Bobby Kotick Departs Activision Blizzard

As of the end of December 2023, Robert “Bobby” Kotick has officially retired from his role as CEO of Activision Blizzard.

Kotick’s departure leaves behind a legacy of controversy and potential complicity to the company’s toxic and hostile workplace issues in his wake, and is part a series of many leadership and policy changes to the company in response to the long, grandstanding saga of the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. As another subsidiary under Microsoft, Jill Braff has been named head of studio for Bethesda and ZeniMax. Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard was officially finalized in October 2023.

The state of California ended up settling the Blizzard’s gender discrimination lawsuit for about $54 million, the very case that has pushed the series of dominoes that catalyzed the acquisition of the company in motion back on July 2021.

In its initial filings of the suit, California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) alleged that the company had a “frat boy” culture, but has went on to now conclude that “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations” of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard in the suit’s settlement text. If the court approves of this settlement, the payout will go to “cover direct relief to workers and litigation costs” and “a settlement fund dedicated to compensating workers.”

While being pushed back by the ABK Workers Alliance union, Blizzard will also be ending hybrid work for QA employees starting this year. The union believes that the in-office accommodations that have been offered due to this decision will not adequately meet the needs of its membership and that it will cause “many, many more employees being forced out of the company and into a desperate situation.”

As Blizzard will be continuing to face turbulence and ongoing changes under a new coat of paint, Microsoft pulls back from their VR projects as consumer trends shown interest in the medium dipped in 2023.

Leaving the Year With Leaks

Insomniac Games had the misfortune of experiencing a severe cyberattack credited to ransomware group Rhysida, who claims to have taken over 1.67 terabytes of data from the company.

After a deadline has passed demanding a ransom of $2 million dollars, Rhysida went on to leak a plethora of internal data and sensitive employee information, such as HR documents, screenshots of private messages, and unreleased images and assets of future projects, and even a playable build of one of those projects. Sony experienced a data breach by a different group in October that same year.

Insomniac has went on to respond to how demoralizing the attack has been, but nonetheless has vowed that teams will resume to push on and that work will continue on the projects that have been leaked. The leaked playable build contains a warning against piracy, which could result in legal action from Insomniac. Downloading it also potentially comes with the threat that it contains implanted malicious software after the hack’s tampering.

Allegedly, Rhysida has sold a tiny portion of this data to an unknown buyer, but a significant portion of 98% of the data allegedly has been released.

In less concerning news, sensitive military documents have been leaked on the War Thunder forums —again.

The Blockchain Is Not for Babies

While the Epic Games Store still won’t necessarily list games in its catalog with the Adults Only rating, the platform has adjusted its policy to now allow exceptions for games utilizing blockchain technology.

The ESRB board has been labeling games using blockchain technology with the AO rating, determined on “assess[ing] whether products may reward real money, prizes with real world value, or something that can be exchanged for or converted to real money.” NFT-based game Gods Unchained was removed from the Store for its AO rating, but has since been relisted on the platform after this policy update.

Government Goes After Gacha

Reguators China are attempting to introduce new policies to curb spending and monetization practices in online games.

Per several other past initiatives in an effort to reduce play time and addiction to games, some of the terms of these regulations include imposing spending limits on players, disallowing in-game items to be auctioned or used as speculative assets and that all Chinese games must be ran in servers based within China.

Researcher Leon Y. Xiao has further found that the policies will require that loot boxes shouldn’t make their contents exclusive and that unspent currency must be refunded to players if a game shuts down.

While in Korea, the Korean Fair Trade Commission has fined Nexon for changing and reducing the loot box probability rates without transparency across their published titles that contain this equivalent mechanic.

The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft

On top of an ongoing string of other lawsuits pushing back against the exploitative use of the technology, The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft, opening what might possibly be one of the largest lawsuits against AI thus far by for copyright infringement.

The publication alleges that the AI technology used has been illegally pulling from the Times’ archive to train ChatGPT. Data that that plaintiff has currently reported has found the Times as one of the largest sources that the technology has pulled from, arguing that ChatGPT is for-profit that now directly competes with the Times’ own services.

Wizards of the Coast deservedly catches flack again, this time for the use of AI art going unchecked in a recent social media campaign for Magic: The Gathering.

In other news…

Teenager Willis Gibson is the first human player to fully complete a version of Tetris on the NES. Going by “Blue Scuti” on his YouTube channel, the run lasted for about 38 minutes.

Devolver Digital capped off the holiday season with a quick Public Access Holiday Special that showcased several upcoming indie titles, such as The Plucky Squire, Pepper Grinder, and Baby Steps.

Actor James McCaffrey passed away. McCaffrey has starred in various film and television roles, and provided his voice for the titular role in the Max Payne series and was a regular talent for Remedy Entertainment’s various characters, such as Alex Casey in the Alan Wake games.

Publisher Versus Evil laid off its entire staff, effectively shutting down. Versus Evil was acquired by TinyBuild in 2013, and effectively all titles of their library, such as The Banner Saga games, have been moved under TinyBuild’s ownership.

Ubisoft’s The Crew will be going offline. The game has already been delisted from all online stores and will remain playable until March of this year.

While Sea of Stars has much to celebrate following their win of Best Independent Game at the 2023 Game Awards and achieving a 4 million player milestone, the game is removing the cameo appearance of Jirard Khalil. Also known as The Completionist, Khalil was met with allegations of financial fraud against his family-founded charity to support dementia research, the Open Hand Foundation.

Publisher Bushiroad Games and developer Eighting announced the production of a Hunter x Hunter fighting game. Bushiroad has published various titles based on anime and manga IPs, and was responsible for bringing the multimedia musical franchises Love Live! School Idol Festival and BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! into the mobile games market.

As even its own cast awaits an official greenlighting of a sequel to Illumination’s animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, rumors suggest the animation studio has pitched the idea of potentially also adapting the Smash fighting games into a film.

Likewise, Jack Black won’t be waiting for his next gig for too long as he is reportedly to play Steve in the Minecraft adaptation.

Meanwhile, the Paramount television series adaptation of Halo has been confirmed for a second season.

While the official server of MMO City of Heroes was shut down way back in 2012, NCSoft officially granted a license to a long active, private-run server Homecoming. Players are reassured that accounts will remain untouched and that the gameplay will continue to be free, hoping to be supported by donations.

Fans of Baba Is You will be pleasantly surprised by the release of Mobile Suit Baba, a tactical mission-based puzzle game that revisits the same quaint Baba characters and setting.

The post The Bulletin: Bye Bye Bobby appeared first on Gamesline.

The Black Game Developer Fund is going its second year strong. If you are an independent Black game developer or know anyone that this is relevant to, applying is encouraged!

Dual Wield Studio debuts the Convention Artist Safety and Health Fund. Dual Wield Studio has been a steady facilitator and distributor of merchandise for many independent games developers and their titles. This fund hopes to help mitigate the costs that many vendors and artists may face when exhibiting at shows and conventions due to inconsistent policies responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

New details have been unveiled for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 at a recent Nintendo Direct. The game is releasing on July 29 for Switch systems. Plus, we’ve been promised another major expansion  by the end of 2023.

Playstation will not attend and be present at Gamescom 2022. This is another announcement following Activision Blizzard, Take-Two and Nintendo’s own statements that they will not attend the event this year either.

There is a shortage of Xbox controllers across Europe. As supply chain issues continue to shake up many industries, Canada and France are also reeling from a culturally devastating mustard shortage.

Meanwhile, harassment allegations and toxic workplace issues continue at GFuel. Several influencers that have previously worked with the brand have responded to the company’s latest layoff, tying it with similar accusations that the company has already faced years prior.

Square Enix is still on insisting on making NFTs in their roadmap. They hope to create “story-based” NFTs, whatever that means.

New details about Overwatch 2 have also been unveiled including: the introduction of a previously alluded, unseen character, the Junker Queen, and the verification that player purchases like skins and other transactions will be transferred to the second game.

That said, Overwatch 2 is planning on entirely replacing the original game at its launch. While Overwatch is getting slowly whisked away for the junkyard—

Any prospect of future Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games is now trashed, due to Activision Blizzard’s acquisition of Vicarious Visions. This was further confirmed by Tony Hawk himself on a Twitch stream.

But unlike other things that should be getting tossed to the dump instead…

It unfortunately seems like that Bobby Kotick has been re-elected to the Activision Blizzard’s board of directors for another year.

The post The Bulletin: Getting Junked appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s one of the biggest weeks of news in a while as WB announced a Smash Brothers clone called Multiversus, Sony had a Star Ocean full of news drop during their State of Play, Among Us is adding new roles in the next content update, and in sadder news, PAX South is coming to an end and apparently Pokimane owns EVO. Oh, you thought I was done? Amazon’s New World is a complete mess, Blizzard officially changed McCree’s name, Blizzcon was cancelled, and Bobby Kotick took a pay cut in a failed attempt at good PR. Far Cry 6 has horrible marketing, Resident Evil had a big week, the Wu-Tang clan are making an RPG and Shoji Meguro is leaving ATLUS to make his own game. Speaking of new games, A Quiet Place is getting a game tie-in from iLLOGIKA, Digimon Survive is now coming in 20222 and ConcernedApe has the Haunted Chocolatier in the works. We’re also getting a new third party DLC character in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Melty Blood: Type Lumina‘s DLC Rollout is starting this winter.

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As always you can support us on our patreon, follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo , @solonface, @YourPalNiall, and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

You can also join our discord channel at thegamezone.zone !

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

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“The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before.”

Basically Activision would like more money, and mobile developers like King are raking it in. Not a surprise to see Activision really putting themselves out there in this way since they’ve always been known to be ruthless when it comes to profits. And as developers go, King is the mobile developer to get.

The Irish based developer boasted $2.260 billion in revenue just last year and are the…kings…of mobile development at the moment. Also King just recently launched a beta for a new, free, game engine called Defold. Defold encourages quick collaboration and testing of games and even allows developers to stream their games to their own devices for instant testing.

Despite the hefty price tag this all seems like a good move for Activision. Sowing up the future by keeping your fingers in every burgeoning section of the video game business.

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