Lightyear Frontier Celebrates Over 700,000 Players in Launch Week

Within two days of NetEase announcing a renewal of their partnership to bring Blizzard games back to China, over two million players have pre-registered, 147,000 accounts reactivated, 92,000 accounts recovered, and Blizzard China has received 1,000+ resumes! While restoring service to other Blizzard games including Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft, Diablo, and Heroes of the Storm, the response for WoW has been overwhelming. Officially reported by Blizzard China and translated by NasDa on Twitter, these stats show the extreme appetite for World of Warcraft in China. While many players completely rerolled on Taiwanese realms in order to keep playing after servers shut down last year, many more still have been left in limbo, without access to the game they invested the better part of two decades into playing.

Pokemon GO players are sharing an unusual quirk with the popular mobile game's in-game inventory, with one player having 37,000 items over the max capacity. The massively popular monster-catching mobile game from Niantic features more for players to collect than just its lineup of in-game creatures, with multiple useful items available. Items like Berries and stronger Poke Balls can help players to capture new Pokemon, while Potions and Revives keep a player's Pokemon healthy for Pokemon GO's in-game battles. Now, one fan's inventory is way over the game's normal max capacity.

The early access release of has illuminated much more about what the highly-anticipated interstellar title has to offer. The debut release from FRAME BREAK, a subsidiary of Amplifier Game Invest, gives many classic conventions of its genre fun, technological twists through its mech-based mechanics. They're overall quite satisfying, and exploring the alien world is a relaxing yet engaging journey. As is to be expected from an early access game, there are elements that could use more expansion, but it currently has a very strong foundation to build on.

A huge new change just landed in Fortnite today, and very few players seem happy about it. Color-coded cosmetic rarities are now a thing of the past, meaning there's no more obvious separation between a Rare skin and a Legendary one, and fans are worried what this means for the future of skin prices.

Botany Manor, a relaxing puzzle and adventure game developed by Balloon Studios, is now available as a day one launch title for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, and the highly rated interactive story Kona is also making a return to the service. Set in an expansive estate in 1890’s Somerset, England, Botany Manor is an immersive sim that puts players in the role of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who continues to dabble in her passion and research. Many players will enjoy spending several relaxing hours completing Arabella’s botany research, growing rare plants, and filling out her botanical record.

Activision has revealed that it has banned more than 27,000 Call of Duty accounts over the weekend. Speaking to CharlieIntel, the company said that Team Ricochet was able to identify and ban these accounts thanks to updated detection systems.

In one of the biggest auctions for a raw boxed video game, a rare sealed hangtag copy of Castlevania for the original NES recently sold for $90,100 on eBay after a bidding war that started at $37,000, all for a hard-to-find game with a literal sticker price of $27.87. 

Helldivers 2's ongoing Major Order has commanded soldiers to finally squash the mechanized Automatons on the western front, but unfortunately, frequent crashes threaten to jeopardize the weekend's operation, and one developer recommends letting the game "rest." 

Establishing a cozy homestead in the untamed wilderness of outer space is the main goal of , and mech upgrades are the key to success. This peaceful open-world farming sim has players jumping into the pilot’s seat of a rickety old mech, using its tools to tame a previously unexplored planet. However, building your dream settlement requires special resources that only an upgraded mech can harvest.

As World Of Warcraft Classic - an MMORPG that is, confusingly, a new version of the old version of World Of Warcraft - enters phase 3 of its Season Of Discovery, PCGamer has an interview with some of the devs where they talk about the decision to not run Player Test Realms - servers where they roll out the new content to smaller numbers of players to road test it. This means that when they launch new stuff for Seasons Of Discovery it'll probably break more often, but it means players get to discover brand new things together. Which is great! And the developers think it's good too.

If adding mechs to Call of Duty led to Titanfall, and adding mechs to farm sims led to Lightyear Frontier, then does that make Lightyear Frontier the Titanfall of farm sims?

For as sweet as Stardew Valley's Penny may seem, she has heartlessly stopped a player's rise to financial success by squandering $200,000 worth of Starfruit Wine. In a rather comical anticlimax, the Stardew Valley player has learned the hard way to not put all their eggs in one basket or, precisely, to not put all their Starfruit Wine in one room.