industry news
South Korea approves merger of Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard as both companies continue to fight UK regulators
There has been another plodding step forward in Microsoft's billion-dollar buyout of Activision-Blizzard, as reports from Korea Xbox News have now confirmed that South...
NCsoft West restructures as NC America, with shared CM for Lineage II, Aion, and Blade & Soul
Back in February, we reported on a wave of layoffs that struck NCsoft West, which saw 20% of its workforce handed their walking papers...
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...
CD Projekt Red lays off employees working on a multiplayer version of The Witcher as a result of a ‘new framework’
This story will need a bit of a primer before we get into the details of the headline, so let's review: Last October, CD...
Square-Enix FY2022: Revenues decline as company remains ‘aggressive’ on blockchain
We continue with the near-endless march of financial reports out of gaming companies in May, and this one is another biggie, as Square-Enix has...
UK government body issues order that blocks Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard from ‘acquiring an interest’ in each other
Despite the multi-billion dollar deal between Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft slowly making forward movement in multiple smaller markets and potentially one very large market, the...
Electronic Arts ends 2023 fiscal year with $7.4B in revenue, talks up investment in ‘games as a platform’
The numbers are in for Electronic Arts' fourth quarter and its overall 2023 fiscal year, and by all accounts, the behemoth is still behemoth-sized....
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...
Idea Fabrik, the company behind Hero Engine and The Repopulation, disappears from the internet
The beginning of this year saw a sad but perhaps unsurprising development for the Kickstarted sci-fi sandbox MMO The Repopulation when the workers contracted...
Appellate court reaffirms Apple’s store is not monopolist but must still allow third-party purchasing options
The three year-long legal fight between Apple and Epic finally made another step forward yesterday, but since it has been that long, allow us...
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...
Nexon formally files a copyright infringement lawsuit against Dark and Darker studio Ironmace
Considering the very public back-and-forth between Nexon and Dark and Darker developer Ironmace, this development seems like a foregone conclusion, but it is now...
MUD Aetolia used ChatGPT to generate NPC dialogue and grant a fake quest
Some game developers continue to laud AI generation tools like ChatGPT as the future of many frontiers, including NPC behavior in MMORPGs and gaming...
Ubisoft Paris is accused of developer crunch and poor project management by French game workers union
Solidaires Informatique, the French game workers union that has been working with employees at Ubisoft Paris since the developer's widespread sexual harassment claims came...
Disney axes its fledgling metaverse division as part of a 7,000 employee layoff round
How long does it take for the House of Mouse to decide the metaverse isn't worth it? Roughly a year, apparently, as Disney has...
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...
