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Amazon-owned Twitch have announced that they will lay off “just over 500” people – almost 35% of their workforce – in the course of on-going plans to “rightsize our company”, with CEO Dan Clancy conceding that the streaming service has been operating based on “where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today.”
Earlier this week, I shared a Tweet, or X post or whatever, that was a Twitter Film Guy being like, “It’s a burden talking to people about my passion, movies, because I think about them on a fundamentally different level”. Like, okay, Scorsese, you can say you didn’t really like Murder Mystery 2, the normies won’t chase you out of town with pitchforks. You know what actually is a burden? Your passions being watching hours of anti-multi-level marketing (MLM) YouTube videos, which is the content hole I fell down over the Christmas break. Your weird uncles have at least seen a film before, but it’s not like I can turn to my mum and ask her if she thinks the weird Monat Christians are worse than the Seint make-up TikTok girlies without explaining almost every word in the sentence.
Anyway. My point is: someone should make an MLM simulation game.
We didn’t review Turn 10 and Microsoft’s latest Forza Motorsport and well, thank goodness, because I’ve just taken a look at the Steam page and it’s a regular six-mile pile-up in there. The game’s user reviews are Mostly Negative, three months after release, with complaints covering a wide gamut: the online being full of cheaters, the single player being boring, and the game being poorly optimised for PC.
Little-known indie platform holder Valve have announced a new policy for Steam releases that make use of “AI” technology. To boil it down, developers will now have to disclose how they’re using AI tools on Steam pages, including what “guardrails” they’re putting in place for live-generated stuff that might be illegal or infringe on copyright. Valve are also introducing a new player reporting system for breaches. The company say these adjustments “will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use AI”, with the exception of Adult Only Sexual content that is generated live.
Cult Of The Lamb‘s Sins Of The Flesh update promised to allow your followers to breed, in a way, by finding an egg that would hatch and produce new potential cult members. Players of the action-RPG/management hybrid on social media quickly did what people on social media do: demanded that they add sex.
Its developers said they would and now we get to see what that means when the update launches on January 16th.
Some of the makers of planet-tossing real-time strategy game Planetary Annihilation are working on a sequel, called Industrial Annihilation, which aims to blend together RTS combat with factory building. It’s now in its last week of investment funding and is aiming to release into early access sometime this spring.
When the Ryzen 9 5950X debuted in 2020, it was a staggeringly strong productivity and gaming CPU, with 16 cores and 32 threads of Zen 3 power for a princely £750. A little over three years later and next-gen Zen 4 CPUs are firmly here, but the 5950X remains the most powerful productivity CPU for the venerable AM4 platform.
That makes the 5950X a tempting upgrade option for anyone using an older Ryzen processor that wants to keep using their existing motherboard and RAM, and today this CPU has breached a new low-water mark: £360 on Amazon UK, 52% off its original recommended retail price. (It’s also a nearly-as-good 50% off at the US.)
Acts! It used to be just those old-timey theatre productions that had them, but as in many respects, videogames have nipped through a stage exit and stolen theatre’s underpants. One act isn’t the same as another, however: take the third act of Baldur’s Gate 3, which many players feel isn’t a patch, or indeed a hotfix changelog, on the thunderously well-received RPG‘s first two acts. According to senior RPG designer Anna Guxens, Larian have been following the reaction and are thinking about how they can handle act three’s “drastic” tone shift better in future releases. It’s a timely observation, because in separate news, Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke has posted that he’s “figured out” the first act of Larian’s next unannounced project.
It’s been a good handful of years for fans of secret-ridden games. The sort of secrets that make the game world feel huge and unknowable and transform the post-game into a scavenger hunt more akin to ARGs than classic secret endings. After 2021’s meta deckbuilder Inscryption, and enigmatic Zeldalike Tunic a year later, 2023 brought us Cocoon. Set in a cryptic world of insect-like aliens and their impossible machines, Cocoon is a puzzle game all about mystery.
What best sells the mystery is a minority of puzzles that are so well-hidden, that a lot players might never know they exist. Those are the optional challenges that guard the way to Cocoon’s secret ending. Any given player might stumble on one or two clues for those puzzles, before shrugging and finding their way back to the main story. But as the game goes on and the clues remain unresolved, those players will wonder what other secrets are hidden around them. I talked to Jeppe Carlsen and Edwin Kho from developer Geometric Interactive, to learn why those puzzles were made, and how it feels to watch a community track them down in real time.
