video games

Blizzard President Mike Ybarra has also decided to leave, and Blizzard’s survival game has been canceled.

Amazon‘s gamer-centric streaming outlet Twitch is laying off 500 staffers, CEO Dan Clancy told employees in a memo Wednesday morning. The move is being made in sync with cutbacks at corporate siblings Prime Video and Amazon Studios. Bloomberg had reported the layoffs at Twitch on Tuesday. Clancy said the news had “leaked,” suggesting that the Amazon division had to hold off on confirming any details or answering employee questions in order to co-ordinate today’s announcement with that of the other divisions.

Netflix has said it plans to be in gaming for years to come. Now the company is trying to figure out how to make money from it, a potential shift in strategy for the streamer. Some of the ideas that have been discussed include in-app purchases, charging for more sophisticated games it is developing or giving subscribers to its newer ad-supported tier access to games with ads in them, according to people familiar with the discussions. Pictured: Netflix’s most popular original game is tied to its Too Hot to Handle reality show.

PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month. Sony had previously announced that users would not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation after Dec. 31, even if they had already purchased it. However, the firm now says that due to an “updated licensing agreement” with Warner Bros. — which owns the Discovery brand — consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows “for at least the next 30 months.”

The case could reshape the rules of how other businesses can make money on the Android operating system.

SAG-AFTRA members voted overwhelmingly Monday to authorize a strike against 10 of the major video game companies. The vote was 98.32% in favor. A total of 34,687 members cast ballots, representing a voting 27.47% of eligible voters. The guild’s last strike against the gaming companies, in 2016-17, lasted 183 days. The guild, meanwhile, has been on strike against the film and TV industry since July 14.

The Federal Trade Commission plans to seek an emergency court order that would block Microsoft from closing its $75 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, according to a person familiar with the matter. The FTC plans to file Monday for a temporary restraining order in federal court that would halt the companies from imminently clinching the deal, the person said. A judge would need to agree to issue the time-limited order; there is no guarantee when or if the agency will file for the request.

Netflix continues to ramp up its video gaming ambitions, unveiling plans to release 40 more games this year. Since launching Netflix Games in November 2021, the streamer has released 55 games. Furthermore, Netflix said it’s developing 70 games with its partners, not including 16 games that are currently being developed by the company’s in-house game studios.

Netflix said on Thursday that it was buying Boss Fight Entertainment, a small independent video game studio based in Allen, Texas, as the video streaming company pushes further into the lucrative video game market. The acquisition of Boss Fight, a mobile game developer with 130 employees, is Netflix’s third studio purchase since it set its sights on the gaming industry last summer.

Cutting-edge news technologists from The Weather Channel, CNN, Brainstorm and Planar are leading a vanguard of broadcasters into including augmented and virtual reality in their presentations. They told a TVNewsCheck webinar last week that advances in video game technology are making that possible.

On Tuesday, Netflix reported its worst slowdown in subscriber growth in eight years as people emerge from their pandemic cocoons. But it thinks it has an answer to that: Video games.

After decades of game-to-film flops, a new effort, led by Sony, aims to adapt big PlayStation and Xbox franchises for movies and TV.

“There are no longitudinal studies that show a link between violence and video games,” said Benjamin Burroughs, a professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Certainly, there is no linkage to gun violence.” The theory persists in part because politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken it up as an easy target, since it lacks a powerful lobby like, say, the National Rifle Association.

More American millennials now subscribe to a video game service than to a traditional paid television service, according to a survey on Monday, as consumers favor new forms of entertainment that are shifting the broader media landscape.