Pandemic News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Sony’s said that PS5 will “attack” the all-important Christmas shopping period this year, as it seeks to meet lofty holiday sales targets and outpace its predecessor, the PS4. While the company’s latest console has been a huge success, it’s first two years were impeded by stock shortages caused by the pandemic. With those issues now overcome, it intends to really establish its authority on the generation this fall.

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It’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie and, as it turns out, fans were eager to come back for more of Panem’s most brutal game show/mechanism of totalitarian control. The newest entry in the series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has put up an impressive box office performance so far, earning well over $100 million and going strong into its third week. But with so many other big IP movies bombing at the box office this year, it begs the question: Are other franchises releasing too many movies?

Dishonored fans may want to tune in to Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards 2023 event, which is due to air on December 7 at 7:30 PM ET / 4:30 PM PT / 12:30 AM GMT across all major streaming services and social platforms.

It's been nearly four years since Nvidia's original GeForce RTX 3060 first launched and despite the extra technology advancements brought in by the Ada Lovelace architecture, the evergreen mid-range card is still a popular choice. And now it looks like third-party vendors will keep on churning out new RTX 3060 models, with lower prices, thanks to a continued stream of chips from Nvidia.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is drawing ever nearer, and at today’s PC Gaming Show, GSC Game World delivered a new story trailer for the game. The big news, is that the trailer features none other than Strider, a key character from the previous entry in the series, STALKER: Call of Pripyat. We also get a variety of other hints that this isn’t a narrative reboot – this game will be carrying on the story from past games, so make sure your STALKER lore is in order before you jump in. You can check out the new STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl story trailer, below.

It's been close to eight years since the release of Crashlands, a top-down action-exploration-crafting game about an interstellar truck driver who crash-lands on an alien planet, where she makes friends (and enemies), builds stuff, and sets things right in the world, all in a relentless quest to get back to work. That means the time is just about right for Crashlands 2, which is also a game about an interstellar truck driver who crash-lands on an alien planet and all the rest of it—the same trucker wrecking it on the same planet, in fact. Can you believe this could happen twice?

Kids in the United States really want video game gifts for Christmas, according to survey results published on Nov. 20 by the Electronic Software Association. Video game-related gifts top wish lists — just eking out asks for money, clothes, and non-games electronics. But of the kids surveyed, 39% of kids plan to ask for game subscriptions, followed by consoles (38%), gear and accessories (32%), in-game currency (29%), and physical video games (22%).

The last few months have seen some incredibly low prices on memory and storage products, particularly SSDs. That's great for consumers but not so for manufacturers, who have been struggling to turn a profit. That looks set to flip. The prices of DRAM and NAND chips are on the rise, and that means the bargain bonanza is likely coming to an end.

People did a lot of things to pass time during the early pandemic lockdowns: learn to play the guitar, make sourdough starter, spray their groceries with disinfectant. Among those popular pandemic activities was identifying murderous space goons in Among Us, and if you've set the social deduction game aside since then, you might be interested to know that there's still lots of activity around it—most recently, a collaboration with a bunch of big indie games.

Circle March 22, 2024 on your calendars, folks, because we have a certified Barbenheimer gaming moment coming up, with Dragon's Dogma 2 and Princess Peach: Showtime! set to launch on the same day.

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser left the studio in 2020 and founded a new operation in 2021 called Absurd Ventures. It turns out that he's brought some heavyweight former Rockstars with him to the new gig: As noted by French site Begeek (via Stephen Totilo), Rockstar's former vice-president of writing Michael Unsworth joined in October as Absurd Ventures' head of story and creative management, and former writer and producer Lazlow Jones is onboard as executive producer.

Today, Gearbox Publishing and Blackbird Interactive (Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Crossfire: Legion, Minecraft Legends) have revealed the final PC system requirements for Homeworld 3.

ReedPop is 'investigating the potential sale' of its Gamer Network business.

Valve boss Gabe Newell is headed to court. A court order filed on November 16 (via Gamesindustry.biz) says Newell is required to testify in person in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between Wolfire Games and Valve so the plaintiffs in the case can «adequately assess» his credibility.

As Black Friday 2023 rages on and the pandemic and supply-chain induced price spike for all things PC related all but fades from memory, I can't help but notice some good deals on gaming monitors. Some very good deals, indeed.

I've been wading through all the Black Friday deals guides, and have picked out the very best stocking fillers for under $50. Why? Because I feel your pain.

Layoffs have been one of the defining events of the games industry this year, with thousands of jobs being cut across dozens of companies, all attempting to slash costs as the rapid economic growth of the pandemic years comes screeching to a halt. No company is more emblematic of both these extremes than Embracer Group. In the last few years, Embracer has embarked upon a frenzied spending spree, snapping up studios like Gearbox, Crystal Dynamics Eidos Montreal, and many more, all apparently to stack the decks in a deal with an unknown partner worth at least $2 billion.

Earlier this month, Agnitio Capital founder Shum Singh hosted a panel at the Montreal International Games Summit to discuss the state of mergers and acquisitions in the games industry, and opened the presentation talking about how the pandemic boom fueled incredible M&A activity a couple years ago and gave everyone a story of some founder they knew who sold a studio for an unexpectedly generous valuation.

All Elite Wrestling is having yet another big week in its promotions life, including some welcome news on the video game front via AEW Fight Forever. By that, we speak of how Season 2 of the game’s DLC has arrived, and with its arrival comes the debut of The Acclaimed! Max Caster and Anthony Bowens are ready to make the “mic drop” and rap their way to victory over all the other AEW competitors, and so if you’ve been waiting for your chance to “scissor your way to victory,” this is your chance. Yes, we’re hyping them up quite a bit, but this is a very special team in AEW’s history.

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XFX SPEEDSTER RX 6800 | 16GB GDDR6 | 3840 shaders | 2,105MHz boost |$459.99$369.99 at Amazon (save $90)A Radeon RX 6800 vanilla for $400? Get. Out. People were paying four of five times this much for one of these during the height of the pandemic and crypto craze. This 16GB, 256-bit or a pathetic 128-bit 8GB RTX 4060 Ti for around the same price? Forget it. 

There are plenty of pros and cons at the box office this week. We’ll start with the good news. The Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, opened with a decent but not spectacular $44 million, enough to propel the Francis Lawrence-directed pic to No. 1 domestically, per Deadline.

Most people watching the surreal A24 movie Dream Scenario will think of it as a project tailor-made for Nicolas Cage. It’s exactly the kind of oddity he likes — a character-driven, high-concept story that lets Cage exercise both sides of his acting personality: the quiet, soulful side he brought to films like Leaving Las Vegas andPig, and the manic, shouty one that makes him go viral in films like Mom and Dad or The Wicker Man. It’s hard to imagine Dream Scenario working without Cage. But as writer-director Kristoffer Borgli pointed out after the movie’s secret screening at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, it nearly was made without him — Adam Sandler was originally cast in the lead role.

In June 2020, I found my life steadily unraveling. While quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt besieged by cages: my house, where my entire family lived in suffocatingly close proximity; my room, which, thanks to Zoom, had become an ad hoc auditorium for various professors; and my body, whose masculinity felt increasingly alien. I had successfully avoided interrogating my gender for months, but that changed when I watched Steven Universe.

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One of the biggest joys about the “Creating Games” channel that Masahiro Sakurai hosts is that we learn not just about the games he’s made or the insights into other titles that he has, but we get to learn about his “creative process.” Past videos have highlighted how he views “gaming concepts” and what he feels is the true “essence” of video games as a whole. To that end, the latest video of his series touches on Super Smash Bros Ultimate in a way you likely didn’t expect: his supervising role. Specifically, how he surprises and “touches up” certain things with art to showcase how it should be changed.

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You can even save big on a World of Warcraft-themed edition of the popular board game.

Amazon’s Black Friday selection of board games trends this year toward the classics, with deep discounts on gateway games like Catan and 7 Wonders. But there are a few newer items up available for less as well — including the return of some titles previously only available via crowdfunding.

Content note: This story contains discussions of children being propositioned for sexual actions and receiving sexual messages. 

Human beings are so freaking weird, in the best possible way—particularly when it comes to games like Old School Runescape. We're capable of finding tasks that seem both impossible and pointless, then seeing them through because, as monkfish maniac AvengedKalas says, «it wasn't a matter of if but a matter of when.»

505 Games parent company Digital Bros is cutting its global workforce by 30 per cent.

Even vampires deserve treats. One of the many sacrifices that people make in exchange for eternal life in vampire lore is flavor. They can only eat one thing for the rest of their elongated lives, and it’s a metallic, salty, sinister thing. We all know this. We accept this. But vampires shouldn’t have to give up texture, too. So, in 2013, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch was brave enough to create a vampire with the vision to turn that blood into something good to eat: Eve and her blood Popsicles in Only Lovers Left Alive.

The videogame industry continues to be plagued by layoffs as 505 Games parent company Digital Bros has announced plans to eliminate roughly 30% of its total workforce. The company said the cuts are necessary because, simply put, gamers prefer sequels and remakes to brand-new games, and so that's what it's going to focus on.

Pushing the limits of stubbornness and inside jokes, one Old School RuneScape player has spent thousands of hours over several real-life years manually catching one million of the same fish, to the amazement (and concern) of the MMO's community.

505 Games’ parent company Digital Bros has said that it expects to cut approximately 30% of its workforce.

I recently sat down for an interview with Amelia Tyler, the voice of Baldur's Gate 3's many, many lines of narration. We talked about the Dark Urge, her favourite lines, and scaring the crap out of carers at an old people's home (hypothetically). But we also spoke about mental health, a subject Tyler's very transparent about.

Recently, a group of modders released their own Community Patch for Starfield, representing a collaboration working to improve the studio’s new IP. Creative fans have crafted mods left, right, and center since the game’s release, and that’s without official modding support from Bethesda.

Do you remember Omegle? It launched in 2009 as a chat service with a twist: Instead of picking a server to join or people to talk to, users were randomly paired up for one-on-one chats with anonymous strangers from around the world. That sure sounds like a terrible idea, doesn't it? And sure enough, racism and discrimination, pornography, and child abuse were all persistent problems the site faced. Yet it continued to operate for more than 14 years, until earlier this week when site founder Leif K-Brooks announced that he's pulled the plug.

The day Overwatch League fans have braced for has finally come. Yesterday, OverActive Media, parent company for the Toronto Defiant, confirmed its exit from the Overwatch League. The company announced that as a part of its agreement with Activision Blizzard, it would receive a $6 million termination fee, thereby ending all its commitments to the League. This confirms that a majority of teams have met and voted to terminate their agreements with the League, with each team owner receiving a termination fee. The result is that the Overwatch League is finally ending after six seasons.

Take-Two's CEO believes some companies "overbuilt" during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why we're seeing many layoffs this year.

Goth fashion isn’t new, but fashion associated with the vampire scene has seen a resurgence as the vampire has once again grown in popularity through the success of the 2022 adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, as well as the Castlevania franchise seeing a resurgence with its Netflix series. Once again, the vampire has permeated the mainstream, sinking its fangs into an entirely new generation, coupled with an interest in historical fashion and what this timeless creature has come to represent. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, sometime in 2021, while cleaning out my wardrobe, I decided to dress like I could fit into one of Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania games.

Sony saw its overall corporate revenues rise 33% in the second fiscal quarter ended September 30, but it also saw its profits drop 31% due in part to the long actor’s strike.

Earlier this year, Activision Blizzard expressed doubt about the long-term future of the Overwatch League, and said its efforts to maintain the city-based pro esports league "may prove unsuccessful." That has turned out to be the case, as Activision confirmed today that the Overwatch League as we know it is finished.

After months of uncertainty, Blizzard is officially ending the Overwatch League as it transitions into "evolving competitive Overwatch in a new direction."

Free Radical Design, the studio best known for the Timesplitters series, is in danger of closing down a second time. Per VGC, the Nottingham-based developer is at risk due to the current restructuring program of its parent company, Embracer.

I’ve been playing board games for well over a decade now, and have amassed a huge collection of games. Add to that the access to games I have because of my gaming group, and I’ve had the privilege of playing hundreds of games. Cooperative games have always been something I enjoy, so in this article we will look at my top 3 cooperative board games.

Black Friday may still be a few weeks off, but retailers like Amazon and Target are eager to let you get a head start on your holiday shopping for video games, board games, and books. Regardless of where you decide to shop, the only rule applies is that when you purchase three eligible items, one of the items of equal or lesser value will be free. This promotion includes dozens of products, but we’ve hand-picked a few highlights for you to check out.

Katmai Tech aims to revolutionize the way we do remote work with a new 3D virtual office platform. And today it is launching version 1.0 of its product, Virtual Office.

PlayStation finally confirmed the rumors about a new PS5 model were true last month, unveiling a newer, slimmer model of its latest console. That model will be available to buy later this week, almost exactly three years after the launch of the original console, with a disc version and a digital version to choose from. It seems some retailers are preparing for a similar onslaught to the one that made PS5s very hard to find in 2020 as at least one listing for the console is already ready to go.

Daybreak is the newest release from Pandemic creator Matt Leacock. He’s teamed up with co-designer Matteo Menapace and publisher CMYK (Monikers,Wavelength, Lacuna) to deliver a board game that is as optimistic as it is strategically compelling. Instead of racing to find a cure for global disease, players are tasked with working together to cut carbon emissions and stave off catastrophic climate change. The stakes are high as the world’s fate is racing toward cataclysm. While fun to play, the game ultimately leans more on fantasy than it does real-world approaches to solving a rapidly accelerating climate crisis.

India's viewing patterns have shifted from family viewing to personalised content consumption which is here to stay, as per Taiwanese display solutions company BenQ.

Baby Bezos

We have some monster hits in video games this season as a lot of titles have been released as companies finally recover from the slowdown in game development due to the pandemic.

BlizzCon returns to the Anaheim Convention Center in California this weekend for the first time in four years.

November 2 has emerged as an important day for artificial intelligence, as new developments in the field of governance and pop culture have dominated the news. In the first incident, a new Beatles song was released after 45 years with the help of AI today. The song titled ‘Now and Then' can be heard on streaming platforms now. In another news, the UK PM Rishi Sunak compared risks associated with AI to the likes of pandemics and nuclear war. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.

Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 main character has been revealed, and that character is Phyre. Phyre has been a vampire since the 17th century, and has settled in Seattle to influence the power structures. Outside of the name, players will pick everything about Phyre from gender, clan, the blood diet, behaviours, and outfits. Every character design decision will impact how Seattle’s denizens react to Phyre.

In today's technological world, owning gadgets such as laptops, smartphones, computers, and others has become necessary. After the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the whole world has shifted to a hybrid environment, be it handling businesses, schools, colleges, etc. Therefore, laptops are one of the devices that are crucial in keeping up with today's technological demands.

AMD has released its third quarter financial results. Although the company saw year-on-year growth in revenue, gross profit and earnings per share, the results were not viewed favorably by Wall Street, with AMD shares falling by nearly 5% before recovering later in the trading day. Revenue was up by 4% to $5.8 billion year-on-year, while gross profits rose by 17% to $2.75 billion. The four major Data Center, Client, Gaming and Embedded segments saw a mix of results. 

Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 main character has been revealed, and that character is Phyre. Phyre has been a vampire since the 17th century, and has settled in Seattle to influence the power structures. Outside of the name, players will pick everything about Phyre from gender, clan, the blood diet, behaviours, and outfits. Every character design decision will impact how Seattle’s denizens react to Phyre.

White picket fences are out; 12-foot-tall skeletons from Home Depot are in.

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West launches Nov. 3, and is currently available to pre-order from Amazon, Asmodee, and other online retailers. The $119.99 legacy game is designed to support a maximum of five players over twelve games, with each session lasting anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes.

Memory provider Western Digital is spinning off its flash business into a new company that’ll adopt its own name. 

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A former Bethesda veteran says that all decisions at the studio “run through” director Todd Howard.

In the race to rebound from a two-year slowdown in spending on cloud computing, Microsoft Corp. is pulling ahead of its chief rivals, Amazon.com Inc. and Google.

With just over a week to go until this year's BlizzCon — the show's first in-person event since 2019 — Blizzard has shared a full broadcast schedule detailing everything that'll be available to watch online as the two-day convention unfolds.

Eric Lempel, the SVP & Head of Global Marketing at Sony Interactive Entertainment, has been discussing all things PlayStation 5 in a new interview.

Sony has said it expects one of its best seasons ever for console sales this Christmas, as PlayStation 5 stock is now in «full supply» for the first time since the PS5 launched in November 2020.

Generative artificial intelligence has become a major discussion point in 2023, but we generally hear about its consumer-focused or business-focused applications. However, generative AI is not just limited to this space as it has made a strong impact in academics and research fields as well. A new report has highlighted that a group of researchers have developed an AI tool that can potentially predict deadly viruses before they can appear. This model can be crucial in predicting COVID-19-like pandemic situations ahead of time, and enable governments and the healthcare industry to be better prepared.

The Yakuza series, now renamed Like a Dragon, is known for minigames that are fun enough to yank attention away from the gangster melodrama for hours and hours. Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold more than 40 million copies since 2020 and was fun enough to yank attention away from everything else during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. You can probably see where this is going.

Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda's structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard's stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it's grown bigger over the years. To be fair to Howard, though, it seems like that's in spite of his own wishes.

Roll7 has been a remote working studio for seven years now, and as such the OlliOlli and Rollerdome developer might have a little more experience than most in how to make the set-up work.

Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 launched on PS5 this week, starting a new chapter in one of PlayStation’s flagship series. The importance of the game for the console cannot be understated, as it is one of the biggest current-gen PlayStation exclusives to date. A recent Bloomberg report suggests that Peter and Miles’ latest adventure could be the key to the kind of PS5 sales growth Sony is looking for.

US regulators are set on Thursday to reinstate rules aimed at ensuring that everything on the internet is equally accessible — a principle known as net neutrality that has stoked debate and controversy across technology and telecom industries for more than two decades.

Ubisoft has reorganized its North American studios around a single core location: Montreal, Canada. 

According to Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, a market crash caused by artificial intelligence is “nearly unavoidable.” Like many other regulators, he has called for new regulations on AI to prevent such dire scenarios. Such fears are considerably exaggerated. It is true that AI might cause a market crash — just as many events, some of them quite arbitrary or unexpected, have led to market downturns. On net, though, AI probably lowers the chances of a market crash.

Roblox is mandating most remote employees return to office working three days a week, or take a severance package.