Welcome to another feature of GamingLyfe’s Weekly News Round-up. It can be difficult to keep up with all the video game news that occurs in the industry these days! So, with this Weekly News Round-up, you can review several major highlights that happened throughout the week. This set of top news ranges from Gamescom, an Apex developer debacle, Insomniac Games, to Game Informer.
Note: The news provided in the Weekly News Round-up is a snapshot of the story and presents the focal point of the material provided.
GamesCom
Gamescom is a worldwide gaming event and it kicked off the week with all sorts of news — right before its very own Opening Night Live press event where game announcements were going to be made. Other top gaming companies such as Nintendo, Xbox, and even Google Stadia had their own video presentations announcing what games are coming to their respective platforms.
Nintendo provided news about which new indie games would be coming to the Switch console. Xbox took a deep dive with their games, talking to someone who worked on the particular game thus providing additional information on them. Google Stadia announced what other games would be coming to their cloud streaming service. GamesCom Opening Night Live then closed all the conference-type videos with their own, showing off more new games and announcements. They closed off the whole live stream with a bit more detail on Hideo Kojima’s upcoming game Death Stranding, showing two new character trailers and a small bit of gameplay.
Apex Legends Devs Insults Players
What’s a news week without controversy now-a-days? Some of the development team at Apex Legends were not kind when they took to Reddit to apologize regarding a cosmetic item. The Iron Crown event introduced new skins, but it would require players to grind difficult and expensive loot box mechanisms. Players felt that was going too far … so they pushed back.
A couple devs of the game were responding to Reddit posts in order to try and answer questions. Some responses got out of hand … where a dev called gamers “dicks” and quickly brushed it off as an excuse for “having a spicy lunch and feeling it.” Another response from the team called players “freeloaders” and remembering a time where players weren’t complete “ass-hats.”
Since then, the CEO of Respawn and the development team behind Apex Legends have apologized … Stating that the developer wants to have a healthy relationship with the community.
Sony Buys Insomniac
The talented team who developed games such as Ratchet and Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive, and Spider-Man has finally joined the PlayStation team. In a tweet sent by PlayStation, they announced that Insomniac Games is joining PlayStation’s worldwide studios. A lot of players were not aware that even if the team at Insomniac (who made games exclusively for PlayStation) were part of the PlayStation family until they made Sunset Overdrive, which was an Xbox exclusive. After that, some gamers became aware.
With the huge success of the PlayStation 4 and Spider-Man that was released last year, it would be dumb not to double-down on continuing on making sequels. For the gamers who are Sunset Overdrive fans and worried that they will never see a sequel, worry not as the team still own the rights to the game and can make a sequel if they wanted to. Although, it would most likely be a PlayStation exclusive now.
Game Informer Layoffs
In unfortunate news, GameStop has laid off over a hundred employees. Both its corporate headquarters and other offices including the GameStop owned magazine “Game Informer” has lost a lot of hard workers. The layoffs at GameStop are part of a reboot initiative to transform the business for the future and improve financial performance. The magazine’s editors were all surprised by the news … Several of the editors took to Twitter that they had been laid off.
