GamesIndustry

E3 officially abandoned by the ESA

3 months 2 weeks ago

E3 now officially belongs to the past as the Entertainment Software Association has announced the end of the long running event.

The news was shared simultaneously in a post shared on social media and via the Washington Post, in an article titled: "E3, once gaming’s biggest expo, is officially dead."

The ESA's president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis explained: "After more than two decades of hosting an event that has served as a central showcase for the US and global video game industry, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has decided to bring E3 to a close.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

Allstar raises $12 million in Seed A funding round

3 months 2 weeks ago

Gameplay content capturing service Allstar has secured $12 million in a Series A funding round.

Allstar said it will use this investment to increase product development and expand the use of its technology in future partnerships.

The company currently supports four games and its communities, including Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, and Fortnite.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

Pokémon-themed amusement park to open in Tokyo

3 months 2 weeks ago

A Pokémon-themed park will be opening in Yomiuriland, an existing amusement park located in Tokyo, Japan.

The Pokémon Company partnered with Yomiuri Land Co. (the firm behind the amusement park) and publication The Yomiuri Shimbun to create a new company called PokéPark Kanto, according to The Japan News, the English-speaking branch of the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The new entity will be behind the new theme park, which was simply described as a place "where visitors can enjoy the Pokémon experience in a lush natural environment through various events."

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | Games of the Year 2023

3 months 2 weeks ago

Zora's Domain is covered in sludge and Prince Sidon needs my help.

First, I need to restore the Zora armour (a simple 'find the fish' fetch quest), which will enable me to swim up waterfalls to some sky islands. I don't know what's up there, but I suspect the armour's base rating of 3 isn't going to be enough protection so it's off to the Great Fairy fountain for an upgrade – except she needs some Hyrule bass (basses? bassi?) to do so, which means I've got to head back to central Hyrule and go pond dipping. Inevitably, I find and complete shrines during my search.

Upon my return, I decide to upgrade my standard get-up (Cap of the Wind, Hylian Trousers, and Hylian Armour dyed traditional Link green, natch), only to discover the Great Fairy can't offer the maximum level because I still have one of her sisters to find. This leads me on a fairly lengthy gallop around Hyrule, trying to remember where the last giant flowerbud is, and then to another musical troupe quest, which takes me far to the south, to Faron, to find fireflies for a flute player. More shrines are ticked off along the way.

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Author
James Batchelor

Grand Theft Auto 6 breaks YouTube records

3 months 2 weeks ago

Grand Theft Auto 6 has become the most-viewed new game trailer on YouTube.

The first-look at Grand Theft Auto's latest instalment has reached over 142 million times since it first went live last week.

YouTube also revealed that content creators and the gaming community have generated over 250 million views on GTA 6 related content.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

Building House Flipper 2 from the ground up

3 months 2 weeks ago

House Flipper was a surprising Steam hit of 2018. While not necessarily enthusing the critics straight from launch, the simulation title found a large and faithful community that ensured its long-term success.

This also allowed developer Empyrean to continually update and improve upon the game, release several DLCs, and port it to all platforms, guaranteeing its own sustainability and making House Flipper a standout success.

Empyrean partnered with co-developer, publisher, and fellow Polish company Frozen District throughout the original House Flipper's development, and to deliver its sequel, coming out this Thursday.

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Author
Marie Dealessandri

Epic Games wins antitrust trial against Google | Epic vs Google

3 months 2 weeks ago

Epic Games has won its trial against Google over antitrust claims, with the jury deeming Google Play and its billing system to be an illegal monopoly.

As reported by The Verge, the jury voted unanimously that Google's requirement for developers to use its Play store's payment system for all transactions was anti-competitive.

The trial began on November 3, and the jury voted yes to every question on the verdict form siding with Epic. It also deemed Google's Project Hug initiative – in which developers were allegedly given financial incentives to stay on the Play Store – anti-competitive.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

ZeniMax strikes tentative deal with union on AI

3 months 2 weeks ago

As ZeniMax Workers United and the Communication Workers of America continue to negotiate their first contract with Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax, the groups today released an update on talks, saying they have reached a tentative agreement with the company that would impact how it can incorporate artificial intelligence into its business.

The union said that the deal "commits ZeniMax to uses of AI that augment human ingenuity and capacities, to ensure that these tools enhance worker productivity, growth and satisfaction without causing workers harm."

Under the terms of the deal, wherever ZeniMax rolls out AI in a way that impacts the work of union members, the company will provide advance notice to the union and negotiate its plans upon request.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Free Radical Design reportedly closes its doors

3 months 2 weeks ago

Update, December 13, 2023: Plaion confirmed the closure of Free Radical Design in a statement on Tuesday.

"It's with a heavy heart that we must announce yet another difficult decision," the Embracer-owned publisher wrote. "Today, we have to confirm the official closure of Free Radical Design, and say goodbye to many remarkable, talented and hard-working people."

It continued: "We are beyond grateful for their incredible contributions to Plaion and wish them the best of luck and success on their professional journey from here on out."

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

Call of Duty couldn't stop video game sales dipping in November | UK Monthly Charts

3 months 2 weeks ago

Over 4.55 million video games were sold during November in the UK, a drop of 3% over the same period in 2022.

This is according to GSD data, which tracks digital and physical video game sales.

The drop is due to a weaker release slate in November this year. Last year saw major launches including God of War Ragnarök on PlayStation platforms and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet for Nintendo Switch.

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Author
Christopher Dring

From GTA to TGA | Microcast

3 months 2 weeks ago

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Chris Dring and James Batchelor discuss the biggest stories of the past week, on (potentially) our final Microcast of 2023.

Today's discussion begins with the reveal of Grand Theft Auto 6, from the changes at Rockstar since GTA 5 to the sales expectations and potential impact the game will have on 2024 and 2025, plus our own thoughts on this first look at the game.

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Author
James Batchelor

Ustwo's ongoing efforts to support staff's mental health

3 months 2 weeks ago

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Listening to employee feedback and catering to each staff member's unique needs are key to supporting better mental health in the games industry.

That's according to Ustwo Games' head of people and culture, Julie Piedrabuena, who began her talk about mental health on a positive note during GamesIndustry.biz's HR summit.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

Pikmin 4 | Games of the Year 2023

3 months 2 weeks ago

A decade ago, I wrote a story for the USgamer calling Pikmin 3 "the greatest war game I've ever played."

While USgamer is sadly no longer with us, that particular piece was moved over to VG247, if you feel like reading the case for that.

If you'd prefer the short summary, I loved Pikmin 3 because it illustrated the morally untenable nature of military command. The game puts you in charge of hundreds of almost unfailingly obedient Pikmin that you will be responsible for, that you will order to attack and kill enemies, that you will from time-to-time unintentionally throw into instantly fatal situations, sometimes by the dozens.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora debuts at No.5 | UK Boxed Charts

3 months 2 weeks ago

Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had to settle for No.5 in its debut week, with EA Sports FC 2024 still holding the top spot.

This is according to the GfK boxed charts which, as always, does not count digital sales so the game's overall performance is likely to be better.

While EA Sports FC held the top spot, Super Mario Bros Wonder has made it to No.2 followed by Hogwarts Legacy at No.3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 at No.4.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

Huge console sales deliver record Black Friday for UK games retail

3 months 2 weeks ago

£167 million worth of video game consoles, accessories and physical games were sold over the Black Friday week in the UK, GfK reveals.

It's the third biggest Black Friday for video games so far. It's only beaten by Black Friday 2013 and Black Friday 2020, which both coincided with the launch of a PlayStation console (PS4 in 2013 and PS5 in 2020).

The UK physical video games market saw a revenue jump of 22% compared with last year's event. 47% of that revenue came from console sales, whereas just 40% of Black Friday 2022 revenue came from console hardware.

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Author
Christopher Dring

Microsoft to convert contractor group to unionized full-timers

3 months 2 weeks ago

Microsoft is converting a cohort of contracted game workers into unionized staffers.

As reported by Bloomberg, the ZeniMax Workers United group of 77 will see 23 staffers become full-time employees. They will receive a wage increase of 22%.

The others will gain temporary roles at the tech giant, with $2.75 hourly raises, as well as paid sick days.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau

Where to get illegally pirated games | This Week in Business

3 months 2 weeks ago

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

Every now and then, piracy becomes relevant to the day-to-day reporting of games industry news, usually when a big new game has been leaked online before its actual release date, like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo 2, or more recently, Splatoon 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

And in those cases, the websites covering the leak often get very shy about where exactly that new game can be found online, perhaps because they're worried about assisting piracy, or maybe because they want to keep in the good graces of the publishers whose games have been pirated.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Hideo Kojima's OD, Marvel's Blade and new Monster Hunter led The Game Awards 2023 reveals

3 months 2 weeks ago

In between handing out awards to some of this year's biggest titles such as Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2, The Game Awards 2023 featured a variety of game announcements and world premieres.

The biggest reveal came from Hideo Kojima, who shared his upcoming Xbox exclusive project OD, which will be developed in collaboration with Jordan Peele. A teaser trailer showcased increasingly distressing shots of its cast, including Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier.

Capcom announced the latest entry in the Monster Hunter franchise, confirming its release on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC in 2025, while Embark shadow dropped the release of its competitive shooter The Finals, available to play on PC now.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

Lego Fortnite is first step towards Epic and Lego's kid-friendly metaverse

3 months 2 weeks ago

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Epic has ramped up its plans to establish Fortnite as a metaverse with the launch of Lego Fortnite – the debut product of a long-term partnership with Lego, and the first of three key release within Fortnite over the coming days.

Going live as a new mode in Fortnite yesterday (December 7), Lego Fortnite is a survival-focused co-operative game where players can explore worlds made out of Lego, build villages, and take on monsters and pirates together.

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Author
James Batchelor

Baldur's Gate 3 shadow drops on Xbox following parity issues

3 months 2 weeks ago

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One of the most acclaimed games of the year is finally available for Xbox, as Larian Studios released Baldur's Gate 3 during The Game Awards.

The RPG was originally only available for PlayStation 5 and PC, with Larian citing technical issues on Xbox as the reason the port was delayed. Specifically, the studio was struggling to get split-screen co-op working on both the high-end Xbox Series X and the low-end Series S.

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Author
James Batchelor

Video games in 2024: Eager anticipation, or just treading water?

3 months 2 weeks ago

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Bookended by the long-awaited trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI (which rapidly passed 100m views to become the most-watched game reveal ever) and the trailer-fest of the Game Awards, this week has given us a lot of glimpses of in-development games – but perhaps more than anything else, it's been a great week for aficionados of games you won't be playing until 2025 at the earliest.

With a few notable exceptions, what we saw this week was mostly the beginning of the process of building hype for games that will appear in 2025 and beyond, which makes it hard to ignore the point raised by many of the analysts James spoke to about the GTA 6 trailer this week: that 2024 is looking a little sparse on the release calendar front, and it's hard to see what the drivers of industry growth will be in the coming 12 months or so.

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Author
Rob Fahey

Baldur's Gate 3 sweeps The Game Awards 2023

3 months 2 weeks ago

Larian Studios and Remedy led The Game Awards last night, with Baldur's Gate 3 winning six awards including Game of the Year, and Alan Wake 2 taking home three of the eight it was nominated for.

Aside from Game of the Year, Baldur's Gate 3 was awarded Best RPG, Best Multiplayer Game, Best Community Support, and the Player's Choice category, while actor Neil Newbon won Best Performance for his role as Astarion.

Alan Wake 2 picked up three accolades, including Best Narrative, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

The industry will rally soon, says RallyHere head

3 months 3 weeks ago

It's been a difficult year across the games industry, but the games-as-a-service sector has had some additional concerns all its own, from the trend of just-launched and seemingly successful titles being unexpectedly shut down to Destiny 2 reportedly missing its revenue projections by almost half, there are some questions about what's happening in live service games.

We put these questions to Stewart Chisam at the Montreal International Games Summit last month. As the president of Smite and Paladins company Hi-Rez Ventures and the CEO of Hi-Rez subsidiary and live service game operational support company RallyHere, Chisam has some expertise on the subject, and he seems fairly optimistic about the underlying health of the segment.

"Realistically, I think there's a big COVID hangover in games-as-a-service," Chisam says. "I have a background in supply chains and in supply chains we would call this a bullwhip effect. We had a surge in demand overnight when the pandemic happened. All of our games and practically every other game saw their engagement go up by 50% in many cases, literally overnight. Many more people poured in, and not just numbers of people, but the hours players were putting into the game.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Games for Gaza bundle on Itch.io raising money for Palestinian aid

5 months ago

Front Porch developer Oak Grove Games has organized a Games for Gaza bundle on Itch.io to raise money for the UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The bundle sells for $10, and includes 48 video games and 197 tabletop games, as well as other soundtracks, books, and game assets.

Among the games featured in the bundle are Necrosoft Games' Gunhouse and Hyper Gunsport, Fiction Factory Games' Arcade Spirits, PQube's Muddledash, Noodlecake's Nuts, and Heather Flowers' Extreme Meatpunks Forever.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Why is Trust and Safety so hard? | This Week in Business

5 months ago

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

Discord this week rolled out a new approach to tackling toxicity on its platform. This is a problem that has bedeviled online games and communities pretty much since there were online games and communities, so let's see how Discord plans to solve the problem.

QUOTE | "We really want to give people who have had a bad day the chance to change." – Discord senior director of policy Savannah Badalich explains the company's new content moderation policies, which will avoid permanent bans in an attempt to rehabilitate bad actors.

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Author
Brendan Sinclair

Sociable Soccer's Jon Hare says real player names are "vital" as studio secures FIFPRO licence

5 months ago

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Securing real footballers' names and likenesses is essential to the success of any title dedicated to the sport.

That's according to Tower Studios CEO and creative director Jon Hare, best known as the designer of the classic Sensible Soccer series.

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Author
James Batchelor

Microsoft joins the publishing top table | Opinion

5 months ago

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With the Activision Blizzard acquisition finally going through and the news that Starfield was the top-selling game of September, Microsoft's games ambitions are in a stronger place than they've been for years – arguably, since the first few years of the Xbox 360 era.

The Xbox division, whatever else it may be, is now a publishing juggernaut; it may have cost the GDP of a small country (and the largest acquisition in the history of both Microsoft itself and the games business as a whole) to do it, but Microsoft has gone from being an also-ran in game development and publishing, with a sorely neglected studio system, to being one of the world's biggest videogame publishers on any platform.

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Author
Rob Fahey

Sarah Bond promoted to Xbox president amid leadership changes

5 months ago

Xbox has changed its leadership structure, announcing the promotion of four executives and one departure.

As reported by The Verge, Sarah Bond, Matt Booty, Takeshi Numoto, and Yusuf Mehdi have been promoted to new roles.

Bond is now Xbox president, overseeing Xbox hardware and software platforms, including "player and creator experiences, platform engineering, strategy, business planning, data and analytics and business development," Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer explained in an internal memo.

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Author
Sophie McEvoy

Sony expects boost in PS5 sales now supply chain issues have finally been resolved

5 months ago

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Sony is confident it's heading into one of its best holiday periods to date as it declares that the supply chain issues that have been hindering PlayStation 5 sales have been fully resolved.

The platform holder confirmed plentiful supply of its current console to both the BBC and Barron's, the latter spotted by VGC, meaning the PS5 will be widely available in the run up to Christmas.

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Author
James Batchelor

Ubisoft's H1 sees a 14% revenue bump

5 months ago

Ubisoft released its first-half earnings report today, posting revenue growth, which the firm attributed to its latest releases and back catalog performances. Here's what you need to know for the company's six months ended September 30.

Ubisoft's revenue growth was attributed in part to the September launch of racing sim The Crew Motorfest and pre-shipments for the early October launch of Assassin's Creed Mirage.

The firm highlighted series record unit sales for the racer, while it said that Mirage has had a solid launch with user numbers in line with Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

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Author
Jeffrey Rousseau