In The News
Stay tuned for Red Dead Redemption 2 news Thursday morning at 8 a.m. PST.
Quick, out to the schoolyard, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite are about to fight! Epic Games previously said PUBG inspired Fornite’s Battle Royale gameplay mode — and PUBG is not super thrilled.
“Bluehole [PUBG’s studio] … stated in a press release that it’s considering ‘further action,’” Engdaget’s David Lumb writes. “Bluehole’s Chang Han Kim said … ‘After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.’”
Bluehole then spoke with PC Gamer’s Christopher Livingston to clarify the situation, saying in part, “This is not about the battle royale game mode itself … It’s not about the idea itself, it’s about Epic Games, and that wasn’t really clear … We use Unreal Engine to develop PUBG, and we pay a large amount of royalties based on the size of our success to Epic Games.”
Epic Games created the Unreal 4 engine which Brendan Greene and co. used to create PUBG. It seems most of the tension is coming from PUBG’s concern that Epic Games may exert undue pressure on them by both creating its own PUBG-style game that uses elements of ideas PUBG implements and providing the engine that allowed PUBG to come to be.
According to a European Commission report, piracy doesn’t “affect legal sales for video games or other forms of entertainment,” James Batchelor at Games Industry.biz reports. “‘In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements,’ the report reads. ‘That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.’”
Tell me this isn’t awesome. First, this person’s head is a Nintendo Switch. Second, the screen shows them playing Arms! Kotaku’s Ethan Gach reports that Redditor Kurobiii “encountered the Switch-headed Mario cosplayer at this year’s Tokyo Game Show … The cosplayer apparently has a number of other games queued up as well, with another poster having spotted the human Switch playing Gunvolt.”
Augmented reality startup Mira and virtual reality startup VRChat pulled in $1 million and $4 million, respectively, VentureBeat’s Ian Hamilton reports.
“Mira’s Prism headset is a lot like Google Cardboard but for augmented reality … The funding ‘will be used to provide more resources to the burgeoning developer community’ while helping with “Mira’s content partnership initiatives.”
“Startup VRChat raised a $4 million Series A round of funding led by HTC … VRChat (which is also on Viveport) is one of the first social efforts in virtual reality.”
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has grand ideas for VR porn. “Regarding the present state of VR porn, the major VR companies ‘pretend that adult VR doesn’t exist,’” PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde reports. Luckey later goes on to talk about using giant robotic arms.
One iOS update later and Discord’s iPhone app is struggling. “Users have reported an array of issues they’ve had with the app since updating, including the inability to post pictures or switch tabs without the app crashing,” Polygon’s Julia Alexander reports. “Discord is aware of the issue, but the team doesn’t have an estimated update to fix the issues at this time.”
Steam is updating currencies for Australia, Ukraine, Vietnam, Poland, Argentina, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Qatar, Costa Rica and Uruguay.
The Chinese Room, developer of Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture, “has temporarily ceased development and laid off the majority of its staff.” IGN’s Jordan Oloman writes that “Only Pinchbeck, co-founder Jessica Curry and designer Andrew Crawshaw will remain part of the studio, which will be closing temporarily.”
A Razer gaming smartphone will be out before 2018, GamesIndustry.biz’s Haydn Taylor reports. “‘One of the most hotly rumored things about Razer is that we’re coming up with a mobile device. And I can say that we are coming up with a mobile device specifically geared toward gamers and entertainment.’”
Season 2 of Hearthstone’s Trinity Series starts Wednesday.
Pokemon Go’s equinox event is live.