Welcome back to another quick roundup of video games business and industry news relevant for the MMO genre.
Richard Garriott: Apparently, the former icon of Ultima Online and former boss of Shroud of the Avatar is following up his trip to space and trip to the North Pole with a… trip to the bottom of the sea. No news on his trip to actually finish SOTA or compensate backers.
Team Fortress 2: Valve’s shooter was overrun by racist bots for months, and now the company is finally going to do something about it, specifically in the form of blocking some new accounts from using chat in matchmaking modes. “Work is ongoing to mitigate the use of new and free accounts for abusive purposes,” the most recent patch notes say. Of course, whether this is effective long-term or not is up in the air, as the new measures are apparently causing problems for legitimate players and being circumvented by the worst of the bots. (h/t GIBiz, Kotaku)
COVID-19: Square-Enix announced today that its Stay Home & Play campaign has pulled in over $2.4M for charities “working to address a variety of needs from food insecurity to homelessness” induced by the novel coronavirus across North America and Europe.
Stadia: Yes, Stadia still exists – in fact, Elder Scrolls Online just launched on it. This week, Google dropped the price to $100 for the Premiere Edition bundle, down from $130, although that’s apparently just to make up for the fact that no longer includes the Pro trial, which is now free anyway.
