May 2023

Sales of boxed video games dropped 6% in the UK week-on-week, despite the release of three new titles.

The best-selling new release was Dead Island 2 by Deep Silver, which shuffles to the top of the UK boxed charts. It is the third biggest game release of the year, behind Hogwarts Legacy and Resident Evil 4. It sold roughly half of what Resident Evil 4 managed, but significantly better than Dead Space. We won't know how the game compares to the original until the digital data is released later in the week.

Coming in second place is Minecraft Legends. The physical game sold best on Nintendo Switch, which accounted for 76% of its sales. Not only is digital data missing from these figures, but Minecraft Legends (which is published by Microsoft) is part of Xbox Game Pass, too. The PlayStation versions accounted for 19% of boxed sales, with the remaining 5% on Xbox.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Game studio World Makers has received $4 million in a recent funding round.

Makers Fund led the investment, which will go towards the development of its second title, Deceit 2.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Joel Hochberg, former director of game studio Rare, has died aged 87.

As reported by the Miami Herald, he's survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

Read more

Dead Island 2 is out today. Yes, you're reading that right.

Up there with Skull & Bones, Beyond Good & Evil 2 and probably some other non-Ubisoft titles, Dead Island 2 has been one of the most prominent modern examples of a game stuck in Development Hell.

Announced in 2014 with a planned release date of Spring 2015, it was originally being created by Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager. However, after at least one delay and three years of development, a difference in vision between Yager and publisher Deep Silver led the German studio to be dropped from the project in 2015.

Read more

One of the fun parts of being a games journalist for a trade site is that you get to semi-regularly read through impossibly dense legal filings full of painstakingly detailed arguments about the finer points of contract law.

Another of the fun parts is that being a games journalist for a trade site eventually breaks your brain so you really do think that counts as fun.

So let's have some fun this week and look through Nexon Korea's lawsuit against Dark and Darker developer Ironmace accusing the studio of misappropriation of trade secrets and copyright infringement.

Read more

GamesIndustry.biz will host its first HR Summit at 195 Piccadilly (BAFTA’s HQ) in London on September 27th, 2023.

The event will feature keynote talks, roundtables, panels and networking lunches and drinks. It will conclude with the 2023 UK Best Places To Work Awards.

Tickets are available now with an Early Bird price of £130 + VAT (price will rise to £150 on June 1st, 2023). The event is sponsored by Amiqus and Rocksteady.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

You'd be forgiven for feeling a little cynical about the sudden explosion of hype around artificial intelligence and LLMs (Large Language Models) that we've seen in the past few weeks; after all, it's once bitten, twice shy, and we've all just spent a couple of years being preached at about blockchain and NFTs by glassy-eyed evangelists who got far too high on their own supply.

Anyone can see that LLMs are doing some impressive things, but given how many game companies fell face-first for the unjustified hype around blockchain, and the fact that some of the most obnoxious NFT grifters are now selling themselves as AI gurus online, you'd be quite right to feel wary and to wonder about the actual limitations of this technology, how much of it is smoke and mirrors, and what actual applications it might have to video games.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Staff from VR game developers Ready At Dawn and Downpour Interactive are among those affected by the latest round of mass layoffs at Meta.

Last month, the Facebook firm announced it would lay off 10,000 staff by the end of 2023. This followed an additional 11,000 job cuts announced in November.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

UK-based publisher Outright Games has announced a partnership with UNICEF that will see it raising funds for the charity every year with digital bundles and other activities.

The company, which specialises in family-friendly games, has committed to raising a minimum of £200,000 every year, primarily through special offers on its titles as organised with its licensing partners.

Read more

PlayStation has agreed to acquire Firewalk Studios, the AAA multiplayer developer that is working on a live service game for PS5 and PC.

If the name sounds familiar, it's because Sony had already announced it would be publishing Firewalk's first game back in April 2021. It is the third dedicated live-service game studio that PlayStation has acquired over the last 18 months, alongside Bungie and Haven Studios.

Firewalk was set-up in 2018 as part of ProbablyMonsters (a collective of AAA game developers). It was formed by a number of Bungie veterans, including studio head Tony Hsu (previously general manager and senior vice president of Destiny at Activision) and game director Ryan Ellis (previously creative director at Bungie). It now boasts almost 150 employees.

Read more

A new GamesIndustry.biz whitepaper 'Going cross-platform: a game developer’s guide to tools, technology and process' is available to download right here.

The whitepaper was created in partnership with Endava, and in it we’ll take you through the opportunity, practicality, challenges, and solutions of adopting contemporary cross-platform game development, taking you one step closer to greater success.

The free download is a detailed guide to the emerging cross-platform game development opportunity, and the technologies and options available to game companies pursuing the many gains cross-platform can bring.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Focus Entertainment has acquired simulation developer and publisher Dovetail Games for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition includes all Dovetail's owned IP, such as the popular Train Simulator Classic and Train Sim World, and senior leadership – including CEO Jon Rissik – will continue to run the company.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

A new development studio dedicated to encouraging more action from players regarding climate change has emerged from stealth today.

TreesPlease was actually founded in 2019, but has been officially unveiled today alongside its debut game Longleaf Valley and a seed investment round of $8 million.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Mention motion capture and the first thing likely to pop up in your head is an actor in a black spandex suit stuck with rubber balls. This norm, however, may soon be a relic of the past as software from technology company Move hopes to revolutionise motion capture for AAA and indies alike, as well as beyond games.

"We've created a platform that allows you to capture authentic, high quality, high fidelity human motion, using just regular video cameras," says Move co-founder and CEO Tino Millar. "We can capture extremely high quality human motion, and make sure that motion can transfer and run on different avatars or 3D models, and then be used inside all sorts of different game engines to power really interesting user content."

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Bitkraft Ventures has established a foothold in Asia as it searches for new investments in the largest market for video games.

GamesBeat reports the venture capital firm now has a team in the region, initially in the form of partner Jin Oh and principal Jonathan Huang, with the latter being responsible for the entire investment process.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Epic Games has acquired mobile game developer Aquiris and establishes Epic Games Brasil.

The game maker is the first Latin America subsidiary to join Epic.

Read more

The AARP this week released the results of its latest 50-Plus Gamer of Today and Tomorrow survey, providing insight into the growing game playing audience reaching retirement age.

A survey of nearly 7,800 people conducted last June and July found that 45% of those aged 50 and over played video games at least once a month.

That's up slightly from the 44% reported in the 2019 version of this survey and more significantly over the 38% who played when the first version of the poll was conducted in 2016.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Nordisk Games has announced that CEO Mikkel Weider has stepped down from his role.

As the games firm seeks to replace him, Allan Mathson Hansen will step into the position of interim CEO.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Earlier this year, Behaviour Interactive acquired SockMonkey Studios, a UK developer and the company's first foothold outside of North America.

The Canadian developer and publisher, best known for multiplayer survival horror game Dead By Daylight, is now in its third decade of operation but it was not until last year that it first branched out of its home market by purchasing Scavengers developer Midwinter Entertainment from Improbable.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

During March, US consumer spending on games reached $4.6 billion, a 5% decline year-over-year, according to the latest Circana data.

Software comprised most of the month's revenue (83%), with game content reaching $3.83 billion in March. However, the segment was down 7% compared to last year's performance.

Read more

Forspoken is one of the few AAA video games within the past five years to have a Black female protagonist.

Despite the warm reception for Alfre 'Frey' Holland, the game's energetic and sharp-witted heroine, games publishers and stakeholders still need to reassess their apprehensions and invest in publishing Black-led characters — especially Black women. If there continues to be slow growth in the development of Black-led characters, the AAA sector of the games industry will continue the fragmentation of its Black consumers.

While Black female characters exist in games, they are not often the main characters. For example, 2022 had the release of major titles with Black characters (i.e., Angrboda from God of War: Ragnarok and Sojourn from Overwatch 2). Angrboda is relevant to the narrative in God of War: Ragnarok, but she is still a supporting character the player interacts with via a separate protagonist. Sojourn is a playable character in team-based shooter Overwatch 2; however, there are no protagonists or main characters in team-based games. Both these characters are utilized differently as a part of the player experience — and either way, the player is not adopting the digitized lens of a Black female protagonist.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Almost 60,000 people attended in-person events during this year's London Games Festival.

The organisers announced the collection of 20 free and ticketed games events – which included the Games Finance Market, games curio showcase Now Play This and consumer exhibition WASD – saw 58,000 people coming to the UK capital over the course of 12 days.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Playdate, the indie games handheld that can be controlled by a hand crank, has sold over 50,000 units since last year.

Eurogamer reports that Panic, the company behind the device, has announced 53,142 units have been purchased so far, with 27,000 already shipped to customers.

Read more

StreamElements today released its State of the Stream report for March (based on data from Rainmaker.gg), reporting that hours watched on the streaming platform were down 5% in March, following an 8% drop in February.

Overall, Twitch saw 1.56 billion hours watched in March.

Despite the declines in February and March, StreamElements noted that the total hours watched through the first quarter of 2023 were down less than 1% from the hours watched in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Read more

Latinx in Gaming has announced that the career fair, Conexion, will return this year from Monday, May 22, to Friday, May 26.

The virtual summit provides Latine professionals with networking opportunities to assist them with establishing a games career.

Attendees can speak with employees from gaming firms such as Unity, Bungie, and Activision Blizzard.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

The leader of piracy group Team Xecuter, Gary Bowser, has been released from federal prison for good behavior.

As reported by TorrentFreak, he was released early from a 40-month sentence he received last year for hacking Nintendo Switch consoles.

Read more

Crunch, working conditions, and mental health have been topics of frequent discussion in the games industry for years. At last month's Game Developers Conference, a panel of personal and professional experts discussed the subject at length.

Take This clinical director Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo led the session with an overview of occupational burnout, detailing how the medical community assesses it and what factors play into it.

He was followed by Spry Fox lead game designer Alicia Fortier, Blizzard Entertainment lead content designer Osama Dorias, and The Outsiders lead UX designer Anna Brandberg sharing their own experiences with occupation burnout and what they've learned from the ordeal.

Read more

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Throughout the past month, people from across London and the rest of the UK have been able to see examples of folks from underrepresented groups that are rising up through the games industry.

This has come in the form of the annual Ensemble exhibition, organised by the team behind the London Games Festival, which displays profiles of this year's cohort to attendees at WASD and then later passersby at Trafalgar Square.

Read more

Here in the UK, we're having another long weekend for no particular reason. Government thought we might enjoy a day in the sun, you know? An opportunity to go marvel at some lambs, catch up on the housework, read a book, lounge on a beach, have some pals over for a barbecue, just a free day to do nothing in particular for no reason. We'll return in full force on Tuesday. Until then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Read more

It's with a depressing sense of inevitability that Redfall arrives on PC in a poor state. Like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall has troubling performance problems on PC, along with a number of serious graphical presentation issues. It does get some things right, but once again, we're looking at an experience with an unacceptably high CPU requirement and - yes - stuttering issues.

There's the sense that the game just isn't finished, that's it more like a beta, and that starts with the lack of tweakable options on the settings menu - which is essentially the barebones Unreal Engine 4 set-up. The user has few indicators of what the settings actually do as there are no meaingful descriptions, preview images or hints as to what the performance impact might be when changing a setting. The default UE4 settings are simply not good enough - and it's not just down to the lack of transparency with the user. The lack of utility is also a problem.

So, for example, one setting may actually change multiple aspects of the game. Post-processing can turn off various elements you may want to change individually, including motion blur, depth of field and ambient occlusion. The generic UE4 menu is a bad fit in other regards - the low volumetric setting, for example, completely ruins the effect. It's a far cry from the likes of Days Gone and Returnal, also running on UE4, but deliver real-time previews, great descriptions, frame-rate counters that dynamically adjust with settings adjustment and much more. Arkane really should have done better here.

Read more

More than once on TikTok in the run up to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I have seen a video that seems to have been born from a simple wish: that cooking in real life was as much fun as cooking in Breath of the Wild is.

It's always the same. A pot. An armful of ingredients. Chuck them all in and the ingredients jump around for a bit, and then? Bam: dinner.

I always watch these videos a couple of times, revelling in the pure joy of it. And that's the thing: cooking in Breath of the Wild really is distilled joy. The animation lasts for maybe a few seconds, but it's often my favourite part of the game.

Read more

Nintendo has confirmed it will host a new Nintendo Treehouse: Live presentation on the eve of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's 12th May release date.

Unlike its more typical pre-recorded Nintendo Direct, the Treehouse will be a live broadcast on 11th May that kicks off at 6.45pm PT – that's 1.45am on 12th May UK time, and 2.45am in central Europe – and will include "gameplay from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom".

"Get ready, Legend of Zelda fans!" Nintendo announced on the Nintendo of America Twitter account. "We will be hosting a special livestream leading up to the @NintendoNYC midnight launch of the Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom."

Read more

Mimimi Games – the studio behind stealth-strategy: zombie pirate adventure Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – is warning players of a phishing campaign that's tempting them to sign up for a beta code that doesn't exist.

The studio states that by using a website that "looks identical" to the real one and using a "very similar domain", scammers have fooled players into signing up to the bogus site to download a fake beta.

"Mimimi Games is currently being targeted by a phishing campaign," the studio explains. "Someone is sending out suspicious e-mails with a link to a website that looks identical to the real Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew website and is using a very similar domain, claiming there’s a free Beta download available.

Read more

Bungie has confirmed that Destiny 2's in-game message that announced Warlocks had won an event that hadn't yet finished was "erroneous".

Destiny 2's annual Guardian Games month-long event kicked off earlier this week, ushering in a little more "friendly competition" between the three classes, Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks. So it came as quite a surprise when Bungie deployed an in-game message to all players that declared Warlocks had won.

"Warlocks won Guardian Games 2023!" the message stated. "Warlocks win! Warlocks earned the most medallions and won this year's Games! Visit the Tower for the Closing Ceremony."

Read more

Nintendo announced that its New York flagship store will open its doors on May 12, 2023 for the midnight launch event of the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. People can now make reservations for the event from Nintendo’s official event website. Additionally, Nintendo reported that they are investigating the errors that have appeared when people try to use the Warp Pipe Pass to make reservations for the midnight launch.

The Warp Pipe Pass is a reservation method that allows users to take a shortcut and gain priority access to Nintendo events, in this case the for the New York midnight launch event of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Due to the overwhelming public response, some people using the Warp Pipe Pass to make the reservation are experiencing errors. Nintendo has acknowledged it and reported that they are investigating the reservation errors, and will be providing an update soon.

EA says it is investigating an issue in which Star Wars Jedi: Survivor players are losing their pre-order and deluxe edition items.

After players took to Reddit and the game's support website to report the issue, publisher EA responded to confirm that it was "aware of the reports" and was "investigating the issue".

In the meantime, whilst the bug is investigated and hopefully resolved, EA provides guidelines on how players can try to troubleshoot the problem and restore their items - check out the support page for the full details.

Read more

After you solve the problems in Jarilo-VI in Honkai: Star Rail, you get to build up a The Preservation Trailblazer who is a fire element character. They play quite differently than the Physical Trailblazer on The Destruction path we begin with. However, they’re equally helpful, and it’s pretty simple to find Trailblazer Light Cones and Relics that work with this fire build in Honkai: Star Rail.

What are the best Light Cones for a The Preservation Trailblazer build in Honkai: Star Rail?

One of the key elements of a The Preservation Trailblazer in Honkai: Star Rail is acting as a tank that draws enemy attacks. So, you want to stay alive. Some good three-stars are Amber and Defense. The former’s description for a card that hasn’t been Superimposed says, “Increases DEF of its wearer by 16%. If current HP of its wearer is less than 50% of Max HP, increases DEF by an extra 16%.” The latter is more about keeping the Trailblazer alive, as it restores HP by at least 18% of their max health when their Ultimate is used.

For four-star Light Cones, I like Landau’s Choice. It further makes a The Preservation Trailblazer a target in Honkai: Star Rail, but also decreases the amount of damage they take from enemies’ attacks by at least 16%. This is Me is also good. As its description reads, it, “Increases the wearer's DEF by 16%. Increases the DMG of the wearer when they use their Ultimate by 60% of the wearer's DEF. This effect only apply 1 time per enemy target.”

Mimimi Games, the developers of upcoming supernatural pirate stealth-strategy Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, have warned that they're being "targeted by a phishing campaign." Apparently some nefarious party is sending out emails with a link to a website that looks nearly identical to the official Shadow Gambit site with the promise of beta access. Mimimi say that the email is not from them and that there is no beta.

Read more

An asymmetrical horror game that "previously vanished from the market" has returned to sale on Steam after its original developer shut down.

Last Year – which was originally developed by Elastic Games and "amassed a passionate player base and hundreds of thousands of downloads since it first launched as a Discord exclusive in 2018" – has been "reborn" by new developer Undaunted Games and returned to Steam as a free-to-play title.

"We've always believed in the potential of this title," says Undaunted Games studio head and producer, Matthew Itovitch. "When we did the marketing for the game at PAX East and West in 2018, we saw the reactions from players, and also what this game could be. Last Year definitely deserves another shot at realising that, and bringing back the game is the first step."

Read more

Lost Ark's May update will roll out on 10th May, 2023.

As part of Amazon Games' commitment to "regularly bring new content each month to Lost Ark players in the West", this month's update includes the fifth Warrior Advanced Class and female Berserker, The Slayer, and a heap of progression events to enable you to "quickly level up".

"Slayer proudly takes her place as one of the most powerful warriors," Amazon Games teases. "Leverage her speciality Bloodlust skill to decimate hordes of demon warriors. Then find your way to Wisdom Isle. You'll need the knowledge you've gathered from previous quests to put the pieces together and uncover the path to the final piece of the ark.

Read more