News

How LucasArts Bad Decision Making Killed The Company

Kotaku:

“One of the problems of working in a film company—[Lucas] is used to being able to change his mind,” said one source. “He didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with these changes were.”

Lucasfilm executives meddling with development visions was a common theme at LucasArts for much of its existence, according to people who worked there. It was always a problem.

One of the most prominent examples of this came in the spring of 2012, just eight weeks before E3, when George Lucas dropped a bombshell: instead of starring a generic bounty hunter, 1313 would be helmed by the iconic mercenary Boba Fett.

It had to be Star Wars related.

Valve Backtracks Statement on Releasing Rape Day on Steam

Valve:

Over the past week you may have heard about a game called ‘Rape Day’ coming soon to Steam. Today we’ve decided not to distribute this game on Steam. Given our previous communication around Who Gets To Be On The Steam Store?, we think this decision warrants further explanation.

Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary—we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct. We then have to make a judgement call about any risk it puts to Valve, our developer partners, or our customers. After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think ‘Rape Day’ poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won’t be on Steam.

Not sure why this took any time at all.

Facebook, Zuckerberg Consider Auto Deleting Messages

Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook:

I believe there’s an opportunity to set a new standard for private communication platforms — where content automatically expires or is archived over time. Stories already expire after 24 hours unless you archive them, and that gives people the comfort to share more naturally.

This philosophy could be extended to all private content.
For example, messages could be deleted after a month or a year by default. This would reduce the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later. Of course you’d have the ability to change the timeframe or turn off auto-deletion for your threads if you wanted.

And we could also provide an option for you to set individual messages to expire after a few seconds or minutes if you wanted.

Should have been done 10 years ago.

Video Game Workers Plan to Unionize in 2019

Video Game Developers to start a Union, according to Polygon:

With an armload of handmade zines and an animated roundtable discussion, the grassroots labor organizers from Game Workers Unite made quite a showing at the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Now it appears their work is beginning to pay off.

Earlier this month, a chapter in the United Kingdom officially became a legal trade union in that country. Representatives of Game Workers Unite tell Polygon that they anticipate multiple public efforts to form unions at major studios in the United States and Canada in the coming year.

“By the end of 2019, you’re going to see some public campaigns,” said Emma Kinema, one of the co-founders of Game Workers Unite.

Arctic Monkeys’ New Album Won’t Take Five Years

MusicFeeds.au, talking to Matt Helders:

MF: Will it be another five years before we see another Arctic Monkeys record?

MH: I don’t think so. I think that break was based on various circumstances and that was sort of what we needed at the time. But it’s not a pattern we’re going to get used to as a band. We like being in the studio. We’re keen on making albums.

MF: Do you have any other interesting projects on the boil at the moment or is your focus purely upon the Arctic Monkeys?

MH: I haven’t really got anything that’s in the workings. This is occupying my time now. I’ve just had a bit of a break obviously but that was to recoup, be a normal person for a bit. But yeah, Arctic Monkeys is the focus at the moment.

Promising.

The Last of Us 2 to be Released Before Halloween

Inverse:

The sequel to Naughty Dog’s groundbreaking 2013 post-apocalyptic adventure, The Last of Us, might be released sooner than anyone else guessed. If new leaks turn out to be true, then The Last of Us: Part II might be out before the end of this year.

On February 28, video game blog The Loot Gaming noticed that Peruvian video game retailer LawGamers had shared a promotional image advertising for The Last of Us: Part II pre-orders. The bottom-left corner of the digital sales poster reads “LANZAMIENTO: OCTUBRE 2019” which translates directly to “Launching: October 2019.”

Gameplay demo:
(Warning, it’s bloody)