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Blizzard Entertainment has announced that Chris Metzen has been named as executive creative director of Warcraft.
The news comes nine months after he returned to the company as a creative advisor on the Warcraft team. He returned to the studio six years after retiring.
Supercell is ready to move beyond mobile, as the company today confirmed that it has acquired a majority stake in Melbourne-based Ultimate Studio "to explore Supercell's ambitions to expand to other platforms."
Ultimate is the studio behind the arcade-style racing game Hot Lap League, which is available on Steam for PCs and as a premium app on Google Play and the App Store.
Supercell has been a backer of Ultimate since it was founded by ex-Firemonkeys executives in 2018.
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Sony has announced that it is investigating that a ransomware group claims to have breached its systems.
As reported by Cyber Security Connect, the hacker group Ransomed.vc has taken credit for the alleged attack. The cohort claims the entertainment firm will not pay for the data; it is now for sale with no listed price tag.
Activision Blizzard has laid off some developers from the Hearthstone team, the company confirmed to Kotaku senior reporter Ethan Gach.
Gach reported last night that 10 people within the Hearthstone team were let go without notice as part of a restructuring.
"Organizational changes were made to the Hearthstone team," an Activision Blizzard representative told Gach. "As a result a small number of roles have become redundant. We want to thank these employees for their many contributions."
Monopoly Go has been an instant success for Scopely. The game launched in April, and topped the US mobile charts in August. And this is during a time when the mobile market has been so hostile that mobile publisher Playtika has given up on new releases for the moment because it believes they just aren't economically viable.
In speaking with Scopely's GM of Monopoly Go and VP of product Massimo Maietti, the game's success in the face of a challenging market is the first thing we ask about. Maietti acknowledges the market dynamics have been unfavorable for many, but says Monopoly Go was well-suited to the landscape it launched into.
"I think very few brands in the world have audiences that come into the game experience expecting, wanting, and having a predisposition to play with their friends and families," Maietti says. "We thought if we could harness that built-in interest with a game that would be truly social so you would feel OK inviting your friends and family because the game is for everybody, the game has a chance to really scale.
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Aspyr and Saber Interactive have received a class action lawsuit over canceling a content release for the Switch version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2.
As reported by TheGamer, the suit involves multiple consumers who purchased the RPG. The cohort stated that they would not have done so if the game firm hadn't announced DLC, which restores missing content for the title.
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Twitch amassed 1.73 billion viewership hours watched during August.
The figure represents a 2% decrease compared to July's performance, according to StreamElements and Rainmaker. gg's monthly State of the Stream report.
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While accessibility in games is on the rise for people with disabilities, advocates say that the price point of these devices is concerning.
In conversation with Rock Paper Shotgun, AbleGamers' Steven Spohn notes that one of the main reasons the organization exists is to provide costly, accessible hardware to consumers in need.
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At the very end of last week, Unity finally revealed its revised plans for the controversial Runtime Fee, which originally intended to charge developers every time their games are installed past certain thresholds.
You can find the full details here, but the key points are that the fee no longer applies to Unity Personal users, while Unity Pro and Enterprise developers have the option to avoid the charge in exchange for a 2.5% revenue share based on self-reported revenues.
This year's Tokyo Game Show saw 243,238 participants visit the event, show organiser CESA has confirmed, which is double the attendance of last year.
The 2022 event saw 138,192 participants visit the usual venue of Makuhari Messe, but the entire space wasn't utilised due to COVID-19 restrictions. In 2019, TGS had 262,076 visitors in attendance.
As there were no restrictions this year, TGS 2023 utilised the entire venue and visitor numbers were substantially higher as a result, with 96,033 people on the first public day compared to 47,236 last year.
At Devcom last month, senior narrative designer Arden Osthof gave a talk entitled "Playing with gender: A design framework for character customisation," giving tips on how game makers can improve their protagonist creation tools to be more inclusive.
Osthof previously worked at Ubisoft, with past projects including the Anno series and Tom Clancy's The Division 2, and is currently a freelance narrative designer working on Rho Labyrinths' Mars Vice and Screen Juice's Morbid Metal.
They have been researching character creators since 2017 and specifically how gender-inclusive these tools can be, and what sort of options they can offer for players to express and project themselves accurately.
SAG-AFTRA members have voted in favour of the union authorising a strike for video game actors and performers.
Over 34,600 members cast ballots, representing a percentage of 27.47% of eligible voters. 98.32% approved the authorisation, although this does not necessarily mean a strike will take place.
Earlier this month, SAG-AFTRA called on members to vote on authorising a strike to negotiate the terms of its Interactive Media Agreement with several video game publishers and developers.
A number of major investment firms are set to attend the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit London on Thursday, October 12th.
Investment banking specialist Aream & Co, VC firm London Venture Partners and games fund Kowloon Nights are all set to meet and advise independent developers at the event.
The event is sponsored by TinyBuild and tickets are on sale now for as low as £45 (+ booking fee and VAT). Each ticket includes access to the event, the meeting system, lunch, refreshments and and a four-day pass to the EGX consumer show that runs October 12th - October 15th.
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Creative UK has revealed a new fund to add €35 million to grow the UK creative business sector.
In partnership with Triodos Bank, the Creative Growth Finance 2 investment is a part of the network's council's sector vision and UK government plans, revealed earlier this year.
Roblox has acquired Speechly, a Finnish AI start-up specialising in voice moderation technology, for an undisclosed amount.
Speechly's technology will be used to improve the platform's voice chat service, which was introduced in 2021.
Ahead of the acquisition, Speechly was backed by Y Combinator and raised €2 million in a seed funding round in 2019 led by Berlin's Cherry Ventures, TechCrunch reported.
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On August 29, Digital Eclipse launched the Gold Masters Series, which aims to explore the history of video games through the interactive documentary format.
The first release, The Making of Karateka, feels like the culmination of what the American studio has done in the past decade, integrating many features that had a 'trial run' in previous productions like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Which makes sense, considering it took quite some time to go from the initial idea to the actual realization of it.
Hideki Kamiya, creator and director of Bayonetta and The Wonderful 101, is leaving PlatinumGames.
As reported by VGC, Kamiya was promoted to vice president last year. He will step down from this position on October 12.
"This came after a lot of consideration based on my own beliefs and was by no means an easy decision to make," wrote Kamiya on X.
This week saw several new entries in the UK boxed charts, with Mortal Kombat 1 taking the top spot.
GfK's report showed that the NetherRealm Studios title saw the most sales on PS5, followed by Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.
Round8 Studio's Lies of P debuted at No.3 on the weekly UK physical charts. The Pinnochio-inspired Souls-like is a step away from the studio's free-to-play MMO Bless Unleashed, released in 2020.
Roblox has made several redundancies within its talent acquisition department.
TechCrunch reports that around 30 employees were let go last week as the company concentrates on shoring up its bottom line rather than expanding.
"The aggressive growth targets Roblox was operating against in the past few years required a heavier investment in our TA organization," a Roblox spokesperson told the site, adding that no other teams were affected.
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A Steam Deck 2 is not likely to be released until late 2025 or beyond, according to Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais.
In an interview with The Verge, he attributed this to whether battery life technology will improve enough not to be affected by a higher device performance.
Unity has unveiled its planned changes to the controversial Runtime Fee policy that would charge developers fees on a per-install basis.
Unity Create president Marc Whitten detailed the changes in a blog post, starting with the removal of the Runtime Fee for any games built on a Unity Personal license.
Additionally, the company is changing some of the Unity Personal terms. Previously Personal accounts were only for developers who had less than $100,000 in revenue or funds raised in the previous year, but that's being upped to $200,000.
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A new report from recruitment agency Values Value and career platform InGame Job, says that European game professionals' salaries is determined by location.
The Big Games Industry Employment Survey 2023 is based on a survey of 1,184 respondents regarding the European games market.
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.
With a name like "This Week in Business," the expectation is that we talk about things that happened this week. Things in business, even.
But sometimes expectations go unfilled. And sometimes we plan to write about one thing, but then Unity shoves its foot into its mouth clear up to the knee and we feel obligated to point at the company trying to choke down its own femur and say, "I don't know, seems like a bad idea?"
ReedPop, events organisers and publisher of sites such as GamesIndustry.biz, has announced the results from the first year of its audience platform Engage.
The data platform, which was developed in response to the demise of third-party cookies, saw year-on-year increases in performance across click-through rates (CTR), video completion rates (VCR) and viewability.
Average CTRs rose across the board, with ad campaigns for core partners seeing rates increase by more than 50% when compared to those run before the platform was introduced. Meanwhile, VCRs are up by 20% on average.
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2022 was a stellar year for Bandai Namco thanks to Elden Ring's critical and commercial success.
As a result, 2023 felt like it was all going to be about maintaining that momentum. When we ask Bandai Namco Europe CEO Arnaud Muller about how well the company has managed to rise to that challenge this year, he first points to Elden Ring's DLC, the Shadow of the Erdtree, announced earlier this year and due to release soon.
But he also points to Armored Core 6, which he says is the current focus in Bandai Namco and FromSoftware's relationship. As we previously reported right after our interview with Muller at Gamescom, the firm expected Elden Ring's success to have widened Armored Core's audience, and therefore anticipated the title to be a success.
For all the interest piqued by the information accidentally revealed in Microsoft's FTC submissions this week, there's little in the way of surprising revelations in these documents.
In fact, if you'd been asked last week to predict Microsoft's hardware and software strategy over the coming years, pretty much the safest, most default answers would have lined up perfectly with the plans that emerge from the court filings.
We see, for example, an eight year life-cycle for the Xbox Series consoles with a fairly minor mid-cycle refresh due next year, and a pipeline for Bethesda's studios which has a handful of unknown titles but largely matches expectations in terms of sequels and remakes for the company's major franchises.
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 back every Friday for a new entry.
Starfield launches today for those who paid extra for the Premium edition, so in the grand tradition of Bethesda games, we're going to talk about how broken stuff is.
No, not Starfield stuff. For all I know, the game has been polished to a shine with nary a glitch in sight.
Mena Sato Kato has joined Microsoft to lead Japanese partnership operations at Xbox.
As Windows Central reported, Kato will oversee global partnerships for Japanese companies at Xbox, in her new role that she began in July.
Kato previously worked for Sony Interactive Entertainment as vice president of business development for eight years. She became vice president of mobile business in 2020 before leaving the position a year later.
It's been a little while since we saw a glimpse of the Bad Old Sony – the company that priced the PS3 at $200 above its closest competitor and retorted to criticism by saying that consumers would get a second job to be able to afford the console. Remember those guys?
Subsequently playing catch-up to Microsoft for most of that generation injected a much-needed dose of humility into the company's thinking, while the discovery that the PlayStation brand didn't carry remotely enough consumer kudos to shift Nintendo from the top spot in the handheld market also helped to ground Sony's ideas a bit more firmly in reality.
In the generations that followed, Sony has generally kept its head down, focused on its game pipeline, and avoided annoying consumers too badly. The PS4 side-stepped the DRM bear-trap that the Xbox One tumbled into, for example, and the PS5 pleasantly surprised us all by allowing storage expansion with an industry standard M.2 SSD, bucking Sony's grim history with exorbitantly priced proprietary storage formats.
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Starfield is not technically out until next week, yet it is already dominating conversations in many ways across the games space – and inevitably bugs are a factor.
While multiple reviews from the initial wave of critique for Bethesda's latest blockbuster refer to Starfield as the company's most polished game to date, this comes with the slight caveat that it's not completely polished. Indeed, thanks to those with early access or review code, images of in-game bugs such as floating heads are already doing the rounds on social media - although these seem to be rarer than in Skyrim or Fallout.
A series of layoffs have reportedly been conducted by Embracer at subsidiary Gearbox Publishing.
The wave of layoffs at the publisher started as early as June, Game Developer reported, with localisation specialist Allan Jacquemart for instance posting about it on LinkedIn at the time.
"Unfortunately, no one saw it coming, but my contract and those of my colleagues who started in June had to be terminated on the last day of our probation month (which also happened to be my birthday, yay). We were simply victims of the group's restructuring."
Polish game developer Black Eye Games has announced that it's shutting down.
The news was shared in the final season announcement for its title Gloria Victis, and it attributed to the financial costs of operating and developing the MMO.
It said in part, "Nothing can last forever, and after thinking it through for countless times, we have to make the toughest decision ever.
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Developer Volition Games has announced its complete and immediate closure.
The decision to close the studio was attributed to an evaluation by Embracer Group as a part of its ongoing restructuring program.
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Nintendo has announced that it will release a Mario red edition Nintendo Switch OLED on October 6.
The hardware will launch two weeks before Super Mario Bros. Wonder and cost $349.99 / ¥37,980.
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Arctic7 has announced that it will be opening a new Barcelona in early 2024.
The facility will provide game development support and co-development services for clients.
In some quarters of the industry, it's become popular to say that big game companies no longer need large events to showcase their titles. Inspired by the likes of Nintendo, which has been running its own Direct online broadcasts since 2011, many of the biggest developers and publishers in the world have started to question whether it is worth taking part in these showcases and instead would prefer to control their own narrative with trailers and marketing beats.
There's some question about correlation and causation here, as games appearing in ONL are more likely to be backed by larger marketing budgets anyway, and were significantly outperforming non-ONL games even before the show. Likewise, the post-ONL levels would reflect both the impact of the show as well as the impact of many of those big games having a presence at Gamescom and its 320,000 attendees.
But data from Fancensus suggests that it is worth being involved in these showcases. Looking at the games taking part in Gamescom's Opening Night Live event, titles that were on stage at the Geoff Keighley-hosted showcase dominated 61 per cent of total press coverage surrounding the event.
CD Projekt experienced a decrease in its overall sales revenue and net profit during the first half of 2023, its latest earnings report showed.
The Polish games firm reported sales revenue of 325.2 million PLN ($79.5 million), down 14% year-on-year compared to 377.9 million PLN ($82.2 million) made in the first half of 2022.
Its net profit was 91.3 million PLN ($22.1 million), a decrease of 20% year-on-year compared to 113.7 million PLN ($27.6 million) produced in the same period last year.
Xbox attended Gamescom all guns blazing last week. The intent felt clear from the start: Microsoft wanted to make a statement.
Following a strong showing at Gamecom Opening Night Live, the platform holder had its biggest booth ever at the event, 50,000 square feet built by 500 people over two weeks, with 30 playable games. And it was showcasing the much anticipated Starfield on the very first day, in a theatre seating 300 people, with the unexpected company of Xbox boss Phil Spencer and Bethesda director Todd Howard.
This feels like a pivotal moment for Microsoft, with Starfield in a unique position (and a lot of pressure) to deliver as an Xbox exclusive. A few days from the game's launch, there's a trepidation that can be felt across the industry.