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When Microsoft—a company that made “$198 billion in revenue and $83 billion in operating income” in 2022—made the decision to axe 10,000 workers last week, a number of those came from their video game operations, particularly 343 Industries, the overseers of the Halo series.
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This week, all at once, a perfect storm of deals, discounts, and sales has hit the Nintendo Switch eShop. Batten down the hatches, open up your wallets, and check out some of these limited-time deals, including massive savings on numerous Lego titles, Mortal Kombat games, and hits from Capcom, Ubisoft, and Bandai…
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A few hours ago, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer sent out a company-wide email to all full-time employees under Microsoft’s gaming divisions. A copy of the email was shared with Kotaku by a current Xbox employee, we have confirmed its authenticity, and the full text has been transcribed below:
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We’re only one episode deep into HBO’s live-action adaptation of The Last of Us and fans think they’ve discovered the actor who’ll play Abby.
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Pedro Pascal is playing the emotionally unavailable smuggler-turned-surrogate-dad Joel Miller in HBO’s The Last of Us series, and after years of playing father figures, it seems like the actor is ready to really lean into being a daddy as part of his brand.
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Critically-acclaimed base-building hit Factoriois an odd duck. Since its 2016 Steam release, the game has never gone on sale. And now, the developer behind Factorio is changing the price of its popular game, but it ain’t getting a discount. Instead, the price is jumping up $5 next week. The devs blamed inflation for…
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First came the much-requested changes to loadout drops, now Warzone 2.0 is messing with the gulag. With season two’s arrival on February 15, the gulag will no longer make players team up in pairs of two after suffering defeat on the battle royale map. Instead, as in the original Warzone, it will now focus on 1v1…
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A YouTuber created an alternative Nintendo Switch controller for their pet fish, which allows them to play video games on livestream. That fish managed to spend real money on some digital purchases while trying to beat a gym leader in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (h/t: GamesRadar). And all of this happened because …
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When you gotta go, you really gotta go. I just wish that esports tournaments felt the same about letting their competitors use the toilet. Pro player Oliver “Skiter” Lepko peed in a bottle during an ongoing DOTA 2 tournament, citing the organizers’ rules against going to the toilet during a match. Here’s a photograph…
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PSA for my fellow Destiny players and Brendan Fraser appreciators:A fellow comrade in arms has gifted us with a Destiny 2 transmog kit that recreates Fraser’s iconic, dare I say heartstopping fit from The Mummy. Warning: I’m gonna unabashedly gush about Brendan Fraser.
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While Battlefield 2042 is getting better with each update (or at least closer to the game it could and should have been at launch), there’s one thing that has annoyed a lot of long-time players ever since its release and continues to do so: Specialists, a bunch of “hero” characters designed to replace the old “class”…
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You may remember that one of the funniest stories of 2022 was the way that players of War Thunder—an arcadey online shooter featuring real military vehicles—just kept on posting military documents in the game’s forums. Not as acts of espionage, but to win arguments about specs.
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The increasing popularity of the Persona series in the West has been a wonderful if slow-burning thing to behold, ramping up over the last decade to the point where Persona 5 was a Very Big Video Game Release, and re-releases of older games are now headline news.
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Today, after some leaks and rumors, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition on Steam. The good news: It’s on sale, meaning you can grab all three classic games for cheap. The bad news: It’s the same infamously messy remaster that hasn’t received a substantial update since nearly a…
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Soulslikes, a genre of punishing action RPGs popularized by Japanese developer FromSoftware, are all too common these days. Ever since Dark Souls came onto the scene in 2011,a bunch of studios have been trying their hands at FromSoft’s iconic formula. Some attempt to mix things up by introducing new mechanics, like …
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If you’re reading this, then I’ve somehow managed to pull myself away from my latest obsession: the generously purple, isometric twin-stick roguelike Lone Ruin. Though its main three-layer ruin might feel too short for some, I’ve found it to hardly dampen the perpetual fun; the creative possibilities from randomly…
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Bruce Straley hasn’t been at Naughty Dog for six years, but the game director behind the original PlayStation 3 version of The Last of Us isn’t happy about his lack of credit in the HBO adaptation that began airing this week.
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Two of the biggest outlets in games media are the latest to face layoffs. A number of editorial staff across both Giant Bomb and GameSpot revealed they’d been let go on Thursday, just months after the sites were purchased by the Fandom wiki network.
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Listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast often run the risk of witnessing the self-proclaimed “f—-ing moron” spew garbage like covid misinformation, platforming the internet’s biggest crybaby, or routinely exercise media illiteracy. On the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the UFC color commentator admitted to…
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Another week, another new Marvel Snap location. And sadly, it’s becoming a trend that a lot of these new locations are just really annoying and bad. The latest awful Snap location is Rickety Bridge, a frustrating spot that destroys cards faster than an angry kid who didn’t pull anything good from a dozen packs of …
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Keke Palmer, the actor known for her recent roles in Nope and Lightyear (or as the titular character in the Nickelodeon True Jackson, VP depending on which side of 2000 you were born) has been thriving as of late. As a former Nickelodeon/Disney Channel kid, I’m always happy to see anyone from that era doing well…
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If you played Elden Ring and are a fan of the wildly popular GeoGuessr game genre—in which you’re dropped into a Google Street View and tasked with pinpointing your location—then you may want to thank Redditor u/TheEdenChild. They recently announced they’d created an Elden Ring-basedtake on GeoGuessr which has over…
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Most of us like to think that we’re good people. But if you picked up something worth millions in your local currency, it’s pretty unlikely that you’d give it back to its owner. Yet that’s exactly what one Neopets player did when they found a Wand of the Darkest Faerie.
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It’s the end of an era. Over the last three years, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has been primarily focused on the Pokémon and characters from 2019’s Sword and Shield (SWSH) game, but come March 20, that’s all coming to an end. That’s when the world outside of Japan will see its first official sets of Scarlet & Violet …
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Of all the Microsoft teams caught in the blast radius of mass layoffs announced yesterday, it’s possible Halo Infinite maker 343 Industries was among the worst hit. The studio has faced a wave of departures following _Halo Infinite’_s multiplayer struggles, and the new cuts have sparked strong criticism of those who…
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The Overwatch League, an officially funded esports event, has been dealing with declining viewership and issues with sponsors following Activision Blizzard’s ongoing workplace culture scandal. Now, based on a report from Jacob Wolf, it seems the teams Activision Blizzard employs to play the game for a live audience…
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Co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic was first released on the PC back in 2018. It has a dedicated following online, and tons of loyal fans, but this is not a review of the video game. This is a review of the board game with, confusingly, the exact same name.
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Hi, welcome, let’s take a break from industry news and global doom and talk about a rap video and very, very expensive PlayStation Portable handheld.
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Wizards of the Coast, the company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, have not had a great week. As io9 reported, plans for a revision to D&D’s Open Gaming License—through which other games from other people can borrow some of D&D’s systems—went down terribly, facing opposition from both fans and other tabletop…