Category: News

No Man’s Sky hit a peak concurrent playercount of around 97,000 users this past weekend, following the release of Next, an update which added online multiplayer to the game. 

Hello Games’ procedural space simulator showed over 40,000 concurrent players on Steam last week following the release the Next update, which also included features like expansive base building and overhauled graphics.

According to numbers pulled by PC Gamer, Next didn’t draw in as many players on Steam since No Man’s Sky’s launch, which was just over 212,000 concurrent users, but it’s not terrible for a game that’s seen significant changes since its original (and somewhat controversial) launch.

In addition to the co-op multiplayer and other new features of Next, the 50 percent drop in price of No Man’s Sky is probably contributing to the higher playercount as well, since the game has been sitting at Steam’s global top sellers list since the update launched.

A game that was, until very recently, up for sale on Steam has been accused by numerous parties of secretly using its players’ computers to mine for cryptocurrency.

Eurogamer reports that the platformer Abstractism has come under fire for installing viruses and malware disguised as unassuming files like “steam.exe” and “abstractism launcher.” Though the game itself has now vanished from Steam, it has seemingly been live on the digital storefront since at least late March.

This all comes during a time where Valve has been embracing a more hands-off approach to moderating games that appear on its massive digital storefront Steam, and instead focusing on creating tools for users to filter what appears in their feeds. In a previous blog post, the company said it would endeavor to remove games that are “illegal or straight up trolling” but that it largely won’t police the content hosted on its platform. 

Abstractism itself has been on Steam since at least March 2018, though the earliest mention in its Steam Reviews of overly intensive resource demands only showed up on July 20. 

The YouTuber SidAlpha dug into the scam in a video posted July 29, noting that the game was also using assets from Valve’s Team Fortress 2 to create at least one fake Steam Marketplace item that could then be used to dupe unsuspecting Team Fortress 2 players into trading valuable in-game items for an Abstractism fake. 

A comment on SidAlpha’s original video from the user Matheus Muller neatly sums up many of the concerns, noting that “the game resource consumption is significant and inconsistent with its graphical quality or complexity, [and] the proportion of CPU/GPU/RAM/IO usage is consistent with what you would expect from a crypto miner.”

The developer previously addressed accusations on its Steam Community page by saying that the high resource usage was due to the demands of graphical rendering when the game was being played on high settings but, as Muller points out, “the resources used are not only graphical in nature, but include a sizeable amount of disk space which again is not expected from a game of this complexity, but is expected of a crypto miner.”

The New York Public Commission issued a letter revoking its approval of the 2016 merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable (operating as Spectrum in New York) last week, giving the ISP 60 days to submit a plan “to ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider(s).”

This is a big deal for the industry as it’s an issue that will likely become more prominent after the repeal of net neutrality earlier this year, which might cause internet service providers to block or limit access to content by offering paid workarounds.

The decision comes after allegations that Spectrum defrauded consumers by providing internet service that was much slower than advertised.

“Charter, doing business as Spectrum, has — through word and deed — made clear that it has no intention of providing the public benefits upon which the Commission’s earlier approval was conditioned,” the letter writes.

“In addition, the Commission directed Commission counsel to bring an enforcement action in State Supreme Court to seek additional penalties for Charter’s past failures and ongoing non-compliance. That enforcement action will be filed today in State Supreme Court in Albany.”

The letter continues to list several reasons for taking action, stating that Spectrum repeatedly failed to meet deadlines, failed to fully commit to its obligations under the 2016 merger agreement, and purposefully obfuscated its performance and compliance obligations to the Commission and its customers.

The last item on the list references a complaint made in 2017 from then-Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on behalf of consumers using Netflix streaming services and playing Riot Games’ League of Legends.

Using customer complaints as well as data from Netflix and Riot, Schneiderman alleged that Spectrum falsely advertised the internet speeds customers could expect while paying for the 300, 200, 100, and 50 Mbps plans, all while leasing out hardware that couldn’t actually handle those promised speeds. 

The complaint speculates that only when customers complained enough did the ISP boost their individual connections, wanting to avoid action by the Federal Communications Commission.

Schneiderman went on to argue that Spectrum deliberately bottlenecked internet speeds for streaming and online gaming until companies like Netflix and Riot agreed to pay extra for “access to Spectrum customers”.

Again, the FCC’s decision to repeal net neutrality will likely make these types of issues more frequent in the market, as consumers will be forced to re-consider their contracts with local ISPs and then hold them responsible.

Thief of Thieves, a stealth game that dropped a few weeks ago on Steam, is a stylistic comic book adaptation from Finnish developer Rival Games. While it’s billed as an episodic game, much like its Skybound-linked cousin The Walking Dead, Rival Games is actually about to complete their initial episodic push less then a month after release. 

Why did they pursue this release strategy? What was the value of licensing another IP rather then drafting an initial stealth entry? For answers to these questions, which we got to ask Rival Games CEO Jukka Laakso on the Gamasutra Twitch channel today, you’ll want to watch our archive of that stream which is now embedded up above. 

And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary. 

The entertainment industry rumbled today with the news that Disney and Fox’s shareholders gave final approval on a $71 billion purchase of most of Fox Entertainment by Disney. The deal, as covered by multiple sites, shaves off the news and sports businesses from Fox in exchange for the company’s entertainment assets. 

There are far, far too many implications for the world of media that we can lay out in this article, but we quickly wanted to call out that the $71 billion acquisition does include FoxNext, the video game publishing arm operated by Fox. 

None of the available reporting on the merger appears to indicate any specific plans for FoxNext, but now the company’s game portfolio, which includes Marvel Strike Force and Family Guy: Another Freakin Mobile Game, as well as VR projects based on films like Planet of the Apes and Alien, are now properties of Disney. 

Since FoxNext’s performance will now impact Disney’s future financial earnings, it stands to reason that the house that Walt built (which has recently favored licensing its IP for game-makers rather than maintaining a full in-house development team) will be carefully monitoring the company’s performance as well.