Sega of America workers ratify union contract, protecting 150 employees

The first images from Marvel’s have been released.

Some new videogame releases pounce on us like excitable Golden Retrievers, while others become apparent to us more insidiously, like undead Golden Retrievers creeping back from the grave to do their master's bidding unto eternity. Withering Rooms is one of the latter: released out of early access last week, and noticed by me just yesterday, it's a haunted mansion metroidvania in which you are a small girl in a nightie who must use meat cleavers, pentagrams and spells of self-enlargement or possession or incineration to overcome various monsters of the Silently Hilly and/or Residentially Evil persuasion. No, none of the monsters are Golden Retrievers.

The American Tabletop Awards, the United States’ answer to Germany’s Spiel des Jahres, is back for the sixth consecutive year. The annual award celebrates the very best in board gaming across four different categories, with dozens of games judged by a panel of industry experts who collaborate within a shared set of ethical guidelines. The result is a collection of 20 excellent games, with four winners overall. The categories mirror those of last year, and include titles best for Early Gamers, an assortment of Casual Games, more traditional Strategy Games, as well as Complex Games for more experienced players.

So, we’re in the second year of an ongoing wave of layoffs in the video game industry. If you paid attention to a broader level something like this has also been happening in the tech industry as a whole, but for video games, it’s meant hundreds of very talented and valuable people losing their jobs.

American Horror Story: Delicate is obviously pulling from a variety of sources: It’s based on Danielle Valentine’s book Delicate Condition, but its first half is full of nods to Dead Ringers and Rosemary’s Baby. This isn’t anything new — throughout the good seasons, the bad seasons, and (most frequently) the desperately uneven sequences, American Horror Story has pulled liberally and chaotically from the horror genre. It’s a series that can be almost hauntingly unreliable. However, even at its most unstable points, there is one thing that AHShas always been able to rely on: allowing certain actresses to let their freak flags fly.

Sega Of America employees have become the first a major US video games studio to ratify a union contract. The contract covers guarantees minimum yearly pay increases for around 150 staff through 2026.

Sega Europe is going through some major restructuring, and as a result, it is laying off about 240 developers and letting Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment spin off as an independent company.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is an uncomfortable film for many reasons — most of them deliberate. The title spells this intention out plain as day. The film’s protagonist, a biracial Black sculptor named Aren (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves co-star Justice Smith), tiptoes through an art gallery — and his own life — as though he were perpetually walking across eggshells, consciously and unconsciously agonizing under the weight and expectations of the white gaze. Incapable of asserting the value of his work as an artist or his worth as a person — or simply unwilling to — he radiates an aura of discomfort that immediately draws the attention of Roger (David Alan Grier), a kindly older Black man who just so happens to be, you guessed it, a “Magical Negro.”

Sega of America officially has its first union.

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Recent reports have suggested that Nintendo of America underwent significant restructuring, resulting in the layoff of approximately 120 contractors. Apparently, this move is part of an effort to reorganize the testing operations at Nintendo's Washington state headquarters.

Workers at Sega of America, a division of Sega Sammy Holdings Inc., have officially ratified their union contract, as reported by Bloomberg. This makes it one of the first major North American video-game companies to take this step, which could bode well for future organized labor pushes in the industry.