Category: News

Valve Terminates Insel Games (Wild Buster) Over Fraudulent Reviews


Valve today announced the immediate termination of its dealings with Insel Games. According to the news post, Valve employees discovered that Insel was using accounts to post fake positive reviews for their titles.

It has been recently reported on Reddit that the publisher for this game, Insel Games Ltd., have been attempting to manipulate the user review score for their titles on Steam. We have investigated these claims, and have identified unacceptable behavior involving multiple Steam accounts controlled by the publisher of this game. The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously.

For these reasons, we are ending our business relationship with Insel Games Ltd. and removing their games from our store. If you have previously purchased this game, it will remain accessible in your Steam library.

This affects all of Insel’s titles on Steam, including Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, as well as The Onion Knights: Definitive Edition. The controversy sparked after an email emerged on Reddit allegedly from the CEO of Insel Games showing the company pressuring its employees to buy the game and leave fake positive reviews.

(Source: Steam)

Epic Games Ends Another Lawsuit With Permanent Injunction


Back in January, MMO Fallout reported on the latest lawsuit filed by Epic Games in the district of Northern California court. The lawsuit followed the similar pattern set forth by its predecessors, seeking permanent injunctions and utilizing the natural legal progression of a DMCA takedown notice against the defendant’s Youtube videos. This lawsuit, however, charged defendant Yash Gosai, a New Zealand resident, with creating/finding an exploit that would allow him to obtain V-Bucks, Fortnite’s real money currency, without paying for them. Gosai posted the exploit on his Youtube channel and, when the video was taken down on Epic’s DMCA notice, filed a counter-claim.

Epic alleges that Gosai created, developed and/or found an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale game mode; Gosai then created and publicly displayed a video on YouTube to advertise, demonstrate, and distribute the exploit; Gosai’s video contained gameplay from Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale game; and that using the exploit, Gosai obtained Fortnite V-bucks without paying for them.

Less than a month later, the lawsuit is over with Epic Games claiming the victory. The court found in favor of Epic Games on the charges of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and conversion. The court’s decision, which cannot be appealed by either party, permanently restrains Gosai from finding, creating, promoting, sharing, or otherwise interacting with any program/cheat that interacts with any of Epic Games’ titles. As with its other lawsuits, Epic Games is not seeking monetary damages and as per the court’s ruling both sides will be responsible for their own attorney’s fees.

Since October 10, 2017, Epic Games has filed seven lawsuits against people creating/promoting cheats for Fortnite, of which four have been successfully settled. For two of the three remaining lawsuits, Epic appears to be having trouble serving the summons. In the third, filed against a Russian citizen, is allegedly being ignored.

(Source: PACER Court Documents)

NCSoft Reports Growth For Fourth Quarter 2017


NCSoft today released their fourth quarter results for 2017 and the company has posted increased earnings across the board over last year. Sales, profits, and income grew over 80% over the same period in 2016 fueled primarily by the company’s massive success in the mobile market and the launch of the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. Mobile sales dropped 41% over the last quarter as the launch fervor of Lineage M dies down, while Guild Wars 2 gained a 73% growth over the same period.

For the year of 2017, mobile sales accounted for 57% of total earnings while Lineage 1 dropped 59% with much of that revenue being players transferring to Lineage M. Revenues from Korea and royalties grew massively while the market share from US/Europe, Japan, and Taiwan decreased slightly. Fourth quarter earnings from the US/Europe did grow despite the overall yearly drop due to sales of Guild Wars 2 and its expansion.

(Source: NCSoft)

Counter Strike Co-Creator Arrested For Sexual Exploitation of Child


Seattle police this week arrested Jess A. Cliffe, co-creator of the video game Counter Strike, and are planning on charging him with sexual exploitation of a child. Valve has released a statement to Kotaku that Cliffe has been suspended until more details are made known.

“We are still learning details of what actually happened. Reports suggest he has been arrested for a felony offense. As such we have suspended his employment until we know more.”

(Source: Kotaku)

[NM] Electronic Arts Gives Wrong Numbers On Battlefront II Sales, A Lot of Websites Haven’t Corrected It


Electronic Arts released their third quarter results for the 2018 fiscal year this week, noting increased revenues to $1.16 billion compared to $1.14 billion last year with higher operating expenses. Sales were driven primarily by live games including the various Ultimate Team systems and The Sims 4, with little doubt to the notion that last November’s Star Wars: Battlefront II under performed according to EA’s expectations.

What is in dispute, surprisingly, is how much the game under performed and just how many units the game sold, and the reason behind this confusion appears to be EA’s own error. According to Wall Street Journal’s tech reporter Sarah Needleman, EA confirmed in a statement under an embargo that Battlefront II had shipped over nine million units, about a million shorter than they had anticipated.

In actuality, and according to EA’s own released prepared remarks, the game was expected to sell about eight million and fell short of that by less than one million. So EA’s own reports were upwards of two million less than what they had incorrectly stated.

For Q3, we had expected to sell in about 8 million units, but we fell short of that by less than 1 million units. However, this shortfall was significantly offset by an excellent performance from our live services. The impact of FX was immaterial on the quarter.

Needleman has acknowledged on Twitter that the numbers she was given were incorrect with the earnings call not releasing until hours after the embargo lifted. Evidently nobody informed the rest of the reporters that this information was incorrect, since as of midnight on January 31, MMO Fallout had perused at least a dozen major gaming/tech websites that had covered the story, and not a single one had followed up with a correction.

Understandable, since virtually all of the articles seem to merely copy and paste either information from Polygon.com’s coverage or directly from Needleman’s initial tweet. In fact, the only major news website that reported on this and managed to get it right appears to be VG247 who actually read the prepared remarks and highlighted the discrepancy with the WSJ’s numbers. At least one of the outlets we read actually linked to the prepared statement and even claimed that the report stated the 9 million figure, which suggests the author did not even read the document that they quoted.

Calling malice seems to be a long shot, it looks like the Wall Street Journal was sent incorrect information and while the While Street Journal corrected their story, none of the outlets that sourced the Tweet did any fact checking of their own or took the time to read EA’s following prepared statement.

Gigantic To Shut Down Following Motiga Layoffs


Following their statement in November that Perfect World Entertainment had laid off a number of staff at Motiga, we have learned this week that MOBA title Gigantic will shut down. As of today, purchasing of rubies and hero packs have been disabled, and all heroes will be free until the servers shut down at the end of July.

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the January Update is the final content update for Gigantic, and the game servers will be discontinued on July 31, 2018. The journey over these last few years was met with outstanding support from our players and we are all very proud of the incredible experience Gigantic is today.

Motiga and Perfect World had been seeking ways to keep the game sustainable, unfortunately Gigantic did not resonate with a base large enough to keep the game going. Gigantic follows in the steps of Paragon which recently announced its own sunsetting for just the same reason.

(Source: Gigantic)

Epic Settles Lawsuit Against Minor Fortnite Cheater


Epic Games has agreed to voluntary dismissal and settlement in its lawsuit against a minor filed last year in the eastern district of North Carolina court. As part of the lawsuit and due to the defendant being a minor, certain documents have been sealed on order of the court and the defendant has since been simply named by his initials M.F. Epic had instigated the lawsuit after filing a DMCA takedown notice against the defendant’s video allegedly advertising cheats in their game Fortnite. When the defendant counter-claimed the video, Epic issued its complaint to the court.

Plaintiff Epic Games, Inc., by and through its attorneys, hereby gives notice of the settlement and dismissal of this action. Each party shall bear its or his own attorneys’ fees and costs.

The terms of the settlement are not being made public. Epic’s other lawsuit against another minor is still being pursued, with a recent court document submitted detailing issues that the prosecution had with finding and serving the defendants.

(Source: Court Dockets)

Is Paragon Unsustainable? Yes, Also Shutting Down


It’s barely been ten days since we reported that Paragon was likely unsustainable and that Epic would be giving it another look in the coming weeks.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success, and trying some things internally. In the meantime, Paragon’s release cadence will be slower.”

Evidently the decision was much easier than originally thought, because a week after this announcement Epic has announced the imminent closure of Paragon. In a rare statement, Epic took full responsibility for Paragon’s inability to draw in players, and apologized for failing the community despite the team’s hard work.

We didn’t execute well enough to deliver on the promise of Paragon. We have failed you — despite the team’s incredibly hard work — and we’re sorry.

Servers will shut down on April 26, however Epic warns that the quality of matchmaking will degrade naturally as players leave. Epic is offering full refunds for every purchase on any platform.

Instructions for a refund are as follows:

  1. If you’re not playing on PC, link your Epic account (create one if necessary).
  2. If you play on PC, or have already linked your Epic account, you can request your refund here.

(Source: Epic)

Early Access Title Tower of Time To Launch This April


Fledgling developer Event Horizon is getting ready to release their CRPG Tower of Time early this year on PC, and players are meeting the title with open arms and positive reviews. Boasting 30 hours of story gameplay on launch, Tower of Time promises to harken back to the days of Baldur’s Gate and the Might and Magic series. Starting with two adventurers and adding on to the party as they progress, players will travel through the Tower of Time, collecting randomized loot, customizing your adventurers, and taking down the game’s more than 100 enemies.

Tower of Time’s focal feature is the Arrow-Time combat system, which players may recognize as similar to Bioware RPGs of old. Arrow-Time allows you to slow down or completely pause a battle, survey the field, and plan your strategy.

Currently in early access, Tower of Time is enjoying a very positive 96% overall rating.

(Source: Press Release)

Destiny 2 Is Not In A Good Place, Says Analyst, Following Microtransaction Controversies


It feels like we can’t go more than a week or so without Bungie being forced to apologize to its community for another dumpster fire of a PR decision, with the promise that they will listen closer moving forward. With each apology centered around either a hard-to-overlook bout of poor design or perceptibly underhanded attempt to cripple game progression to bring player attention to the real money Eververse, it may not be surprising that players starting to turn away from Destiny 2 and Bungie’s investors are taking notice.

In a note to investors titled “Destiny is Not in a Good Place,” Doug Creutz of analyst firm Cowen points to Destiny 2 appearing to have a problem keeping its players engaged, with issues surrounding microtransactions and Bungie’s poor communication and response to criticism being at the forefront of his concerns. Creutz also focuses on Destiny 2 Twitch viewership when discussing player engagement, stating that franchise view counts are at an all time low. Destiny 2 is apparently bringing in 4,000-7,000 views on a Friday afternoon compared to 14,000-17,000 from Destiny 1 a year ago.

Cruetz also believes that Destiny 2 may have a much harder time turning itself around than Destiny 1 did, owing to a more competitive market.

“We do think Bungie still has some opportunity to fix the game’s problems over the next year and recapture engagement, but we’re not sure they have the ability to pull it off at this point. We also note that Destiny currently has more serious competition in its genre from a refurbished Division (Ubisoft) and the indie title Warframe than it did three years ago, when D1 had its own share of player dissatisfaction.”

(Source: CNBC)