Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news.
Theorycraft: Could you found a new games studio on $37.5M? Yeah, probably. A bunch of veteran devs are going for it, with a pedigree spanning League of Legends, Destiny, Overwatch, Valorant, Halo, Dota 2, and more. The fledgling company raised that nice chunk of change from investors, including NetEase, which has been all over western investment in the last few years. We don’t know anything about what they’re actually making yet, but it’s a pretty safe bet it’ll be online and competitive.
My.Games: It was a great financial year for Mail.ru, whose revenue is more than one third generated by online games publisher My.Games, which runs games you’ve most definitely heard of, including Skyforge, Allods Online, and Conqueror Online. Revenues for the company overall were up 21.2% in 2020, and the company expects growth of about that much again in 2021.
FIFA fixin: Remember that class action lawsuit gamers had filed against EA alleging that it was using its patented “dynamic difficulty adjustment” system to essentially fix FIFA Ultimate Team games? Players believed that EA was deploying the system to tweak match outcomes and thereby influence purchases. Well, apparently EA wasn’t actually doing it after all, and in fact it managed to convince the plaintiffs to drop the case before it really even went anywhere. “Our clear statements were recently challenged in a lawsuit that alleged we did, in fact, use DDA in Ultimate Team modes,” EA says. “We’re pleased to share that the plaintiffs have now dismissed their case. We provided them with detailed technical information and access to speak with our engineers, all of which confirmed (again) that there is no DDA or scripting in Ultimate Team modes. This is the right result.”
Roblox: Finally, we come to Roblox, the kid-friendly-ish multi-game, which is running another crossover with real life today and through next week in the form of an in-game concert and launch party. The star of this particular show is musical act Why Don’t We, which will perform tonight at 7 p.m. EST and then again several more times in repeat acts throughout the weekend.
