Says It

Halo and Call of Duty co-developer Certain Affinity has been hit with a wave of layoffs, CEO Max Hoberman announced.

Fallout's long-awaited TV show is a little under a month away, and we got our best look at the project so far with a trailer released earlier this month. For the most part, it looks like an incredibly faithful adaptation of a typical Fallout title, complete with a Mister Handy, Ghouls, iconic weaponry, the Brotherhood of Steel, NCR, and pretty much everything else that will make Fallout nerds point at their screens and clap.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse went home empty-handed at this year’s Oscars, with one of its stars proclaiming it was "robbed."

Epic Games has said plans to bring the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to iOS devices in Europe have been suspended after Apple terminated its developer account.

Warner Bros. Games wants to further invest in live service even after Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to impress.

Warner Bros has said it plans to focus on free-to-play and live-service games going forward, despite premium, standalone, single-player RPG Hogwarts Legacy being the best-selling game of 2023.

The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2director Neil Druckmann has shared a new insight into developer Naughty Dog's next game.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's director says the new action-RPG is reaching for a level that was never possible before today's technology, and that's just like the original 1997 game.

Stardew Valley creator reveals the farming sim is "thriving more than ever" and has sold 30 million copies. 

Activision has launched a new Call of Duty ban wave following reports of rampant cheating in Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone.

Clarifying a key detail on the upcoming Elden Ring DLC, director Hidetaka Miyazaki has explained that Shadow of the Erdtree takes place on a new map called the Land of Shadow, which is physically distinct from the Lands Between we know and love. 

Helldivers 2 struggling with player capacities is nothing new, but its game director has a refreshingly new take on new players spending their hard-earned money on the game.

Yesterday, we brought you word of a brewing controversy surrounding the upcoming PS5 action game Rise of the Ronin after director Fumuhiko Yasuda made some comments alluding to a controversial 19th-century Japanese philosopher. It was supposed that these comments were why Sony confirmed the game would not be released in Korea, but now Sony says it never planned on selling the game in one of the world's most lucrative markets in the first place.

Remedy has confirmed plans to grow and expand the Alan Wake franchise following a successful launch for the second mainline entry in the series.

Are you playing Helldivers 2 and wondering if the developers will ever add a player versus player mode? Don’t hold your breath — the boss of developer Arrowhead Game Studios has said it’s never going to happen.

PlatinumGames' powerslide shooter opus Vanquish launched to good reviews and some dedicated fans, but in a year dominated by some of the best FPS games of all time, it never got much appreciation in its day. Now, one of the devs is reminiscing about how it was basically perfectly positioned to be a cult classic.

There are now fewer people playing Palworld than there were at the height of the game's popularity, and one of the devs behind the unlikely survival game hit says that's perfectly fine.

With a little over a month until the release of Dragon’s Dogma 2, director Hideaki Itsuno has confirmed that the game will run with an “uncapped” framerate on current-gen consoles.

The first half of the PS5’s life has seen Sony continuing to release major first-party exclusives with the same impressive momentum that defined much of the PS4’s life, but it looks like things have certainly slowed down. In 2023, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was the only major flagship first-party title to release for the PlayStation 5, and as some have expected, Sony has now confirmed that it won’t be releasing any games on that scale until the end of the next fiscal year (i.e. until at least April 1, 2025).

Palworld creator Pocketpair has acknowledged it is «overwhelmingly short» of developers to help the viral hit maintain momentum.

Currently, only Samsung and Google offer the longest software support for their flagships, which is seven years. OnePlus might receive praise for the clean UI it brings to its handsets, but it will likely be questioned as to why it does not follow the same approach as the two other companies, to which the Chinese firm’s President has an adequate reply. He believes rolling out software updates for seven years is pointless if the hardware cannot deliver the same experience.

Hideo Kojima has spoken about the upcoming Death Stranding movie, admitting that it will be "quite difficult" to adapt his most recent work.

ASRock has stated in an interview with QuasarZone that while making NVIDIA GPUs will be difficult for the company, it isn't entirely impossible.

In a rare and deeply appreciated show of mercy, Rocksteady says Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn't designed to swallow up your entire life.

The Pokémon Company has issued a rare statement addressing the smash hit PC and Xbox game Palworld, after claims the latter has directly copied its designs.

With over eight million units sold and having become Steam’s second-highest concurrently played game to date (with a peak of over 2 million concurrent players), Palworld has taken the world by storm. It’s success, however, has also gone hand-in-hand with accusations of plagiarism, with the similarities of its monster designs to those of the Pokemon series having been a major point of discussion.

The Pokemon Company said Thursday it has not granted any permission to “another company,” referring to Palworld-developer Pocketpair, to use Pokemon intellectual property or assets and “intends to investigate and take appropriate measures” against the fast-growing survival game operator.

Diablo 4 had a rough start with Season 1, an encouraging recovery with Season 2, and now seems to have taken a step back or at least lost some momentum with the launch of Season 3. Players have complained of ineffectual and annoying new content since the new season's release, but as the action RPG's community dips back into disgruntled territory, at least Blizzard has been quick to assure people that it's paying attention to the early feedback.

Hytale, the spiritual successor to Minecraft, hasn't been impacted by the layoffs at Riot.

Palworld developer PocketPair has said it has «no intention» of being found legally at fault for any similarity between it and any other popular pocket monster franchise.

The developer of Cities: Skylines 2 has noticed "a growing tendency of toxicity" amongst its players and has asked the community to "be kind." 

Overwatch 2's game director has apologized for the way a major change in the FPS game was announced, explaining that it was a "mistake" to reveal it out of context.

A Baldur's Gate 3 writer has said it's important to put some of yourself into the characters you're writing, and that they most relate to Astarion when he's "being a giant dumbass."

Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has said it might be time for a younger generation to lead the franchise and helm Final Fantasy 17.

Final Fantasy 7's original developers have admitted the original game's production was so chaotic that they knew things had to change going forward for future games in the series.

Wizards of the Coast has issued a statement on its latest AI art controversy, saying that it will "always" side with human artists. This comes after it concedes that its latest marketing images "may have" included "elements of generative AI", a claim it had previously denied.

Just a couple weeks after being sued by the New York Times over allegations that it copied and used «millions» of copyrighted news articles to train its large-language models, OpenAI has told the UK's House of Lords communications and digital select committee (via The Guardian) that it has to use copyrighted materials to build its systems because otherwise, they just won't work.

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane has promised that if Hollywood doesn't move forward with the movie in 2024, he'll "figure it out outside". 

Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu says the company will be “aggressive in applying” AI in its development and publishing efforts in the future.

PlayStation-owned Insomniac Games has released a statement regarding the recent hack that it was a victim of.

Intel and many other tech companies have amassed against NVIDIA in a "War of Words" claiming that the green team's AI success came from "Luck". However, NVIDIA says that the company's success is attributed to clear vision and execution which Intel lacked.

Blizzard Entertainment is currently working on a way to make newOverwatch 2 heroes free on launch.

The brand and communications director of The Finals developer Embark Studios has addressed the backlash to the studio's controversial choice of leaning on AI when developing the popular new FPS game, saying that the generative tools allow the team to "work better and faster, and do more with less."

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The strange situation that is The Day Before keeps getting stranger.

Fortnite developer Epic Games has claimed victory over Google in its antitrust case.

The Finals, the highly-destructible FPS from ex-Battlefield devs, surprise launched at The Game Awards last night. The shooter had just recently ended a very successful open beta that attracted hundreds of thousands of players, but many (myself included) wondered if Embark Studios still planned to get the game out before the end of 2023. Now it's here, and launch day is going well: The Finals is one of the most-played games on Steam right now, peaking at over 200,000 concurrent players on PC alone.

Skill-based matchmaking is a lot like magnets: How do they work? Nobody really knows outside developers themselves, and historically game makers have been reluctant to talk very much about it. But in a statement shared with Charlie Intel, Activision said it's finally going to start offering some real insights into its processes for Call of Duty matchmaking after the launch of Modern Warfare 3 Season 1 in December.

CD Projekt Red is ramping up development on The Witcher 4 (AKA Polaris) now that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is out. The hotly sought-after sequel is still a few years away from launching, but director Sebastian Kalemba has shed some light on what we can expect.

«Win the trophy and lose your dignity,» is the slogan of a new Taskmaster VR game, which will give fans the chance to live out some of the wackiest tasks to ever appear in the hit British comedy panel show.

After developing social media apps like TikTok, ByteDance made a big push into the gaming market with its Nuverse brand. Now the company may be reversing course. 

First reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, console players of older Assassin's Creed games like Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla encountered Black Friday ad pop-ups for the latest entry, Assassin's Creed Mirage, while trying to access in-game menus. Ubisoft has since stated that the ads appeared due to a «technical error» and removed them.

A Starfield player has successfully accomplished one of the weirdest runs we've heard of yet - finishing the game by only whacking enemies with their gun.

The Government of India has launched a crackdown on an increasingly popular artificial intelligence (AI) technology known as deepfake videos, according to Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar. This development comes a day after Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw held a meeting with top social media companies and announced that the government will soon come up with new regulations to tackle the issues surrounding deepfake videos. 

Is the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake a new Skull and Bones? I'm starting to think it might be. After multiple delays, a complete reboot, and a warning to fans not to expect to hear more about the game in 2023, Ubisoft has dropped a brief message reassuring everyone that it's coming along nicely, and we'll be hearing more about it at some undefined point in the future.

Unity's found itself under fire from the public these past few months—and for decent reasons. In June, for instance, it announced that it would incorporate AI programs into its developer tools, something it didn't really elaborate well enough on to soothe artists and developer fears alike.

Sledgehammer Games' studio head, Aaron Halon, has refuted recent reports that Modern Warfare 3 had a rushed development and that the team was forced to make it instead of Advanced Warfare 2.

Matt Booty, president of game content and studios at Xbox, has laid out the company's future release plans for first-party titles.

Unity appears set to lay off some of its staff in the coming months.

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Warner Bros. will be heavily veering into a live service model for its future games. During its latest Q3 earnings call, CEO David Zaslav confirmed that the company plans to transform its biggest video game franchises into long-term products, bolstered by regular content drops and heavy monetisation. In recent years, gamers have developed a distaste for such money-hungry practices, which often lock out content behind some form of paywall or a battle pass, instead of providing a complete game at launch. The idea is for players to keep playing WB-published games for months, instead of having AAA developers put out a new game every three to four years — which is the general cycle.

As part of its latest earnings call, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav has outlined the company's plans to transform its biggest gaming franchises from traditional console and PC releases into «always on» live service games.

Overwatch 2's executive producer, Jared Neuss, assured fans that the current skin and bundle model is here to stay, reflecting that it's a «sustainable» practice for Blizzard to keep going. 

Cities: Skylines 2 studio Colossal Order has pledged not to release paid DLC for its city building sequel until its heavily criticised performance issues have been «fixed to our standards».

Blizzard has said that it considers bringing its seminal MMO World of Warcraft to consoles “all the time.”

Hitman developer IO Interactive is working on a James Bond game that it says is going to be a new origin story for the titular character, but does the studio intend to follow up on that origin story with sequels? That certainly seems to be a plan.

Alan Wake 2 finally crawled out of the ocean after being stuck in a 13-year-long limbo, and developer Remedy Entertainment is now shifting its focus to its other projects: Control’s sequel, the Max Payne remakes, and other oddball games.

Masahiro Sakurai has said he can’t imagine a new Super Smash Bros. game exceeding the scope of Ultimate.

PC games giant Valve says that it "doesn't know enough" about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to implement them in Counter-Strike 2.

Capcom is planning to release a “major” unannounced title by the end of its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, it’s said.

Counter-Strike 2, the first direct sequel to one of the most important games in PC history, released on September 27 after roughly six months in a limited test period. PC Gamer recently had the chance to ask the Counter-Strike 2 development team at Valve a wide-ranging bunch of questions about the game, its history, and its future: and one of those was about a weird crossover with one of the most despised technologies on the fringes of gaming. 

In its recent fiscal report for the first half of fiscal year 2023/24 (which runs until March 31, 2024), Ubisoft has announced the delay of an unspecified “large game” from the ongoing fiscal year into the next one. The company says this will allow it to “maximize its value creation”.

Roblox Corp has laid off a number of employees in China after conducting an "evaluation of the operational structure" of the company.

TikTok owner ByteDance says it's committed to its virtual reality arm, Pico, following a report that claimed it was intending to wind down the business.

Josh C. Simmons, the developer of the browser-based free game Sqword, had a rather unorthodox response to websites embedding and monetizing the game.

Diablo 4's new season dumps so many rare items on you that I'm pretty sure it would've been deemed a game-breaking exploit around the game's release.

«I think it would be pretty epic.»

Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser has commented on the company’s relationship with Microsoft, after Xbox was revealed to be a potential suitor for the Mario maker.

Insomniac Games has suggested fans will play a significant role in helping the studio decide where to take its Spider-Man series.

Don't expect Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard to suddenly mean the revival of Guitar Hero, or other classic franchises. These things take time, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said, and should come from a genuine passion amongst developers.