The main thing for the weekend (November 4-6)
During the day, Fortnite launched a record number of gamers, the chief operating officer left the Embracer Group, Microsoft decided to create AI tools for working on plots, quests and dialogues in games - we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
On November 3, Fortnite launched the "As Before" season, in which gamers were given the opportunity to visit the very first island in the game again. The idea turned out to be extremely successful. According to calculations by Epic Games, on November 4, Fortnite attracted 44.7 million people, they spent 102 million hours in the game per day. According to the developers, Fortnite has never been so popular. Also, according to the portal Fortnite.GG Over the weekend, Fortnite updated the online record: 6.17 million people were in the title at the same time at its peak.
The U.S. Court of Appeals has resumed consideration of choreographer Kyle Hanagami's lawsuit against Epic Games. Recall that Hanagami sued the company in March 2022, saying that Epic Games copied elements of his dance for the It's Complicated emotion in Fortnite. In August 2022, the district court dismissed the lawsuit: it pointed out that the copyright law protects the entire dance, not individual elements, besides, dance and emotion do not have much in common. The Court of Appeal did not agree with this decision. In his opinion, the district court ignored the fact that Epic Games took not just the elements of the dance, but the exact movements of the dancer's legs, head, shoulders, arms and fingers.
▫️Embark Studios has announced that 7.5 million gamers participated in the open beta test of THE FINALS. For comparison: at one time, 7.7 million people played the Battlefield 2042 beta.
▫️Embracer Group's Chief Operating Officer Egil Strunke left the holding company in the midst of restructuring. Now he will develop his own company, Strunke Games, which will advise game studios. Strunke worked for the Embracer Group twice. For the first time, he worked in the period from 2011 to 2014 at the then Nordic Games, from which the Embracer Group grew. For the second time — in the period from 2019 to 2023.
Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Inworld AI, a startup that is working on technology that "revitalizes" NPCs. According to Inworld AI, thanks to it, you can communicate with NPCs in natural language, much like with ChatGPT. Together, the companies are going to develop multiplatform tools based on generative AI to create plots, quests, dialogues and other content in games. Microsoft did not say when the tools would become available to developers, but stressed that both employees of its internal studios and third-party teams would be able to use them.
