Sat.Feb 11, 2023 - Fri.Feb 17, 2023

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The Heart of Gaming Is the Power Fantasy

The Bottom Feeder

Now it is time to decide who MUST love me. (All articles this month are to get attention to our new Kickstarter. If you like weird, retro indie games or RPGs, it’s worth a look.) Video games function best as power fantasies. This is a statement that can generate controversy, though fifty years of video game history show that it is true. We've seen debates about whether video games can be art.

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Activision Blizzard planning to end full remote work

Game Developer

Update : A spokesperson for Activision Blizzard confirmed employees would have to return to the office for three days per week starting in April.

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What would a Game Pass dominated landscape look like? | Opinion

GamesIndustry.biz

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox There's plenty of interesting stuff in the documents released by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) about its investigation into Microsoft's attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard, but the titbit that has perhaps attracted most attention is Microsoft's admission that a game appearing on Game Pass negatively affects its sales for at least a year.

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Get your free copy of the 2023 Video Game Publisher List now

PreMortem.Games

IndieGameBusiness has just released its updated directory with over 500 video game publishers. The best thing about it? Besides the fact that it has 500 game publishers in alphabetical order with links and the platforms they primarily release on? It’s free! Get your digital copy here. Game consultant Jay Powell is the driving force behind IndieGameBusiness.

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What independent means to Private Division: Michael Worosz and Blake Rochkind on five years of Private Division and what’s next

Game Development News

Private Division’s Michael Worosz and Blake Rochkind sat down with Vince Pavey to tell him all about Take-Two’s independent - but not indie - developer label

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Q&A with Blizzard leadership on return-to-office, bonuses leaves devs fuming

Game Developer

Comments made by Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra during a company town hall reportedly outraged developers and cratered morale.

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Backfirewall by Naraven Games reveals the secret life of apps in our phones

PreMortem.Games

In Backfirewall players deal with a sassy self-aware smartphone operating system that faces replacement by a superior and far better optimized successor. It’s a tragicomic adventure that really makes you feel for programs that have their code erased and replaced on a regular basis, all in the name of technological progress. The game is the debut of Swiss indie game studio Naraven Games.

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Making string marshaling safe for the CoreCLR garbage collector

Unity Blog

Unity Engineering Manager for.NET Compilers and Runtimes Josh Peterson walks through some of the recent changes the team has made to marshal string data across the managed/native boundary in a GC-safe way for the new CoreCLR garbage collector.

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What can soap teach you about gaming?

Game Developer

This is a sponsored article by Dove, and you may well be wondering what on Earth we are doing cropping up on GameDeveloper.com. You may suspect it’s another brand trying to force its way into the gaming scene but it turns out, we’re on a bit of an important mission and if you have a couple of minutes to spare, we’ll tell you why you should care about it.

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Microsoft confirms Game Pass cannibalizes sales

GamesIndustry.biz

The UK Competition and Markets Authority's provisional report on the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition includes an admission from Microsoft that putting games into its Game Pass subscription service cannibalizes sales of those titles. "Microsoft also submitted that its internal analysis shows a [redacted]% decline in base game sales twelve months following their addition on Game Pass," the CMA noted in its report.

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Solo dev Pat Naoum of the handpainted The Master’s Pupil: “Creativity is a tool”

PreMortem.Games

As if developing a game by yourself wasn’t daunting enough, Pat Naoum decided to completely handpaint his debut game The Master’s Pupil. That alone took him hundreds of hours and the whole project now sits at 7 years. But the end is near, the game will release on steam sometime in the foreseeable future. “The painting really comes down to uniqueness”, he says.

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Avatar: A splash hit for awards season

Unity Blog

Together, Unity and Wētā Digital have been working to bring Wētā tools – including those used to make Avatar: The Way of Water – into the hands of developers and creators. With the first being released this year, learn more about what’s to come.

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How to Commission Music for Your Game

Game Developer

A well-crafted musical score has the power to completely transform the player's gaming experience, adding depth, mood, and emotional impact to the game's world.

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Saudi Arabia increases stake in Nintendo to 7.08%

GamesIndustry.biz

Reports have emerged that Saudi Arabia has once again increased its stake in Nintendo. Saudi Arabia-based Twitter account BRHM reported today the nation's Public Investment Fund now owns 7.08% of the Mario maker, with Trading View reporting the same figure. The Fund previously took a 5.01% stake in Nintendo back in May 2022, and increased this to 6.07% just last month.

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Michael Blaker’s Synth Saturday: Chapters 26-32 of “New Battlefield” by operation.meteor

Game Industry News

Hey all. I’m back with the final set of chapters in a Gundam Wing and Seed crossover that’s one of my favorite Fics for this week’s Synth Saturday. It’s Chapters 26-32 of “New Battlefield” by operation.meteor. Plot: This is the Bloody Valentine War’s final set of chapters in the story, and it really does get amazingly epic.

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Inclusion starts here: Why a year spent supporting representation was the best of my career (so far)

Unity Blog

Spurred by a Unity-funded grant, Senior Solutions Engineer Krystal Cooper shares her path to becoming the first Expert in Residence (EIR) in Atlanta and launching a pilot program aimed at serving underrepresented creators from within Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

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Firaxis veterans Jake Solomon and Steve Martin depart studio

Game Developer

Firaxis says farewell to its studio head and creative director of XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns.

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Three Xbox rivals believe the Activision Blizzard merger would harm competition

GamesIndustry.biz

The UK regulator has summarised six meetings it held with Xbox rivals as part of its investigation into the proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition. The six companies are either an existing competitor or a potential competitor in "console gaming services or cloud gaming services," the CMA explained. Out of those six companies, half of them believe that if Microsoft was to complete its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it would harm competition.

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Liz Prince on Amiqus sponsoring this year’s MCV/DEVELOP Women in Games 2023 Awards

Game Development News

We’ve taken the opportunity to talk to Liz Prince, business manager at Amiqus about the company’s thoughts on Women in Games and what more can be done for inclusion in the future

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How to Fix Resident Evil HD Remaster Lag, Crash, and Others

Game Errors

The remake of the game made it look and feel more awesome than the classic version of the game from 1998 it, but like any other game, it has some errors and issues. The most common Resident Evil HD Remaster Issues that players complained about are Random Crashes: Resident Evil HD Remaster crashes at startup Performance Issues: Lag, Stuttering, Low FPS Black Screen Below you can find these glitches detailed and solutions on how to fix them.

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Saudi Arabia investment fund increases stake in Nintendo

Game Developer

Saudi Arabia's state-backed PIF investment fund continues to put its money into a variety of big-name video game studios.

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Embracer sales up 128% during Q3, but organic growth down

GamesIndustry.biz

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox Embracer Group has published its financial report for Q3 FY 22/23, which is the three months ended December 31, 2022. Net sales : SEK 11.6 billion ($1.

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Navigating the Complexities of Game Porting

Starloop Studios

The complexity of porting games is often overlooked and considered to be a simple case of bundling a game together and making it available on other platforms. The reality of porting games is that it’s a significantly more complicated process than it seems, especially seeing as every platform has its intricacies to navigate. To overcome [.

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Cocos Shader Tutorial 1.0 - about UV

Cocos

Preview Here : Preview Link Introduction to UVs The reason for naming it as UV is that X, Y, and Z have already be used by 3D coordinates. In order to distinguish it from 3D, so it is named as UV. Among them, U refers to the horizontal axis, V refers to the vertical axis, and the range of UV is 0 to 1. ) The vertical axes of textures and picture pixels is shown above, when sampling textures in shaders, that is from top to bottom, which is top-right corner.

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Saudi wealth fund increases stakes in EA and Take-Two Interactive

Game Developer

The Public Investment Fund also holds stakes in other major players including Nintendo, Capcom, and Embracer Group.

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Blizzard president sends a message | This Week in Business

GamesIndustry.biz

Morale at Activision Blizzard took a hit this week, which is probably a lead we could have used for any This Week in Business column of the past year and a half. This time the problems stemmed from a Blizzard Entertainment all-hands meeting that was reported on by Game Developer. The intent of the meeting was to discuss the results of an internal employee satisfaction survey, but whatever those results were, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra put on a performance that probably made them worse.

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[Fixed] Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen Crashing & Other Issues

Game Errors

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was released on Steam and by now the game received a lot of good reviews. However, you can suddenly get Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen crashing on PC according to other players. Dark Arisen is a huge open-world game in which players start an epic adventure with three AI companions called Pawns. As we said, there are a few issues with the game that makes it hard to play due to errors such as fatal error failed to open the file on Dragon’s Dogma.

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Top Game Development Sessions at NVIDIA GTC 2023

Nvidia

Join us for the latest on NVIDIA RTX and neural rendering technologies, and learn how they are accelerating game development. Join us for the latest on NVIDIA RTX and neural rendering technologies, and learn how they are accelerating game development.

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UK regulatory board issues new game-focused data protection requests

Game Developer

The ICO's suggestion for game developers aim to keep the large number of young game players in the UK safe.

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Game Changers | Professor Jim Huntley

GamesIndustry.biz

GamesIndustry.biz Game Changers is a series of profiles on the groups and individuals going the extra mile to make the games industry a better place. These interviews encompass folks from around the world helping to improve conditions and attitudes towards diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, mental health and more. You can read more Game Changers interviews here.

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How to Fix Lightning Returns Final Fantasy 13 Crashes & Other

Game Errors

Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII was released on Windows through the Steam platform. The game is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII-2 and concludes the story in Final Fantasy XIII. Some players complained that the game has some issues and bugs that are making it unplayable. Lightning Returns Final Fantasy 13 crashing and issues that players reported mostly happen when the game is not loading and is stuck at the Square Enix logo, plus performance issues and stuttering.

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Float Compression 6: Filtering Optimization

The Astronauts

Introduction and index of this series is here. Several posts ago we learned that filtering the data can make it more compressible. Out of several simple filters that I tried, “reorder data items byte-wise and delta encode that” was the most effective at improving compression ratio. That’s all nice and good, but the filtering has a cost to it.

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Apex Legends hits player count peak with deathmatch mode

Game Developer

Apex Legends ' new season is bringing all the players to the arena.

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Hogwarts Legacy is the biggest Harry Potter game launch of all time | UK Boxed Charts

GamesIndustry.biz

Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data). It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best -- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn't a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie).

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