2025 is set to be a bumper year of growth for the games industry due to the long-awaited launches of Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto 6.
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Amazon Video has renewed Secret Level for a second season.
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This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world.
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Every year, we turn to a panel of trusted analysts to ask them what they see coming down the road, and ask them to assess their predictions from the previous year.
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The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has announced that Nintendo of America veteran Don James will receive the AIAS Lifetime Achievement Award.
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The latest episode of The GamesIndustry.biz Microcast is available to download now.
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Aonic has received a €152 million investment after entering an agreement with Metric Capital Partners and Active Ownership.
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Vancouver-based studio Hothead Games has closed its doors.
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At the outset of 2024, the most often expressed concern about this year in the games business was that it was going to have a very sparse and underwhelming release calendar, at least compared to the spectacular heights of 2023. This was to some extent a ripple effect from the pandemic years: a backlog of delayed software made its way onto the market during 2023, meaning that with many major studios set to be in the early stages of new projects, 2024's line-up did not look very inspiring.
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Across the road from The Game Awards, in a car park featuring a couple of trailers and some plastic flamingos, sits the Racoon Logic team.
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Tis the season to be jolly pouring over pie charts, bar graphs, tables and any other statistics we can throw at you.
Two Tencent directors have left Epic Games' board of directors after the US Justice Department "expressed concerns" about their positions.
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Watch time on Twitch has remained stable year-over-year, with 18.9bn hours watched in 2023 compared to 18.5bn this year.
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The Australian video game industry generated $339.1m AUD ($211.9m USD) in revenue in 2024.
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Moon Beast Productions has secured $4.5m in seed funding.
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Activision has recast some of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's voice actors amid the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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Early this year, we made some predictions on legal trends for 2024. Now it is time to look back and see where we have been right (+) and where we have been wrong (-), as well as making some new predictions for 2025.
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Sega of America is facing a lawsuit from one of its long-running musical partners: Johnny Gioeli, a member of the rock band Crush 40.
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In late 2017, I interviewed Guerrilla Games' Jan-Bart Van Beek about his original pitch for what would become Horizon: Zero Dawn, how the studio designed this world, and the lengths the team went to in order to make this new IP stand out.
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Frostpunk developer 11 Bit Studios has cancelled the development of its first console-centric title, codenamed Project 8, resulting in an unknown number of layoffs.
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Sony is increasing its stake in Kadokawa Corporation, which will make it the FromSoftware parent's biggest shareholder.
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The Game Awards 2024 achieved an estimated 154 million global livestreams, the organisers have announced.
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Electronic Arts' college football game is now the biggest selling sports video game in US history when it comes to dollar sales.
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As the ninth generation enters mid-life, the rumour mill has started again on what new console hardware will look like. If there is one thing the video game industry does very well, that is jumping on trends, especially if plenty of money could be made. This time it’s all about gaming mobility. Reports have come out that both Microsoft and Sony are courting console handhelds as the next best thing. The logic being that the Nintendo’s Switch is one of its best-selling consoles of all time, Valve has seen success with Steam Deck and Sony has seen its mobile streaming peripheral, the PlayStation Portal, fly off shelves. So why not have a dedicated PS5 console handheld or a dedicated Xbox handheld? It makes perfect sense to the c-suits, who bury themselves in spreadsheets.
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Humanity is in danger, and I'm ignoring it.
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Pacific Drive is the latest game getting the Hollywood treatment.
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Original story, December 17 2024: A "network of illegal casinos" is allegedly permitting children to gamble using their Roblox currency.
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The team behind Catly, a pet sim announced at last week's The Game Awards, has vehemently denied its debut trailer was created using generative AI.
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Flashbulb Games has laid off seven of its staff.
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The Jingle Jam livestreaming event has raised an impressive £2.7 million over two weeks, the charity has announced.
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It's been over a year since I fell down the Remedy rabbit hole, and I'm happy to report there's no end in sight.
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Just over three million video games were sold in the UK during November, which is a drop of 33% over the year before (GSD data).
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We are back for another look at how different countries are regulating loot boxes. There is certainly less preoccupation with the legal question of whether loot boxes are banned as a form of gambling. Unless your paid loot boxes offer random rewards that can subsequently be transferred between players, I generally wouldn't worry (except in Belgium where all paid loot boxes are banned).
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The latest episode of The GamesIndustry.biz Microcast is available to download now.
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Mass layoffs have been the defining theme of the past two years — and they're not over yet. The industry is still feeling the effects of this crisis, even though many players are starting to see signs of stabilization.
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Polish studio Dark Passenger, which was founded by former Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 developers, has completed a funding round to the tune of $3 million.
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In some ways, this article has been eight years in the making.
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Capcom is planning to revive more of its dormant franchises following the reveal of an Okami sequel and the return of Onimusha last week.
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This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world.
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Turning points are tricky things: they seem so obvious in hindsight, but are tough to spot when they’re actually happening. False positives are common, because all manner of things can seem pivotal in the moment, but transpire to be far less important in the long term.
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Workers at Elder Scrolls Online developer Zenimax Online Studios have unionised, Communications Workers of America has announced.
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The launch of PUBG Mobile, later redeveloped into Battlegrounds Mobile India after it was banned by the government, was a turning point for that nation's games industry.
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Team Asobi swept The Game Awards last night, with Astro Bot winning four awards including Game of the Year.
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Hideki Kamiya has returned to Capcom at the head of a new studio, Clovers.
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Almost 100 developers have been laid off from Warner Games Montreal.
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Former Marathon reboot director Chris Barrett has filed a lawsuit against Bungie and Sony for "deliberately destroy[ing his] reputation by falsely, and publicly, insinuating they had 'investigated' Barrett and 'found' he had engaged in sexual misconduct," and to avoid paying him a $45 million payment.
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uBroker Spa has acquired a 49% stake in Italian indie studio, Memorable Games.
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A group of industry veterans have formed a new publisher, Cooldown Games, which will bring premium games to PC and consoles.
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Following the success of its debut title Asura, Ogre Head Studio is busy developing its next roguelike: a deckbuilder called Yodha.
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We're in a golden age of video game concerts right now. Masses of fans have flocked to concerts such as Final Fantasy's Distant Worlds and Final Symphony, Genshin Concert Tour, the Game Music Festival in London featuring performances of Baldur's Gate 3 and The Last of Us, and Stardew Valley's Festival of Seasons.
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Glow Up Games is shutting down, co-founder Mitu Khandaker has announced.
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Epic Games has entered a deal with telecoms company Telefónica, which will see the Epic Games Store and Fortnite pre-installed on Android devices.
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AFK Journey, What If…? An Immersive Story, Squad Busters, Thank Goodness You're Here!, and Balatro+ have all made it to Apple's 2024 app Store Award winner list.
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A new game from Andrew Gower has been a long time coming.
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The creation of the India Game Developers Conference in 2008 has been key not only to enabling collaboration and organisation within the Indian games industry, but also highlighting the work of India's developers to the world.
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Nintendo has fully acquired the remaining shares of Monolith Soft, having previously owned 96% of the studio's stock.
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Polish developer People Can Fly has announced more layoffs, affecting more than 120 employees.
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3D capture and processing company Clear Angle Studios has opened a new location in Culver City, Los Angeles.
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2018 was a pivotal year for the video games industry in India. Smartphones had already been moving towards the ubiquity they enjoy in the West but the launch of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds marked a significant shift for the market.
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GamesIndustry.biz is squeezing in one last territory special before the year wraps up, dedicating the rest of the week to sharing insights into India.
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Build A Rocket Boy has acquired PlayFusion for an undisclosed sum.
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Monument Valley 3 is releasing today, ten years after the series debuted, and a mirror of developer Ustwo Games' evolution during that time.
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The US' Federal Trade Commission has started the process to refund consumers impacted by Epic Games' alleged dark pattern tactics that led to unwanted purchases.
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Xsolla has partnered with telecommunications firm StarNest to create a new game development academy.
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Rocksteady Studios has confirmed it will end support for Suicide Squad less than a year after its debut.
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Square Enix's Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D remake launched at No.1 on Japan's November charts, having sold 712,188 copies on Switch within two weeks.
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Indie publishing label Cult Games has acquired PR, publisher, and marketing firm Neonhive.
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Original story, December 9 2024: The entirety of Itch.io was temporarily taken offline earlier today, but the site appears to have been restored.
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Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Tim FitzRandolph, the solo-dev otherwise known as Walaber, who recently released Parking Garage Rally Circuit, an arcade racer where you drift around parking garages now available on Steam.
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The latest episode of The GamesIndustry.biz Microcast is now available to download, offering you a quick dive into the biggest news of the past week.
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Ubisoft's two biggest shareholders continue to discuss a potential buyout that would take the Assassin's Creed publisher private, but a new report suggests there is disagreement over control of the business going forward.
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The Australian Classification Board has banned Hunter x Hunter Nen x Impact due to "implied sexual violence."
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Life is Strange: True Colors developer Deck Nine has made an unspecified number of layoffs.
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75% of UK students advocate the integration of esports into the school curriculum, with 64% already engaged in esports-related academic activities.
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Apple is facing a class action lawsuit from UK developers alleging that the App Store's 30% fee is anti-competitive.
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During EGX in London, PlayStation veterans Chris Deering, David Wilson, Geoff Glendenning, David Ranyard and Masami Kochi took to the stage to share stories from the history of PlayStation.
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Google's AI tool Genie 2 is a "large-scale foundation world model" capable of generating "an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments" from a single image prompt.
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Specialist media distributor and publisher Future has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool.
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Electronic Arts has added 23 new patents to its public library of free accessibility tools, including patents for photosensitivity analysis plugins, intelligent personalised speech recognition, and generating expressive speech audio from text data.
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Dark Math Games has secured additional investment for its debut project, XXX Nightshift.
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Games industry service provider PTW has opened a new studio in Charleston, South Carolina.
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Mobile developer Top App Games has secured a $10 million investment.
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Blue Owl Capital has acquired a minority stake in Bitkraft Ventures for an undisclosed sum.
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Black Myth: Wukong, developed by China-based studio Game Science, enjoyed a record-breaking performance when it released in August, reaching a peak of 2.4 million concurrent players as well as becoming the top-grossing game across multiple markets for the month.
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Reforged Studios has acquired South African developer Yellow Lab Games.
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Fortnite user-generated content developer Creators Corp has received a $2 million investment from new venture fund Lumina.
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Developer IllFonic has confirmed it has made "cuts" to its staff.
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Nintendo has walked back plans to publicly launch its Alarmo clock in Japan this January.
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The CEO of Tantalus and then Keywords Australia is stepping down.
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Deceive Inc developer Sweet Bandits Studios has announced that it is shutting down.
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Raphaël Colantonio and his team at Wolfeye Studios haven't revealed much about their second game. A few teaser images have been released, and the briefest glimpse of gameplay was shared on social media, but the game remains a mystery beyond that.
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This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world. You can find all previous Playable Futures articles here.
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