Eurogamer

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast we discuss the fallout from today's dramatic decision by the UK to block Microsoft's $68.7bn Activision Blizzard deal, and whether an appeal could still turn things around.

With the UK regulator issuing a stern warning over how it sees the deal impacting competitiveness among cloud gaming companies, it remains to be seen how much more Microsoft could do to reassure the UK without structurally changing the deal. Or does, perhaps, Microsoft say the UK should not have given up on this so easily, by saying a block on the deal was simply the most straightforward option?

So, do we think an appeal could still succeed? And what will it take? Joining me to share their thoughts are Eurogamer's Ed Nightingale and Victoria Kennedy.

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It's been seven months since the last instalment of developer Jupiter's mighty Picross puzzle series on Switch, meaning there are probably a fair few fans in need of a fresh fix right about now. Luckily, help is on the way, with Picross S9 officially launching tomorrow, 27th April.

This ninth mainline series entry on Switch introduces a grand total of 485 new puzzles, so plenty of fresh deductive, dot-plopping column action to be getting on with. 300 of those are Picross and Mega Picross puzzles, 150 are Clip Picross, 30 are Colour Picross, and the remaining five are Extra puzzles - three of which will require you to link play data from Picross S6, S7, and S8.

Additionally, the local co-op mode introduced in Picross' previous instalment makes a return in S9, meaning up to four players can work together to solve its new conundrums.

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It's easy to think of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in terms of its predecessor. Jedi: Fallen Order was broadly thought of as a good game with a few snags holding it back, namely a few disruptive technical issues, an incomprehensible map, and an overreliance on backtracking through lengthy platform sequences (not helped by, you know, the incomprehensible map). Fix those, you reckon, and there's probably a very good game here.

Mostly, Jedi: Survivor has fixed all that. Or at least patched it up. There's much less backtracking this time, thanks to new and plentiful fast travel points. The map is clearer, since sacrificing the Star Wars-iness of the last game's flickering holo effects for this one's more opaque visual helps a fair bit. And the technical issues are less catastrophic, although things can still get pretty rough at the seams - think hands, hair, and various items regularly clipping through surfaces, and some frantic pop-in and cloak-flapping when coming in and out of cutscenes. Plus one hard crash - but broadly, those gripes have been tended to.

On top of that, Jedi: Survivor's systems have expanded beyond Fallen Order's. Instead of adding a few potted plants to Cal Kestis' ship, after you've collected their seeds from the wild, you now have an entire roof garden on the new planet, Koboh, that you can pootle about with. Instead of new people you meet during the story joining you on the ship as major characters, NPCs will now be recruited to Greeze's Koboh bar, Pyloon Saloon. There's a new mini-game, a kind of highly simplified auto-chess battler, where you can deploy units that you'd defeated in battle and scanned with your lovable droid, BD-1, to unlock them.

A range of Donkey Kong characters are set to join the Lego Super Mario family in the near future, the toy company has announced.

Continuing the push for Donkey Kong seen in Nintendo's theme parks (and, rumours suggest, perhaps also next on the big screen) are a range of Lego Super Mario sets featuring the ape and his many pals.

Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Dixie Kong, Cranky Kong and Funky Kong all pop up in a quick teaser posted by Lego to Twitter this afternoon. It remains to be seen how many extra sets you'll need to buy to collect them all.

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The Duviri Paradox, Warframe's latest expansion, is weird, quite unlike anything the free-to-play shooter has attempted before. It ditches the game's usually overt sci-fi trappings in favour of something closer to a fantasy western: it's in black and white (except when it isn't); it's a rogue-like; it's simultaneously both a sequel and a prequel (paradoxes, eh?), and the whole thing takes place inside the mind of its new Big Bad. Oh, and despite being radically different, it's also the new opening to the game. Like I said, The Duviri Paradox is weird.

So what, you might well ask, is going on here? "It's sort of the reality when... you've been making the same game for 10 years," Warframe's creative director Rebecca Ford tells me during a recent chat, "that if you keep piling things on at the end of the experience, you leave a lot of people behind... And we also realise the people who've been with us for 10 years, if we keep giving them exactly what they expect, eventually they'll lose interest.

"So we tried to converge the immense weight of veteran expectations with the grim reality of running a game as a service and people feeling it's too impenetrable. And we tried to force gravity to bend to our will and create this new beginning. Will it work? You tell us!"

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Trombone Champ developer Holy Wow has added a brand new, incredibly difficult track: Flight of the Bumblebee.

The piece, for you music nerds, was composed by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as an interlude for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan (composed from 1899-1900). It's a notoriously tricky piece full of fast, buzzing melodies.

Thankfully, this latest update to the game also adds in a Practice Mode so players can reduce the speed by up to 50 percent. Phew!

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Nintendo will attend Gamescom this year, event organisers have announced. It'll be the first time Nintendo has shown up at the German mega-show since 2019.

Nintendo's appearance at Gamescom suggests it will have something meaningful to show there. But what? The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 will both have been released by the time Gamescom opens in late August. Could Nintendo have something hardware related to unveil to the world?

With the all-conquering Nintendo Switch in its sixth year of life, it certainly feels about time the Japanese company at least talked about what's next.

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The setting sun dyes the sky a soft orange as Link glides through the air. Far beneath his dangling feet, Hyrule lies almost forgotten as my focus is fully set on the collection of islands scattered across the horizon. One in particular catches my eye - a small island adorned with a tower, which seems to hail from a lost civilization, and, lying at its feet, a pool of water. Carefully I manoeuvre Link above this pool and, when the time is right, send him diving down to the floating isle. Somehow, even high in the heavens, fish swim in the water.

Tears of the Kingdom is unique in the Zelda series in that it's the first time a new instalment has reused a Hyrule from a previous game rather than completely reinventing the country. Outside of the game's trailers and a Bokoblin infested fort I invaded during a recent preview event at Nintendo's European headquarters in Germany, we don't know how much the Hyrule overworld has changed since Breath of the Wild. Yet, from what I've experienced, the sky islands help prevent this returned trip to a familiar Hyrule from feeling repetitive by bringing a new landscape to a world many of us have spent months exploring.

UPDATE 4.30pm: Following an early leak, Sony has made PlayStation Plus' Monthly Games line-up for May official. As previously rumoured, GRID Legends (PlayStation 4 and PS5), Chivalry 2 (PS4 and PS5), and Descenders (PS4) will all be made to available to Premium, Extra, and Essential subscribers starting on Tuesday, 2nd May.

You'll have a little over a month to pick them up, with Sony's next batch of additions arriving on 6th June. And, of course, you've still got a little while to add April's Monthly Games to your library - Sackboy: A Big Adventure and Tails of Iron are sticking around until Monday, 1st May.

ORIGINAL STORY 3.17pm: May's PlayStation Plus games will be Grid Legends, Chivalry 2 and Descenders.

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Microsoft has said it will appeal today's shock decision by UK regulators to block its $68.7bn Activision Blizzard acquisition - but how will this work, and could it still be a success?

Appealing today's decision will be a lengthy process for Microsoft, and hamper any chance of the deal being approved globally for months - and that's without the separate decisions still due from the US Federal Trade Commission and the EU's European Commission, both of which are still scrutinising the deal for themselves.

"According to the Competition Appeal Tribunal site, straightforward cases are aimed to be dealt with within nine months," games industry analyst Piers Harding-Rolls told Eurogamer today. "If the appeal is successful it is then returned to the CMA to review. This again will take some time.

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Blizzard has confirmed the final Diablo 4 PC system requirements.

There are four spec tiers outlined in a post on Blizzard.com, all of which will be available in the upcoming Server Slam weekend and the launch build of the action role-playing game.

"We have provided multiple tiers of PC spec requirements based upon data from our Early Access and Open Beta weekends to ensure the settings you choose suit your playing preferences and hardware," Blizzard said.

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Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has responded to this morning's stunning decision by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block Microsoft's $69bn acquisition deal.

In an internal email, published publicly, Kotick stated the result "isn't the news we wanted - but it is far from the final word on this deal".

He also confirmed that the decision will be contested, alongside Microsoft. "We're confident in our case because the facts are on our side: this deal is good for competition," he said.

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Indie game developer Young Horses has released four of its games for free, each of which is available on Steam right now.

Young horses is perhaps best known for Bugsnax, a game that tasks players with finding and capturing the eponymous half-bug-half-snack creatures on a mysterious island, and Octodad, which sees players taking on the role of an octopus posing as a human man with a normal, human family (something that is easier said than done!).

You can expect more of the teams' eclectic flair in this latest offering of new and older games. Young Horses has released IndependANT, Antbassador, Snakedate and Octodad: Student Edition under its "Free Range initiative". While the developer calls these releases "smaller side projects", each of them looks like a lot of fun to while away some time.

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EA has revealed the accessibility options it's added to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, including a Slow Mode toggle to ease both combat and platforming.

Other options include fully remapping the controls, subtitle and visual options, and multiple difficulty settings.

"With Jedi: Survivor, we've been able to build on what we learned from Fallen Order," said Jonas Lundqvist, senior director of development, in a new blog post on the topic.

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Microsoft's $68.7bn Activision Blizzard deal has been dramatically blocked by UK regulators, following a months-long investigation.

The decision by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority prevents Microsoft from buying the publisher behind Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, follows earlier concerns it would lead to an unfair impact on archrival PlayStation.

Instead, today's decision stems from the CMA's concerns over the deal's proposed impact on the cloud gaming sector. In today's final report, the CMA said Microsoft's ownership of Activision Blizzard risked "stifling competition in this growing market". In response, Microsoft has said it will now appeal.

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Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 gets Plunder mode today, Activision has announced.

Plunder was a popular mode in Warzone that challenged squads of players to grab the most cash within a set time limit.

This new version of Plunder features new Buy Station items, new public events and permanent rewards.

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Later today, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is set to give its verdict on Microsoft's proposed $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

While this may give a strong indication as to whether the merger is approved globally, the US Federal Trade Commision (FTC) still has the hearing for its complaint to stop the merger filed back in December. That's set for 2nd August, after Microsoft's 18th July merger deadline expires.

As such, Microsoft is planning a swift end to the FTC's deal concerns, reports the New York Post.

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Flashback 2 comes out in November on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch and PC, publisher Microids has announced.

Microids released a new trailer, below, that gives us our best look at gameplay yet.

Flashback 2 is the sequel to the 16-bit sci-fi classic Flashback (let's pretend Fade to Black doesn't exist).

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Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters. It's a series about highlighting some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also a series about you having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

Spaceships have been our vessels for adventure and exploration for decades. They've flown us to worlds we can barely imagine, introduced us to species we can barely comprehend - slight variations of humanoids anyway - and kept us dreaming about what's just beyond our technological reach. But which spaceships in games do you remember, and which are the best?

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Microsoft's gaming revenue fell four percent and Xbox hardware revenue declined 30 percent in the latest financial quarter, the company has reported.

While Microsoft does not report console sales and did not provide an updated number for Game Pass subscribers (it had 25m as of January 2022), it's clear the company is struggling to sell Xbox consoles. In fact Xbox console sales have struggled for some time. Xbox Series X and S sales were down during the crucial holiday quarter last year, and it looks like they were down in the quarter ending 31st March this year, too.

The only bright spot for Microsoft was a slight three percent increase in Xbox content and services revenue. The company said this was "driven by better-than-expected monetisation in third-party and first-party content, and growth in Xbox Game Pass".

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It's a sign of how popular Genshin Impact has become that Honkai: Star Rail is discussed more like its sequel than the fourth entry in the Honkai series. Along with a complete tonal 180 from the 'Breath of the Wild clone' derison Genshin Impact drew at launch, these constant comparisons can understandably irk some Honkai Impact 3rd players, but it's really tough to separate the two due to how similar they are. Cut out all of the annoying grinding and open world from Genshin, then whack it in a blender with turn-based combat and a squeeze of Honkai lore, et voilà, you've made a Star Rail smoothie. Not exactly a healthy one, when considering your precious gaming time, but healthier than falling off another cliff because your stamina bar depleted again on your third day farming for character materials.

So is that it? Is it just a sci-fi Genshin that cuts out the more time consuming activities? A big part of me wants to say yes. You could put a screenshot of the two side-by-side and it'd be tough to tell them apart, from similar character models and environments, right down to the UI. However, that description feels like it's doing a disservice to Star Rail's delightfully goofy humour, charismatic voice cast, and truly magnificent combat.

Microsoft Flight Simulator has released its latest World Update, this time bringing geographical enhancements and handcrafted landmarks to 13 countries and 28 non-sovereign territories across its digital rendition of Oceania and Antartica.

As per developer Asobo's announcement post, World Update 13 brings improvements to Microsoft Flight Sim's Polynesia (Hawaii and Easter Island), Melanesia (Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Indonesia's West Papua, and the Solomon Islands), the Galapagos Islands, and key regions of Antarctica, including the Antarctic Peninsula.

Today's update expands on each region's previous renditions with new aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and digital elevation modelling data, including an updated height field for Hawaii and a version of Honolulu city introducing "dozens" of handmade buildings.

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It barely seems like yesterday, developer Rusty Lake was wowing us with its wonderfully inventive co-operative puzzler The Past Within, but now the studio is back to announced its next adventure, Undergound Blossom, coming later this year.

To date, Rusty Lake has released 16 games under the Rusty Lake and Cube Escape banner - some fully fledged premium offerings, others free-to-play companion pieces - blending casual point-and-click puzzling and room-escape-style conundrums into a wonderfully sinister, narratively intertwined saga charting the lives of the Vanderboom family.

As with developer Rusty Lake's last few titles, the newly announced Underground Blossom ditches the Rusty Lake moniker but is still very much set in its sprawling universe, this time taking players on a journey via the Rusty Lake underground system through the life and memories of Laura Vanderboom - first introducd all the way back in Cube Escape: Seasons.

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Obsidian's pint-sized garden survival adventure Grounded is back with its big 1.2 update, this time adding the likes of wasps, a construction gnat (exactly what it sounds like), and Steam Deck verification, fixing some previously troublesome issues on Valve's handheld.

Starting with Steam Deck verification, 1.2 remedies a range of problems, meaning initial loading and log-in should now function properly, prompts should no longer flicker between gamepad and mouse/keyboard controls, and the virtual keyboard should now correctly appear as needed. Obsidian has also optimised and tuned Grounded's default graphics settings on Steam Deck for a more "enjoyable experience".

Elsewhere, Grounded's 1.2 update introduces new foes in the form of wasps, which can be found guarding their mini-hives around the yard or situated in more challenging Wasp Nests, where players can also encounter the new Wasp Queen boss. Defeating Grounded's latest enemies will unlock new items to craft, including armour.

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Dead Island 2 is something of a cross-platform success story, offering reasonable image quality and performance across both last-gen and current-gen consoles - so how does it fare on PC? Does it buck the trend of recent Unreal Engine 4 releases by delivering a stable, performant experience, or is it another disappointing PC port in the 2023 #StutterStruggle saga?

To find out, I played through around the first half of the single-player game on a range of PC hardware to nail down optimised settings and run performance tests.

Before we get to the results, let's start with that first boot experience - which is broadly positive. The initial logo screens can be skipped with the enter key, but you'll want to make sure you don't skip the (rapid) shader compilation step. It's easily done, but this pre-compiling shaders ahead of gameplay is key in ensuring a smoother, more consistent PC gaming experience. For those wondering, consoles are fixed hardware platforms, so shaders are shipped with the code.

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Sega is readying itself for a summer of maraca-shaking mayhem it moves to bring its classic rhythm-action game Samba de Amigo to Switch - and ahead of its arrival, the publisher has revealed 20 of the 40 tracks it'll be shipping with on launch day.

Samba de Amigo: Party Central, as Sega is calling this new Switch version, takes the infectious rhythm-action of the Dreamcast original - which sees players following on-screen prompts to furiously shake their maracas in time with the music and in the desired position - but spices things up with a bunch of new mini-game-like interludes as songs progress.

Sega previously confirmed Party Central would feature 40 tracks at launch, but was a little vague about what they might be beyond a couple of Sonic the Hedgehog tunes. Now, though, it's revealed 20 of the licensed tracks players can rhythmically flail to, with artists including Ariana Grande, Carly Rae Jepson, and Gloria Gaynor, plus some returning song favourites, such as Ricky Martin's La Copa de la Vida and La Bamba.

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Netflix has released its first teaser trailer for the third season of The Witcher, the last to feature Henry Cavill as Geralt.

There's a release date too, with the series split into two volumes: the first will arrive on 29th June, the second will follow on 27th July. That's a frequent occurrence on Netflix these days, so viewers can binge a few episodes but not the full season in one go.

Here's that official teaser trailer:

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Star Trek: Resurgence comes out 23rd May for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One and on PC via the Epic Games Store, Dramatic Labs announced.

Star Trek: Resurgence is a Telltale-style narrative game set shortly after the Star Trek: The Next Generation's timeline (that's the show with Picard, Riker and Troi etc). Here's the official blurb:

"A worker uprising threatens the tenuous peace between two alien civilisations, and Starfleet is forced to intervene. Players experience the conflict and larger mystery from two key perspectives. The U.S.S. RESOLUTE's First Officer Jara Rydek is part of the diplomatic envoy led by Ambassador Spock that's tasked with finding a resolution – and uncovering the ultimate source of this tense situation.

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After its initial reveal on April 1st this year, Asus is finally ready to shed more light on its ROG Ally handheld gaming PC, which launches on May 11th and will be sold by Currys in the UK. The Steam Deck competitor looks to be a more premium device than Valve's offering, with a faster AMD Ryzen Z1 series processor, seven-inch 1080p 120Hz touch screen and Windows 11 - but no price has yet been announced.

The hardware side of the equation is perhaps the most fascinating, so let's begin there. The Ally is powered by a 'custom' Ryzen Z1 chipset that includes Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics produced on a 4nm node. (By comparison, current Ryzen 7000 desktop designs use a mixture of 5nm and 6nm processes, which should give the Ally's APU an advantage in terms of performance per watt.) We expect to see configurations of the device featuring the Z1 (6C/12T, 22MB cache, 2.8TF 4CU GPU) and Z1 Extreme (8C/16T, 24MB cache, 8.6TF 12CU GPU) processors announced by AMD earlier today, offering increasing levels of horsepower for a higher asking price.

Speaking of which, the impressive-looking APU is backed with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM in dual-channel mode, while storage is up to a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD and UHS-2 Micro SD card expansion - faster than what is available on the Deck, which is limited to PCIe 3.0 storage and UHS-1 Micro SD cards. Wi-Fi 6E is also included, in comparison to WiFi 5 on Steam Deck. It'll be interesting to see whether all SKUs of the Ally come with the full complement of RAM and storage, or whether this will be pared back on the cheaper options.

Like the streets of New York, Los Angeles is one of those cities that even if you've never stepped foot in the place, you still instantly recognise its landmarks. We visit LA an awful lot in games, too - as recently as last week, I was battering the brains of the undead cops that patrol up and down Venice Beach in Dead Island 2 - but I've never seen LA like this. A luscious, leafy paradise where the palm trees sway and the turquoise waters glisten and molten lava dribbles down the hillside beneath that iconic sign. Though known now as Burning Shores, ghosts of the LA we know so well still remain if you know where to look.

I've always been mesmerised by Horizon's world, a peculiar place that's simultaneously familiar and foreign, old and new, and Horizon Forbidden West's long-anticipated DLC, Burning Shores, does nothing to change this. How strange it is, even now, to watch a mechanical animal pounce and pirouette as it chases its prey, moving as if it's made of meat and muscle and not scrap and steel. Yes, they still terrify me.

The ongoing feud between Blizzard and NetEase ramped up this week after reports out of China suggested NetEase had filed a lawsuit against the World of Warcraft maker demanding £35m.

Wowhead covered a report from Sina Technology that claimed NetEase has filed a lawsuit in Shanghai against Blizzard seeking ¥300 million in refunds for discontinued games and services to the over one million players it had in the region before servers were shut down in January.

World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm and the StarCraft series became unplayable in China on 24th January, when NetEase's licence expired (mobile game Diablo Immortal was unaffected).

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We are just a mere few weeks away from Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's launch, and in anticipation Nintendo has released a new TV spot.

For those keeping track, this trailer is the finished product from last week's leaked footage. Titled "You can do what?!", the TV spot highlights some of Link's new abilities, such as Fuse and Ultrahand.

We can see Link creating a hovercraft of sorts to coast over the lands of Hyrule. Then, he battles a Flame Gleeok (essentially confirming the theory that we will be facing different varieties of Gleeok enemy in Tears of the Kingdom) with a fused shield and he uses his Ascend ability to pop up through an enemy camp. You can see the trailer for yourself below:

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Diablo 4 hardcore characters who die in PvP suffer permadeath, Blizzard has signalled.

Blizzard community director Adam Fletcher confirmed the feature in a tweet. It means that if your hardcore character dies in PvP, you will have to make a new character.

Diablo veterans will be familiar with the consequences of death when playing hardcore characters. Indeed, Blizzard has in the past warned Diablo players it is in no way responsible for their hardcore characters, and will not restore them under any circumstances.

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - Friday the 13th: The Game publisher Gun Interactive's latest stab at the asymmetrical multiplayer horror genre - arrives on 18th August and will be included as part of Xbox Game Pass on release.

Announced at the tail-end of 2021, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is being developed by Sumo Nottingham, sounds pretty par for the course amid the current crop of asymmetrical horror games like Dead by Daylight and Evil Dead: The Game.

It pits a brand-new cast of youthful "victims" against powerful foes - in this case, killer family members either plucked from or inspired by Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror classic.

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Fandom has responded to Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores' recent review bombing on Metacritic.

Please note, there will be spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores below.

Horizon Forbidden West's DLC Burning Shores released last week, with many praising its visuals and smooth gameplay performance. However, one plot point has led to the game being review bombed on Metacritic, where the DLC currently sits with a 3.2 user rating. Previously, Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores saw its user rating drop to as low as 2.7.

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A demo for innovative first-person puzzle game Viewfinder is now available on Steam.

The debut game from Scottish developer Sad Owl Studios, Viewfinder is a puzzle game that plays with perspective.

Early on, players must discover photos around the world which they then place and step into to progress. Later, they're equipped with a camera to take pictures of the surroundings, which can then be placed and moved into to solve puzzles. Check out the trailer below to see it in action.

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EA has called on the internet to avoid posting Star Wars Jedi: Survivor spoilers after an apparent leak of the game ahead of its release.

Copies of Respawn's upcoming action sequel appeared to get into the hands of people four days before its 28th April release date - and of course story spoilers hit the internet soon after.

"No spoilers!" reads a tweet from the EA Star Wars account.

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Starting Tchia is an experience. The music starts, you realise the entire game is voiced in French and Drehu, and you know it's a game built on passion. If you're like me, however, starting Tchia also involves encountering the unreadable text in its options menus.

It's unfair to single Tchia out. It offers a wealth of accessibility options. But it also represents the most recent example of a growing trend in video game UI, in which text is becoming smaller and less legible.

To understand why this is happening, and explore possible solutions, I spoke to accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton and lead designer of typeface studio Lettermatic, Riley Cran.

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A "supermajority" of employees at Sega of America have announced plans to unionise, with the aim of securing higher base pay, improved benefits, and a number of other goals.

This latest unionisation effort is being organised in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America labour union - which has previously assisted employees at the likes of Activision Blizzard King and ZeniMax Studios - and represents a broad selection of departments and disciplines at Sega's Irvine, California headquarters.

According to Axios, the group - which calls itself the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega, or AEGIS-CWA for short - consists of 144 employees with roles across marketing, localisation, product development, and quality assurance.

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The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a 2021 ruling on Epic Games' antitrust lawsuit against Apple, which both parties had appealed.

Epic launched its lawsuit against the iPhone maker in August 2020, following the company's decision to revoke Epic's Fortnite developer account, blocking the battle royale game from being distributed on its devices. Apple made the move after Epic deliberately circumvented contractually mandated App Store payment mechanisms within its Fortnite iOS app, which would have allowed it to avoid Apple's 30 percent platform fees.

The following year, California's Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers ruled against Epic in nine of its 10 claims, determining the company had failed to prove Apple held a monopoly as defined by antitrust laws. However, Gonzalez-Rogers did side with Epic in one matter, ruling Apple could not block developers linking out to alternative payment methods from within apps - a practice known as "anti-steering" - as that would constitute "anti-competitive conduct" under state law.

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