In The News
We know a little more about the esports tournament coinciding with the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Korea. AListDaily’s John Gaudiosi spoke with Intel vice president John Bonini to learn more.
Here’s a snippet: “Bonini said the goal with bringing esports to the Olympic Games is to celebrate the competition across video gaming while introducing new audiences to competitive gaming … The fact that most people play games now also helps connect with a broader audience, as do the human stories behind the competition—a staple of traditional Olympic sports coverage.”
EA news:
Don’t forget Disney. Rob Fahey wrote an opinion piece for GamesIndustry.biz walking through recent moves the company has made against Gazillion Entertainment and Electronic Arts — and why we should pay attention. “It set its development budget based on those projections, spent money on marketing based on those projections; Disney has now unceremoniously dumped those projections in the bin…”
A Black Friday boycott is ongoing for FIFA 18. Angry players of EA’s game created “A consumer campaign called #FixFifa,” Polygon’s Colin Campbell reports. “A Change.org petition has so far attracted more than 23,000 signatures … The #FixFifa campaign is calling on players to ignore any new offers, and to hold back on spending money in the game.”
GamesIndustry.biz’s Haydn Taylor reports that microtransaction revenue on PC “has doubled since 2012 … In 2012, PC free-to-play generated $11 billion in revenue and doubled to $22 billion in 2017. It is expected to grow a further $3 billion by 2022.”
The report by SuperData also had this to say, “EA has a ways to go in fully understanding gamers’ appetites for microtransactions in different games.”
The Game Awards executive producer Geoff Keighley “exclusively announced that this year’s installment will allow people to vote through a live Twitter Direct Messenger and Facebook Messenger bot,” AListDaily’s Steven Wong writes. “’The general idea is to let users interact and let them feel like they’re part of the show by gamifying it . . . A lot of people were skeptical on whether an online streaming show would reach a mass audience.’”
“What new features in the Battle for Azeroth expansion help the long-running MMORPG stand out from its new competitors?” That’s what Gamasutra’s Bryant Francis asked Blizzard about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Check out a bit of their answer: “’We had years of experience building this content, how do we make something more compelling? How do we make something that doesn’t become stale after X uses.’”
G2 Esports is partnering with Formula One driver Fernando Alonso. “They announced today with a video the birth of a new F1 simulation team,” Sport Fair’s Claudia Toscano reports.
Streamer Roberto Garcia was profiled in The New Yorker by Taylor Clark. Here’s a portion of the piece about his life and decision to become a full-time streamer: “Game streaming, Garcia discovered, required non-stop work. The only way to attract viewers, and to prevent the ones you had from straying to other broadcasters, was to be online constantly, so he routinely streamed for eighteen hours a day.”
At what point will developers turn to AI to create their worlds? The University of Lyon, Purdue and Ubisoft put out a paper, Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett reports, about “an AI that is able to construct most of its own 3D landscapes.”