Avowed & Obsidian Entertainment’s Art Director, Matt Hansen took to the Iron Lords podcast to reveal some “juicy” information about the upcoming title.

Obsidian Entertainment’s next title, Avowed, is coming out this February 2025. Ahead of the big release, Obsidian Entertainment’s Art Director Matt Hansen and Production Director Ryan Warden have jumped onto the IGN Iron Lords podcast to reveal some upcoming information about the title.

Hansen explains that Avowed development is focusing on getting the title to run at a crisp 30fps and getting to 60fps would be a hard task even for the more robust Xbox Series X console. He even goes so far as to say that as a first-person single-player title, “you don’t necessarily need that 60 frames.” Below is the latest story game trailer revealed by Obsidian back at the Xbox Games Showcase 2024.

Hansen continues with an explanation of how smooth gameplay is paramount to the overall experience, which is why they’re targeting 30fps. He says “[The 30fps] allows us to get a lot juicier with VFX and lighting and all this other stuff. It’s a trade-off we opted to make relatively early, and we’re really happy with that. The game’s running pretty smooth for how visually dense it is, and that was always our goal.” The notion is that Obsidian would rather have Avowed run excellent at 30fps than choppy at 60fps. The recent single-player release of Black Myth Wukong has also been said to run smoothly at 30fps.

Other Xbox-published titles like Starfield and Hellblade 2 have launched at 30fps as well, to help avoid input or performance issues they could trip on. While Starfield has since seen an update that brings the performance near 60fps, Hellblade 2 still has yet to receive an update, but this means Avowed can also launch at 30fps and get an update later on to boost visual fidelity.

Avowed launches on February 18, 2025 for Xbox Series S/X and PC.

The release date for Unknown 9: Awakening has been announced.

During Gamescom Opening Night Live, developer Reflector Entertainment along with publisher Bandai Namco revealed Unknown 9: Awakening will release on 18th October. It will be available across PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC (Steam).

You can check out the live action trailer for Unknown 9: Awakening, which stars The Witcher's Anya Chalotra as the game's protagonist Haroona, below.

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Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the long-awaited next game from the team behind the original Life is Strange, will arrive in two parts.

The first installment launches for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 18th February 2025, with its concluding slice then a month later on 18th March.

Tonight also brings an initial look at gameplay from Don't Nod's latest teen adventure, which has a dual timeline split between 1995 and 2022, when its young protagonists are now adults - and dealing with the consequences of their/your actions.

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Microsoft has confirmed the next batch of titles headed to Xbox Game Pass for the latter half of August: Atlas Fallen, Core Keeper, and Star Trucker.

Then there's that little known game called Call of Duty Black Ops 6. You'll be able to participate in the early access open beta when it kicks off for Xbox Game Pass subscribers on 30th August, 2024, with pre-downloading available from 28th August.

"Sure, it takes itself way too seriously and the loot chase can get monotonous, but everything outside of the monster-slaying is just an excuse to get right back to the monster-slaying. Or make the monster-slaying cooler with upgrades," we said in our Atlas Fallen review.

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Just when Geoff Keighley had started to fade from your memory, he comes rubber-banding back with a vengeance - snap! It's Gamescom week and it kicks off with Opening Night Live this evening from 7pm UK time (other Opening Night Live timings here). A pre-show with additional announcements will begin at 6.30pm UK. We'll be watching and reporting on it live, as always, right here, so you can either keep abreast of announcements while you do something else, or you can join in with your thoughtful and amusing comments. Please keep us company. Please.

What do we expect to see today? Well, probably Geoff Keighley, but also the new Indiana Jones game, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Dune Awakening. We're also expecting Little Nightmares creator Tarsier to unveil its new project, which could be exciting. On top of that: Diablo 4 expansion Vessel of Hatred, Civilization 7, hero shooter Marvel Rivals, Lost Records (the project made by the creators of Life is Strange), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (which was recently delayed), and Black Ops 6. Keighley's best pal Hideo Kojima has also been tweeting enigmatic silhouetted pictures of actors who are presumably playing roles in Death Stranding 2.

And before you ask, "Yes, there will be new game announcements," Keighley said on X.

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The upcoming Until Dawn remake for PC and PlayStation 5 will reportedly cost £60 at launch.

That's according to reliable leaker billbil-kun from Dealabs, who has also said that a physical PlayStation 5 release is also on the cards.

All versions of the Until Dawn remake will be priced at £59.99 here in the UK, billbil-kun stated. That's €69.99, or $59.99 for those in the US.

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Ubisoft has cut 45 staff across two of its North American studios, as part of its third round of redundancies so far this year.

The company has laid off workers at both Ubisoft San Francisco, the developer of XDefiant, and Red Storm Entertainment, which had been working on the now-cancelled The Division: Heartland live service game.

"Last week Ubisoft San Francisco and Red Storm Entertainment informed their teams of a restructuring that will result in 45 employees leaving Ubisoft," a spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Eurogamer.

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Ubisoft has updated the PC requirements for its upcoming Star Wars adventure, Star Wars Outlaws, and released a new teaser showing off what kind of performance PC players can expect when the game releases on 30th August.

Taking up a modest 65GB, the settings shouldn't be too punishing for those looking only to meet the minimum standards – although you will need to have DLSS or FSR – but those pushing for the "ultra" experience will need a decent rig.

Check out the details below:

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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is one of Digital Foundry's most eagerly anticipated games, effectively hitting the beats that made the first series entry so enjoyable. The grand scale of the environments, the dense swarms of tyranids, the absolute carnage of combat - it's all back in Space Marine 2, enhanced by the impressive technical capabilities of the Swarm engine. Focus Entertainment recently shared a preview build of the PC version of the game, and we're eager to share our impressions with you. We're liking what we see - but Space Marine 2 pushes hardware, which poses interesting challenges to the current generation of consoles, especially on the CPU side.

Saber Interactive has taken on development duties for this game, and our first impression is that it's done a fantastic job of capturing the Warhammer 40,000 aesthetic: colossal, heroic figures, massive-scale gothic architecture stretching out into the far distance and an enviable wealth of animated detail in the immediate area. The sense of density is only heightened once you get your first taste of combat: dozens of tyranids rushing you, while hundreds (possibly even thousands more) can sometimes be seen massing in the background.

Density in detail at close range also impresses, though it's not quite to the same extremes as Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. That said, as third-person game up against a first-person experience, that's not actually a bad thing. It works exceptionally well. The emphasis on detail also means that something has to give elsewhere: Space Marine 2 doesn't seem to be using cutting-edge lighting or global illumination technology, but you do get accomplished versions of mature technologies like shadow maps, screen-space reflections and screen-space ambient occlusion, while the GI solution (which does seem pre-calculated or 'baked') does give a good impression of light bounce. The quality of the physically-based materials also works well.

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Kaitlyn Dever, the actress portraying Abby Anderson in the second season of HBO's The Last of Us adaptation, required extra security during filming for her own protection.

This comes from fellow castmate Isabel Merced, who is playing Dina in the show. Speaking with Josh Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused, Merced discussed the strong emotions the series can spark within some that have resulted in volatile reactions from so-called fans.

When Horowitz said he was concerned about Dever, and the toxicity she will likely receive "through proxy of being Abby", Merced stated there are "so many strange people" who "genuinely hate" the character. This is despite her being completely fictional. And, because of this, Dever was required to have extra security during the filming for the second season.

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Sony has announced August's PlayStation Plus games.

Those on the subscription's Extra tier will get the following titles:

In addition to the above, those on PS Plus Premium will also get access to the below:

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We now have a release date for the upcoming, current-gen version of slasher horror Until Dawn.

The game will arrive on both PC and PlayStation 5 this autumn, on 4th October. What better way to get yourself ready for the run up to halloween than doing your utmost to save that poor group of unsuspecting teens from the horrors of the night.

In addition to announcing a release date, the Until Dawn team has also shared a few details about how it has enhanced the game with changes to graphics, gameplay, story elements and "more". Before I get into all that, though, you can check out a new trailer for Until Dawn showing off some comparisons between the remaster and original below.

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Today is the day that the much anticipated Janthir Wilds expansion lands in Guild Wars 2, with the talk being primarily about the Homesteads, the account-wide player housing feature that is a cornerstone of this update.

Going to the The Janthir Wilds

Over on the Guild Wars 2 site this morning they had an prep announcement to get players ready and frame the plans for the expansion:

Happy release day! When Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds launches in just a few short hours, you’ll begin a bold adventure into a dangerous and untamed wilderness. The denizens of Tyria are determined to recover and build a new future, and cooperation with neighbors is crucial. Your mission: befriend the lowland kodan and uncover the mysteries of a land that was once home to the enigmatic mursaat and their White Mantle followers.

In Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds, you’ll embark on a story that unfolds across four major releases, starting with today’s launch and continuing with quarterly updates through the first half of 2025. Below is a high-level view of what’s going live today and our plans for what’s coming in the following three quarterly releases.

There’s a significant change to our map content plans that we’d like to bring to your attention. We had originally announced that the expansion would feature three open-world maps—two at launch, with a third released in a quarterly update that would then be expanded on in a subsequent quarterly release, like Inner Nayos. Rather than shipping the third map in two parts, we will instead be releasing a standalone map in both the second and third quarterly releases, each similar in size to Lake Doric. This brings the total open-world map count for Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds up from three to four.

As always, game development is full of surprises, so this roadmap comes with a general disclaimer that our release plans may change, despite our best efforts.

It isn’t just a launch today, but a commitment to a content update cadence over the next year.

There is also a launch trailer to go with today’s release.

I am sure the content will be appreciated by the core audience, but as an outsider I am a bit more interested in how the player housing implementation plays out.

I like player housing, but only when it is done well.  I know there are some vocal proponents out there that are absolutists on the idea, that any player housing is better than none, but I feel if you aren’t going to do it well, integrate it into the game, and give it some sense of being in the context of the world, then you should spend development time elsewhere.

So I am very much a fan of EverQuest II housing, which was integrated into the game on day one, which has a myriad of style and decor options, and which has a trade skill profession dedicated to making furniture.  Well done, 9/10 score, always do stuff with housing a guild halls when I go back and play.

Other attempts have not grabbed me.  WoW’s garrisons were impersonal to the point of being hideaways, and were seemingly designed specifically to prove that housing takes people out of the world, which was the WoW team’s argument about housing up until then.

Likewise, LOTRO’s housing is very pretty, but detached from the world, inflexible, and shoved off into distant corners so that they have no sense of being a part of anything.  I would have much preferred an instanced doorway in a lively town like Bree than the instanced neighborhoods of abandoned homes across the road from a marsh that was the state of things last I checked in.

So I am keen to hear how this new run at player housing works out.

Meanwhile, ArenaNet has other things planned to go with the launch.

• August 20–August 26: Twitch Drops
• August 26: Guild Wars 2 Anniversary Week
• September 10–September17: Fractal Rush Bonus Event
• September 17–September 24: Return to Path of Fire Bonus Event
• September 24–October 1: WvW Rush Bonus Event
• October 1–October 8: Living World Season 4 Bonus Event
• October 15–November 5: Shadow of the Mad King Halloween Festival

So there is a lot going on for fans of the game.

Related:

• ArenaNet – Announcing Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds
• ArenaNet – Janthir Wilds Store Page
• ArenaNet –  Janthir Wilds Launches Today!
• MOP – Guild Wars 2’s Janthir Wilds expansion officially launches with player housing today

It was announced at the Imperium fireside meeting this past Saturday that the coalition had taken 69 systems since the opening of the offensive against Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and the assorted members and hangers on that make up their coalition.  Sniggering about the obvious number aside, we have been busy.

These gains include systems beyond the Catch region, extending out to Tenerifis, Immensea, and Impass.  So the sov influence map… you can see the latest one here or the full historical directory here… has changed.

Here is the pre-campaign state of the map.

Area of Operation – July 25, 2024

And here is where things stood on Sunday, August 18th.

Area of Operation – August 18, 2024

Our foes have been pushed back and you can see systems in Immensea lit and ready to be taken from Legion of xXDEATHXx.  The enemy is mostly busy trying to reorganize their holdings further back to accommodate refugees and retreats from the front.  The alliance they created, Goons Failed to Defend This System, which was put together to goad the Imperium into attacking, has been wiped off the map.

All of which is less a chest thumping declaration of triumph than a cold statement of fact.  Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and their gang has proven unwilling or unable to defend the space taken and has been sending messages out to its members and allies that they will just take all the space back once Goons get bored and go home.

In their narrative this has been a success in that they did, in fact, goad the Imperium into attacking.  Their claim is that on their side the whole thing was just a couple of SIGs.

A little more substantial claim on the Imperium side is the structure kill count.

• 2 – Keepstars
• 21 – Fortizars
• 1 – Tatara
• 2 – Azbels
• 59 –  Astrahuses
• 2 – Raitarus
• 22 – Athanors
• 23 – Metenox Moon Mining Drills
• 35 – Skyhooks

That list gives lie to the claim that this was just a couple of SIGs on their side.  I mean, when I go out on operations with SIGs on the Imperium side we try to live out of an NPC station, or maybe a Raitaru or an Astrahus.  We do not drop two Keepstars.  Keepstars are a commitment, targets that attract hostiles and which, if you are not out in force, will be attacked.

Dropping a Keepstar means serious business.  And two Keepstars on one grid… a potential clash of titans… I mean, unless one side just doesn’t show up.

There goes the neighborhood!

Then there was the great hell camp of Utopia.

After blowing up the two staging Fortizars in the system of Utopia in Curse, we were told that Fraternity, Horde, and their allies had moved all of their capital ships to one of the NPC stations in the system.

We dropped a Fortizar of our own in sight of the undock and setup a hell camp.

The camped station and our Fortizar

A hell camp is when you have your foes in a single location and you bubble them in and put up a guard fleet around the clock to catch them if they try to break out.  Hell camps are a thing of legend, especially in Goonswarm, as they demonstrate the sometimes stupid lengths we will go to in order to best a foe.  Hell camps can for run for days, weeks, or even months if the goal is clear and the foe well and truly trapped.

The hell camp of the battlefield after the clash at M2-XFE during World War Bee was a classic example.  While likely a strategic mistake… to do the hell camp we had to let down the watch on the wall of Helm’s Deep, the protected industrial region we had held against overwhelming odds, and in doing so those three constellations were lost and all of our structures purged… it was tactically a very popular operation and did demoralize our foes for weeks.

The M2-XFE Keepstar grid and the hell camp

You could log in and sit around for an hour or two and suddenly some foe would get impatient or log in the wrong character and a titan or a super carrier or a fax would appear in the bubbles and a hoot would go up on coms and we’d dog pile on the unfortunate for another easy kill.

I got on a few such kills.  We were all working from home during the pandemic, so I would just leave myself logged in and coms on a speaker so I could turn from my work laptop and join in if something came up.  Good times.

The hell camp in Utopia though… that felt a bit weak to me.  Unlike the M2-FXE hell camp, hell camping a station requires the hostiles to log in, see local, and still think they can undock.  You aren’t going to get very many accidental kills and the whole thing is prone to station undock games and what not.  I’ve been there and done that.  I remember us bottling up the Southern Coalition at the station in 319-3D in Delve a dozen years back.  As a tactic it has its place.

But this hell camp didn’t feel right to me.  It wasn’t clear that the enemy was bottled up or that they cared if they were.  They hadn’t bothered to show up for more than a couple of fights and their stated goal was to bore us to death, so why would they care if they couldn’t undock?  They were not going to do so anyway.

The hell camp in Utopia

I nearly wrote a post about the hell camp, but my attention was elsewhere.  I did go out and get a few screen shots of it and our Ferox Navy Issue fleet hanging out, ready to unleash their aimbot accurate railguns on anybody dumb enough to show up, but I didn’t join the camp.

Certainly Gobbins made hay about us and our hell camp.  Apparently he openly and repeatedly pinged out on Discord to all who were listening that the Imperium were fools, that there was nothing there, that the capital ships had been withdrawn previously, and that they were gone, safely back in home space, out of reach of the Imperium and were not coming back.

The Imperium could go pound sand with their hell camp.

The Imperium took screen shots of those pings… we all have enough low level spies in each other’s organization that no general ping goes unread by all… and the coalition diplomats brought them to organizations in the area of operation who had previously declined to cooperate with us because they have assurance from Gobbins that Pandemic Horde would totally be there to help defend their space.  This did not bolster confidence in PH and their promises and we now apparently have cooperation from groups who were previously willing to defy us based on the backing they assumed they had.

This was all part of the plan, or so we were told, so the hell camp served a purpose, if not exactly the expected one.  And they probably got a few random kills in any case.  If you wait long enough anywhere in null sec somebody will eventually blunder in and get caught.

Which brings us to the other part of Saturday’s announcement, which was that the Imperium is expanding its space.  We have groups that want more space and we have a vested interest in preparing for however CCP’s plan to reinvigorate null sec with the Equinox expansion… launched back in June and expected to be a thing… maybe by November… turns out.

I previously wrote about how Equinox seemed to be the end of farms and fields, the old goal of being able to make any null sec system useful and able to support players, to the old pattern of some systems having value while others did not.  This was surprisingly… to me at least, I am not used to getting the point of things without having them explained with small words… taken up by the Imperium and other null sec entities and became the wide versus tall argument.

Farms and fields was a “tall” view of null sec, where a large group could provide for itself in a constellation or two.  The “wide” view of the world has only some systems providing enough value to fully upgrade so a large organization needs to grab more space to ensure it has the resources it needs to support its members.

So the Imperium is expanding as a hedge against that, getting the timers started on things because the sovereignty level take 60 days to get to five and you can’t do all possible upgrades until you get there.

We will likely be taking more than the 69 systems already acquired… and if Pandemic Horde and Fraternity want to take them back like they have said they are going to do, they might have to undock and put some effort into it.

Also, by the time this posts the Fortizar kill count will have gone up by at least one… assuming PH doesn’t come to defend it.  But that has been a very safe assumption so far.

A new design post went up last week about Stars Reach seemingly tailored to the question being asked in the comments of past posts; Who is this game for?  I know Bhagpuss has put that very response in more than one comment so far.

Stars Reach Continues

However, if you were expecting a simple answer, something like Smed saying H1Z1 was dedicated to Star Wars Galaxies players, you are going to be disappointed.  SWG isn’t even mentioned, so as much as Bree at Massively OP has declared Stars Reach to be a remake of exactly that, that is not a specified goal.

Also, this is another philosophical post with a byline from Raph, so it is his sort of soft and/or more nuanced approach to these sorts of question.

But, I’ve been here for the philosophy so far, why not carry on.  My own posts in the area so far:

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe
• Part IV – Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations Blossom
• Part V – Stars Reach – What if a guild could own a planet?

So what are we looking at as far as answers go?  Well, there is, in a big headline font, in all caps, the following:

THIS IS A SANDBOX GAME

I tried to reproduce the color, in case that was important, but they’re using a different color palette on their site, so it may not be a 100% match.

I think we knew this, but in case there were any questions, there it is.

Sandbox tends to mean game play that is not based on linear advancement, that there is no “winning” state like hitting the level cap, maxing out all your skills, or defeating the final raid boss and getting that epic gear drop that completes the set.  It is the journey and not the destination for Stars Reach, which has declared against anything like end-game raiding.

Which, as always, sounds great, but then I have been playing EVE Online for coming up on 18 years and the biggest problem there isn’t PvP or the cash shop or CCP messing up the economy through self-defeating attempts to make us play they way they want us to play or the difficulty of the UI or the lack of a decent map or the oft repeated, yet never substantiated tales of new players being ganked on their first undock.

No, the absolute, number one, no question about it problem is “So what do I do now?”

This is the problem, the reason you cannot have a pure sandbox game… because it wouldn’t even be a game.  It would be Garry’s Mod which, while it can be fun, is hard to classify as a game.  And it is an outlier in many way, the key one being its level of success.  You are unlikely to be able to duplicate that.

Raph has directly said that there needs to be a game, something to give players some sense of purpose out of the gate.  Likewise, EVE Online provides some sense of structure to help new players along, which are missions.  Only, then people get stuck in the missions, advance through them, get to the point where they have a nice battleship that can face roll level 4 missions… and they’re done and they leave, never to return, having solo’d themself through a few months of game play and ended up finding the game boring.

New Player Trajectory – 2014 edition

I can attest to that track as I did that myself, along with a few of the other obvious paths forward, like mining, manufacturing, and market tycoon.  They all end up feeling pretty empty once you achieve the level of success you were aiming for.  And CCP has spent some time trying to address this problem, which the spoke about nearly a decade back, though they ended up fixated on the tutorial for way too long… the main problem crops up AFTER the tutorial people… but have made some progress.  But it is still probably the #1 issue the game faces today, 21 years into its being.

in EVE Online the way out of that mission experience is to find a purpose beyond the mechanics of the game.  I am invested in the soap opera of null sec empires.  This has kept me playing for at least a decade and the roller coaster ride of it has pulled me back from a few points of thinking maybe it was time to move on.

But that, and the New Eden economy, rests on PvP and destruction and Raph is put combat on the optional list for Stars Reach.  No PvP save for the esoteric economic competition sense of the term.

So Stars Reach wants to give you some things to do.  No, wait, let me phrase that correctly.

SOME THINGS TO DO

Some things like, possibly:

• THE ADVENTURER
  • Run across the geyser fields towards a crashed Old One ship, before the Cornucopia get there.
• THE TRANSLATOR
  • Observe aliens speaking in strange glyphs; match them up, and crack the code of what they are saying.
• THE EXPLORER
  • “Beep! Beep!” Audio signals help you find a soft spot in space to open a new wormhole.
• THE FARMER
  • Plant red wheat under a violet sky; crossbreed strains to get a valuable healing variant.
• THE MEDIC
  • One press of a button conjures a healing bubble around you as you call your party closer.
• THE XENOBIOLOGIST
  • Sneak up on house-sized carnivorous bunnies and draw their blood; gotta sample ‘em all.
• THE PILOT
  • Collect crystals fallen from shattered asteroids and drag them in bags behind your ship.
• THE MINER
  • Tunnel underground – the map is fully destructible. When the gold is gone, it’s GONE.

I am once again put in the mind of No Man’s Sky, which has some of those jobs as part of your experience as the traveler.

The Playable Worlds team has LOTS of ideas… and has gotten a lot of positive response… or so they say.  I suspect that much of that positive response, like much of the negative response, has been due to people overlaying their past experience on the vague philosophical underpinnings of the design that has been shared with us so far.

That is certainly the basis on which I have now spewed out half a dozen blog posts on the topic so far.  We get presented with something new and immediately assess how it is similar to past experiences and process accordingly.  Bree at MOP hears Raph talk about “sandbox” and believes we’re getting a new Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies.  I hear about sandboxes or infinite worlds or cloud computing and I apply my own personal and professional experience to interpret what is meant.

The thing is, the post from Playable Worlds… doesn’t answer the question posed in the title in any way.  The post is more about what they might do and they tap into some of the Nick Yee work from his Quantic Foundry research, literally borrowing a chart from it, to talk about all the things the possibly COULD do, but which they haven’t decided on yet.

The problem with every software project is that there are always many more things you could do than you actually have time, budget, or resources to implement.

So the actual message of the post is that they are on their way forward to test some of their theories.  This past weekend the first group of play testers were allowed in to try some of the initial work.

Who the actual game is for has yet to be determined beyond a theoretical estimate.  But they are trying to test their theories.  I heard that they had 47 people online at once and found some issue including a client memory leak.  However, these tests are very, very early in the process, so there is likely a long road ahead before the average schmoe like me gets a peek at what is going on.

I don’t think it will take until 2047.  But I would be surprised if there was a “there” there for any general user before, say, 2027.  That is just a little more than two years away.

Related:

• Stars Reach – Who is Stars Reach for?
• Massively OP –  Stars Reach begins testing this weekend as Raph Koster talks playstyle and the anti-endgame

In our house I am the master of channels.  I am the one who unsubscribes from services we’re not watching, re-subscribes to services when there is something for us, and makes sure we don’t get signed up until a show we’re interested in has a full season available.

A mere four years ago we were at a point that felt almost like a renaissance of streaming content… we were all stuck inside and in need of something to do and streaming channels were there to deliver.  And then we got a vaccine, decided the pandemic was over, and realized that maybe we didn’t need a subscription to 17 different streaming services.

Netflix

Meanwhile, all the players who got into the streaming service game, having been lulled by the seemingly effortless success of Netflix, found themselves in a bit of a bind as they found this was not a cheap and easy path to riches even as people began trimming back on their subscription count.  This led to the need to raise prices, which drove even more people to dump their offering.

Still, the strong will prevail and, after some closures and a series of mergers… there are still probably too damn many channels.  More than we can afford to subscribe to continuously, so this is where we are at.

After more of four years of peaks and valleys and industry strife, these are the channels we end up watching.

The Long Haul Keepers

These are the services which we remain subscribed to pretty much always.  They have, on some level, a reason or a proven value to keep them around.

• Netflix

This is the one service we subscribe to continuously and watch most regularly, and it is largely because they throw more content at us than any two or three other services combined.  Sure, a lot of it is garbage, and most of it isn’t for us, but every Friday night they have a selection of content added to their service to choose from.

Add in that they drop a full season at a time so you can binge to your heart’s content and that they have probably one of the best apps by most measures, and you can see why I never bother to put Netflix on the bench.

Finally, their app works.  It is fast, responsive, comprehensible, and doesn’t assume I can read the tiny title card from across the room.  It also skips the “previously” section if I just watched the previous episode and lets me skip the beginning and end credits successfully.

That said, they just announced that they are cancelling my $12 a month plan and enrolling me in a $7 a month plan with ads.  Netflix promises it will just be a couple of ads at the beginning of some programming, but we’ll have to see how it goes.  The other alternative is $18 a month for no ads, and then we’re getting into the “you need to prove your value every month” zone of streaming services.

• Amazon Prime Video

I think it is just called Prime Video honestly, but I always put “Amazon” in there to remind myself that this is part of our Amazon Prime subscription, which is something we keep even when we’re not watching any of their shows.

So, technically, it is the other service we subscribe to continuously, but if my annual Prime member ship was just for it, I would cancel it in a heartbeat.  But I get other benefits from my Prime membership that make it worthwhile, so technically we subscribe to Prime Video.

The problem is that while they occasionally pull off something good… the recent Fallout series is a “prime” example… there otherwise isn’t a lot of new content there, and much of what is new isn’t very good.  If you missed some straight-to-video bad science fiction film, Prime is apparently where they all end up.

It is also very much in the business of bait and switch, where they will get a series from another service like Starz or MGM+ and show you a season… or, in one case, the first season MINUS the final episode… the prompt you to subscribe to that service… through them, of course, so they get a cut… which does not make me happy.  I have gone off and subscribed due to this at times, though I always go directly to that service, like Starz, and contract with them direction so Prime does not get a cut.

This is, in part, out of spite, but also because the Prime Video app isn’t great.  It is not the worst, but it is at best mid-pack.  It is slow, it can be hard to see, browsing for shows is not great, and it is really hit and miss about whether it will let you skip the “previously” or opening credits and just hates when you try to skip the end credits to start another show.  This is likely, in part, to them just showing a lot of content from other services, which they put the minimal effort into adapting to their app.

Finally, despite paying for access to Prime, if I don’t want to get ads during shows, I have to pay extra.  This, as you might expect, irks me and I will not pay their ransom.  The only upside to this is that they don’t show ads on all content, though amusingly some content an ad comes up to tell you the video will be ad free thanks to a specific sponsor, for who an ad then plays.

TL:DR – Not great, but comes with a package I never cancel.

• Apple TV+

Apple is in an interesting niche in that it is just cheap enough and the content is high enough quality that I don’t rush to cancel our subscription.  There isn’t a lot of new content, and they are still wed to the “let’s stretch out people’s subscription time by showing one episode a week because maybe, this time, we’ll have the next Game of Thrones and everybody will need a full week to discuss the show” routine, which I find irksome.

Our house rule is we don’t start watching anything until it is six episodes in.

The app is also not the best.  When you have something selected on scree it makes that item about 5% larger than it was when not selected, so I often have to move the selection a couple of times to see what has focus on screen.  It is a pain in the ass to just go watch the next episode if you stopped at the start of the credits last time you watched a series.  It wants to resume from exactly where you left off unless you fish around in the app to fine the page for the full series that has the episode list.

But the app does at least run pretty well for us.  I will give it that.

And, like I said, there isn’t a ton of new content.  It is the Anti-Netflix, which just throws a constant stream of new content at you.  So we spend a lot more time watching Netflix because we’ll take a chance on an episode or two of something new or watch some potentially bad movie on a Friday night because the commitment feels low and there are many other options if we bail.

• KQED Television

I almost forgot about this.  I give public television a regular monthly payment which gives me access to their regular lineup of shows and whatever they import from the UK via Masterpiece Theater.  We used to have half a dozen public television channels in the SF Bay area that each had their own varied content.  They all got scooped up by KQED in San Francisco over the years.  We almost never watch this these days, unless I want to go back and re-visit one of the Ken Burns documentaries, but technically we’re continuously subscribed.  At least when you stream you are not interrupted by pledge drives every few months.

• Xfinity Stream

Also, I should mention this because, due to the fact that Comcast is our only internet provider option and that they make sure that internet bundles are cheaper if you include cable TV, we still have cable TV at our house.  But on the rare occasion when we want to watch it, we watch it using the app on our Roku Stick.  And, live TV with ads… this is how animals watch TV, right?  Just sitting there and being force to watch whatever is “on” at that very moment?  How did we survive this?

The Frequent Recurring Subscriptions

These are the services that we are often subscribed to, but which get turned off now and then when we run out of content.

• Disney+

I will echo what I have heard many other say, which is if I still had pre-teen children in the house, I would never unsubscribe from Disney+.  It is also the one stop shop for all things Star Wars and the MCU and the entire 35 year life of The Simpsons.

But our daughter is now a college graduate and my nostalgia for the Disney catalog and the other properties they own isn’t all that strong.  So we’re willing to unsub from this one when we’re done with whatever the latest Star Wars series is.  And, because Disney+ is still locked into the “one episode a week” ploy to get people to string out their subscription for an extra month or two, we don’t subscribe until a season is set.

The app itself is pretty good.  It does group up content well enough and is responsive and doesn’t crash on our Roku stick.

• Hulu

Some very decent original content.  Will subscribe when a new season of something is out.  They do adhere to the “one episode a week” thing, so I wait until seasons are complete.  They do also get Fox and FX stuff, and at one point I watched literally all of the available episodes of Bob’s Burgers while also watching all available episodes of Archer, both of which feature H. Jon Benjamin voicing the lead role, which was quite a trip.

The app is okay, though it isn’t well organized.  They like to put the “continue watching” piece of the UI way down the main page and prefer to promote their new stuff, so you really have to bookmark the things you like and go to your personal page to get what you want out of the app.

• Starz

One of the relics of the premium cable channel era, somewhere down the list from HBO and Showtime, its once niche with us is the period piece dramas like The White Queen, The Spanish Princess, and The Serpent Queen get us to subscribe for a while.  They also feature a lot of movies, but everybody has a lot of movies and they are almost never the ones I am in the mood for at any given moment, so somehow that rarely works out.

• Paramount+

We originally came here to watch Yellowstone then found that this is where all of the Star Trek content lives as well as having a cross programming agreement with Showtime, so there is kind of a lot here.  However, we can get a bit burnt out on it as well.  We’ll watch a few seasons of this or that then stop watching for a while, at which point I will turn off the subscription.  But we do return.

• AMC+

This is the channel for all things Walking Dead, which my wife is still into because of the soap opera-like drama.  As I noted previously, after a season or two of zombies, people really became the main enemy, while zombies would only show up when the plot demanded.  Decent channel, not too expensive, and AMC has quite a bit of original content.  When something pops up we’ll subscribe for a while.

The At Need Only Channels

These are the services that we only subscribe to for very specific reasons, then cancel ones we’re done.

• Max

You would think they would be better at this whole streaming things, having been in on that business since the HBO Go app, their first cut at streaming, launched back in 2010.  Then again, the whole thing hasn’t been the same since the end of Game of Thrones.

The old HBO business model was to get people subscribed based on a few prestige series and maybe first access to films that had recently left the theaters, which worked well enough in the age of cable TV and the early days of streaming.  Now films don’t see to be the draw they once were, there are a ton of competitors, and they haven’t quite hit another big winner.

I mean, they can get a show like Succession that gets a lot of awards, but I think Netflix puts out a show about once a month that gets as many or more viewers, and a hit on Netflix will get 5-10x the viewers.

And at one time we would stay subscribed to HBO for years at a stretch.  Now, however, with the consolidation under the Max brand and the removal of back seasons of some shows, and other shows entirely, and their lack of anything really new and good… we went back last to watch season 4 of True Detective and it was okay, but I cancelled the service once we were done

• Peacock

This was an okay service the first few times we have subscribed, and they did a credible job with the Olympics recently.  I mean, I cannot blame them directly for NBC cutting away from the opening ceremonies to watch the US team standing around waiting to get on their boat.  I know the French are… uniquely French I guess… but they’re still more interesting that Snoop Dogg trying to engage random strangers in conversation or Kelly Clarkson repeating “Oooh, look at that” over and over.  And past that, if you wanted to watch very specific competitions, they let you.  So maybe the most accessible Olympics when it came to video.

But beyond the Olympics it has been degrading as a service.  They are going hard on ad revenue with a cheap subscription.  The problem is that I am fully willing to buy the more expensive ad free option, but they now show you the version of the content that has been cut up for ad injection… without the ads.  What this means is that every so often the show pauses for nearly a full second while the server apparently has to decided on the fly whether or not an ad gets played or not, then moves on when the result comes back negative.

That doesn’t sound bad, until you learn just how many ads Peacock thinks they should inject into 30 minutes of television.  It quickly becomes annoying out of all proportion to the actual duration of the interruption.  It isn’t completely unwatchable, but it just pulls me out of the show and makes my brain think, “Oh, here is another place where they would have put an add had I not given then an extra $8 for a month of service.”

Also, “ad free” did not apply to Olympic coverage, and I am still salty about that.

The Odd Outsiders

Services we have tried once and haven’t really felt the need to return to.

• Acorn & Britbox

I am lumping these two together because they share the same problem, which is the US view of British television after having been raised on US public television cherry picking the very best and putting it on in front of us via Masterpiece Theater.  We think everything produced in the UK is sophisticated and urbane, performed by actors who are veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with performances delivered in that very specific BBC news reader accent, written by over educated graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, which holds a mirror up to life while making historical and literary references that mean we have to keep Wikipedia to hand in order to keep up.

Some of us grew up on a diet of things like I, Claudius and House of Cards and Monty Python and it skewed our perception.

So a pair of channels filled to the brim with British television content seems like heaven.

The problem is that Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abby are not the prototypical British programming, the pinnacle to which the island strives; Benny Hill is.  And even that is a huge cut above the average.  There are a lot of simply unwatchable, predictable, crap shows on Acorn and Britbox.

Finding that for every Prime Suspect there are a dozen dreadful police procedurals out there, often hampered for US audiences with incomprehensible UK regional accents and slang, is enough to burst the myth of British television superiority.  You’re just as bad as us at this TV thing and it is a miracle when you can build a season of television on even three hours of actual content.  At least in the US when we crank out mediocre content, we get 8, 10, 16, even 22 episodes out the door.

I’ll go back to letting US public television cherry picking for me, thank you.

So yeah, we’ve been through both of these channels and found that the good stuff we’ve seen already elsewhere and the rest… is usually not the good stuff.

• MGM+

We subscribed to this because of a Prime Video bait and switch with the show Monsieur Spade.  They had some content worth watching, but not enough to keep us subscribed and, lacking another screw job from Amazon, there isn’t anything there we’re dying to watch.  I think all the Bond films are available there… but I also have them all on DVD so I am excused from every having to watch them because there are just right there, I could watch them any time I want.

• Tubi

Technically not a subscription service but a free ad supported venue, one of my nieces that works in Hollywood… I have two such nieces… was working as a producer here so we gave it a try.  Oh man, ads suck, and injected ads suck at least 3x as much because if they don’t have enough ad buys, they will just show you the same damn ad two or three times back to back.

If the future is ad supported, they need to work on that.  It is awful.  Anyway, my niece has another job so I do not feel the need to engage with Tubi anymore.

Conclusions

We wished for a bright future of on demand entertainment where we could select and watch anything we wanted.  But we wished on the monkey’s paw, and as the finger curled down, we were given a patchwork landscape of competing services, shifting content availability, and difficult UIs.

I think the biggest problem is just know what there is out there to watch.  My least favorite thing these days is to sit down on the couch and have my wife ask, “So what should we watch?”  This portends me using the remote to scroll through large sections of half a dozen services to find something that looks good.

This, btw, is why Netflix wins so often for us.  They at least always have something new, something we’re willing to invest at least a bit of time into.  And after about fifteen minutes of my wife vetoing this or that I’m ready to just put anything on so I can stop this futile quest for content.

Using the Roku for streaming helps, as it will search all channels and services for programming and find it.  But you have to know what you are looking for.  If you are doing the streaming equivalent of channel surfing on a Friday night there are just too many places to look.

I know we don’t want to go back to half a dozen channels where you watched what was on or nothing at all, but there was a simplicity to it and a limited scope where you could glance at the TV listings and just decide to read a book or go play a video game.

So what are you watching these days?  Which channel scratches your itch?  And is there any decent new science fiction shows out there?  Is Orphan Black: Echoes any good?  Might have to re-up AMC+ if it is.

And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal.  I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead.  And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case.  As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time.  There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day.   I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere.  Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist.  Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going.  A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates.  Others are around, but on different mediums.  Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive.  Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter.  They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky.  You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following.  I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!)  Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games.  We argued with each other.  SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars.  I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up.   There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers.  And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well.  I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr.  I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that.  Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line.  It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from.  The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that.  But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things.  The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim.  Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game.  That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience.  Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists.  Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words?  Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures?  Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it.  I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform.  Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true.  Zero readers might be too much quiet.  But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined.  For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis.  Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one.  That one is for another day… or maybe never.”  Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written.  The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed.  Did I soften on this expansion or that release?  Am I nostalgic for some title I panned?  Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online.  Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes.  Was it really that bad?  Did I miss something in it?  Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly.  My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture.  Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust?  Look at them all!  Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

1. 2TonWaffle Community
2. A Boy and His Computer
3. A Hobbits Journey
4. Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap
5. AI MMORPG News
6. Aistoryweavers.studio
7. Aiyna
8. Alexs Review Corner
9. Alligators And Aneurysms
10. Alvans Digital Garden
11. Amerpie
12. And So It Goes…
13. AppAddict
14. Art by Lucas da Silva
15. Avaruussuo
16. Axxuys Blog
17. Aywrens Nook
18. Beats and Skies
19. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
20. BinaryDigits Cafe
21. Bio Break
22. Cascading Space
23. Chasing Dings
24. Contains Moderate Peril
25. Cotswold Diary
26. Cubic Creativity
27. Endgame Viable
28. EVE Online Pictures
29. Exposition is Inevitable
30. Flamingo Flix
31. Funky Frogster Zone
32. Gaudete Theology
33. Geek on a Harley
34. Gendo Glow
35. Grubz Blog
36. Heartless Gamer
37. Hey Dingus
38. In An Age
39. Inconsistent Software
40. Indiecator
41. Inventory Full
42. Jeremy Cherfas
43. Jess is Typing
44. JJxSly
45. Juha-Matti Santala
46. Just Text
47. Kaushiks Blog
48. KayTalksGames
49. Kellys World
50. Kluwes
51. Lameazoid
52. Linkage
53. Living Out Loud
54. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
55. Martins Notebook
56. Matan Abudy
57. MMO Casual
58. Monsterladys Diary
59. Mormoroi
60. Mutant Reviewers
61. Nathan Friend
62. Necoco loves stuff
63. Nejimaki Blog
64. Nerd Girl Thoughts
65. Nerdy Bookahs
66. Neville Hobson
67. Noisy Deadlines
68. Notes by JCProbably
69. OwlBlog
70. P.S Its Me
71. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
72. Pink Gallica
73. Point Click Repeat
74. Quintessence of Dust
75. Ramble With(out) A Cause
76. Ramblings by Joshua
77. Reality Frameworks
78. Riels Nest
79. rscottjones.com
80. rsjon.es
81. Rumors Matrix
82. SamJC
83. Sane Boat
84. Sane Boat
85. Scopique
86. Select Star Studio
87. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
88. Shaky.Sh
89. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
90. SoftThistle 2.0
91. Splendide Mendax
92. StarShadow
93. Sword of Seiros
94. TAGN
95. Tales of the Aggronaut
96. Tart Darling
97. The Chip Bag
98. The Dragon Chronicle
99. The End of My Worlds
100. The Everjournal
101. The Friendly Necromancer
102. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
103. The Lost Outpost
104. The Naming Way
105. The Tony Burgess Blog
106. Time to Loot
107. Uncountable Thoughts
108. Unidentified Signal Source
109. Usama Insights
110. Valentines Days
111. Vicissitudes
112. Wand3r
113. WAWAWA
114. Werd I/O
115. With Love Kechi
116. Words Under My Name
117. Yordi

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants.  We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

Secret Level is a gaming-inspired anthology series coming to Prime Video on December 15. The upcoming Amazon title is from the same team behind Netflix's Love, Death and Robots. From the teaser released during Gamescom, this new project will be continuing the Blur Studio specialty for creating masterful animated works for an adult audience. The creative team was looking to inspire "nerd joy" with Love, Death and Robots and from the first glimpse, Secret Level seems like a natural progression of that goal.

Each of the 15 stories in the show are inspired by a different game. The official list of inspirations is: Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, PAC-MAN, various PlayStation Studios games, Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament and Warhammer 40,000.

Games feel like a natural inspiration for this type of animation showcase. The cinematics in some contemporary AAA titles have all the polish and emotion of standalone films. Plus, game-inspired television series have been reaching new levels of success in recent years thanks to projects like Fallout, The Last of Us and Arcane.

Tarsier Studios, creators of the first two Little Nightmares games, is back with another creepy adventure — and its “partially disemboweled talking pig” teaser video looks like it set the proper tone. Announced at Gamescom Opening Night, Reanimal takes two children on an adventure across land and sea as they work together to rescue their missing friends on an island filled with horrifying creatures.

The developer helmed the first two Little Nightmares installments before Supermassive Games took over for part III. The new game promises to up the ante with “a more terrifying journey than ever before.”

The horror-adventure game stars a brother and sister in an “unsettling tale” who “go through hell to rescue their missing friends.” The protagonists are described as broken but resilient, facing fragments of their troubled past in the guise of gruesome beasts. It will somehow explore themes of hope and redemption as they navigate the chilling environment.

Tarsier Studios / THQ Nordic

The game lets you play single-player or co-op (local and online). In an illustration of the creators’ understanding of the horror genre, it uses a shared, directed camera “to maximize claustrophobia and tension.”

Reanimal doesn’t yet have a launch date other than “coming soon,” but we know it will be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. You can check out the announcement trailer below.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set in 1937, in the space between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, and it’s being developed by MachineGames, the studio behind the most recent Wolfenstein installments. So, of course the game’s main enemies are Nazis, and obviously it has a robust range of Nazi-punching mechanics. What makes The Great Circle intriguing, even after just a 30-minute hands-off preview, is its lighthearted interpretation of classic Indiana Jones tropes, leaning into the series’ humorous tone and adding twists like open-handed Nazi slapping to Indy’s repertoire.

When it comes to combat, Indiana has a whip, a revolver and his fists (or palms). His whip appears to be the most useful tool on his belt, allowing him to swing across gaps, activate levers, and pull in enemies nice and close for a one-two punch. Hitting a Nazi with the whip briefly incapacitates them while they’re reeled in, setting up an advantageous close-quarters melee situation. Hand-to-hand combat requires precise timing in order to land knockout combos or finishing moves, and on top of throwing punches and slaps, Indy is able to block and defensively parry. In fistfights, the game’s first-person perspective crops in extra tight, filling the screen with punchable Nazi surfaces and enhancing the tension behind each blow and dodge. He can also pick up objects and hit enemies with them, and in pre-recorded gameplay footage, it all looks supremely satisfying.

MachineGames

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just an action game, though. Many of its encounters can be approached with stealth mechanics, where players sneak past guards and perform silent takedowns without fisticuffs or gunfire at all. The revolver is really a last-ditch option in each scenario, game director Jerk Gustafsson and creative director Axel Torvenius said. Otherwise, puzzles are a pivotal component of gameplay.

Indiana is joined on his adventures by Gina, an Italian journalist who’s searching for her sister, and together they encounter a variety of logic and spatial puzzles. Some are quick, like finding an alternative entrance to a sealed room, and others are more involved, requiring a few minutes of focus to fully understand.

The preview focused on Giza, Egypt, showcasing bustling outdoor marketplaces, a depressing Nazi meeting room and a vibrant temple hidden beneath the sands of the Great Sphinx. Here, Indy and Gina had to catch the sunlight with a series of ancient mirrors, lining them up one by one until the beam bounced to the proper place. This particular puzzle room seemed straightforward and slightly clever (though maybe that’s just because The Mummy is one of my favorite childhood movies), but there are apparently more challenging riddles in the game, too. The most complex puzzles are hidden, requiring some light exploration in various regions, and they’re not necessary in order to complete the main storyline. These bonus riddles are just some of the many secrets to find around the game’s world.

MachineGames

“I don’t really like too difficult puzzles myself,” Gustafsson said. “I like to just enjoy the experience and not be so challenged by them. That said, we do have a mix [of puzzle difficulties] because I like a lot of variation. It’s not like we have some unique puzzle mechanic that goes across the entire game. We tried to create every puzzle in a different, unique way.”

There are also difficulty options for the puzzles overall, allowing players to choose how complex they’ll be throughout the entire game.

Indiana has a notebook that fills up with evidence, objectives and photos that he takes while investigating various relics around the globe. The camera is an essential tool in The Great Circle, and each snapped pic can unlock new clues and trails to follow. Indy also carries a lighter, which functions as a flashlight and can set stationary torches ablaze. His play style is customizable, with dozens of upgrades available as the game progresses. One potential upgrade is True Grit, an ability that allows him to recover from a fatal blow by crawling toward and grabbing his fedora within a certain amount of time. You know, classic Indiana Jones stuff.

MachineGames

I’ve seen some angry chatter online from people who don’t like the first-person perspective in The Great Circle, citing a desire to actually see Indiana as he does all this cool stuff, just like in the movies. I don’t think these people have much to worry about — not only are there plenty of cutscenes featuring Troy Baker’s utterly impressive 1980s Harrison Ford impression, but parts of the game are in third-person after all.

“When it comes to a character like Indiana Jones, I want to play the character and I want to be the character, I want to look through and explore the world through his eyes,” Gustafsson said. “To me that’s a very important part of what we do here. For me, it was a very easy choice. But also, we do mix in some third-person elements here. We have very much come back to our own history with games like Riddick and The Darkness where we also did this mix between first-person and third-person perspective. We do that for this game, too. Everything is not first-person, even though the core experience is in first-person.”

Torvenius added, “There’s a great opportunity here as well for us because we do have a large section of the game that is mystery, it’s solving puzzles, being up front and close to ancient relics and ruins and scriptures. So it adds an intimacy to the adventure to some aspect, that you can get really up and close and can really inspect things, which is actually pretty nice how it plays out in the game.”

MachineGames

Even in first-person scenes, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks, sounds and feels right so far. Baker’s Indiana Jones is nearly indistinguishable from the early film versions, his voice drawling and gravelly with a sarcastic bite. There’s a dry humor built into his interactions, as is fitting. In one scene, he’s introducing himself to a woman who has an intricately designed eye patch; she seems to be indigenous to the jungle they’re sitting in.

“I’m an archaeologist,” Indiana says.

“Another one,” she replies, clearly unimpressed.

It’s a quick moment from a short preview, but it sets a solid tone for the game as a whole: dry, lighthearted, and a little punch-drunk in between all the actual punching. Or you could say, a bit slap-happy amid all the slapping. Either way, these Nazis won't know what hit them.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to Xbox Series X/S and PC on December 9. It'll be available on Game Pass Ultimate, and it's also coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025.

We've got our first big announcement of Gamescom: Borderlands is back. Borderlands 4 is the next entry in the franchise from Gearbox Software and 2K Games. It's due to arrive in 2025.

There's no gameplay in the announcement video released today. While that's a touch disappointing, it isn't much of a surprise for a teaser trailer or for a release that is still likely at least a year away. (And that's assuming no delays.) But the Borderlands games are known for their polished first-person shooter experience, particularly in co-op, and for their sharp sense of humor. Hopefully both of those traits will be returning in full force with the new game.

What doesn't seem to be returning is the cartoony art style that was a hallmark of the previous three titles. The teaser looks more like it's advertising a prestige television science fiction series rather than the zany Borderlands world. But it's early days yet and the studio will surely be sharing more updates as the game progresses through development.

Gearbox was likely hoping to springboard this announcement off a wave of renewed interest in the series after the blockbuster movie adaptation this summer. But since that project was a disastrous disappointment, hopefully a new game will give fans of the series something fresh to be excited about.

Streaming prices love to go up, but here’s a rare instance in which one is going down. Paramount+ is lowering prices on its two annual plans for a limited time. The cheapest option is just $30 per year, and this gets you the Essentials plan. This is the basic subscription that allows access to Paramount+ programming with ads.

It doesn’t, however, offer access to Showtime. For that, the cost doubles to $60 per year. In addition to the secondary streaming service, this plan offers live CBS streaming and the ability to download shows to a mobile device. This is also an ad-free plan, though live TV still has ads (for obvious reasons.)

For the uninitiated, Paramount+ is home to most, but not all, new Star Trek shows. It also hosts the dad-friendly Tulsa King and the Jeremy Renner vehicle Mayor of Kingstown. As for genre fare, there’s the Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff Knuckles, the recently-canceled Halo show and a remake of Stephen King’s The Stand.

Showtime, on the other hand, is a long-standing cable institution that’s seen as “HBO’s younger sibling.” The platform offers access to hit shows like Yellowjackets, Billions and The Chi. The network also has a stable of older properties, including Dexter, Ray Donovan, Shameless and many more. Finally, it’s the best way to watch Twin Peaks: The Return, which is so dang good.

These deals only last until September 6, at which point the discounts disappear into a puff of smoke. The usual prices for these annual plans are $60 for Essential and $120 for the Showtime bundle. As for monthly subscription costs, they keep going up and up.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Black Myth: Wukong, considered China’s first true AAA game, has broken Steam’s concurrent players record for a single-player title, passing Cyberpunk 2077 for the single-player record. In addition, it’s now the game with the second-most all-time concurrent players to date (including multiplayer), moving past Palworld. Based on the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, the souls-like action-adventure epic peaked at 2,223,179 players.

Industry analyst Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo posted on X (Twitter) early on Tuesday an estimate that Black Myth: Wukong’s regional breakdown heavily favored its home country. The agency’s pie graph showed China claiming 88 percent of the game’s players. (In second place was the US at a mere three percent.) Although some interpreted that as potentially showing inflated numbers, the game launched in the middle of the night in the western hemisphere, and Carless’ stats were posted around 5AM ET.

The title’s records come against a backdrop of misogyny and censorship accusations aimed at developer Game Science. Streamers who were granted early access keys were given a (non-legally-binding) document that raised some eyebrows.

Game Science / Sony

The document included a list of banned topics the streamers were to avoid discussing while broadcasting gameplay. The New York Times reported that the off-limits subjects included politics, “feminist propaganda,” COVID-19, China’s gaming industry, and anything else that “instigates negative discourse.” (While streamers were given the list, reviewers weren’t.)

Of course, the COVID mention is easily tied to the nation’s “zero-COVID” restrictions.

As for the “feminist propaganda” restriction for Black Myth: Wukong’s streamers, you can easily draw a straight line from widespread accusations of misogyny from developer Game Science and individuals working there, including some of its cofounders. Among the many instances (summarized in a 2023 IGN story) were Game Science recruitment posters from 2015, one of which implied friends with benefits were an office perk and another featuring a dumbbell with the text (translated) “fatties should fuck off.” (Yikes.) The accusations go on from there.

Game Science / Valve

Game Science has ties to the Chinese government, which is no stranger to accusations of misogyny and censorship. To cite only a few examples, the #MeToo hashtag was censored or blocked on Chinese social platforms during the height of the movement, posts from feminist and LGBTQ+ groups and voices are routinely blocked or deleted on the country’s social media, feminist perspectives are frequently restricted or censored in China’s academic institutions and activists are no strangers to harassment, surveillance or arrests.

Tencent Holdings, a five-percent stakeholder according to The NY Times, has direct ties to Xi’s government. Meanwhile, the game’s publisher, Zhejiang Publishing & Media, is majority-owned by the Zhejiang provincial government. Finally, Hero Games, the company that sent out the streamer keys on Game Science’s behalf, has financial ties to “several state-owned enterprises,” according to The NYT. Hero Games owns around 20 percent of Game Science.

Some streamers supplied with keys (and the attached red tape) decided not to cover the game. “I have never seen anything that shameful in my 15 years doing this job. This is very clearly a document which explains that we must censor ourselves,” the prominent French streamer Benoit Reinier said (translated) in a YouTube video.

In Engadget’s preview of Black Myth: Wukong from earlier this summer (which didn’t include provisions about censored topics like streamers received), Mat Smith found the game visually stunning. We found the demo “elevated by how good the environment looks, the bizarre monster design and the quiet, unsettling soundtrack.” The game is available now on PC and PS5.

Once upon a time in the tail-end of the last century, there was something called the Y2K bug. This bit of computer code was supposed to herald a global robot apocalypse at the stroke of midnight when 1999 became the year 2000 because of, uh, clock dates or something. Anyways, nothing happened. Or did it?

That’s the premise behind A24’s new horror comedy, the appropriately-named Y2K. The film imagines a New Year’s Eve of 1999 in which the computers really did turn on humanity. It’s written and directed by SNL alum Kyle Mooney, who made the fantastic and underrated Brigsby Bear.

As you can see from the trailer, it’s a 1990s teen party comedy, like Can’t Hardly Wait, but also an apocalyptic horror film. This particular hodgepodge brings to mind This is the End, in which Seth Rogen and other celebrities fight off a demonic horde.

However, instead of a demonic horde, these teens will be fighting for their lives against VCRs, old-school computers and, of course, murderous Tamagotchis. Also, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst is somehow involved. The cast is composed primarily of unknown teenagers, but the adults are played by Tim Heidecker, Alicia Silverstone and Mooney himself. The movie hits theaters on December 6.

Lucasfilm has decided not to renew The Acolyte for a second season, according to Deadline and Variety. Fans won't get to see how the show was supposed to end and won't get to know how the plotlines its creator, Leslye Headland (Russian Doll), teased at the end of the first season would unravel. Engadget Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar called The Acolyte "Star Wars at its best" in his review, discussed how unique its premise was, and drew parallels between the series and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

Deadline says the show had a strong start and garnered 4.8 million views in the first day it became available for streaming, reaching 11.1 million views after five days. However, viewership fell in the coming weeks, and its finale was reportedly the poorest performing finale for a Star Wars series. 

The Acolyte was a mystery-thriller story featuring a former Jedi trainee played by Amandla Stenberg, who's suspected of committing a series of crimes. Her former Jedi Master played by Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game) now has to find her to get to the bottom of things. Manny Jacinto, who played the smuggler Qimir, gained a lot of attention online due to this shirtless scenes. It was revealed in the later episodes that he plays a bigger role in the story, and viewers were even supposed to learn his real name in the next season. 

The show is still available to watch on Disney+ for those who don't mind not getting closure for its story. 

The next entry in the Pacific Rim franchise could be an origin story for the universe, set before the events of the 2013 film by Guillermo del Toro. According to Variety, the franchise's producer Legendary Entertainment has signed a first-look TV deal with Eric Heisserer. One of the first projects he's developing with Carmen Lewis, his co-founder for his production company called Chronology, is a prequel series for Pacific Rim. Heisserer won several awards for his screenplay for Arrival, the Denis Villeneuve-directed sci-fi movie starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. He also wrote the script for the Netflix post-apocalyptic movie Bird Box, which starred Sandra Bullock. 

It sounds like the project is still in its very early stages, so we'll have to wait for its storyline and projected release date if it does get the green light. Seeing as it's supposed to be the Pacific Rim origin story, though, we may get to see the first kaijus emerging from the interdimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. We may also get to see how the first Jaegers, or the gigantic mechas controlled by human pilots to fight the alien monsters, were designed and created. 

The original Pacific Rim movie was followed by Pacific Rim Uprising, its 2018 sequel film that starred John Boyega and was directed by Steven S. DeKnight. If the series pushes through, it'll follow Pacific Rim: The Black, an anime series that streamed on Netflix in 2021 and 2021, which serves as the continuation of the two films.

Gamescom 2024 is almost here. Exhibitors from over 60 countries will descend on Cologne, Germany, for what is now the industry’s biggest gaming event following E3’s demise. An opening night presentation will kick off the festivities with new game announcements, trailers, footage and other surprises (like the obligatory awkward celebrity cameos). You can watch the showcase right here on Tuesday, August 20.

As usual, industry stalwart Geoff Keighley will host the Opening Night Live festivities, which begin at 2PM ET on Tuesday. E-sports MC Eefje “sjokz” Depoortere will join as co-host.

Keighley has confirmed the showcase will include the following:

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (“a new look” at the game)

• Monster Hunter Wilds (a new trailer)

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (a play-through of the first campaign)

• Marvel Rivals (new heroes and updates)

• Dune Awakening (an “extended look” at gameplay)

• Civilization VII (the gameplay world premiere)

• The next game from Tarsier Studios, creators of Little Nightmares I and II

You can bookmark this page and tune in here to stream the event on August 20 at 2PM ET.

There is a disturbance in the force, and his name is Nubs.

Disney has a fairly sweeping Star Wars High Republic story going. Everything from live-action to books, video games, audio dramas, comics, cartoons, and tie-in merchandise abound. With the cancellation of The Acolyte, however, if you want to watch High Republic Jedi do their thing, Nubs is your guy. — Read the rest

The post Star Wars: The Acolyte's cancellation leaves High Republic fans with Nubs appeared first on Boing Boing.

Initial buzz about Grounded was minimal; just an inkling that something fresh might emerge in gaming. Yet its sudden explosion into mainstream consciousness proved otherwise; mesmerizing millions with its blend of survival, exploration, and crafting gameplay. Obsidian Entertainment seems to have created some form of magical shrinking potion that allows us to experience life from an ant's point of view! Grounded was an unexpected sensation that captured everyone's interest surprisingly early. A stealthy title that initially managed to stay under the radar before blossoming into something amazing and inspiring players around the globe; suddenly everyone was talking about survival in backyard environments!

Crafting Depth, Overcoming Challenges...

I have spent endless hours wandering among towering blades of grass, building intricate fortresses, and fighting massive insects that would send any arachnophobe shrieking with fear. It is an extraordinary world with beauty as well as fear; every dewdrop could provide life support while spiders could pose grave threats; its ability to transform everyday things into extraordinary experiences is truly astounding. Far from me to recommend to those who buy PS5 games a title that I did not finish and totally enjoyed it. Grounded may contain quirks - software bugs not of the garden variety - which are sometimes annoying, yet these issues are easily overlooked given its sheer joy of discovery. Every corner offers new challenges; discovering an underground cavern or crafting a powerful weapon are always exciting experiences in Grounded!

Stealth and Survival Mechanics

Survival mechanics in Antsy are deceptively deep for such an apparently straightforward premise, from gathering resources, crafting tools, and building your base to exploring your surroundings and fortifying against monstrous insects lurking behind every corner. I spent hours fortifying my base only for it to become overrun with angry ants; an experience both thrilling and frightening at once! A game about being shrunk down seemed like an odd choice of subject matter; yet once I ventured into that unfamiliar and overgrown world I became fascinated and became fully immersed in its strange beauty, creating an unparalleled feeling of discovery!

An Engaging Experience for Both Beginners and Veterans Alike

Every blade of grass and dewdrop holds something special to reveal; there's great pleasure in exploring this miniature world and piecing together what happened here. Grounded's humor also stands out: from absurdly large bugs to its quirky dialogue, Grounded, among PS5 adventure games, manages to be both frightening and delightful at the same time. Grounded stands as proof of what can be accomplished with fresh perspectives and taking risks; its success speaks for itself and millions are playing this beloved title!

Final Thoughts: Exceed Expectations

Obsidian Entertainment has conjured an immersive universe that is both intimate and massive in scale. A backyard that was once mundane transforms into an expansive wilderness where every dewdrop may become its own lake; every pebble becomes its own formidable mountain; not simply another take on "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." Obsidian has created something bolder - an immersion into an alienated reality where survival becomes ever-present anxiety. Grounded isn't without its problems; performance issues may hinder gameplay at times and some of the later game content feels thin at times, yet these are minor drawbacks in what otherwise represents an exceptional package.

7Levels is teaming up with Legendary Entertainment to drop a killer new game this fall: “Kong Survivor Instinct.” This 2.5D action-adventure indie game is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and it’s going to be epic. Kong Survivor Instinct Trailer Set right after the events of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” you’ll step into…

The post Kong Survivor Instinct Revealed appeared first on Invision Game Community.

SteelSeries, the OG esports brand known for blending gaming and culture, has partnered with Blizzard Entertainment to drop a sick new line of World of Warcraft-themed gear. With WoW’s tenth expansion, The War Within, on the horizon, this limited-edition collection is bringing back all the nostalgia while hooking you up with some serious in-game bonuses.…

The post SteelSeries and Blizzard Team Announce World of Warcraft Gear appeared first on Invision Game Community.

Content leaks have been an ongoing controversy in the entertainment sphere for decades, effecting every industry from film, television, to comic books and print novels. While fans obviously want to know everything they can about an upcoming release, it can be easy to forget just how harmful leaks can be to the people working on a project.

Dubbed one of the “biggest leaking disasters” in the anime industry’s lengthy history, the recent Netflix leaks that’s caused highly anticipated shows like Dandadan, Ranma 1/2, and Arcane Season 2, and more to be partially or fully leaked online has fans and industry professionals in an understandable outrage.

How Did So Many of Netflix’s Biggest Animated Releases Get Leaked?

While details are still sparse at this time on how the site was hacked, online sleuths have speculated the leaker may be located in Japan due to the content being recorded in Japanese and lacking subtitles. The leaked footage from these episodes are low quality and covered in watermarks, which seems to suggest that many of them were still in production when the files were taken.

This leak isn’t just a bad look on Netflix’s part, it’s also extremely harmful for the team’s involved in each of these series’ and film’s productions. Fans and professionals alike are furious over this series of events, and many are urging the streaming to giant to make an official statement.

At time of writing, Netflix has been silent on what happened.

VTubers – a type of content creator that uses an animated virtual avatar to represent them as opposed to using their real face – has become a cultural staple over the past few years, and are typically synonymous with the anime and manga community.

One of the largest VTuber agencies in the industry, hololive production, is famous for introducing some of the biggest talents in the space, including Sakura Miko, Houshou Marine, and Usada Pekora. One of their Gen 2 talents, Minato Aqua, recently announced through X (formerly Twitter) that she would be “graduating” – or retiring – at the end of August 2024, with her graduation stream taking place on August 28.

Sadly, for fans of the content creator, this isn’t the only piece of heartbreaking news surrounding Minato Aqua in recent days.

Minato Aqua’s New Visual Novel, ‘AQUARIUM’, Has Officially Been Cancelled Following the Vtuber’s Graduation

Something that really made Minato Aqua stand out compared to other talents in hololive was the release of her Aquarium game, which originally dropped in 2022 for the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch before later being ported to Steam in October 2023. During the live event, “Hololive Expo 2024”, Entergram, the company behind the first Aquarium game announced a sequel was in development in March 2024.

Tragically, following Minato Aqua’s graduation announcement, Entergram swiftly followed up by stating that the game’s production had been cancelled.

While fans are understandably distraught over the news, they still expressed gratitude for the team working at Entergram on all their hard work, even if they would never be able to see the finished product.

A re-release version of Sanctuary, an artbook to celebrate 40 years’ worth of artwork from Inomata Mutsumi, will come out on August 21, 2024. The book will be available via Amazon and will cost 4070 JPY ($27.80). [Thanks, Famitsu!]

The book contains 256 pages and over 2000 pieces of work from various genres that Inomata worked on in her lifetime. This includes anime, games, novels, and magazines. It serves as a chronicle that looks back on her career, which heavily focuses on designs for sci-fi and fantasy characters.

Inomata Mutsumi died on March 10, 2024, though the news broke on March 18, 2024. Her career started in 1979 and lasted until she died. She was known for her work on the Tales series, including Destiny, Graces, Hearts, Innocence, Xillia, Berseria, and Zestiria. She also worked on the animation for Urusei Yatsura and City Hunter, as well as designed for the My-HiME and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED franchise. Her art style included the usage of watercolors, and her characters tended to have large eyes and slender figures, making them look like they came from a shojo manga.

Sanctuary, which collects artwork from Inomata Mutsumi over the past 40 years in a single artbook, will come out on August 21, 2024.

The post Inomata Mutsumi Artbook Sanctuary Will Be Re-Released appeared first on Siliconera.

Ubisoft has made another round of layoffs, this time cutting staff from two of its US studios.

A total of 45 employees have been let go across the Assassin's Creed publisher's San Francisco studio and Red Storm Entertainment, which is based in Cary, North Carolina. It is unclear which departments have been affected.

"Yesterday Ubisoft San Francisco and Red Storm Entertainment informed their teams of a restructuring that resulted in 45 employees leaving Ubisoft," a Ubisoft spokesperson told IGN in a statement.

Read more

Eschatology Entertainment has raised $11.3 million in series A funding, led by Krafton.

The funding round also included participation from GEM Capital and The Games Fund, both of which invested $4 million in the game studio in 2022 which supported initial development and hiring.

This new investment will be used to help launch the release of its first title, a Souls-like first-person-shooter set in the apocalyptic Wild West.

Read more

We all know, at this stage, that rumours of the death of the console were greatly exaggerated. This narrative took hold pretty strongly for about a decade, fuelled by the introduction of various smart devices – smartphones, smart TVs, and so on – and by some fairly optimistic notions about 5G and internet speeds in general.

The logic was simple; the world was filling up with devices that you could play games on, and with the potential for streaming games in ways that didn't require a device at all looming on the horizon, selling consumers an expensive, dedicated gaming console seemed like a tougher prospect with every passing day. Even as each successive generation of console hardware boomed, confident prophets told us that decline into irrelevance was inevitable for this sector.

Ultimately, those people who predicted the end of consoles were wrong (so far, at least) for a very simple reason: they didn't actually understand the appeal of consoles in the first place.

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PlayStation 5 has now sold through four million consoles in the UK, GfK data reveals.

It's the ninth console to achieve that feat in the UK, but took 31 weeks longer to get there than PlayStation 4.

It's the fifth-fastest selling console in the UK, although it has a comparatively much higher price point than those ahead of it. PlayStation 1, for instance (which is the fourth-fastest) dropped to £129 after 76 weeks on sale and was under £100 by the time it reached four million sales.

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Bandai Namco has published its first quarter financial results, and has recorded a significant increase in both its net sales and profits.

For the three months ended June 30, 2024, net sales increased by 24.8% year-over-year to ¥280 billion ($1.9 billion), while profit rose by 56.3% to ¥34 billion ($233 million).

The publisher saw a boost in its digital entertainment sales, which increased by 55.8% to ¥106 billion ($725 million).

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PS Plus members have renewed calls for more notice on games leaving the service. This has been a recurring complaint since the revamp because Sony often gives players as little as one week to wrap up their progress, which isn’t enough when it comes to lengthy games. There have also been occasions where Sony didn’t announce a departure until the very last minute.

When does Sony typically announce the list of games leaving PS Plus?

Sony provides a preliminary list of games leaving the service shortly after a catalog refresh. As an example, September 2024’s departures were announced today after new games were added to the service this morning.

However, as emphasized above, these are preliminary lists. Sony may remove games without a warning — like it has done so in the past — or give as little as a few days notice.

Players refreshed their demand for more notice after they discovered that Sea of Stars and Lost Judgment — both lengthy games — were added to PS Store’s ‘Last Chance to Play’ section with barely two weeks’ notice. Forums like Reddit and ResetEra saw members asking fellow players if there was a way to expedite their progress before the games left the service.

Given that there are hundreds of games in the catalog, Sony should endeavor to provide one-month notice for departures. We don’t see a good reason why this isn’t possible or why this shouldn’t be the case. Random updates with little notice are quite a nuisance.

The post PS Plus Users Continue to Demand More Notice for Games Leaving Service appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.

Until Dawn‘s PS5, PC price leaked over the weekend, earning sharp and unanimous rebuke from players. Ballistic Moon’s enhanced version of the 2014 Supermassive Games title will launch on October 4th, and reportedly has the same price tag as Astro Bot: $60 (£60 / €60 / AU$110 / CA$80).

Until Dawn’s PS5 and PC price isn’t justified, players say

The aforementioned leak comes from none other than Dealabs user billbil-kun, who has a pretty stellar track record. According to them, Until Dawn’s PS5 version will also get a disc release but regardless of the format players purchase and what platform they make a purchase on, the price is the same.

If this leak is accurate (we hope it’s not), this is a baffling move by Sony. For comparison purposes, The Last of Us Part II Remastered cost $50 and, as previously mentioned, a brand-new full-fledged Astro Bot costs $60. With Silent Hill 2’s remake releasing just four days after Until Dawn, we’ll be surprised if Sony manages to sell many copies at this price.

I personally loved Until Dawn, but it’s pretty much a one-and-done game, so I can’t imagine people will be paying $60 for it regardless of how “enhanced” it is. As one player said it, “Until Sale,” then.

The post Sony Blasted Over Until Dawn PS5, PC Price Following Leak appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.