President News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

An attendee of GDC 2024 says that her drink was spiked at a hotel bar, but authorities refused to investigate the matter. Snow Rui, president of the game publisher Hooded Horse, says that she was met with "complete indifference" from emergency services, with police reluctant to investigate and the hospital she was admitted to refusing to run tests for commonly used date rape drugs.

On the set of Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland's latest movie, authenticity was key. Civil War, an action-packed film that follows a near-future version of the US as it's torn apart by a tyrannical president, seceded states, and violence, used real tanks, real weapons, and real jets to bring its warfare to life.

A few weeks ago, Toys for Bob unexpectedly split from Activision and Microsoft to become an independent developer once again. However, even in that announcement, the studio based in Novato, California mentioned that they were exploring a partnership with Microsoft for their next game.

Final Fantasy 15's director believes that game developers should familiarize themselves with generative AI.

In 2019, Arkane founder Raphaël Colantonio left the studio after nearly two decades. During his tenure, he served as president and co-creative director, working on games like Dishonored and Prey. That same year, Colantonio teamed up with former Arkane exec Julien Roby to open WolfEye Studios.

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

Chris Paulson, a former executive at Activision Blizzard, has joined the team at Skybound Games, a division of The Walking Dead company Skybound Entertainment. Paulson will serve as executive vice president and general manager of games publishing.

AI roundup: South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol highlights the risk of AI to democracy at a global summit. Yeol talked about how fake news and disinformation are being spread with the use of AI and how it could create a big threat. In other news, Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset with the ability to support on-device generative AI. Know more about such AI news today, March 18, 2024.

There is a moment that looms large over everything else in the pilot of Apple TV’s post-Civil War drama, Manhunt, a conversation that will haunt Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) for the rest of his life. He’s hard at work in his office, putting together the plans for Reconstruction, when Abraham Lincoln (Midnight Mass’ Hamish Linklater) comes in tossing a baseball and invites him to the theater tonight (Ulysses S. Grant flaked to hang with his wife). Stanton is intrigued, drawn in by his friend’s easy charm, but ultimately backs out — he also owes his wife a night together. And so Lincoln strolls out, bemoaning that he’ll just be hanging out with Mary’s friends as he sees Our American Cousin.

Turtle Beach, the accessories giant best known for its gaming headsets, has acquired PDP for the value of $118 million.

Behaviour Interactive has acquired fellow Canadian firm Fly Studio.

In today's Patch 10.2.6 announcement, Blizzard confirmed that Dragonflight Season 4 will only launch «several weeks» into the patch cycle. This means that Season 4 will likely be released around late April. Once Patch 10.2.6 goes live on March 19th, we will have a Season 4 PTR cycle, as previewed by Executive Producer and Vice President for WoW Holly Longdale. Dragonflight Season 4 Mythic+ Updates

Old emails uncovered in a lawsuit against Valve have revealed that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was previously very disgruntled with the changes to Steam revenue splits announced in late 2018, and went as far as to call Valve "assholes" in a message to president Gabe Newell.

In a rare display of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill that seeks to ban TikTok in the United States or force its sale to a non-Chinese entity. The newly advanced legislation poses another in a long list of hurdles for TikTok's stateside ambitions.

The United States House of Representatives has passed the “TikTok bill” that would effectively ban the short-form video-sharing app if owner ByteDance doesn’t divest. Representatives voted on Wednesday on the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, pushing it forward with a majority vote of 352 to 65. The bill is expected to move onto the Senate for another vote if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) brings it to the floor. President Biden said he’d sign the bill should it reach his desk.

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

OpenAI lambasted Elon Musk's allegations against it, saying in a court filing that the billionaire entrepreneur's claims “rest on convoluted — often incoherent — factual premises.” 

Silent Hill 2 has been rated in Korea.

Since his tumultuous takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has made an unabashed turn to the right politically, defying the orthodoxy that Silicon Valley is a citadel of well-heeled liberals beholden to Democrats. Long considered non-identifiable ideologically, Musk's politics are now hardline right wing as he uses his platform (now called X) to stoke the themes cherished by Fox News, conservative talk radio and far right movements across the West.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will return to the ChatGPT-maker's board along with three new directors, the company said on Friday. Below is a timeline of the events in a tumultuous few months for the artificial intelligence company. Date Event Nov. 17, OpenAI board fires CEO Sam Altman and 2023 President Greg Brockman quits. Mira Murati named as interim CEO Nov. 18, Altman's firing was over a "breakdown in 2023 communication between Sam and the board," and not "malfeasance", COO Brad Lightcap says in an internal memo Early investor Khosla Ventures says it wants Altman back at OpenAI, "but will back him in whatever he does next" 

In a recent interview with The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini revealed that the anime-focused streaming service was experimenting with implementing AI-generated subtitles for the service’s library of titles. Purini’s proposition was that AI could expedite the workflow of subtitling and closed captioning in order to launch episodes “as close to the Japanese release as possible” for worldwide anime fans.

Hasbro and Magic: The Gathering/Dungeons & Dragons parent company Wizards of the Coast announced that it has "about 40" video games in the works and that it hopes to collaborate with Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios again as it pushes further into the medium.

How do you win the prize for outstanding performance in the Junon Parade in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? After you have worked out how to recruit all Midgar 7th Infantry Units for the Junon Parade, you can put them to work and win the top prize. As part of our Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth guide, we're going to reveal how to win the prize for outstanding performance in the Junon Parade. Doing so unlocks the Stealing the Show Trophy.

Fortnite Chapter 5, Season 2 will seemingly introduce flying mounts to the game, as originally leaked by dataminers and now teased by the official Twitter account.

Entertainment giant Warner Bros is still planning on focusing on live-service titles in spite of a lacklustre reception to Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.

Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann doesn't think he will be in the business of making video games forever, at least not at the scale we would expect from the storied creative. He is best known for his work on both Uncharted and The Last of Us; in fact, it was the experience of adapting the latter for HBO, something he «really enjoyed», along with moving into a stage of life where «your kids are number one», which prompted thoughts of a sea change.

Executive Producer and Vice President for WoW, Holly Longdale, posted on X (formerly Twitter) about lessons learned from players waiting for Patch 10.2.6. Blizzard revealed one month ago that Patch 10.2.6 would not have a PTR and is coming in March.

In the seven years since its release, the Nintendo Switch has become a beloved piece of hardware. Not only is it Nintendo’s best-selling console, it’s one of the most popular consoles of all time. It’s also the console that boosted Nintendo’s reputation after the poor reception of Wii U. In 2021, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, looking back on the Switch, said it was a “make or break” console for Nintendo.

Junon is dangerous territory for Cloud and his friends in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. The city is already one of Shinra’s major hubs, but matters are made even worse when the president himself is set to arrive to host a parade. This presents a perfect opportunity to don some disguises and hide in plain sight among the ranks, though things get a little out of control when you are recruited to lead a team of troops to perform in a rhythm minigame. You could brush this off and just get by, but where’s the honor in that? Show the president your stuff by making the best parade formation possible.

The Last of Us director and Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann has described the studio's next project as "really ambitious" and is under no illusion that bringing it to life will be easy.

Apple has unveiled its latest MacBook Air lineup, featuring the groundbreaking M3 chip that propels the laptop's performance to new heights. The M3 chip enhances the MacBook Air's capabilities, making it up to 60% faster than the M1 model and a staggering 13 times faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, the sports analytics crowd may be outnumbered. The people who killed the sacrifice bunt and turned NBA games into a 3-point shooting contest aren't quite sure what will happen when AI fully invades sports — whether in the front office or on the field.

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

Entertainment veteran John Scarpone has been hired by Sega as its new global head of transmedia.

Naughty Dog is one of the big players when it comes to gaming studios. It has given us timeless titles from Jak and Daxter to The Last of Us. The President of Naughty Dog, Neil Druckmann, recently sat down for an interview with the rapper Logic to discuss their career trajectories and their plans for the future.

The campaign to defend a single planet, Mort, from Helldivers 2's encroaching Automaton threat saw players die "over 10 million" times in the past two days alone. 

Sega has hired former Disney and Scopely executive Justin Scarpone to lead its transmedia strategy.

SEGA has announced the appointment of Justin Scarpone, former executive of The Walt Disney Company and Scopely, as executive vice president and head of Global Transmedia Group, effective April 1. The establishment of a Global Transmedia Group will allow SEGA to advance its transmedia strategy across its portfolio of intellectual property, such as Persona, Like a Dragon, Angry Birds, and more in the coming years.

Apple Inc. shareholders rejected a labor-backed request for an artificial intelligence transparency report, which would have delved into whether the company is using the technology ethically. 

Sony Interactive Entertainment is cutting around 900 members of staff from its workforce.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced today that the corporation will cut around 8% of its workforce, or more than 900 jobs. Also, in the announcement, they stated that PlayStation Studios London will be closing.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is laying off around 900 workers, or 8% of the company, outgoing president and CEO Jim Ryan said in a news release published on Tuesday. Employees from all regions — North America; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; Japan; and Asia-Pacific — are impacted by the cuts, including several PlayStation development studios. London Studio, the in-house team that created the SingStar series, will close entirely, Ryan said.

PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst has confirmed that some projects have been cancelled in the wake of layoffs across Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Sony is the latest company in the video game industry to announce massive layoffs in 2024. We’ve learned that Sony Interactive Entertainment is letting go of about 900 people across several studios; PlayStation’s London Studio will shut down as a result.

Sony is laying off 900 people, around 8% of its gaming workforce, outgoing president Jim Ryan has announced.

PlayStation has announced the intention to lay off roughly 8% of its current staff, affecting employees at multiple first-party studios around the world.

Just a few days after potentially teasing a new game in the series, Nier Automata's director has followed up with another odd teaser.

The Nintendo Switch successor will reportedly launch in March 2025, a delay that's down to the prevention of 'scalping.'

Nier's series director has potentially teased a third game in the action-RPG saga.

Dark Souls creator and the president of developer FromSoftware, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has been speaking aboutDark Souls 2’s impact on the series, and says that he’s not sure “how or if” the series would have progressed in the manner it did without the divisive second installment.

FromSoftware president and Bloodborne’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has acknowledged the demand for the popular 2015 action-role-playing game to be remade, but hasn’t confirmed if one is ever going to happen. 

Earlier this week, AMD announced organizational changes to its sales leadership with the promotion of Neil Spicier & Omar Fakhri to CVP roles.

FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has commented on the turbulent state of the video game industry with regards to layoffs, saying his current vision for the company is expansion.

Nintendo has released Mother 3 on Switch Online, but only in Japan.

Realistic AI-generated images and voice recordings may be the newest threat to democracy, but they're part of a longstanding family of deceptions. The way to fight so-called deepfakes isn't to develop some rumor-busting form of AI or to train the public to spot fake images. A better tactic would be to encourage a few well-known critical thinking methods — refocusing our attention, reconsidering our sources, and questioning ourselves.

Game developer Build a Rocket Boy has unfortunately announced a number of layoffs, which will affect the developer globally. 

We don’t know about you, but it feels like the PS5 has barely broken a sweat yet. Despite being over three years old, the system’s lifespan has been hugely impacted by the pandemic, which has seen its first-party software cadence slow to a crawl and its early years massively affected by hardware shortages. It’s a little odd to hear Sony talk about the system entering the “latter half” of its lifecycle, then.

Presidents Day Nintendo Switch deals are here, and we're seeing some particularly comprehensive sales hitting the shelves this week. You can save on everything from Zelda to Yoshi right now - but the real gems are the recent releases. 

The OnePlus 12R recently launched at an attractive price of $599.99 in the U.S., offering impressive hardware for the money that buyers were being charged for. The company also marketed the 256GB ‘price to performance’ handset as sporting the faster UFS 4.0 standard, but thanks to a series of tests, it was found that OnePlus was lying to its customers, as it was using the slower UFS 3.1 memory. To make up for its false advertising, the smartphone maker is now issuing refunds to anyone who picked up the 256GB storage variant.

Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.

Hell is more accessible than ever before — Diablo 4 has been revealed as coming to the PC Game Pass on March 28! Officially revealed during an episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Diablo 4 will debut on the PC Game Pass on March 28. Players will be able to journey in Sanctuary even more easily than before — which was originally announced back in 2022, during a statement regarding the future of Game Pass after the Microsoft and ABK merger. While Diablo 4 is the first Activision Blizzard King title to debut on PC Game Pass, Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, had this to say regarding other titles:

The developer of Disco Elysium, ZA/UM, has reportedly laid off around a quarter of its staff.

Microsoft is going to be launching four titles in its line-up to other platforms in the near future.

The most recent Xbox Podcast with the CEO of Microsoft gaming, Phil Spencer, the president of gaming content and studios at Xbox, Matt Booty, and the president of Xbox, Sarah Bond, saw the three discuss the future of the gaming console but also how it would always stick to its roots. 

One of the most interesting details revealed in the latest episode of the Official Xbox Podcast was that Xbox Game Pass now has 34 million subscribers.

The last 10-days-or-so have been quite the roller coaster for Xbox fans. Team Green was thrown into turmoil earlier this month by rumors that everything from Starfield, to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, to even Gears of War may be going multiplatform. Granted, some of those rumors were later walked back, but still, the spectre of a third-party future with Xbox getting out of the hardware business was raised.

If it weren’t enough that Microsoft detailed its plans for bringing first-party titles to other platforms (which doesn’t include Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle), it also discussed its next-gen hardware. Xbox president Sarah Bond promised the “largest technical leap” in a hardware generation.

During today’s Xbox Business Update, Sarah Bond, president of Xbox at Microsoft, reaffirmed the gaming company’s commitment to hardware. She confirmed that Xbox is already looking ahead to its next console, which she teases will be a major technical leap.

Somehow it’s been just over three years since the Xbox Series X launched. But here we are! It’s not surprising that Microsoft is already looking ahead toward its fifth-generation console; these things take a long time to develop. But the company officially acknowledged development on Thursday in its Official Xbox Podcast, where Xbox president Sarah Bond said Microsoft is targeting “the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions they’re building.”

Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 4 will be the first new Activision Blizzard title to hit the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, head of Xbox president Sarah Bond announced Thursday during an episode of the Official Xbox Podcast. Diablo 4 will become available on March 28, Bond said, and it sounds like the first of multiple Activision and Blizzard-developed games bound for Game Pass.

Xbox president Sarah Bond has said the next-generation Xbox will mark the biggest jump in hardware capability we've ever seen from one console generation to the next.

A new report suggests that the threat of dozens of layoffs looms at ZA/UM, as the studio has canceled the development of a standalone expansion to its beloved RPG Disco Elysium.

Well, Xbox most definitely isn't exiting the console business any time soon, with today's business update absolutely squashing any speculation that Xbox Series X would be Microsoft's final gaming console.

It’s been confirmed that four games that were previously released as Xbox-exclusive titles are on the way to other platforms, although it’s not been explicitly confirmed which ones they are. 

The president of Xbox, Sarah Bond, has confirmed that the company is already looking forward to the next-generation of hardware, and aims to deliver “the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.”

Hell is more accessible than ever before — Diablo 4 has been revealed as coming to the PC Game Pass on March 28! Officially revealed during an episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Diablo 4 will debut on the PC Game Pass on March 28. Players will be able to journey in Sanctuary even more easily than before — which was originally announced back in 2022, during a statement regarding the future of Game Pass after the Microsoft and ABK merger. While Diablo 4 is the first Activision Blizzard King title to debut on PC Game Pass, Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, had this to say regarding other titles:

After finally securing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now bringing the company’s games under the Game Pass umbrella. Activision Blizzard titles will be heading to the Xbox Game Pass service, starting with Diablo IV this March.

Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM is set to lay off around a quarter of its staff and has also cancelled a Disco Elysium expansion, according to a new report.

During last week's rumored Xbox town hall meeting, Xbox President Sarah Bond reportedly told employees that every screen is an Xbox.

The upcoming boss of Sony's PlayStation, Hiroki Totoki, has said that bringing the company's first-party line-up to PC could be a way of improving its margins.