If you’ve never seen the episode of Bluey, the beloved Australian kids’ cartoon, that Disney refuses to screen for American audiences, now’s your chance. “Dad Baby” has been uploaded in full to the official Bluey YouTube channel.
12.04.2024 - 19:03 / engadget.com / Lawrence Bonk
Late last year, over 100 employees of Avalanche Studios, the makers of Just Cause, announced an intent to unionize. The workers have officially ironed out a collective bargaining agreement with the Swedish labor unions Unionen and Engineers of Sweden. The agreement goes into effect during the second quarter of 2025.
While specifics of the agreement remain unknown, Avalanche said that it “will help standardize frameworks around essential areas such as salaries, benefits, employee influence, and career support.” The company says it’s working closely with both unions to ensure a smooth implementation of these frameworks.
Avalanche was founded in Sweden, but has since become a global entity. With this in mind, the move to unionize only impacts workers located in Sweden, which amounts to around 100 people. The company employs more than 500 workers globally.
Despite that caveat, this is still another high-profile move toward improving the rights of workers in the gaming industry. Avalanche joins several other companies that recently organized under collective labor contracts. Sega of America workers overwhelmingly voted to unionize last year, a move that impacted 200 employees. Over 300 ZeniMax Studios quality assurance workers voted to unionize last year, and parent company Microsoft didn’t stand in the way. Activision, another Microsoft company, boasts a union with over 600 members, which is the largest one in the entire industry.
This is all good news for workers, but there’s also a dark cloud floating around the industry. There have been a boatload of layoffs throughout the past several months. As a matter of fact, over 6,000 people lost their jobs in January alone. Impacted workers hail from many of the companies mentioned above, like Sega of America, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax.
As for Avalanche, it’s continuing work on the forthcoming Xbox exclusive Contraband. The game’s been in the pipeline since 2021 and it looks to be an open-world co-op adventure set in the 1970s.
If you’ve never seen the episode of Bluey, the beloved Australian kids’ cartoon, that Disney refuses to screen for American audiences, now’s your chance. “Dad Baby” has been uploaded in full to the official Bluey YouTube channel.
From Resident Evil and Monster Hunter to Street Fighter and more, Capcom has an impressive stable of established IP with a long history of success- though the company, it seems, has some new things in the works as well. One of those things is seemingly a new game called The Descendants.
As an Assassin's Creed girlie, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed Mirage, a pared down (but still big game, which is really just proof of how bloated AAA games have gotten, but I'll stop because it's not time to take my personal bugbear for a walk) Ass Creed game that was closer to the simplicity of the older games in the stab 'em up stealth-action series. Yesterday creative director Stéphane Boudon and art director Jeal-Luc Sala took to Reddit for an AMA, and in response to a question about plans for Mirage DLC, Boudon said no - but that they have ideas for more stories for Basim.
Bumi: Next Stop, Earth! is a new game by Blamorama Games that dropped right on Earth Day. It’s a game but it’s also about getting eco-conscious and giving a little love to our planet. This is the first game by Blamorama Games. Apparently, the devs have plans for more games, comics and even films in the pipeline.
Fallout 4's developer is working to minimize the impact of its big new-gen update on existing mods.
Cities: Skylines 2 is still having a very rough time, to the point where every player who bought the recent Beach Properties DLC will soon be offered compensation, and its devs are delaying the Bridges and Ports Expansion as well as the console release of the base game.
is already known for pushing out a substantial amount of updates since its launch in February 2024, but developer Arrowhead Studios clarified why it can't push out even more with an excellent explanation. Ever since Super Earth's war against the Terminids and Automatons exploded in popularity, the community has enjoyed a steady stream of patches that both add new content to the game and fix any bugs plaguing the experience. It'd be unreasonable to expect any more from Arrowhead but for those who do want extra updates, it'd be unfair to make such demands.
Nier Automata's director believes Japanese game developers have had difficulty implementing "Western systems" because it was hard for them to move away from Japanese-made game engines.
Ghost of Tsushima will have a host of other special features on PC beyond the new overlay and trophy support. That includes cross-play.
The surreal puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes hits the Nintendo Switch and PC on May 16, as revealed at Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase event. This is a big deal, as the game’s being developed by Simogo, the company behind the mind-blowing adventure Sayonara Wild Hearts, which was one of our favorite titles of 2019. It’s also being published by Annapurna Interactive, who helped steward games like Stray, Open Roads and Cocoon to digital store shelves.
2021 was a strange year for games. Amid the pandemic, major titles were few and far between, and instead, indie games reigned supreme. No game saw more fervor and applause than It Takes Two from Hazelight Studios, an exclusively co-op action-adventure game that has managed to sell 16 million copies as of March 2024.
Hazelight Studios – the development team behind acclaimed co-op games It Takes Two and A Way Out – is seemingly gearing up to announce its next game sometime later this year. In commemoration of its upcoming 10th anniversary in November, Hazelight Studios briefly touched on its next game in a post on Twitter, writing, “We’ve got new (real good) stuff cooking that we’ll talk more about later this year.”