Xbox says it has fixed the issue at the heart of the major service outage suffered in July. Chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet, who initially offered an explanation as to why so many services were affected, promised to investigate further at the time, and he has now returned with an update. Read more
Category: Gaming
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Smilegate will rescue Lost Ark's western servers, as Amazon ditches support while retreating from MMO development
Amazon Game Studios has announced it will no longer support the Western game servers for massively-multiplayer online action role-playing game Lost Ark, from 2027 onwards. Read more
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Meccha Chameleon has now sold 20 million copies in two months
Meccha Chameleon, the indie hide-and-seek game that launched on Steam two months ago, has cemented itself as one of the year's biggest hits. The game's developer posted a sales milestone update today, announcing that sales have surpassed a staggering 20 million copies. Read more
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ChatGPT and Gemini both just passed 1 billion users
For the 14th time, a Google product has hit 1 billion users. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that a billion people are using Gemini every month, and that Gemini is Google's fastest-growing product ever. A billion users is a huge milestone, but Google isn't the first AI app to hit it. OpenAI's ChatGPT […]
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As Xbox head Asha Sharma reportedly visits Bethesda HQ, workers put up red flags representing laid off staff and a giant inflatable rat outside
It's probably a weird day to be working at Bethesda's Rockville headquarters. In a week's time, on August 18th, the Communications Workers of America have organised numerous rallies across the US and Canada in support of Xbox workers, 1600 of which may lose their jobs over the next year, on top of the 1600 who have already been laid off. Today, as shared by Game Developer's Chris Kerr, CWA union members have already initiated a protest outside Bethesda HQ in the form of a giant inflatable rat, and a huge number of planted red flags, each one representing a laid off worker, as Xbox CEO Asha Sharma reportedly.
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"I think that might be a misread": Thief designer on why making a triple-A immersive sim doesn't really work
Broadly speaking, it's fine for something to exist as a niche. Whatever form of media a thing might be, to fulfil a niche is to meet the expectations of at least a handful of people with a particular taste that many others don't, and I think that's a delightful thing to do. In video games, immersive sims might not be the most niche genre in the world, but they've historically not done gangbusters sales wise, meaning that triple-A takes don't quite make their money back. If you ask Randy Smith Evergreen, a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, perhaps avoiding the world of triple-A is the way to go for immersive sims.
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