Ikonorganizasyon

Electronic Arts set up its indie publishing wing, EA Originals, following the success of thread-based puzzle-platformer Unravel in 2016. Indie games with EA’s backing like Fe (another platformer), A Way Out (a multiplayer prison-break drama), Sea of Solitude (a boat journey through a flooded city), and Lost in Random (an action-adventure with sentient dice) followed.

So did a couple of online multiplayer games: Rocket Arena and Knockout City, the latter of which EA handed control of back to its creators when it went free-to-play in 2022. Subsequently, developers Velan Studios announced Knockout City would be shutting down.

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Jeff Gamon, the general manager of EA Partners who oversees EA Originals, said he is “hugely proud of that relationship we have with all of our partners, regardless of how things worked out. With [Velan Studios founders] Guha and Karthik, I am still very close to them. Every step of the way we were by their side. Completely transparent. These things are built in collaboration from day one.”

EA Originals’ next release isn’t quite such a niche concern. It’s Wild Hearts, a Monster Hunter-esque action game developed…

Elon Musk has announced that NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino will be the next CEO of Twitter. Yaccarino is expected to take the reins of the troubled company in about six weeks, although Musk made it clear that he’s not actually going anywhere.

“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk tweeted on May 12. “@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”

Musk said in October 2022 that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” reflecting his ambition to remake the struggling platform as an all-in-one site for news, communications, online shopping, payment processing, and various other functions. What exactly he has in mind or how he’s going to go about making it happen isn’t clear, but he rebranded Twitter, legally at least, as X in April. It’s a silly name, but one with some history for Musk: X.com is the name of the online bank he co-founded in 1999 that eventually morphed into PayPal.

“Thank you @elonmusk!” Yaccarino tweeted in res…

Helldivers 2 definitely involves strategy, but the way I play it would not be described as strategic. My first few hours in Arrowhead’s hit shooter were chaos, not helped by the fact that I dived straight into Automaton turf and started blasting away at thick-armored robots with a pea-shooter. I got filleted by melee bots, ran into my fellow patriots’ air-strikes, thrown through the air at a rate of knots, respawned more times than I could count, and probably set back the cause of liberty by several weeks. But hey: it was a good time.

Now I’m a little more familiar with how the liberty-em-up works (and have discovered the wholesome joy of bug-squishing) and have begun to unlock the various loadout options, I do think a little more before blasting down to a planet’s surface. These thoughts largely involve whether I bring an SMG or a shotgun. But some Helldivers are much more thorough, and you don’t have to go far on the internet to find the usual tier lists, recommendations, spreadsheets, and warnings about so-called trash builds. Gamers like to min-max and, as the popular game in town, Helldiver kit is being given the full treatment. 

The trouble i…

People like the Fallout TV series on Amazon an awful lot—we called it “the best Fallout since New Vegas”—and that seems to be having quite the spillover effect for the Fallout videogames. All of the games in the long-running post-nuclear RPG series have seen a significant jump in players, and they’ve also muscled their way into Steam’s top-selling games chart.

SteamDB noted on Twitter (via Eurogamer) that “Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam with the release of the Fallout TV series.”

Fallout 4 is the biggest beneficiary, spiking up to more than 83,000 concurrent players over the weekend, compared to a high of 24,000 the weekend before, a few days ahead of Amazon’s Fallout launch. Fallout 76 arguably set an even more impressive mark by surpassing 39,000 concurrent players on the weekend following the TV series release, a new all-time high on Steam for the four-year-old game. Fallout 3—my favorite of the Bethesda Fallouts, and I make no apologies for it—also saw a huge bounce, going from roughly 1,000 concurrents on April 7 to 6,700 a week later.

Some of that Fallout 76 surge is no doubt helped by the “free play …

Watch On

Who doesn’t love spinning around? People who take themselves too seriously, that’s who. If you don’t take yourself too seriously and also partake in a little virtual reality gaming, this spinny VR chair might be up your alley.

The Roto VR Explorer has just opened up for pre-orders at $799 (£799) and is set to ship in October. It’s a very spinny chair, the basic idea being a chair that turns in the direction you’re looking. This is what Roto’s “Look & Turn” technology is going for, and judging from the Roto VR trailer, it looks like it implements it well. 

Pairing this spinny tech with VR seems like a great idea, and far from being a gimmick, it claims to solve some problems with gaming on the best VR headsets. The first thing that stuck out to me was Roto’s claim that this Meta-partnered Roto chair will solve “the problems of 360º viewing, locomotion and motion sickness”.

I’ve personally never struggled with motion sickness while VR gaming, but I’ve been around people who have, and it’s not fun. If this chair can really solve that problem, that will be enough reason for a substantial portion of VR gamers to consider one right there.…