Author: [email protected] (Tyler Wilde)
-
Card game developer says it paid an ‘AI artist’ $90,000 to generate card art because ‘no one comes close to the quality he delivers’
The maker of digital trading card game Champions of Otherworldly Magic says it has spent $90,000 on card art, the entirety of which has been paid to a single “AI artist” who receives $15,000 per month despite dedicating less than two full work days to the project each month. “We pay our AI artist 15,000…
-
Gamers seek legal win that would stop developers from rendering online games unplayable: ‘It is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media’
Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew this month, rendering the 10-year-old racing game unplayable due, it said, to “server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” It’s hardly the first time an online game has been sent to a farm upstate by a publisher that neither wants to continue supporting it nor offer players a way to…
-
Smaller games can be ‘more creative,’ says designer who made one of Ubisoft’s most acclaimed games with a tiny team
Upcoming multiplayer combat foot-racing game DeathSprint 66 looks pretty cool, but I still might be a little nervous if I were responsible for making back its budget. A genre of news story we’ve become pretty familiar with is “niche multiplayer game was great, but not enough people played it to justify keeping the servers on.”…
-
Upcoming pirate RPG wants to break from cliché and show ‘what piracy really was’
—
by
Golden age pirates: murderous villains or freedom fighters? It’s the latter view that French studio Savage Level hopes to express with its first game, a tactical RPG that stars Captain Flint, the fictional pirate whose buried treasure is sought after in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. “This game gives us the possibility of informing the…
-
The PC game releases we’re most excited about in April
Just as spring weather starts to brighten up the Northern Hemisphere, we’re confronted with a bunch of new reasons to stay inside. Among other things, April includes the release of Steam’s second most-wishlisted game—medieval city builder Manor Lords—as well as the full first season of Amazon’s Fallout show. Find more on those happenings below, along…
-
Spectator rushes stage at CS2 tournament and gets tackled into trophy, smashing it to pieces
(Image credit: @meffew on X) A spectator rushed the stage during the PGL Major Copenhagen Counter-Strike 2 tournament today. In videos posted on social media, a man can be seen running down an elevated walkway toward the main stage, where the trophy sits on a pedestal in front of the players. After arriving on stage,…
-
Actor Louis Gossett Jr, who voiced Half-Life 2’s vortigaunts, has died
Actor Louis Gossett Jr, who has appeared in dozens of films, television shows, and plays—as well as two videogames—died this week at 87, reports AP News. Gossett began acting as a teenager in New York, and as a young adult landed a number of roles in Broadway plays, including 1959 classic A Raisin in the…
-
I really enjoyed running around as a tiny ant in this upcoming RTS
Empire of the Ants is a real-time strategy game, but I failed to do much serious strategizing when I got the chance to play it at GDC last week. I was enjoying walking upside down too much. I’ve never played an RTS quite like Empire of the Ants. As an ant, I explored a realistic…
-
Twitch targets butt streams with new rule banning ‘content that focuses on intimate body parts for a prolonged period of time’
It’s best if you imagine Twitch’s latest rules update being read by a downtrodden, barely present spokesperson. “Content on Twitch is always evolving,” they mutter, unable to recall how many versions of that statement they’ve composed before. “And we want to make sure our rules work as intended and keep up with emerging behaviors.” The…
-
Lawyer warns game developers about ‘unlawful game design’ as ‘dark patterns’ lawsuits rise
When I think of game design that might be “unlawful,” I think of gambling, but things aren’t so simple these days, warns Eric Weiss, a trial lawyer who defends companies from class action lawsuits and other disputes. The US Federal Trade Commission is on the lookout for so-called “dark patterns” in software and websites, and…