Category: News

Electronic Arts announced its acquisition of the cloud gaming technology assets and personnel of GameFly today.

This will likely open up more possibilities for the company to expand its reach of games through streaming to more players on more devices.

The acquisition makes sense for EA, considering GameFly launched a game streaming service back in 2015 through Amazon’s Fire TV streaming box which featured a console-like controller with gamepad.

The service consisted of packages of games organized by genre, and offered unlimited access to seven titles for a monthly fee. 

Before that however, GameFly acquired the Israel-based streaming startup Playcast Media in 2009, where the company launched a pilot program with Israeli cable networks to stream games directly to users’ television sets.

According to a press release announcing the deal, GameFly will join EA’s functional teams, including the central technology organization that is responsible for developing and operating the platform that powers EA’s games and services.

The regulatory board that doles out ratings for games seeking release in Australia has refused classification to Compulsion Games’ We Happy Few, effectively banning the sale of the game in the country.

The game is one of just many to be slapped with ‘RC’ label through the years, alongside games like Saints Row IV and a host of mobile titles, as a result of the country’s infamously strict rating process.

Though Australia’s rating board has loosened up in some ways by adding an 18+ classification to its system, it’s still fairly common to hear of games being refused release based on violence, sexual content, or in-game drug use.

When refused classification, developers have the option of cutting offending content from their game and resubmitting to the board in hopes of receiving a rating the second time around, but, that isn’t always feasible for every developer.

In the case of We Happy Few, the Australian Classification Board explains that the game falls under section 1(a) of the National Classification Code’s computer games table covers games that “depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be classified.”

In this GDC 2018 session, id Software’s Kurt Loudy & Jake Campbell go into the philosophy behind the combat design of 2016’s DOOM and its implementation, and discuss the possibility for its inclusion in multiple genres.

The talk discusses “push forward combat,”  an approach to combat design resulted from tearing down genre conventions like regenerating health, reloading and cover, putting the focus instead on the player taking what they need from enemies. 

It’s an interesting dive into how this approach to FPS combat design emphasized brutality, aggression and speed. Developers interested in learning about the combat design of DOOM can now watch the talk for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new 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, GDC Europe, and GDC Next 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.

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