News Mash-Up - Week # 42

• • On October 19, Konami held a showcase called Silent Hill Transmission, in which they revealed the most recent updates for the series. Among these updates were the announcement of as well as a trailer for a remake of Silent Hill 2, a new movie, and a few new future games.
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• • Meta has announced a new virtual reality headset - the Quest Pro - priced at $1499, almost four times the price of the previous headset, the Quest 2, priced at $399. This announcement comes despite the inability of Meta to retain users on Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality experience. When it originally launched the metaverse, Meta hoped to engage 500,000 monthly active users by the end of the year in 2022. However, as of now, this goal has been changed to 280,000. The current monthly active users stand at under 200,000.
    
    
  • Riot Games, the firm responsible for League of Legends, has acquired Wargaming’s Sydney Studio. The studio will now rebrand as Riot Sydney and help in the development of Riot games.

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  • Overwatch 2 had over 25 million players during its first ten days of release. This tops the release of the original Overwatch significantly, as it had 15 million players after three months on the market. The two games are a bit different, however, since Overwatch 2 is free-to-play while the original was a full-priced game.
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  • Microsoft is reportedly creating a mobile gaming store for Xbox to compete directly with Apple and Google. This comes during Microsoft’s ongoing acquisition of Activision Blizzard, known for its popular mobile games.
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  • Nvidia has decided to “unlaunch” its RTX 4080 12GB graphics card, after receiving much criticism around its name and differences to the similarly called RTX 4080 16GB card. Despite the names, the 12GB card not only had less memory, but also lower bandwidth and fewer Cuda cores. The RTX 4080 16GB model is still planned for release on November 16.

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  •  Comcast is shutting down G4, its games-focused television network, following its low viewership numbers and inability to obtain its targeted financial results. All remaining staff will be laid off following its closure.
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  • Netflix continues to take its first steps into the gaming market, reportedly “seriously exploring” its cloud gaming offering according to Mike Verdu, Netflix’s vice president of gaming. Verdu also confirmed that Netflix will open an internal game development studio in Southern California, to be headed by Chacko Sonny, the former executive producer of Overwatch.
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  • The unlicensed gambling ban that Twitch announced in September has gone into place, effective October 18. As of now, they have added a new post to the Community Guidelines on the site reiterating the policy.
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  • The Commonwealth Games have decided to drop esports as a medal event for the 2026 competition. This comes despite the success of esports in the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, UK. The specific reasons for this decision remain unclear.

Week commencing Monday 16 October 2022