General game developing news and updates.
Smoke and Sacrifice is Now Available on Steam and is 20% off!*
Smoke and Sacrifice sees Sachi, a mother forced to give up her son, adventure into a grotesque underworld on a quest that will lead her to a darker truth.
*Offer ends June 7 at 10AM Pacific Time
Play Train Simulator for FREE starting now through Sunday at 1PM Pacific Time. You can also pickup Train Simulator and DLC at up to 75% off the regular price!*
If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play Train Simulator. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Play Rising Storm 2: Vietnam for FREE starting now through Sunday at 1PM Pacific Time. You can also pickup Rising Storm 2: Vietnam at 50% off the regular price!*
If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
The team at Valve seem to have unceremoniously delisted the upcoming mass shooting simulator Active Shooter from Steam today, calling the developer “a troll, with a history.”
This is a big deal because the alleged game developer in question (Revived Games, aka Ata Berdiyev) seems to have a storied history of making terrible games, often by reusing the assets and intellectual property of others, and then quickly having them removed from Steam.
It’s also significant given that the alleged video game in question purports to put players in the shoes of either a mass shooter or the law enforcement personnel attempting to stop them, and thus quickly earned the public ire of mass shooting survivors, the parents of victims/survivors, politicians, and basically anyone with a conscience.
“We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher ACID from Steam,” a Valve representative told Motherboard. “This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously been removed last fall when he was operating as ‘[bc]Interactive’ and ‘Elusive Team.'”
Sure enough, the Steam listing for Active Shooter (which was supposed to launch next month) now appears to be nonexistent.
“Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation,” the rep continued. “His subsequent return under new business names was a fact that came to light as we investigated the controversy around his upcoming title. We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve. The broader conversation about Steam’s content policies is one that we’ll be addressing soon.”
It’s worth pointing out that earlier this month Valve’s content policies were publicly called into question after developers began reporting threats of removal from Steam over games the company deemed to include inappropriate adult content.
Celebrate Street Fighter’s historic legacy with Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection for Nintendo Switch. This all-in-one package highlights the series’ past in an anthology of 12 classic titles!
Includes:
Street Fighter
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Street Fighter II: Champion Edition
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
Super Street Fighter II
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Street Fighter III: New Generation
Street Fighter III 2nd Impact: Giant Attack
Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future
To purchase the digital version of this collection, please visit https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/street-fighter-30th-anniversary-collection-switch.
Alcohol Reference
Mild Blood
Suggestive Themes
Violence
Finnish edugaming startup TeacherGaming has teamed up with publisher Paradox Interactive to bring an educational version of Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines city-building game to classrooms around the world.
It’s a nice bit of news for the 2015 game ((which has sold over 5 million copies) that’s well in line with the folks at TeacherGaming’s history of advocating for (and helping realize) the use of video games as practical teaching tools.
If TeacherGaming sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same group of folks that also helped bring about MinecraftEdu (since acquired by Microsoft) and KerbalEdu.
The educational version of Cities: Skylines that’s now available to teachers (via TeacherGaming’s online storefront) includes custom educational tutorials and eight custom teaching scenarios that can be pared with lesson plans. Like other TeacherGaming games, it’s also been modified to allow teachers to track students’ progress.
The folks over at Polygon are reporting that a number of people who lost their jobs as Xbox Support staff early this year have since seen some of their former duties taken over by unpaid participants in the Xbox Ambassador program.
This is potentially a big deal because some of the former employees (kept anonymous by Polygon) allege that they helped to train Xbox Ambassadors before they were laid off, with one source claiming that they were specifically tasked with increasing the Ambassadors’ input on Xbox support issues.
If that’s true, it sure looks like Microsoft cut some support staff (reportedly around 12, all hired through IT consulting firm Affirma Consulting) and replaced them with unpaid labor in the form of Ambassador participants.
The Ambassador program has been around for years, and offers participants the promise of potential prizes and recognition in return for help with solving Xbox customer support queries. You must have, among other things, an active Xbox Live Gold membership and over 1500 Gamerscore to be an Ambassador.
Gamasutra has reached out to Microsoft for confirmation and clarification of this issue. As always, if you or someone you know was affected by this you can email Gamasutra to share your story confidentially.
In today’s update we’ve fixed an issue with the MMR awarded by team challenges. The intended behavior of team challenge tokens is to allow a party to play against a significantly more difficult opponent, and to adjust MMR by an amount relative to that difficulty using the normal MMR formula. However, an update we released fairly recently caused this calculation to overcorrect, resulting in players getting significantly more MMR for wins. We’ve started correcting the MMR and rank medals of accounts affected, but this process may take a day or two to complete.
In other ranked news, we are expecting to ship season two in the coming week or so. We will post more details as we get closer to ship.
Longstanding British game company Codemasters (Dirt, F1) plans to make an initial public offering on (a submarket of) the London Stock Exchange this week with an estimated valuation of £280 million (or roughly $371.24 million USD).
Notably, the Financial Times reports Codemasters — which is poised to release its arcade car combat game Onrush next week — is expected to devote £15 million (~$19.8 million USD) of the money raised to bolstering its game development coffers.
The rest of the earnings funneling chiefly into the pockets of the studio’s biggest investor, the Indian firm Reliance Big Entertainment, though £10 million (~$13.2 million USD) will reportedly be split among a group of the company’s directors and senior management.
Codemasters made a similar attempt at an IPO in 2003, but wound up calling it off due to debt concerns. The Financial Times notes that the company currently owes Reliance roughly £124 million (~$164.4 million), but if the company does successfully go public this week it will be the end of a roughly 31-year run as a private company.
Crackpot theories so wild, they just might work!
That was basically the order of the day during a very special panel session at GDC 2016’s Artificial Intelligence Summit, during which a cabal of game AI devs proposed pie-in-the-sky ideas that they’ve been unable to try, may never be able to try, and which may or may not even be feasible.
During the half-hour panel AI experts Steve Rabin, Rez Graham, Daniel Brewer, Brian Schwab, Alex Champandard and Tobias Karlsson dug into everything from rewarding bots for building bots to using player data in one game (a match-3 puzzler, for example) to train/define AI in another game in a different genre.
It was a fascinating (and fun) session to see, so if you missed it back in 2016 don’t miss your opportunity to now watch the talk completely free via the official GDC YouTube channel!
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.
