Blizzard To Explore Bringing NetEase Games To Xbox And Other Platforms

Wired Productions will publish Chinese developer Pollard Studio‘s psychological horror game KARMA: The Dark World for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG), the company announced. A release date was not announced.

Single-player life simulation game Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game will launch digitally for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC via Steam this fall, publisher Private Division and developer Weta Workshop announced. It will support English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese language options.

Uncapped Games, a new studio comprising developers who have worked on iconic real-time strategy series such as StarCraft, has announced it is working on a new game set to shake up the real-time strategy genre. Led by StarCraft 2’s former lead multiplayer designer, the Tencent studio has shed light on the unnamed project in a new half-hour documentary.

A newly confirmed day one Xbox Game Pass game for June 4, Rolling Hills, may appeal to fans of life sim games like Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley led the charge when it came to the life sim/cozy game renaissance, inspiring all kinds of similar games that offer their own unique twists on the concept. There are multiple Stardew Valley-style games readily available on Xbox Game Pass, including Stardew Valley itself.

Dragon Age: Pals Adventure is opening up for pre-registration today on mobile. This card-hunting title is hitting Android devices in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Developed and published by Pixel Spirits, it currently supports English, Simplified Chinese and Thai languages.

Minecraft has released a new Kung Fu Panda DLC, bringing players content based on the popular DreamWorks franchise. Minecraft has a significant history of collaborations with famous pop culture names that got the blocky treatment. The DLC released by Mojang includes Minecraft collaborations with other games and names outside the gaming world.

Jeff Strain has a pretty impressive resume, co-founding both Guild Wars developer ArenaNet and State of Decay creators Undead Labs, but things don’t seem to be going as well for him lately. Today it emerged that Possibility Space, one of the new studios Strain has founded with his wife under the larger Prytania Media umbrella, is closing for a rather unusual reason.

AI roundup: In a race to bring AI to smartphones, Oppo and OnePlus partner with Google to bring the Gemini Ultra platform to smartphones. This move will allow smartphone brands to provide improved integration of AI. In other news, Adobe is currently developing its artificial intelligence text-to-video generator for which it is buying videos to train the model. Know more about such AI news from today. 

Over a year after its exit from China, Blizzard announced its return to the country thanks to a new partnership agreement with NetEase. Starting in the summer of 2024, fans of Blizzard and Microsoft games in China can expect to see the return of titles such as World of Warcraft and Hearthstone that were part of the previous NetEase agreement.

Microsoft Gaming and NetEase have entered into an agreement to explore bringing new NetEase games to Xbox consoles and other platforms.

Microsoft is rumored to make a huge announcement about its back catalog after its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.

Blizzard games are set to return to China, thanks to a new agreement with publisher NetEase.