Month: October 2024

Krafton, the South Korean mega-publisher that owns PUBG: Battlegrounds and most recently released The Callisto Protocol, has published a strategy note about 2023 (spotted by Eurogamer) that’s based on a talk livestreamed to its employees.

The company says the key items were “sustainable growth” and expanding publishing operations globally, which it helpfully summarises as “more games, new publish[ing] strategies.”

“We remain steadfast in our ultimate vision to secure and expand powerful game-based IPs,” said CH Kim, Krafton CEO. “To achieve this, now is the time to concentrate our capabilities in 2023 and emphasize our need to innovate and focus organizational capabilities, strengthen our publishing capabilities and systems, and continue investing in the…

There are few artifacts of videogame culture that can teleport me to a specific time and place more powerfully than the sound of the MP5 from Modern Warfare 2. For months in 2009, the prickly whine of an MP5 followed (ideally) by the chime of a 3-killstreak UAV meant that I was in my happy place—getting a few matches in after school, probably sipping an energy drink I bought with quarters.

I was the perfect age to become a Call of Duty obsessive and still associate the series with some of my fondest memories of gaming, which is why I’m not surprised that, 14 years later, Activision is bottling up that nostalgia and selling it back to me with Season 3 Reloaded’s “Throwback Audio Pack.”

“The ultimate taste of nostalgia is coming with Season 03 Reloaded,” reads today’s

The New York-based indie studio Dang is closing after releasing only one game, but what a game. The hyper-fast and movement-focused Boomerang X released in 2021 and was notable among other things for supporting an experimental type of gyro controller, the Flick Stick, as well as mouse-and-keyboard, so that players could whizz its deadly shuriken-boomerang around in the fanciest of patterns. The game sits with around 800 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam though, judging by this announcement, that sadly didn’t translate to sales.

Dang announced its shuttering via a screenshot of a statement written in Notepad, which is certainly a vibe—the studio later said it was because “none of us really wanted to make a professional-looking closure announcemen…

Sam Barlow’s studio Half Mermaid, the developer of Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality—one of highest-reviewed games of 2022—are teasing a pair of mysterious new projects on Steam called, mysteriously, Project C and Project D.

The newly-arrived Steam pages for both new games are heavily redacted. The description for Project C opens with a biblical quote—“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known”—and then teases “the new cinematic” something that promises something “for the first time ever in a videogame.”

Project D, on the other hand, is a survival horror something—game, perhaps—whose description includes the words “1983,” “nurse,” “nightm…

Poor Intel. Last year was pretty rough for the 55-year-old semiconductor firm, as it accrued just $54.2 billion in revenue, 14% less than the year before. After paying all its bills for manufacturing, research and development, and biscuits, there was just $1.7 billion left over in net income. Poor Intel. 

So when the US administration announced the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, with a total of $280 billion up for grabs, Intel jumped right in to get some of that golden booty. Only now it’s asking for a further $10 billion, at the very least, to ensure Intel’s US developments can continue.

This news of Intel’s re-enactment of Oliver Twist (via Wccftech) isn’t in the least bit surprising and not because of the company’s recent financial results. Cutting-edge semiconductor…

First spotted by GamesRadar, Withers pulled out all the stops in Baldur’s Gate 3’s new post-game epilogue, calling in a favor with the Forgotten Realms’ god of music, Milil, to perform for you. Fans noticed an uncanny resemblance to Larian composer Borislav Slavov, and while the artist didn’t confirm it either way, it seems like a deliberate homage.

Slavov previously did the excellent soundtrack for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and his score for Baldur’s Gate 3 is up for best music at this year’s Game Awards. I didn’t clock the resemblance between Slavov and Milil right away, but seeing them side by side, that’s totally him, right? In response to GamesRadar’s reporting, Slavov simply replied “Well..🙃” on Twitter.

The Forgotten Realms has a ton …

Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous computer hackers in the world and the subject of an over two-year manhunt in the 1990s, died of complications from pancreatic cancer last Sunday, aged 59. His death has been confirmed to the New York Times.

Mitnick is a legendary figure, one of those people whose life story reads like an elaborate work of fiction. After getting his start with a punch card machine that let him get free bus rides at age 12, he graduated to phone phreaking and hacking as he got older, breaking into networks owned by corporations like the Digital Equipment Corporation. The police weren’t too keen on that, and he was sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release in 1988.

He almost made it through, but right toward the end of his supervis…