Game Developer News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

"Save scumming"—the practice of quickly reloading saves after an undesired result in a video game—brings out some really weird opinions on Al Gore's internet. Yes, it's usually not how a game is "intended" to be played, but it's a feature that only exists in single-player games where players are free to dictate how they spend their time without hurting anyone else. It literally doesn't hurt anyone why do people have such weird opinions about it we don't need to have a hot take on everything oh my god.

For Xbox boss Phil Spencer, the Xbox Series S is important to have out in the market. Talking to Eurogamer, Spencer was asked about that specific system and its place in both the console space currently and the game industry at large. 

NetherRealm's upcoming fighting game Mortal Kombat 1 will feature audio narration for in-game Fatalities. 

Approximately 50 employees have been laid off at BioWare today. 

Epic Games has begun a titular First Run program for third-party developers on the Epic Games Store. The aim, according to the developer, is to "give developers of any scale the opportunity to activate our global audience right at launch."

There's a new PlayStation device on the way, and its name is PlayStation Portal. 

Microsoft has agreed to give Ubisoft the cloud streaming rights to Call of Duty and all other Activision Blizzard titles releasing over the next 15 years in a bid to push its $68.7 billion merger through in the UK.

A new game publisher in the Midwest has started up, and it's fittingly called Midwest Games. 

Global development company Virtuos has opened a new studio in Prague to expand its engineering capabilities.

Trampoline Tales founder Dan Dilorio revealed the studio's most recent game, Luck Be a Landlord, has been banned across 13 countries on the Google Play Store. In his blog, Dilorio admitted to feeling "very aggravated" by those bans, which include the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Tunisia.

Charles Martinet is stepping back as the voice of Mario in Nintendo games.

Roblox Corp. has been hit with a class action complaint and accused of participating in an illegal gambling ring involving children.

Call of Duty developer Treyarch has bid farewell to studio design director David Vonderhaar. On LinkedIn, he wrote that he was departing the studio to pursue a "a rare and unique opportunity" and a currently unknown project.

It's official: Rovio is now a part of Sega. The Japanese developer fully completed its €706 million (or $775 million) acquisition of the Angry Birds studio. 

A week after Rockstar approved mods from Grand Theft Auto Online's roleplaying community, Take-Two has removed a mod for Grand Theft Auto V that featured AI-generated dialogue. 

Microsoft will close the Xbox 360 marketplace in July 2024, but says the closure won't affect the ability to play Xbox 360 games or DLC that have already been purchased.

2K confirmed its upcoming NBA 2K24 will come with two premium season passes. 

Rubblar sees you using a long rubber hand to steal things from twisty-turny environments while on a tight time limit. Players will need to use their stretchiness to pull their purloined items back in time before they get caught.

Embracer said its restructuring program is on track and confirmed it's quietly moving forward with studio closures.

NetEase has tapped Bioware veteran Rich Vogel to lead a new studio based in Austin, Texas.

This interview has been edited for clarity

In the latest episode of the Game Developer podcast (recorded at GDC Showcase, with our sibling organization GDC), we chatted with Charlie Cleveland, game director and CEO at Moonbreaker developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment, as well as the creator of Subnautica. We got very excited together about the power of collaboration tool Miro, the excitement of crunchy systems design and the nuances of random numbers, and the crucial importance of rapid prototyping and iterative design, even if the initial results aren't pretty.

Guild Wars 2 publisher NCSoft has developed and released a collection of AI language models called VARCO LLMs to help developers create new content including images, texts, and digital humans.

Prytania Media, the privately held triple-A studio cohort established by Undead Labs co-founders Jeff Strain and Annie Delisi Strain in 2021, has made some notable additions to its family.

Tango Gameworks' Hi-Fi Rush continues to grow, as it's now hit 3 million players. 

Valve has made some updates to Steam's minimum price thresholds that might impact developers selling games or DLC for $5 USD or less.

The summer of 2023 looks starkly different than the summer of 2020. Three years ago, protestors across the United States turned out by the thousands to protest the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police. Their activism was a reaction to the inequities inflicted on Black people in the United States—largely by the police, but also in almost every other aspect of civil society.

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Xbox has introduced another wrinkle to its player reporting system in the form of enforcement strikes. With the strikes, players will see tangible repercussions for wrongful misconduct on their individual records. 

Proper design documentation can be one of the most important elements of video game production. Without them, team members may struggle to stay on the same page when designing features, and development can run horribly awry. Many studios use Game Design Documents (GDDs) to communicate their vision for a game to other team members or stakeholders. Though the days of any sort of monolithic GDD format or design bible are long gone, they still have a place in many designers' and teams' methodologies.

Veteran Ubisoft scribe Drew Holmes has been appointed IP director of Far Cry.

According to a new report from Axios, the Savvy Games Group was the other party in Embracer's much-touted $2 billion deal that fell apart. 

IGN just released a video called “Baldur’s Gate 3 is causing some developers to panic.” You can watch it here if you haven’t. The video has gotten a lot of game developers upset, and has gotten a lot of gamers up in arms. The crux of the video is a negative reaction to a series of tweets by Xalavier Nelson Jr talking about how Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a reasonable bar for most RPGs going forward.

The Pokémon franchise may be winding down from its semi-annual release schedule. In a translated interview at ComicBook, The Pokémon Company's COO Takato Utsunomiya acknowledged that the company considering a change to its release cadence for the long-running series. 

Applicants at Roblox Corp. are being allowed to use Roblox as a platform for interviews. Per Axios, Roblox Corp. is allowing potential hires to use their avatars in the Roblox Career Center to hold virtual interviews for the start of the hiring process. 

Rockstar Games has made an interesting acquisition in its purchase of Cfx.re. The team isn't a game developer, but a group responsible for FiveM and RedM, two of the biggest online roleplay communities within respectively Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2. 

Game localization company Altagram has issued a lengthy apology for failing to credit its translators for their work on Baldur's Gate 3.

The saga of Overwatch 2 has been one of the stranger ones in Blizzard's history. If you run the game all the way back to its origins, you'll remember that it rose from the ashes of a cancelled MMORPG codenamed "Titan," became the 2016 hero shooter Overwatch that wetted Activision's appetite for an esports franchise, and morphed into a free-to-play live service game that was initially pitched as a standalone sequel.

After the monumental success of From Software's Dark Souls in 2010, many games sought to follow along with the growing popularity of challenging and stoically designed action RPGs—they came to be known as "soulslikes." One of the earliest soulslikes was 2014's Lords of the Fallen from developer Deck 13. Following a successful launch, publisher CI Games announced a sequel—though that game would take some time to see the light of day.

Composer Austin Wintory has a secret that might surprise you. For years, his work in games like Journey, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and Aliens Fireteam Elite has consisted of sweeping scores populated with orchestral swings and emotive choirs. You'd be forgiven for thinking his musical passions were strictly inspired by cinematic soundtracks or the symphony.

Gamesight CEO Adam Lieb has faced a strange challenge for the last few years while preparing marketing plans for clients: explaining why partnering with a VTuber might be one of the best ways to market their game on Twitch and other livestreaming services.

Baldur's Gate 3 is seemingly the latest high-profile release to launch with an incomplete set of credits.

Baldur's Gate 3's well-earned roaring success is making it the kind of overnight hit that was years (maybe a decade) in the making. Larian's experience with the Divinity series signaled that audiences were ready for a return of number-crunching role-playing games like the kind labeled as "computer role-playing game" in the '90s. (And lest we forget, Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity and Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun also laid the groundwork for genre revival).

According to Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick, the upcoming port for Rockstar North's Red Dead Redemption deserves to be priced at $50. 

Zoeti is a roguelite deckbuilding game that sees you fighting fantasy monstrosities with magical powers, all fueled by poker rules and hands. Playing for your life can be a bit more exciting than playing for money, after all.

Grand Theft Auto V is still performing above expectations and drove results at Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two, and all signs point to a sequel close on the horizon.

In this free GDC Vault video from 2010, then-EA designer Stone Librande (now a design lead at Riot) looks at the flaws of most traditional Game Design Documents (GDDs) and offers a solution for making extremely concise, readable one-page designs.

Classic Electronic Arts games like Dante's Inferno and Crysis 3 are going offline in the next several months. 

New Zealand's primary competition regulator, the Commerce Commission, has approved Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Baldur's Gate 3 is already performing "way beyond" the expectations of developer Larian.

Developer Ironmace revealed its upcoming RPG Dark and Darker will be published by Chaf Games. The studio referred to Chaf as its "official partner" on the game's Discord server, adding that it was "helping us prepare" for the game's launch. 

Nearly two years after being acquired by Unity, VFX company Wētā has established a new department focused on 2D and 3D art tools. 

Danish studio Campfire Cabal has reportedly been shut down by parent company Embracer Group.

Final Fantasy XVI failed to meet the high-end of Square Enix's sales expectations, according to company president Takashi Kiryu.

GameStop is ending support for its cryptocurrency wallet due to the "regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space."

Baldur's Gate 3 has topped 500,000 concurrent players on Steam in one day.

Sanzaru Games' Meta Quest game Asgard's Wrath stood out in a sea of first-person virtual reality combat games by mixing first-person hack & slash action with a host of powers inspired by Norse mythology. For Asgard's Wrath 2, the Meta-owned game studio sent its Norse heroes south, and set out to experiment with new mechanics that sell the power of godhood.

A recent update to the sales data section of Capcom's website reveals the Ōkami series has surpassed 4 million sold units. As of June 30, 2023, the long-dormant franchise has crossed the threshold despite not having a new entry in over a decade. 

Nintendo experienced a bumper quarter thanks to the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has been a hit for publisher EA, and the company hopes to further capitalize on that success by bringing the title to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom topped 18.5 million sales in under two months.

Discord has revealed that Xbox games will soon be able to be streamed directly onto its platform. 

Nintendo will resume network services for the Wii U versions of Splatoon and Mario Kart 8  on August 3 after an extended service period that lasted five months.

Live service franchises like FIFA helped publisher EA deliver record net bookings during the first quarter of the fiscal year.

IGF finalist We Are OFK (now also known as Pop. Love. Panic!) is a beautifully animated game/interactive series about a virtual indie pop band's origins. In this free GDC Vault video (embedded above) co-art director Nafisah Tung dives deep on how they and the team contributed to the style and personality of the characters. In the talk, they go from early concept art and storyboards through the nitty-gritty of specific lighting decisions and animation style in order to bring these vibrant personalities to life.

Creator and media critic Anita Sarkeesian revealed to Polygon that her organization Feminist Frequency is coming to an end. 

Remnant 2 has topped 1 million sales in one week, according to publisher Gearbox.

Game sales fell "below expectations" at Sega during the first quarter of the fiscal year.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick and company president Karl Slatoff will be paid a combined $72.3 million in compensation this year.

Hasbro thinks it's time for Activision Blizzard's Transformers games to come to Xbox Game Pass. At a recent Q&A with Transformer World 2005 at San Diego Comic-Con earlier in July, a spokesperson for the toy company was asked about older games in the series being re-released for newer consoles. 

Picross developer Jupiter says collaborating with Nintendo is becoming "more difficult than ever."

Fresh reports indicate Nintendo is planning to release a successor to the Switch during the second half of 2024.

Samantha Ryan, the veteran EA exec who led the studios behind the publisher's single-player and lifestyle franchises, has stepped down.

Blizzard Entertainment's newest update for Diablo IV has added an extra barrier to buying its premium battle pass. The change comes following recent controversy around the ease of buying said pass for the RPG's first in-game season. 

Over in Europe, the PlayStation 5 has received a mild price cut. On the UK's PlayStation Direct site, the standard edition of the console is now priced at £404.99 (or roughly $521), down from its original price of £479.99. 

GameStop has lost its CFO around two months after the departure of former CEO and president Matthew Furlong.

Owlcat Games has quickly u-turned on its decision to introduce an advertising tracking solution called AppsFlyer into Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous due to a fan backlash that surpassed its "worst expectations."

For Baldur's Gate III, Larian Studios used intimacy coordinators to help with its romantic scenes. In a recent interview with BBC, voice actors Devora Wilde (who voices Lae'zel) and Jennifer English (Shadowheart) revealed the coordinators were brought on to help actors feel more comfortable acting out the more amorous moments. 

In this insightful and honest talk about viral word game Wordle's first year at the New York Times (NYT), executive producer Zoe Bell outlines the core teachings she and her team came to from shepherding a viral game to a new platform and helping it grow. Bell goes through the first year of Wordle in the publication's possession chronologically, extolling the virtues of "first, do no harm," to the game, adding value to the experience, and overall deciding to "buy a game you love and treat it like you built it."

Tencent has made another acquisition, this time for Visual Arts. The two companies released a (translated)  joint statement confirming the deal, with Visual Arts stating that it will remain itself "and the staff will continue to do the things it wants to do."