Multiplayer

• Mario Kart Tour Reaches 90 Million Downloads; Ustwo Games Accused of Union Busting

  2 weeks ago News

  

  TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Mario Kart Tour reaches 90 million downloads; Ustwo Games accused of union busting; and PS4 cross-play moves out of beta. Mario Kart Tour reaches 90 million downloads Mario Kart Tour has reached 90.1 million downloads in its first week of release according to data from Sensor Tower, making it the fastest mobile game launch for Nintendo, surpassing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp which saw 14.3 million unique downloads in [...]

• Gamescom Round-Up: The Google, Nintendo and Microsoft Conference Streams

  2 months ago News

  

  The vast  expo Gamescom kicks off tomorrow, starting its 11th year. Likely to attract hundreds of thousands of consumer and trade attendees, the event is now a giant of the gaming sector. And as is something of a tradition, the day before Gamescom launches proper was marked by major press conferences. It being 2019, of course, they were predominantly streamed entities. Nintendo, Google and Microsoft all broadcast events gearing up their Gamescom activity, and this year the emphasis was on game releases [...]

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• Analysis: Grand Theft Auto Online's New 'Real Money Casino'

  3 months ago News

  

  If you’ve browsed the mainstream press recently – and read beyond the news of the new UK Prime Minister – you may have noticed a story ripe with controversy. The perennially popular Grand Theft Auto Online has recently enabled the ability to spend real money in a fictional casino. Grand Theft Auto, of course, has always courted controversy. Many will even tell you it does so deliberately. Gambling, rightly so, is a pastime that is closely regulated. And through recent scandals [...]

• SkyWeaver dev Horizon Blockchain Games secures USD$3.74m (£2.97m) seed round

  3 months ago News

  

  Canadian game dev and blockchain infrastructure outfit Horizon Blockchain Games has completed a USD$3.75m (£2.97m) seed round. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture fund Initialized Capital led the round, which was also supported by Golden Ventures, Polychain, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group and Inovia Capital. The seed round is likely to be a significant boon to bringing Horizon’s game SkyWeaver to market, and to the further development of the company’s blockchain video game network Arcadeum, which is pitched as a ‘crypto arcade’. Backing by [...]

• Cuphead to Be Made Into Netflix Show; Nintendo Debuts Switch Lite

  3 months ago News

  

  TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the trending stories in gaming. In today’s news: Cuphead to be made into Netflix show; Nintendo debuts Switch Lite; and Amazon is developing a Lord of the Rings MMO. Cuphead to be made into Netflix show Cuphead, the beloved indie 2D shooter from Studio MDHR, is to be made into a comedy series on Netflix. Itself based on classic 1940’s animated TV shows, Cuphead has been a huge success since its launch in 2017, having shifted over [...]

• Snap Games details real-time multiplayer focus for hyper causal Snapchat games

  3 months ago News

  

  As one of the dominant social platforms for teenage and young adult users, Snapchat is an obvious home for hyper casual instant games. That’s something the platform’s team are keenly aware of, it would seem, as a number of games have recently become available for Snapchat, each playable directly within the messaging service. Yesterday, for example, the internal Snapchat games division Snap Games released its seventh titlefor the platform, Bitmoji Tennis. The launch coincided neatly with Wimbledon, and continues the platform’s Bitmoji [...]

• Industry Veterans Release Game Development Platform; Cuphead Launching for Tesla Cars

  4 months ago News

  

  TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the latest news from the world of gaming. In today’s edition: Industry veterans release new game development platform, Coherence; Shoot ’em up, Cuphead, is launching for Tesla cars; and Apple releases iOS 13. Industry veterans release coherence Playdead co-founder, Dino Patti, and Unity co-founder, David Helgason, aim to democratise the creation of online games with the launch of Coherence, a cloud-based, open-source development platform. Coherence will bring the development of multiplayer games to the masses, where technical [...]

• Epic Removes Problematic Player-Created Content from Fortnite

  6 months ago News

  

  Gaming giant Epic has removed a player-created scene from the Fortnite gameplay map after the game’s fans reported that it depicted seriously problematic content. TheGamingEconomy will offer a brief warning here; this article will necessarily make very occasional and passing references to suicide. Back in 2018, Epic revealed that an area of the Fortnite map would be given over to a region called The Block. The idea is that Epic uses The Block to showcase some of the best player-made Fortnite environments, rotating [...]

• GDC Day Four Roundup: Microsoft's Stadia Response, Steam Store Redesign & Overwatch's Well-Behaved Players

  7 months ago News

  

  As the Game Developers Conference 2019 nears its end, the news continues to flow. The most interesting story related to the show in this roundup doesn’t come from the GDC floor itself, though. Instead, it’s from within a reported internal Microsoft email. Specifically, in an email handed to tech site Thurrott (thanks GamesIndustry.biz), Microsoft’s head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, apparently contacted colleagues to assure them that the reveal of Google’s game-streaming platform Stadia validated Microsoft’s efforts in the same space. The Google [...]

• GDC Day Three Roundup: Epic's USD$100m 'MegaGrants', Oculus' New VR Headset & Keyword's €100m Acquisitions Pot

  7 months ago News

  

  As GDC continues to thunder forward, Fortnite and Unreal outfit Engine Epic has revealed a USD$100m (£76.6m) fund for developers that use its tech. The MegaGrants initiative has been launched alongside a new suite of online multiplayer dev tools; but the funding pot isn’t reserved purely for games makers. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, studios can apply for grants that range from USD$5,000-to-USD$500,000 (£3,800-to-£383,000) – and here ‘studios’ refers to game makers, TV and film production firms, enterprise developers, education specialists, and even [...]