Chinese firm Leyou Technologies has acquired a 20 percent stake in Austin-based developer Certain Affinity for $10 million. 

Established by a group of former Bungie employees back in 2006, Certain Affinity has co-developed a number of popular titles including Halo 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Doom. 

Leyou was at one time best known as a poultry supplier, but recently made inroads into the games industry after acquiring Dirty Bomb creator Splash Damage and Warframe developer Digital Extremes. 

The chicken peddler turned games mogul now hopes to work with Certain Affinity to create an “ambitious and exciting” new title. 

As part of the agreement, Leyou also has the option to snap up Certain Affinity’s remaining shares in 2021 for a valuation based on an agreed formula. If that deal goes ahead, it could cost Leyou up to $150 million. 

“With its proven track record producing high-quality video games, Certain Affinity possesses the technical capability and talent to create highly successful titles, which in turn will assist Leyou in further diversifying its video game portfolio and enhancing its revenue streams,” said Leyou CEO, Alex Xu.

“This strategic investment into Certain Affinity is consistent with the growth strategy of our company as we continue to look for opportunities to invest and increase our market share in the video gaming industry.”

It’s been a busy and exciting summer for everyone at Team Xbox. Back in August we gave you a first look at the fall update for Xbox One, and we showed off the new Home, Guide and Community tabs. Since then, we’ve been working with Xbox Insiders to gather feedback, test and refine new features that we’re releasing worldwide starting today. As gamers, we like to play and watch content the way we want, with the people we want. With this update, our fans asked for more personalization options and we’ve put more control in their hands. Here’s a rundown of the new features.

You can personalize your “Home” more than ever before: You can…

• Make Home uniquely yours. Add your favorite games, friends, Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass, and more directly to your Home screen with a new concept that we call blocks. Once you’ve added blocks, you can remove or change the order of the blocks as you see fit.
• Have up to 40 pins!  All these pins will appear in the Pin block on Home, as well as the Pins flyout in the new Guide!
• Easily discover new things, such as friend activities, leaderboards, LFG posts, tips, quick links to Game Hubs, across both your console and Xbox Live at the top of Home.
• Choose dark, light, or high-contrast theme option in Settings.

You’ll experience a fast, powerful and convenient Guide:

• It’s now faster and easier to move left and right through horizontal tabs with the left thumb stick or bumpers.
• When you bring up Guide while in an active party or broadcast, Guide will automatically open the party or broadcast section by default for faster access to controls.
• New “Friends in games” flyout informs you of friends playing the same game.
• Game invites will show up in the Multiplayer tab of the Guide.
• The new Tournaments section in the Multiplayer tab of the Guide provides a quick portal into the official and community tournaments that you’ve joined. Enjoy more Xbox Arena tournament options with the addition of new titles.

Don’t worry about missing any actions when you step away from your console:

• With the enhanced notification system, when your Xbox One is idle, time-sensitive activities and status are visible from far away.
• The screen-dimming functionality has also been updated to better prevent screen ghosting, both when the screen is dimmed and when it’s showing notification snapshots of what’s happening on Xbox Live.
• The newly redesigned Game Hub Welcome tab now features a summary of all the great content around the game on one page.
• Profiles now enable faster access to recent activity. You can now easily manage who sees your activity feed content through the “Others can see your activity feed” privacy setting.
• See more content at a glance with new Community feed, and view screenshots and game clips in an immersive, full-screen view.

Get a head start on Xbox One X (Launch Day Nov 7): Your console setup experience will be quicker for both new users and upgraders.  There are new options to help save time when moving from one Xbox One to another (including Xbox One X), so you can get back to playing faster.

• Transfer your games to an external drive so you can connect it to your new console and play immediately. Just unplug the drive from your current console, plug it in to your new one, and you’re ready to go.
• Existing Xbox One owners can back up their games and console settings to an external drive so that they’re ready to be applied to the new console during setup.
• Copy your games and apps over your home network from one console to another via network transfer.
• Bulk transfer will allow you to select and transfer as many games as you want all at once.
• You’ll be able to download 4K content for some games ahead of time to your Xbox One or Xbox One S, so that you’re ready to transfer Xbox One X Enhanced games to your new console on day one.
• You can easily discover Xbox One X Enhanced titles in the Store, and developers can optimize game delivery by making sure that 4K assets are installed only for Xbox One X.
• You’ll be able to sort and filter your Installed and Ready to Install games library to find Xbox One X Enhanced titles.

Discover and Create Engaging Content:

• The Mixer tab on the dashboard will now display broadcast previews so you can see what’s going on in popular streams before you join them.
• If your bandwidth supports a 1080p broadcast, we will upgrade it automatically for your Xbox One family of devices.
• The Broadcast & Capture tab in Guide is also now more deeply integrated with Mixer. Once you start a Broadcast, a new flyout will appear that includes your profile stats.
• You can also use a USB webcam to broadcast yourself alongside your gameplay on Mixer, or to have a 1:1 or group video chat with friends using Skype.
• GameDVR will now be able to capture up to 4K/HDR screenshots and game clips on Xbox One X, and you’ll be able to capture content directly to an external hard drive.

Other big features include…

• You can get personalized tips & help, smart notifications, community tips, & troubleshooting through the new Xbox Assist App.
• You can also change your console language to select right-to-left languages – Arabic & Hebrew – in the Xbox Settings menu.
• You will also see a new Microsoft Store logo and name in the Xbox dashboard, providing you with a simpler experience when you download and buy the latest products and content from Microsoft and its partners, including hardware, games, entertainment, apps and more.

It’s been an incredible journey for the entire team at Xbox as we worked to bring you this update. Thanks as always to our fans and Xbox Insiders for the valuable feedback. Be sure to keep letting us know what you think at Xbox feedback.  We’ll have even more great features coming very soon! See you on Xbox Live.

Mike Ybarra
Gamertag: Qwik
Twitter: @XboxQwik

While Nintendo’s corporate structure is easy to understand, fellow platform holders Sony and Microsoft are broader and more complex. They’re companies with numerous sizable divisions and spin-offs, with various businesses and interests outside the game industry. That subverts any idea of ‘console wars’ in the modern era, to a degree, especially when you see examples such as Microsoft-owned IPs like Minecraft making a hugely profitable impact across platforms.

The latest example of business trumping tribalism has come via Sony Music Entertainment, which recently established its own publishing label called Unties. The new publisher’s brief is pretty clear – to find quality titles and bring them to gamers around the world (translation via Gematsu).

At Unties, we dig up the masterpieces buried in those situations, and support them so that more users notice and pick them up. We spread information about excellent games and sell titles for multiple platforms.

It so happens that one of the games the company will publish is Tiny Metal, developed by Area35. It was first confirmed for Switch back in May, and drew intrigued looks due to its visual style and isometric strategy. Yes, some hope it’ll basically be an indie Advance Wars.

Though in this case it’s Sony’s music subsidiary behind the release, via Unties, it’s another positive sign that platform holders can support each other when necessary. If only some of the more vocal fans of each corporation could be as supportive in online debates – it’s all just gaming, after all.

In any case, Tiny Metal is arriving on Switch, PS4 and PC on 21st November; are you planning to give it a try?

Yesterday we revealed that the first main addition to Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle – the Ultra Challenge Pack DLC – had gone live, allowing season pass buyers to get their hands on some lovely new content. Today, Ubisoft has released a trailer for the package, giving us a quick look at these new features.

The trailer shows off its new co-op campaign (which consists of five exclusive new maps), and a glimpse of the eight ‘Ultra Hard Challenges’ that have made their way to the Secret Chapters of each world. You can check out the trailer for yourself below.

These new modes look as beautiful and fun as ever and, if you have bought (or now buy) the season pass, they should be available for you to play when you next update the game.

Have you decided to grab yourself the season pass for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle?

Rogue Trooper Redux is Now Available on Steam!

A pioneering tactical shooter and landmark comic book adaptation, Rogue Trooper is back, remastered and revitalised in true high definition. Experience acclaimed third-person action in this BAFTA-nominated tale of betrayal and revenge at the far reaches of the galaxy!

Many indie devs feel like they’re under pressure to make high-quality art that rivals that of big-budget studios — with the smallest team size and budget possible.

At GDC 2017 The Molasses Flood’s Gwen Frey, self-described sole animator and over-tasked generalist on The Flame in The Flood, discussed how to rapidly generate triple-A quadruped locomotion as an indie dev.

It was a video-heavy talk that focused on animation authoring and state blending for quadruped characters. According to Frey, these characters have unique foot sliding challenges and traditional solutions result in either poor fidelity motion or a bloated animator workload.

Frey shared some techniques for illustrating high-quality quadruped locomotion without the need for transition animations, using two different quadruped characters as examples – a boar with a rigid spine, and a large, gangling wolf with a procedural spine. 

It was a fascinating talk, one that you can now watch 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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