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New survey reports one in 10 game developers have lost their jobs in 2024

2025-01-22T14:31:52-05:00

One in 10 game developers lost their job in 2024. That's according to the results of the annual Game Developers Conference state of the video game survey. The survey sampled over 3,000 developers and covered a number of topics including industry layoffs and what kind of games developers are working on.

Prolific layoffs have ravaged the industry over the last two years making the question of their impact on developers one of the most important in the survey. In addition to 10 percent of developers losing their jobs, 41 percent of respondents said they had been impacted by layoffs in some way, either by being laid off directly or seeing cowor …

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Baldur’s Gate 3 developer is moving on from Dungeons and Dragons

2024-03-22T12:44:46-04:00

With the sheer popularity surrounding Baldur's Gate 3, the game is ripe for an expansion - but if it ever happens, it won't be made by its developer Larian Studios. During a panel at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Larian founder Swen Vincke revealed that the studio plans on moving away from Dungeons & Dragons games, as first reported by IGN.

"We're not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're not going to make Baldur's Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're going to move on," Vincke said. He added that Larian is also going to "move away from D&D" and start a new project.

Counter …

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Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops

2024-03-21T18:46:30-04:00

Can Qualcomm replicate Apple's feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here's one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops - no porting required.

In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled "Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games," Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed.

Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon …

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Fortnite players can now build their own Lego games

2024-03-20T13:41:42-04:00

The worlds of Lego and Fortnite are continuing to intertwine. At its State of Unreal keynote at GDC, Epic announced that, starting today, creators will now be able to use Lego templates and other Lego-branded elements to craft their own games inside of Fortnite. The Lego tools will be available in both Fortnite Creative and the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).

Like all other user-made games in Fortnite, Lego games are eligible for payouts through the game's creative economy, though it sounds like there are more restrictions compared to typical Fortnite Creative islands. In particular, Lego says that "all published Lego Islands must have a …

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State of Unreal 2024: all the news from Epic’s GDC showcase

2025-01-22T08:03:54-05:00

Every year, Epic holds a keynote at the Game Developers Conference to showcase the latest advancements for its Unreal Engine game-making tool, as well as its business as a whole. Last year, that included updates to its hyperrealistic MetaHumans, the launch of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and a revamped creator economy within Fortnite. This year, the company has a lot going on — from the mobile version of the Epic Game Store to the resurgence of Fortnite — so expect a busy hour or so of news. At the very least, we should get some pretty tech demos for UE5.

The keynote kicks off on March 20th at 12:30PM ET, and you can watch it live on both Twitch and YouTube.

Epic is adding its hyperrealistic MetaHumans to Unreal Editor for Fortnite

2024-03-20T13:32:59-04:00

At GDC last year, Epic launched a robust new creative tool called the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). And this year, the company announced some major new features that are on the way for it. To start, the company's MetaHumans - hyperrealistic human characters that can be animated using only an iPhone - will be available in UEFN beginning today. Epic says that users can import any characters made using the MetaHuman Creator tool and the MetaHuman Animator into UEFN, where they can then be used as NPCs in player-made games.

While MetaHumans are the highlight, a couple of other notable features are coming as well. Epic says that UEFN will b …

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Captain America and Black Panther face off in the first trailer for 1943: Rise of Hydra

2024-03-20T12:43:03-04:00

Epic's State of Unreal keynote opened with a surprise: a first look at 1943: Rise of Hydra, the new Marvel game from writer and director Amy Hennig, best known for her work on the Uncharted franchise. It features an "ensemble" of playable characters including Captain America and Black Panther and is described as a "narrative-driven action-adventure game."

Here's how Marvel describes the setup:

As the game's narrative unfolds, players will assume the role of four central characters: a young Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America; Azzuri, T'Challa's grandfather and the WWII-era Black Panther; Gabriel Jones, a US soldier and member of the Howling …

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GDC is exorbitantly expensive — but still vital for many game developers

2023-04-27T09:00:00-04:00

For this year's Game Developers Conference, over 28,000 people showed up to San Francisco, California, in March to talk, listen, play, and network. Developers gathered to hear presentations on how to hone their craft, meet with peers, and conduct business. The experiences facilitated by GDC keep fledgling games alive, get them vital exposure, and provide opportunities for developers to meet the people that can help them break into the industry or simply provide advice for their games. Yet, for how important GDC is as a professional event, it remains wildly out of reach to a lot of people for whom it provides the most benefit: the developers …

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Framework announces Laptop 16 — and promises ‘holy grail’ of upgradable graphics

2023-03-23T13:00:00-04:00

The secret: this laptop has a removable butt. | Image: Framework

It's been four years since Dell promised the Alienware Area-51m would be a truly upgradable gaming laptop - and nearly two years since the company got sued for utterly failing to deliver that dream.

Now, Framework, the sole company in modern memory* with an actual track record of delivering a fully upgradable laptop, is taking a stab at it, too.

Today outside the 2023 Game Developers Conference, it's announcing and previewing the Framework Laptop 16, its second laptop platform ever, with the claim that it's "delivering on the holy grail for gamers, creators and others who need power, with modular upgradable graphics!"

Here's what the Framework Laptop 16 looks like with a GPU module, RGB keyboard and fancy dot matrix modules. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge" data-portal-copyright="Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge">

Framework CEO Nirav …

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Game developers aren’t so hot on NFTs, the metaverse, or huge acquisitions

2023-01-19T12:01:00-05:00

Ahead of the Game Developers Conference in March, the organizers of the event have released its annual State of the Industry survey results. Surveying 2,300 respondents, the questionnaire covered developer sentiment on a wide range of topics, including NFTs, unionization, the metaverse, and more.

As overall sentiment on NFTs cools amid continuous stories of fraud and scandal, the GDC survey reports only 23 percent of developers say that their studios are interested in Web3 technology - a slight decline from 27 percent last year. There does seem to be a marked decrease in NFTs and crypto in video games, as anytime a studio announces a Web3-b …

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