Today's News:
* Epic Games recently made a major change to the way their Epic Games Store operates for developers and publishers. This new change involves Epic now offering developers 100% of revenues generated for their games on EGS in return for signing a six-month exclusivity deal for their games on PC. After those six months, the deal will then revert back to the current split of 88% for developers and the rest for Epic for game sales on their store. The deal also only covers games that have not been already released on other digital storefronts on PC.
Link:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/...f-exclusivity/
* Kotaku reported that a man was recently arrested over theft charges that may or may not be related to him being a notorious leaker of footage of Starfield ahead of its release. The charges may or may not also be released to how this person was able to get his hands on multiple copies of Starfield ahead of its release and had tried to sell them at online store Mercari to prove his authenticity as the leaker. Besides gameplay videos, this person also posted videos of themself commenting about Bethsesda's legal efforts to shut down his videos and him holding copies of the game to prove he had them available for sale.
Link:
https://kotaku.com/starfield-leak-fe...rly-1850773855 ,
https://www.destructoid.com/starfiel...rrested-video/
* Bioware announced that they recently laid off around 50 employees as part of their current restructuring plans to make them a "more agile and more focused studio." It was also announced that those laid off will be given the ability to find other jobs internally in the studio and at other EA-owned studios if possible.
Link:
https://blog.bioware.com/2023/08/23/...te-of-bioware/
* As part of Microsoft's efforts to appease the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) government body, MS had restructured their deal with Activision Blizziard in regards to cloud gaming. This new revision will now see Ubisoft running AB games from their own cloud-based service and in return will get a one-time payment from Ubisoft to compensate MS for the cloud streaming rights to AB games. The idea being that this would limit MS's ability to monopolize cloud stream gaming to alleviate this being the biggest fearand obstruction that the CMA had over purchase attempt of AB.
Link:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-i...e-acquisition/ ,
https://www.destructoid.com/microsof...-cma-concerns/