GamesIndustry

EA Motive continues to make headlines.

Based in Montreal, the developer is best known for making the critically acclaimed Star Wars Squadrons, and has already built a reputation for working with fan favorite IPs. It’s currently working on the remake of Dead Space, which is due out in January.

And with Dead Space coming to the end of its development, the team has its eyes on another major project. Just two weeks ago, it announced that it is teaming up with Marvel to create a brand new Iron Man video game.

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Pete Hines, former senior VP of global marketing and communications at Bethesda Softworks, has been promoted to head of global publishing at the studio, GamesIndustry.biz can confirm.

Additionally, Erin Losi, vice president of global marketing and communications, will now lead all of Bethesda's global marketing and communication efforts.

Hines joined Bethesda Softworks in 1999 as a member of the marketing team, primarily working in a PR capacity on the studio's Fallout projects.

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When Activision Blizzard released the hero shooter Overwatch in 2016, it was met with positive critical and consumer reception.

Over the years, the game went on to see multiple additions and updates. It also inspired a number of games similar to itself: a colorful cast of characters with various roles, and an assortment of abilities. October 4 marked the release of its sequel, Overwatch 2 (OW2) across multiple platforms.

While Overwatch 2 is technically an overhaul of the previous game and not a separate new release with new heroes, and multiple changes, critics judged it as though it is a proper sequel to the original.

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There's a quote from games exec Reggie Fils-Aime that I really like.

"When you’re doing well, don’t be excited about that high-flying performance. When you’re doing poorly, don’t be sad. Always have an even keel and always focus on the next big adventure."

It’s a lesson from his time at Nintendo, which is a company that has a long history of jumping between success and failure. But it’s advice that can apply to anyone to working in video games. And certainly to a few of us right now, who might be feeling a little anxious looking at the recent market data.

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FunPlus announced that it has a new game development studio in Barcelona with the intention to further grow in the country.

The expansion joins publishing division FunPlus Barcelona, which was established in 2019.

Enri Cabestany, vice president of publishing for Europe and LATAM, will oversee the new studio. He brings with him a career history of over 15 years of publishing games and managing personnel.

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Regulators in Brazil are the latest to approve Microsoft's proposed mammoth acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The Administrative Council for Economic Defence (CADE), announced yesterday that it had agreed to the merger "with no restrictions."

"Considering the huge popularity of Call of Duty, it is reasonable to infer that if Activision Blizzard games were no longer available on Sony consoles, PlayStation users could decide to migrate to Xbox, or even a PC, to continue having access to franchise games," CADE said in a document detailing the decision.

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Content warning, this article contains references to suicide, sexual and financial exploitation, and substance abuse

A lawsuit lodged in San Francisco this week has alleged that Roblox enabled the financial and sexual exploitation of a young girl, according to Reuters.

The girl, who is currently around 13 years old according to the outlet, started playing Roblox when she was "nine or ten years old." The case states that the individual met adult men via the platform.

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"The next generation is not in a box."

A full year before PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S were announced, Google presented its own vision for gaming's future: Stadia, a cloud gaming service that enabled you to play across any device.

The service was teased in the days before its unveiling via an outdoor exhibition near San Francisco's Moscone Center, on the corner of 4th Street and Howard Street, intriguing GDC 2019 attendees with historical gaming pieces such as the Nintendo Power Glove, the Dreamcast and a copy of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600. An empty case at the end of the timeline would later be home to a Stadia controller.

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Starbreeze is returning to third-party publishing, launching a dedicated publishing arm after dropping this part of its business following its restructuring in 2019.

To kickstart its publishing efforts, the Stockholm-based company signed a deal with The Tribe Must Survive developer Walking Tree Games to publish the game in Early Access from 2023, with a full launch expected in 2024.

The announcement did note that the publishing agreement between Starbreeze and Walking Tree Games is "pending that the developer gets funding from the German federal games industry-funding programme."

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Bandai Namco Europe has increased its investment in German developer Limbic Entertainment, taking a majority stake.

The company had acquired a minority stake in the studio in February 2021, and since then had announced the Limbic team was working on sim title Park Beyond.

This investment follows Bandai Namco Europe's strategy to "accelerate Western development capabilities," the announcement said.

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The annual Australian Game Developer Awards took place last night, a celebration of exceptional talent hailing from the region.

Massive Monster's Cult of the Lamb was the big winner of the evening, picking up four awards including Game of the Year.

Wylde Flowers, from developer Studio Drydock won twice, taking home Excellence in Narrative and Excellence in Mobile Games.

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Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Alain Puget, creative director of Alkemi, which recently launched the card game narrative journey Foretales on PC and Switch.

When I launched Into the Breach for the first time, I was not prepared for what hit me.

You see, when I tried FTL, the real-time strategy roguelike debut title from Subset Games, I very quickly bounced off of it, hard. It felt very random and unfair to me, and it took a whole afternoon of discussion with friends, who were very hardcore fans of FTL, to convince me to try it again. The second time around with a few basic tips from them, I finally got why the game was indeed an absolute gem.

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FIFA 23 debuted at the top of the UK physical charts, beating FIFA 22 launch sales.

Sales for this year's instalment have gone up 1.6% compared to 2021, which may sound like a small increase but is significant as it follows two years of serious decline at retail for the FIFA franchise. And the series was already steadily decreasing before that.

Sony's consoles dominated FIFA 23's sales, with 41% of the copies shifted going to the PS5, now the biggest retail platform for the football series, and 30% going to PS4.

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Media network Gamurs has raised $12 million in a series A round.

The round was co-led by LA Dodgers Ownership Group's investment branch, Elysian Park Ventures, and sports-focused capital fund Cerro Capital.

VC funds Powerhouse Capital, Aura Ventures, and Artesian also contributed to the round.

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The Australian games circuit has a rich history of turning out great indie titles, such as the BAFTA-winning Hollow Knight, Unpacking and The Artful Escape, to name a few recent entries.

That streak is carried by Cult of the Lamb, a recently-released roguelike from developer Massive Monster that invites players to build a cult as a cartoon lamb. The game combines cute building and light social mechanics with some much sinister themes.

Since its August release, the game has become a critically acclaimed hit, award-winning hit, picking up four wins at the Australian Game Developer Awards (AGDAs) including Game of the Year.

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Mobile game company Sandsoft has announced the opening of a new development studio in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The new developer will be led by head of studio Yahsir Qureshi, previously executive producer at the company. Prior to joining Sandsoft, Qureshi spent almost five years at EA as senior lead product manager on FIFA Ultimate Team, and also worked at Natural Motion on Dawn of Titans.

Sandsoft Riyadh will be the company's new headquarters, with the team "committed to nurturing local talent," the announcement said, also unveiling a paid internship programme called Press Start.

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Blizzard has confirmed Overwatch 2 has been targeted by at least two DDoS attacks, and is continuing to work on restoring the game.

Overwatch 2 launched globally yesterday and replaces the original hero-based arena shooter, which went offline on Monday. Among other changes and additions, Overwatch 2 shifts the game to a free-to-play model.

However, players reported a variety of server errors and expressed frustration at being unable to join Overwatch 2 matches. Eurogamer reports some users claimed to be in queues of up to 40,000 people.

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SpecialEffect's flagship fundraiser, One Special Day, is due to take place this Friday, October 7.

During that day, revenue from partner studios will be donated to the charity, with the participating games available via the One Special Day Steam Promotion or, for mobile titles, directly on the event's website.

Over 90 studios are due to participate, via the sale or other initiatives, including EA, King, PlayStation London, Sumo Group, Xbox, and more.

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Gruby Entertainment announced that conglomerate Tencent is now a minority shareholder of its studio.

The exact amount of the investment wasn't disclosed in the announcement.

However the game developer said that Tencent aims to expand the growth of the Poland-based games company.

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The National Labor Relations Board has found merit to at least one part of a complaint lodged against Activision Blizzard by the union representing Raven Software QA testers, according to The Washington Post.

The board has determined that the publisher's April decision to raise the minimum hourly pay for all QA testers except those at Raven was evidence of retaliation against employees for protected union activity.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson disagreed with that finding, telling The Post, "Due to legal obligations under the [National Labor Relations Act] requiring employers not to grant wage increases while an election was pending, we could not institute new pay initiatives at Raven because they would be brand new kinds of compensation changes, which had not been planned beforehand. This rule that employers should not grant these kinds of wage increases has been the law for many years."

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Finnish studio Supercell is winding down development on Everdale, just over a year after its launch.

"It is with a very heavy heart that we inform you that the team has decided to end the development of Everdale," the developer wrote in a blog post. "At Supercell, we set our standards extremely high for our games: our goal is to make games which will be played for years and remembered forever."

"Although we gave it our all, it became clear to us that Everdale does not meet our ambitions for a Supercell game."

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Outsourcing firm Keywords Studios has further expanded its presence in Australia, as it launched two new studios in the country.

Tantalus South, is located in Adelaide and Tantalus North, is based in Brisbane.

They will join the likes of Keywords' Tantalus Melbourne, one of the company's Australian subsidiaries.

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CD Projekt joint CEO Marcin Iwiński today announced that he is stepping down from that role by the end of the year as he submits his candidacy to be the chairman of the company's supervisory board.

Iwiński would succeed Katarzyna Szwarc, the current chair of the supervisory board.

"Our hugely ambitious strategy has such an inspiring and strong team at the helm," Iwiński said, "and I deeply believe in our plan to take CD Projekt to new heights. As such, I intend to remain a major shareholder, and in my new non-executive role I will remain active and engaged dedicating my focus on supporting the entire management board."

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The person behind last weekend's leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 footage may have been arrested.

The City of London Police today announced that they arrested a 17-year-old in Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking as part of a UK National Cyber Crime Unit investigation.

While the authorities did not specify details of the hack in question, journalist Matthew Keys said a source with knowledge of the matter told him the arrest stemmed from the Rockstar Games hack that led to the GTA 6 leak.

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A new report from Newzoo says that 43% of Brazilian game consumers spend money on the titles they play.

The motivations for spending were listed as unlocking extra content, personalizing characters, an easier gaming experience, playing with friends or family, and accessing a subscription.

Accessing additional content was the number one reason as to why consumers would spend money on games.

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"Stigma" is something of a dirty word in video gaming, seeing as the industry has gone decades now chaffing about the unfair stigma that has often clung to it as a corruptor of innocence, a purveyor of violence, or just a waste of time.

But stigma isn't always a bad thing. It can actually serve a very valuable purpose.

Recent years have shown us very clearly that there are limits to the systems we have in place, that rules apply differently to different people, and that sometimes social disapprobation is really the only tool we can rely on to punish bad behavior in any tangible way. (Exhibit A, although there are plenty more in games and beyond.)

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Women in Games, Epic Games and skincare brand Dove have partnered on a programme to increase diversity and representation of female characters in games.

Called Real Virtual Beauty, the programme also aims at "supporting young girls with self-esteem education across the virtual world" across a series of actions.

As part of the programme, the companies will run a "real beauty in games" training course, "inviting game creators to help reflect the diversity we see in everyday life, and to avoid contributing to stereotypes and biases in design."

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There’s a quotation that gets dusted off every time a question of media or journalistic ethics bubbles up to the surface of our collective consciousness, variously attributed to George Orwell, William Randolph Hearst, and Daily Mail founder Lord Northcliffe: "News is something that someone else does not want printed; everything else is advertising."

It’s unsurprisingly a favourite quote of journalists, although at best it’s a bit reductive, and it could do with some acknowledgement that while real news is something somebody, somewhere would prefer to remain unreported, it does not follow that anything which somebody somewhere wants to suppress is necessarily news.

Sometimes information is just private, or sensitive; the criteria for determining whether it’s news, or news-worthy, has to be something better than merely the fact that someone will be upset about it being reported or revealed.

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Valve has launched a new Steam Charts section on its marketplace to give better insight into the best-selling and highest-earning hits.

The section replaces the old 'stats' page on Steam and features real-time rankings for the top sellers and most played games, was well as a weekly chart and monthly overview of the top new releases.

The new top-selling list is calculated on total revenue of each title, encompassing full-game purchases, DLC sales and in-game transactions. This chart also includes free-to-play titles and pre-orders; for example, the current No.1 at the time of writing is the pre-purchase of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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Wired Productions has formally opened Black Razor Records, its new music label.

The video game publisher said that with the music division it intends to "bridge the gap between the video game and music worlds."

Black Razor's first album release will be Arcade Paradise, a four EP from the game of the same name.

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It's been 11 years since the creation of League of Geeks and the Australian studio starting development on its debut title, the very successful Armello.

And seven years after Armello's Early Access launch, League of Geeks is finally ready to unveil a second title. At EGX today, the studio announced that it's working on a remake of Vic Davis' 2009 cult classic, Solium Infernum, with a planned launch for 2023.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is running a studio for 12 years off the back of one game," League of Geeks co-founder Trent Kusters says with a laugh when we meet at Gamescom. "The roadmap for content and features has ended on Armello. I think we did over 27 major updates, and a bunch of patches, five or six DLC, and everything in between that."

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Theorycraft Games announced that its raised $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Founded in 2020, the company was formed by CEO Joe Tung, Mike Tipul, Michael Evans, Areeb Pirani, and Moby Francke. Collectively the group has worked at studios such as Blizzard, Bungie, Riot, and Valve.

Theorycraft says that the new investment will go towards development of its first title, codenamed Loki and expansion of its workforce.

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There's pressure on any sequel that builds on a beloved game to live up to the standards set by its predecessor, but when that original game is more than three decades old, the pressure reaches a whole new level.

This is the challenge that faced Return To Monkey Island, a pirate adventure game helmed by series creator Ron Gilbert for the first time since 1991's Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Released earlier this week for PC and Switch, it reunites series fans with (and introduces newcomers to) bumbling pirate Guybrush Threepwood, zombie pirate LeChuck, and a whole host of classic characters from the previous games.

Reviving long-absent IP — the last outing for Guybrush and co was 2009's Tales of Monkey Island by Telltale Games — is nothing new to the world of entertainment, but whether that return lives up to expectations and rose-tinted memories can vary by franchise. In the case of Monkey Island, it appears Gilbert and his team have triumphed.

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As a small country with a population of around 350,000 people, Icelanders like to joke that everyone is practically related – but that's certainly the case in the local games industry thanks to CCP Games.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary in June, CCP Games has been Iceland's biggest success story – not just for its persistent space-based MMO Eve Online, but also laying the foundations for other game companies to spring up over the years. In fact, new studios are still being founded by former alumni; Parity Games, for example, is led by CEO and co-founder Maria Gudmundsdottir, who worked at CCP for 12 years.

There was, however, a long time when CCP was Iceland's sole game developer. Having been with the company for more than two decades, CEO Hilmar Pétursson points to the 2008 global banking and economic crisis as a moment of opportunity.

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YouTuber Jason Yevgeniy Gastrow, better known as Videogamedunkey or simply Dunkey, has announced the launch of his indie publishing company, Bigmode.

Gastrow has been a YouTuber for over a decade, with his channel currently garnering seven million subscribers and billions of views. In the video announcing Bigmode, he explained that his experience as a YouTuber is what gives him a good understanding of the type of games players want, with the publishing label aiming to be as developer-friendly as possible.

"I've been on YouTube for 11 years now and one of the core themes of my channel has always been to slam dunk soulless cash grabs into the garbage can and lift up and praise the truly inspired works of art in this medium," Gastrow said. "For years and years, I have always sought out the very best indie games out there and have tried to do them justice, putting millions of eyes on the games that actually deserve attention."

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The developer behind Cyberpunk 2077 reports the game has received a recent boost to its player count, with one million people playing on a daily basis.

The figure was announced via the game's official Twitter account, where CD Projekt Red noted this is a mix of new and returning players, adding: "We wanted to use this opportunity to thank you for being with us and playing the game."

While the studio did not specifically state the cause for the spike in players, it's believed to be a combination of two things: the recent debut of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime spin-off for Netflix produced by CD Projekt and Japanese animation studio Trigger, and the accompanying Edgerunners update for the game, which introduced a number of fixes, new features, and cross-save progression between platforms.

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Logitech has entered the high-end handheld gaming space with the unveiling of a games streaming device that launches next month.

The Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld features a seven-inch high-definition touchscreen with a 60Hz refresh rate, plus all the joysticks, buttons, triggers and inputs expected from modern gaming devices.

It will arrive on October 17 and is priced at $349.99, with an introductory offer of $299.99 available to consumers in the US and Canada.

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It was announced that staffers at Anemone Hug Interactive have become the first Canadian video games union.

The successful unionization makes the group the newest members of the Canadian Animation Guild, IATSE Local 938.

"These workers have found a home in the IATSE and game workers across Canada should use their success as inspiration to form unions at their own workplaces," said IATSE International president Matthew D. Loeb.

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Content warning: Article contains references to terror attacks, mass shootings and racism.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a grant of nearly $700,000 towards the research and prevention of extremism in video games.

As reported by Motherboard, the funding will go towards a program that will create resources for monitoring, evaluating, and preventing extremist activities in gaming spaces.

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Twitch today announced that it is downgrading the subscription revenue split it offers preferred streamers beginning next year.

Twitch president Dan Clancy announced the change in a blog post today, saying the company offers a standard 50/50 share of revenues to streamers, but has for some time had a "premium" tier of partnered streamer that would receive a 70/30 split instead.

The platform stopped offering those premium agreements more than a year ago, as Clancy said the service realized it hadn't been transparent about their existence, nor consistent in who they would be offered to.

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