games industry
Microsoft’s buyout of Activision-Blizzard gets full clearance from China
Microsoft has cleared yet another hurdle in its slow subsumption of Activision-Blizzard, as China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has completed its investigation of...
Mike Ybarra defends patent filing for AI art generator in Blizzard style
The extremely sticky wicket of AI art generation and its impact on multiple creative industries has now hit the higher echelons of Blizzard's executive...
Pokemon Go pushes back against ‘incorrect’ estimates that its revenue has dropped this year
Pokemon Go developer Niantic is a private company, which means that it doesn't share its quarterly financial reports with anyone since it's not being...
World of Warcraft producer claims Blizzard is bleeding talent and creating ‘crisis maps’ for feature releases
It would appear that another bout of brain drain is afflicting Blizzard as a whole and World of Warcraft in specific. One of the...
FTC finalizes fine for Fortnite’s dark patterns as Epic talks up NFT ‘games’ on EGS
Usually when people says things are going "pretty well," your first sympathetic instinct is to ask about what might be troubling them; those words...
Roblox confirms that it had $150M in Silicon Valley Bank, now shut down by regulators
We would love to be in the kind of position where seeing millions of dollars disappear registers an "everything is fine" response. That looks...
E3 2023 unveils plans for a week-long series of digital pre-event showcases starting June 11
Most gamers are now familiar that E3 is coming back this June in two flavors - one for industry pros, press, and influencers, and...
Congress is very disappointed in gaming’s response to extremism in games as the ESA downplays the problem
In mid-December, members of the US Congress sent signed letters to major game companies about what they're doing to combat the rise of online...
Sega plans to raise the salaries of its Japanese workforce starting in July, but they still fall short of national averages
At first blush, there's some good news coming out of Sega for its Japanese workforce, as the company announced plans to raise pay rates...
CWA asks European Commission to allow buyout of Activision-Blizzard and a ‘clear path to collective bargaining’
The multi-billion dollar buyout of Activision-Blizzard by Microsoft is going to undoubtedly make waves across the games industry, game platforms, and game developers. It's...
GDC’s State of the Games Industry survey once again demonstrates dev skepticism for metaverse and blockchain hokum
This year's State of the Game Industry from GDC - its 11th since beginning the project - delivers a range of insights from the...
Microsoft and Unity collectively shed over 10,000 employees in latest round of tech layoffs
Another round of layoffs are coming to both Microsoft and Unity. Both tech companies are dropping more employees from their respective workforces, with Unity...
No, Amazon is not trying to buy EA, probably
If your gaming-related social media feeds were full of breathless hot takes and panicked concern over rumors that Amazon was looking to buy up...
Rockstar devs call studio ‘a boys’ club transformed into a real company’ as it reels back crunch culture
Readers might recall a rather infamous episode related to Rockstar Games and the treatment of its devs during the creation of Red Dead Redemption...
Unity unveils plans to merge with app monetization platform ironSource in a $4.4B deal
Unity, the engine that powers a wide number of MMORPGs as well as other games, is hoping to improve its fiscal fortunes through a...
How video game player data collection processes have expanded outside of gaming
The EULA - aka the wall o' text that we all blitz past in order to get to play the MMORPG or multiplayer title...
GDC’s State of the Game Industry: NFTs, the metaverse, and more than half of game devs want to unionize
Ahead of the annual Game Developers Conference, GDC organizers poll industry workers and release it all in a state-of-the-industry wrapper, which has landed in...
Facebook commits to hiring 10,000 employees in the EU to build its metaverse
How many people does it take to build a metaverse? If you're Facebook, you have a pretty definitive number: 10,000. That's the amount of...
MMO Business Roundup: Valve’s SteamPal, Rockstar’s record label, and Cyberpunk’s legal battles
Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news bits.
Valve: Would you like Steam to be your pal? Too bad because Valve...
Epic Games denies rumors that it’s aiming for an IPO
It's a pretty well-known fact that Epic Games is doing pretty well for itself between the success of Fortnite and the ongoing popularity of...