Artificial Agency, a startup located in Edmonton, has secured $16 million to advance its "AI-powered behavior engine." The funding round saw participation from Radical Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Flying Fish, Kaya, BDC Deep Tech, and Tirta Ventures. After operating in stealth mode for a year, the company has revealed its activities, stating it is collaborating closely with several prominent AAA studios. The engine is expected to be accessible to all studios by 2025
In November 2023, the creators of GameMaker made the engine completely free for non-commercial use on all platforms except consoles. This decision led to an increase in young developers
GameMaker is one of the most accessible game engines. And the team has found that more and more young users are trying out the engine thanks to its free license tier.
Eve Online developer CCP Games will soon make its Carbon Development Platform an open-source project. The company has now explained how this move should help extend the lifecycle of its popular MMO.
CCP Games, the Iceland-based developer of the enduring MMO Eve Online, is preparing to make its universe accessible to the broader development community. Earlier this year, the company revealed its plan to open source its proprietary Carbon Development Platform, which includes the Carbon Engine and other technological tools, thereby providing other developers with access to the same technology that powers CCP's flagship game. When asked about the rationale behind this decision, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson cited the importance of legacy
Although more and more game companies are incorporating generative artificial intelligence into their production process, Nintendo prefers to stay away from such technologies. At a meeting with investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stated that generative AI could lead to copyright issues
Another top executive at Unity has decided to leave the company. This time it's the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Carol Carpenter (Carol Carpenter)
The recent spring and summer game showcases were thoroughly enjoyable, including PlayStation's event, which, despite lacking high-profile announcements, still presented some interesting content. In the past, Sony might have dazzled with trailers for games still in early development or, as in the case of the Final Fantasy VII Remake announcement, not even in development yet. Perhaps it should have employed a similar strategy this time. Instead, the company featured several titles set to release in the coming months. Notably, one of these upcoming games is Astro Bot, which appears to have the potential to be a game of the year contender. While the showcase may not have been the most thrilling, all the highlighted games are expected soon.
On the other hand, Xbox's presentation stood out as the main attraction, covering a wide range of releases. It included titles launching soon, games scheduled for 2025, and others planned for even later. The showcase featured real gameplay footage, some attention-grabbing moments, and the anticipated Fable. Overall, it was an impressive event from start to finish. Additionally, Microsoft reinforced its commitment to Game Pass, quelling doubts expressed by myself and others about a possible scaling back of its subscription services. Now, the next step is for the company to fulfill these expectations
Believer, an indie studio founded by former Riot Games employees, has decided to open source its proprietary technology Friendshipper. All developers and enthusiasts are now free to use the toolset in their own projects.
The Believer Company has announced that its internal development tool, Friendshipper, is now available as an open-source project. The studio, founded by former Riot Games employees, is developing a next-generation open-world multiplayer title. Friendshipper has been instrumental in enhancing the efficiency of their development process, particularly in accelerating the implementation of bug fixes during playtests. Chief technology officer Landon McDowell explained to GamesIndustry.biz that the goal of Friendshipper is to "very quickly make changes to the code, quickly do builds, and then get changes in those builds out to ourselves as well as testers"
ByteDance reports that its gaming division has moved on to the next stage of its development. During the restructuring, it reviewed its processes and decided to focus primarily on "creating engaging games" rather than increasing profits and daily project audiences.
The next WN Conference is coming to Istanbul, Turkey on June 11-12. Here is an overview of the event’s official program, which includes talks from industry experts, workshops with companies like Google and AWS, and more.
In two weeks, on June 11-12, the next WN Conference will be held in Turkey. The main version of the program is already available on the event's website. What to pay attention to in it — we'll cover in our article.
Tim Cain, one of the lead developers of games like Fallout and Arcanum, recalled his idea for an action RPG based on the Conan universe, which never came to fruition. This dates back to 2004, when he was working at Troika Games.
At the Digital Dragons conference, Larian Studios' head Swen Vincke acknowledged that while creating Baldur's Gate 3, studio employees sometimes had to work overtime. However, there was significantly less crunch compared to their previous games.
The Swedish holding Thunderful Group is exiting the game distribution business. The company announced the sale of AMO Toys, Bergsala Aktiebolag, Thunderful 1, and Thunderful Solutions.
Marc Whitten is preparing to leave Unity. The company announced this in a report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
In March, Slavania, the debut game by FrostLeaf Games studio, published by Game Art Pioneers, was released on Steam. We talked with Vladimir Averyanov, the game designer of the project, about how the metroidvania was developed based on Russian fairy tales.
Unity continues to improve its engine. She released a preview version of Unity 6 with accelerated rendering, artificial intelligence-based tools and various optimizations for multiplayer games.
Unity has found a successor to John Riccitiello, who left the post of CEO in the fall of 2023 after a scandal with an updated pricing policy. She announced that from May 15, 2024, this position will be held by Matthew Bromberg.
Epic Games has officially released an updated version of the Unreal Engine — 5.4. It has significantly improved the quality of animation and improved rendering performance.
On April 17, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation again included UNIGINE in the register of domestic software. The engine has been missing from the list since the end of February.
On April 11, the global strategy Revival: Recolonization was released on PC in full. App2Top talked with Sergey Ulankin, head of console and PC publishing at HeroCraft, about how development was going, how successful early access was, about working with VK Play, and much more.
Ziva Dynamics is a company that deals with technologies of complex modeling and deformation in real time. Her tools are used to create realistic 3D models of people, animals and other creatures. The other day, Unity, the company that owns Ziva Dynamics, decided to abandon their support.
This was told by one of Godot programmers Adam Scott in an interview with journalist Stephen Totilo from Game File.
Epic Games held a presentation of State of Unreal at the GDC 2024 developer Conference. During it, the company demonstrated the capabilities of the next version of the Unreal Engine and shared a number of news on the development of Fortnite and its business in general. We have collected the most important announcements.
Epic Games just held its annual State of Unreal keynote, showcasing the future of Unreal Enigne and sharing other news related to Fortnite and its business in general. Here are all the major updates announced at the event.
The giant 2024 Unity Gaming Report has been released. It is dedicated to trends in game development. If possible, we will briefly tell you about the main thing from the study.
Good news. Despite the crisis in the industry, new gaming companies are still emerging. Emanuel Palalic and Garrett Young have announced the launch of a new studio. It's called Emptyvessel. This is the second such announcement in the last 24 hours.
In mid-February, OpenAI introduced a new generative network that is capable of generating very high-quality video by text format. It's called Sora. We talked about its prospects in the gaming industry with teams that have already implemented other neural networks into their pipeline. Our experts include representatives of Charisma, Playkot, Lost Lore, Skywaylab and ZiMAD.
The Defold Foundation has announced that its engine now supports the development of games for PlayStation 5. You can get all the necessary tools, documentation and source code of the engine for free. The only limitation is that you need to be an approved PlayStation developer to access them.
The young Russian Case studio decided to develop its own game engine. She plans to make its use free for indie teams, but without access to the source code.
Unity has published a financial report for the fourth quarter of 2023 and immediately for the whole year. She reported on revenue growth, and also shared new details about the process of "rebooting" the company.
There are no more game engines in the registry of domestic software. On February 20, UNIGINE was removed from it by the decision of the expert council under the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.
In January 2018, Autodesk stopped supporting the Autodesk Stingray engine, formerly known as Bitsquid. However, the tool lives on. Developer Andy Touch noticed that it was used by the authors of the popular shooter Helldivers 2.
Indie developer Maxim Bykov has been developing the lamp role-playing platformer Roam (formerly Moist) for three years now. About the project, the pipeline, the difficulties of development and expectations, in our interview with him.
An update has appeared. Eidos Montreal has confirmed the cuts.
In accordance with the new law adopted in Europe, Apple has announced a number of innovations in iOS. These include support for third—party stores and payment systems. But there were nuances. Those who want to use the new functionality will have to pay for each installation. For more information about the situation, see our analysis.
The current head of Roblox Studio, Stefano Corazza, announced that his company has joined the Blender Development Fund.
Game studio RAWRLAB Games has released a toolkit for porting Godot games to the Nintendo Switch platform. The solution is free, distributed under the MIT license. The only limitation is that you need to be an authorized Nintendo developer to work with the code.
The organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), with the participation of the Omdia consulting firm, conducted a survey of 3,000 game developers. According to him, over the past 12 months, 7% of developers have already changed the engine, and 28% began to consider this possibility.
Unity continues to restructure, this time preparing for changes in its leadership. The founders of ironSource, an app monetization platform it acquired in 2022, will soon leave the company.
All six ironSource founders will leave Unity within the next six months. This is reported by the Mobilegamer portal, which has read the letter from Jim Whitehurst, interim CEO of Unity, sent to the company's employees.
Less than two weeks into 2024, mass layoffs continue to impact the industry. This time, Unity has decided to cut around 25% of its total workforce as part of its ongoing restructuring.
In a recent report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Unity announced plans to conduct a record round of layoffs. She decided to lay off a quarter of the staff, or about 1,800 people.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams. Next up is an interview with Vitaly Agafonov, head of the Nau Engine product.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams. Next up is an interview with Denis Shergin, CEO of UNIGINE.
The developers of UNIGINE announced the release of a new version of the engine — 2.18. Among the key changes are improved performance, VR "out of the box", improved animation system and editor, and much more.
Electronic Arts has suddenly rebranded the Frostbite engine by presenting a new identity and vision for its proprietary tech. The company is betting big on collaborative efforts, while no longer restricting developers from using third-party solutions.
The creators of the Defold engine have decided to remove the monthly fee for using the source code for console platforms. Now every registered developer can access it for free.
