In The News
Weekend in review:
Blizzard Entertainment called forth some world-renowned StarCraft: Brood War players to showcase StarCraft: Remastered. The launch party kicked off yesterday at Gwangalli Beach in South Korea. Festivities included “thematic DJs, legendary showmatches, and an official ‘launch countdown’ to pre-release the game exclusively to PC Cafe’s around the country prior to the game’s global release on August 14th.” Check it all out on their Twitch stream.
Violent video games (VVG) do not desensitize players or reduce their empathy, according to the results of a German study. The Department of Psychiatry, Social Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Hannover Medical School conducted the study, which focused on “long term effects” of playing VVGs. Study participants “played first-person shooter titles like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty and Battlefield for at least four years and for at least two hours per day on average,” GNewsTube reports.
Results ran “contrary” to the initial hypothesis of reduced empathy. The study did show, however, that many of the participants displayed anti-social behavior.
“The lack of group differences in our fMRI data does not suggest, that excessive VVG use leads to long term emotional desensitization and a blunting of neural responses related to empathy. This is corroborated by the questionnaire data which did not reveal differences between VVG users and controls for empathy and aggression measures.”
Their final conclusion? “We interpret our results as evidence against the desensitization hypothesis and suggest that the impact of violent media on emotional processing may be rather acute and short-lived.”
There goes TheDW’s hopes and dreams of sipping Pina Coladas lounging poolside on a gamer cruise. Gamer Tech Events had scheduled a cruise for gamers departing Oct. 20, but everything seems to be falling apart, Kotaku’s Eric Van Allen writes.
Drama #1: Despite losing its boat charter, “Gamer Tech Events continued to promote and sign new partnerships without updating the status of the cruise.”
Drama #2: MoneyMatches (a former investor) CEO Zach Smith gets into a fight with Gamer Tech Events’ CEO Curtis Smith about the cruise having never existed during a recorded phone call.
Drama #3: Red Bull also pulls out after Royal Caribbean tells Gamer Tech Events to cease all advertising because it hasn’t paid them anything. “The cruise page has since been pulled offline, and organizers announced that refunds are available for all cruise-goers who would rather not wait and see.”
Can you imagine a livelihood dependent on being an MMO currency hacker? Manfred has been doing this for 20 years, he revealed in an interview with Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai.
“Manfred, who asked me not to reveal his real name, says he has been hacking several video games for 20 years, making a real-life living by using hacks,” Franceschi-Bicchierai writes. “His modus operandi has changed slightly from game to game, but, in essence, it consisted of tricking games into giving him items or currency he doesn’t have a right to have. He would then sell those items and currency to other players (for real money) or wholesales them to online gray markets, such as the Internet Game Exchange, that then would sell those goods to individual players.”
PlayStation Plus will now cost you more in Europe. As of today, “the monthly price is increasing from £6 to £7, the quarterly cost from £15 to £20, and an annual pass is rising from £40 to £50,” Engadget’s Jamie Rigg reports.
My goodness, it feels like all I write about is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds drama. Today’s no different, and TheDW is starting the week with a fresh heaping of PUBG popcorn.
Lotoe received a 1-week ban after allegedly stream sniping Shroud. Stream sniping is when you use a person’s Twitch or other live stream to figure out where they are. He denied he did anything wrong to Polygon’s Allegra Frank, and said he doesn’t watch Twitch. “‘The only way people are saying I was stream sniping them was because the devs surely banned with evidence, but in reality they banned me within 1-20 minutes,’ lotoe continued. ‘I don’t see how they could of [sic] received reports and investigated the case in that amount of time.’”
Reddit, Discord and Twitch all exploded in a fight between Lotoe defenders and accusers. That anger soon directed itself at PUBG, which reached out through community managers on forums and eventually Brendan Greene on Twitter. Greene stood by the ban and insisted that the data did indicate lotoe had attempted multiple times to join the same lobby as Shroud — while not hard evidence of stream sniping, Greene said “we see no other reason why they would consistently attempt to be in the same lobby as someone who is broadcasting live other than to have an advantage in the game.”
Ethereum (cryptocurrency) miners are literally renting Boeing 747s to ship orders of GPUs. PC Gamer’s Paul Lilly reports that “Some 36,000 units of Ethereum is collectively mined each day. At around $200 per unit, miners are competing for $7.2 million worth of Ethereum per day. At one point just a few weeks ago, those figures were doubled with Ethereum spiking to $400.”
Two thousand copies of Dark Souls Vinyl Trilogy will be available for purchase sometime in the fall. It’s “a 9-vinyl collector box that includes all the Dark Souls orchestral themes composed by Motoi Sakuraba and Yuka Kitamura,” the YouTube description reads.
Splatoon 2’s a fun game. Some people think it’s 65,000 Dominoes worth of fun. YouTuber TheDominoKing built a tribute to the game, Game Informer’s Elise Favis explains, “which uses 65,556 dominoes in total, portrays a bunch of inklings and other characters such as Off The Hook’s Pearl and Marina.” Check out the full video here.
Cloud9’s newest esports team plays Rocket League. They signed The Muffin Men. “As Rocket League continues to grow, tune into Torment’s, SquishyMuffinz’ and Gimmick’s Twitch channels to see when and where they will compete next,” the press release says.