Scope out a few of the game industry news stories from the last week below, hand-picked from across the world of games. This week looks at the opening event during a busy few days (online) at Gamescom, G-STAR going digital, Unity, Nintendo and more to read up on!
Index:
- Biggest News and Reveals from Gamescom’s Opening Night Live Event
- G-STAR Event Goes Digital for 2020Â
- Rumor: Might Nintendo Offer an Upgraded Switch in 2021?
- Unity Announces IPO
- Fall Guys is one of 2020’s Biggest Indie Game Success Stories
- Facebook Horizon VR Social Enters Closed Beta
Biggest News and Reveals from Gamescom’s Opening Night Live Event
Source:Â The Verge
“Gamescom 2020 may not be the in-person spectacle we’ve come to know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. The virtual version of the trade show kicked off with Gamescom Opening Night Live, a two-hour-long event that featured plentiful announcements and trailers, covering everything from the Fall Guys phenomenon to upcoming blockbusters like Star Wars: Squadrons and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.”
Check out the story from The Verge for the highlights from the Opening Night Live event.”
G-STAR Event Goes Digital for 2020
Source:Â GamingLyfe
The ranks of confirmed online-only events continues to swell as 2020 approaches autumn. G-STAR, one of the biggest events in the world has confirmed an online-only experience. Read on for details.
“This year’s G-STAR B2B exhibition will be held online, establishing a complete quarantine system for COVID-19. It will be an opportunity to meet compelling Asian gaming companies in the most convenient and pleasant environment.”
Rumor: Might Nintendo Offer an Upgraded Switch in 2021?
Source:Â ExtremeTech
After several days of intense speculation and reports that Nintendo might roll out a new model of Switch in 2021 that offers, among other improved specs, 4K display output, a story in ExtremeTech suggest not getting too excited about these particular rumors:
“New claims suggest Nintendo wants to build a 4K Switch and that such a system could appear in 2021 alongside a lineup of new games. The new system is ostensibly a response to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Nintendo’s way of staying relevant in a competitive console market.
The chances of a true, native 4K Switch, however, seem pretty small — and pretty unnecessary. The current Switch features a 6.2-inch screen and a resolution of 1280×720 when undocked and 1920×1080 when docked. The relatively small screen already has a 237 PPI display and hurling more pixels at the panel isn’t necessarily the best way to improve the experience of using the device, at least, not to that degree. There’s also the problem that power consumption per frame tends to rise linearly with respect to resolution at the same clock and voltage.”
Unity Announces IPO
Source:Â VentureBeat
VentureBeat profiles Unity, a company behind one of the world’s most popular development platforms, which has just positioned themselves to join the stock market for public trading. In taking this step, they also shared some insightful info about the company’s financial profile:
“Unity Technologies has filed for an initial public offering to help its business of making it easier for developers to create video games and other kinds of computer-generated entertainment.
The rumor of Unity’s IPO has been around for a while, and now the company has filed an S-1 statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For the first time, Unity publicly revealed its financials. In 2019, the San Francisco maker of the Unity game engine — used by 1.5 million monthly active users to create games and other content — reported a loss of $163.2 million revenue of $541.8 million. In 2018, the company reported a loss of $131.6 million on revenue of $380.7 million.
Software built with Unity runs on more than 1.5 billion devices. Unity is one of the most important technologies in gaming. It has 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play.”
Fall Guys is one of 2020’s Biggest Indie Game Success Stories
Source:Â CNN
There have been many success stories for the game industry in 2020, such as Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch and The Last of Us Part 2 on the PlayStation 4, but right now, few games are attracting more attention and players than this one:
“Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout” has taken the gaming world by storm. The game from indie publisher Devolver Digital has now sold more than 7 million copies on the PC games store Steam and an undisclosed number on PlayStation, putting it well on its way to out-sell some of the most popular video games on the market over a similar one-month launch period.
Facebook Horizon VR Social Enters Closed Beta
Source:Â Social Media Today
Hot on the heels of a lot of recent news from Facebook’s AR/VR team, there is still news (about social VR) from their camp this week.
“As explained by Facebook:
“Horizon invites you to explore an ever-expanding universe of virtual experiences designed and built by the entire community. Everything you see in Horizon, including the Plaza and worlds created by our teams at Facebook, has been built with the Horizon creation tools. In Horizon, you can build the things you want to see and places you want to visit.”
To get more info, take a look at Social Media Today’s story about Horizon.
Do you have interesting news to share, or something coming up that would also fit into this regular feature? Let us know!
