News Mash-Up - Week # 27 + 28

Top News Items

• • In the recent court case between Epic and Apple, one of the areas of contention was Epic’s inability to have its own Fortnite store on iOS. Apple maintained that it has the right to prevent third parties from opening a side store on their operating system (for security reasons). A new law called the Digital Market Act has been approved by the European Parliament and states that any large platform that maintains a “gatekeeper” (i.e. a walled garden) will be unlawful, that third-party app developers should be allowed access, and that side-loading of software should be made accessible.
    
    
  • The UK equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission in the US (FTC), The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK, are investigating the planned take over of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft (for $68 billion) to see whether competition will be stifled with this takeover. The CMA has set itself the deadline of September to 1st reach a conclusion about the upcoming deal.
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• • Twitch is making further changes to its platform. The company will now pay streamers significantly more often as it is cutting the minimum payment threshold from $100 to $50, which is a win for streamers. This implies that it will take less effort or time before streamers are paid, but obviously the amounts will be smaller.  The new threshold will be implemented in Argentina, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and Taiwan on July 15th and in additional countries in the future. An expected 70,000 streamers are expected to benefit from this change.
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  • Ubisoft has confirmed that, beginning September 1st, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD (the add-on game for Assassin’s Creed III) will be pulled from Steam and Ubisoft Connect stores and access will be turned off. Sony also confirmed that all film content from Studio Canal in Germany and Austria will be pulled from the PlayStation Store beginning the 31st of August and that accessibility to these movies will be revoked (after previously stating they would remain available). In both cases, neither company has offered compensation or refunds. 

• • In the first two weeks that Falls Guys became free-to-play on the latest consoles and Switch, 50 million players have registered to play the game. In the first two weeks of release, the troubled free-to-play game Diablo Immortal has generated $24 million and has been downloaded 15 million times.
    
    
  • EA’s new game Skate, expected sometime this year, will now be a free-to-play live-service game after initially being announced as a full-price game.
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  • The SEGA Genesis Mini 2, which will release in Japan in late October, will also be released in North America. There are currently neither details on whether there will be a European SKU, nor an announcement about the price or release date for the U.S.
    
    

• • In a blog announcement by AMD, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 is now available for Xbox Series game developers. This means that Xbox games will take advantage of the high upscaling technologies which have already been available for the latest AMD PC GPUs.

Week commencing Monday 4 July 2022