current health.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Scenario raises $6m ahead of AI-powered art engine early access

1 year 2 months ago

San Francisco-based tech company Scenario has raised $6 million ahead of the early access launch of its Gen AI Engine.

The funding round was led by Play Ventures, with contributions from Anorak Ventures, VR Fund, and Founders Inc, as well as Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, and former Blizzard executive Hamilton Chu.

Scenario's Gen AI Engine aims to provide game developers with "style-consistent game art" via artificial intelligence trained by the artists themselves.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

Report: Ubisoft CEO addresses "the ball is in your court" comment in staff meeting

1 year 2 months ago

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Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot has reportedly apologised to staff for the comments he made in an email last week.

In the context of a financial forecast announcing the cancellation and delay of several projects, Guillemot had told staff last week to "give it [their] all" and be "as efficient and lean as possible," Kotaku reported at the time.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

Legal trends for the games industry to watch in 2023 | Opinion

1 year 2 months ago

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One year ago, we made some predictions on legal trends for 2022. Now it is time to look back and see where we have been right and where we have been wrong – and make some new predictions for 2023.

So, what we have predicted for 2022 was the following:

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Author
Dr Andreas Lober and Luca Guidobaldi

Study: Loot box labels inconsistently applied

1 year 2 months ago

Loot box researcher Leon Xiao has found that rating board warning labels about randomized loot boxes are being inconsistently applied.

Xiao's latest study looked at the whether the North American ESRB and Europe's PEGI rating systems are applying the "In-game purchases (includes random items)" labels consistently. The labels were rolled out by both groups with essentially identical criteria after government scrutiny on loot boxes.

Separately, Xiao also took a random sampling of 100 games on Google Play that were known to have loot boxes in them and check to see if the comparable IARC label regarding loot boxes was included alongside each game's rating.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Game Changers | Dr. Mick

1 year 2 months ago

GamesIndustry.biz Game Changers is a series of profiles on the groups and individuals going the extra mile to make the games industry a better place. These interviews encompass folks from around the world helping to improve conditions and attitudes towards diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, mental health and more. You can read more Game Changers interviews here.

Ryan Earl didn't originally set out to become Dr. Mick, a PhD and licensed marriage and family therapist who discusses games and mental health.

In fact, Earl tells GamesIndustry.biz he didn't originally set out to become a doctor at all, beginning university as an advertising major.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Microsoft laying off 10,000

1 year 2 months ago

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Update, January 19, 2023: According to Bloomberg, the Microsoft layoffs have been impacting its gaming divisions. The publication reported that Bethesda Game Studios and 343 Industries were among the companies affected.

Sources who talked to Bloomberg said that veteran developers who had been working at Xbox for over a decade lost their jobs.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

European games market struggled in December as new releases faltered | European Monthly Charts

1 year 2 months ago

Console and PC game sales struggled across Europe last month, according to the latest GSD data.

27.4 million tracked games were sold across European markets in December, a drop of 13% over the year before.

11.4 million of those sales were digital (down 17% year-on-year), while nearly 16 million sales were physical (down just over 10%).

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Author
Christopher Dring

European Parliament votes to take action against loot boxes, gaming addiction, gold farming and more

1 year 2 months ago

The European Parliament voted today to adopt a report calling for the European Commission to address several issues in the games industry that it believes will better protect consumers, especially young people.

The report was led by MEP Adriana Maldonado López, and secured 577 votes in favour, with 56 against and 15 abstentions.

López made more than a dozen recommendations in her report, including a call for harmonised rules across the European Union's single market when providing clear information about games content, as well as systems that help parents understand and control how much time and money their children spend on games.

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Author
James Batchelor

BGFG acquires N4G, TechSpy and more

1 year 2 months ago

By Gamers For Gamers (BGFG) has acquired games media aggregator website N4G.

It has also added FilmWatch, TechSpy and AnimeShinbun to its line-up of websites. All four sites were operated by Hava Media.

BGFG has promised to make UX fixes, performance tweaks and 'improved personalisation' to N4G, working with existing community manager Christopher Goodno.

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Author
Christopher Dring

Elden Ring wins best game at the New York Game Awards

1 year 2 months ago

The 12th New York Game Awards chose FromSoftware's Elden Ring as their game of the year.

In a ceremony taking place yesterday, the New York Videogame Critics Circle awarded 16 prizes, with Elden Ring also winning the Statue of Liberty Award for Best World.

Poncle's Vampire Survivors, which GamesIndustry.biz staff recognised as their game of the year not once, but twice, won the best indie game category.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri