Category: News

Play Funcom’s Conan Threesome Free Over The Weekend


If you’ve ever wanted to play all three of Funcom’s Conan games and not have to pay anything for the privilege, you’re in luck. Starting September 19 and running through September 23, you can download Conan Exiles and Conan Unconquered. You can also play Age of Conan which was already free to play, but just pretend that it’s one of those play now keep forever deals that you can play whenever and also keep.

So if your taste is MMO, tower defense, or survival sandbox, you’re in for a treat this weekend.

Planetside Arena Launches On Steam


Planetside Arena is here. The battle royale spinoff by Daybreak Game Company launched today, September 19, 2019 and is available completely free to play.

Early Access launches with squad mode (12 player teams) and teams mode (3 players per team) with matches up to 300 players. The main call of Planetside Arena, the gargantuan massive clash mode, will be available in Q2 2020 when the game fully launches and will feature matches of up to 1,000 people. Hopefully the Daybreak team can keep the ball rolling until that time.

Check it out at the link below.

Source: Steam

Steam Library Beta Shows Life After Clickbait Spam


The new visual update for Steam is here! Well the beta is, anyhow. You can download the beta by going to your settings and opting into the beta branch of the Steam client. It’s very simple and doesn’t require any external downloads unlike the previous trick to get ahold of the early version.

The new Steam is all about ease of use. Click on any game and you’ll see all sorts of information provided by the developer. See your achievements, your trading cards, DLC releases, timed events. Anything your heart desires and more that you might have had to navigate through multiple windows to find before is now in one easy place. What isn’t there? The clickbait spam.

One big complaint that users have had of the Steam News section for each game is that Valve thought people really wanted to see clickbait spam from bloggers like Rock, Paper, Shotgun, PC Gamer, etc. It’s basically a glorified RSS feed that pulls stories based on certain websites that Valve trusts (for some reason) tagging their articles with the games in question. The result? An embarrassing deluge of articles that have little if anything to do with the game they are tagged in.

Well those of you unhappy with Valve’s handling of the Steam News will be glad to know that the clickbait spam newsfeed is officially gone as of the new library. It will be interesting to see how the traffic to the websites is affected once they are no longer getting free advertising on a massive platform for their clickbait.

Guild Wars 2: The Icebrood Saga Prologue Is Here


Today marks the launch of the next phase in the Guild Wars 2 living story. The prologue sets up the story for season five and introduces a new cast of characters for the Pact Commander to meet as they investigate a new threat.

The Icebrood Saga is a totally new story in the world of Guild Wars 2. After Season Four’s thrilling conclusion in which Dragon’s Watch finally defeated Kralkatorrik, elder dragon of Crystal and Fury, it is a time of great celebration. But a shadow of dread grows over the festivities as whispers from the Far Shiverpeaks indicate Jormag, another of Tyria’s elder dragons, is emerging from its slumber and luring charr and norn warriors under its thrall. A new cast of characters take center stage as the Pact Commander and crew investigate the looming conflict that threatens the world’s snowy reaches.

[NM] Rooster Teeth’s Game Launches, Immediately Dies


Vicious Circle is a game developed by Rooster Teeth Games and launched on August 12, 2019 making it just one month old as of this week. It looks like No Man’s Sky and not just because you’ll have to fly across the galaxy in order to find another person. It labels itself “an uncooperative multiplayer shooter in which mercenaries compete for loot against a terrifying monster.”

It is also a massive flop just one month after launch. Vicious Circle launched on Steam last month to a peak of 304 players and as of this writing has seen a 24 hour peak of six. Radical Heights, the dead Battle Royale game that shut down a long time ago, peaked at four concurrent players on Steam over the same period. And it doesn’t have functioning servers. Battleborn has a higher player count.

Warner Media announced this week that they would be cutting 50 jobs at Rooster Teeth, approximately 13% of the employee force at the company. Vicious Circle was not specifically mentioned in the announced layoffs.

IPE Update: Acceleration Bay Files MTD Against Epic Games


Nearly two months ago Epic Games filed a lawsuit against Acceleration Bay LLC seeking declaratory judgment from the court in regard to allegations that Epic was using technology owned by AB in one of its many patents. Acceleration Bay filed a motion to dismiss on lack of subject matter jurisdiction (wrong court) as well as lack of controversy. In order to receive a declaratory judgment, a plaintiff must show the court that there is very likely to be a lawsuit over the matter.

“The Court should dismiss this action because there is no immediate case or controversy between Epic Games and Acceleration Bay. Epic Games seeks declaratory judgment of non-infringement of seven patents owned by Acceleration Bay. But in the pre-suit communications that Epic Games alleges gave rise to this action, Acceleration Bay did not provide Epic Games with any claim charts or infringement analysis and Acceleration Bay did not threaten Epic Games with litigation. Instead, the parties were engaged in preliminary licensing discussions, when Epic Games abruptly filed this action. The Complaint fails to allege facts sufficient to confer declaratory subject matter jurisdiction over this action, dictating dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1).”

For its part, Acceleration Bay has denied ever threatening Epic with a lawsuit (despite evidence from Epic showing just that) but instead offering a “mutually acceptable path forward” which may end up on the list of veiled threats alongside “nice business you got here, it’d be a shame of something were to happen to it.”

“Acceleration Bay never threatened Epic Games with litigation. For example, on April 30, 2019 and May 8, 2019, Acceleration Bay’s representative (Mr. Garland) stated in an email that Acceleration Bay is “interested in arranging an introductory meeting [to] provide an overview of Acceleration Bay and to agree to a mutually acceptable path forward” and that Acceleration Bay “remain[s] interested in trying to reach a business solution with Epic Games.” Declaration of Paul Andre filed herewith (“Andre Decl.”), Ex. 1 at 1.”

See? No threats, just wanting to reach an amicable solution (and sue if you don’t meet our demands). If you wanted to see the “generic, substance-free form letter” that Epic received, I have included it below.

As always, MMO Fallout has provided the court dockets in our Google Drive at the attached link. Download it, share it, do whatever you want with it. It is 74 pages in whole so get yourself a nice cup of coffee before you dive in.

More on this story as it develops.

RuneScape: One Third Of Revenue Comes From Microtransactions


There is a lot to unpack from this week’s DCMS report, but gamers might be interested in a tidbit of information that came out about RuneScape’s revenue model. The DCMS inquiry had a major focus on immersion, addiction, and particularly people spending a lot of money on microtransactions. With Jagex being a UK-based developer, it was only a matter of time before RuneScape entered into the picture. And RuneScape gets its own section of the DCMS inquiry to show “even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas.”

The notice was in response to concerned reports from the public about how easily large amounts of money can not only be spent, but are encouraged to be spent through in-game events and how RuneScape allows players to spend vast amounts of real world cash to skip over parts of the game’s content. In its response, Jagex’s Kevin Plomer stated that the game does technically have a cap on spending, and where exactly microtransactions line up in terms of overall revenue:

“Jagex told us that it generates about one-third of its revenue from microtransactions, with two-thirds coming from an alternative subscription model. The company’s director of player experience Kelvin Plomer told us that players “can potentially spend up to £1,000 a week or £5,000 a month” in RuneScape, but that only one player had hit that limit in the previous 12 months. The company’s reasoning for setting this limit seemed to stem from fraud prevention, rather than out of a duty of care to prevent people spending more than they are able.”

By contrast the inquiry notes that Epic has no cap at all on Fortnite however purchases are limited to store stock meaning a player can effectively spend $200 per day. Candy Crush maker King noted to the inquiry that they used to email players about their spending but halted the practice due to the negative response.

“we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that.”

The whole long read can be found at the UK Parliament website here.

Jagex Cancels Weapon Diversity Update, At Least For Now


Jagex today announced that they are cancelling the weapon diversity update, a project that had been in beta for the last month. The weapon diversity program was meant to differentiate weapons from one another on a more solid grounding, but the major impression was that the update just wasn’t transformative enough. Most changes were being made to weapon DPS which left players simply choosing the weapon with the most optimized damage.

In the end, we were unanimous as a team. The QA resource could be used on projects that we are currently working on (and planning to announce at Runefest), tightening them up and increasing our confidence in them. That came with a caveat: we still believed in the aims of Weapon Diversity, so we agreed that we would get our design team to design completely new utility benefits for weapons, which could be introduced over time rather than in one big clutch. For example, a quest might have a reward of a javelin; we would then take the opportunity to release a javelin effect to be rolled out for all javelins at the same time.

With their options being plough ahead, restart the project from scratch, or cancel it and focus on other major projects, Jagex chose to cancel. The good news is that while this project is dead, the spirit remains alive and is still being planned for the future.

Regardless of all of this, the aims of Weapon Diversity have not gone away: we still want to bring strategy back into weapon choice, and we believe that will make the gaining of weapon rewards so much more joyful.

Incidentally the weapon diversity beta ran alongside the bank rework update which was also temporarily cancelled only to be brought back, so those who had been looking forward to this update may not be completely disappointed.

Source: RuneScape

[Video] Planetside Arena Footage


Daybreak Game Company this week released new footage of Planetside Arena. The footage features Squads, a massive game mode pitting teams of up to 12 players in matches with up to 300 people.

Planetside Arena goes into early access on September 19.

Pearl Abyss Launches Full Megan Fox Trailer For Black Desert


Who loves Black Desert? Megan Fox does. Pearl Abyss today launched the full Black Desert trailer featuring Transformers star Megan Fox. The full trailer dubbed “Follow the Light” will be aired on national television spots. Check it out and revel in how much the Sorceress Class looks a lot like Megan Fox.