The Fridge

2 months after being acquired by private equity, Splash Damage is making major layoffs so it can ‘remain agile,’ even though it hasn’t released a game since 2020

Two months ago, storied shooter studio Splash Damage parted ways with Tencent and ended up in the hands of private equity investors. I said at the time that it probably wasn’t a good development, and I wish I’d been wrong but I was right: The studio said today that it is “entering a studio-wide consultation…

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Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: ‘It makes no sense,’ he says, because ‘AI will be involved in nearly all future production’

Look at any of a number of Steam store pages—Arc Raiders, for instance—and you’ll see a fairly prominent “AI generated content disclosure” laying out which parts of the game make use of AI generated content. Go to the Epic Games Store, however, and you’ll see nothing of the sort. And that’s a difference that’s not…

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Yes, Arc Raiders servers are down

Uh oh, Arc Raiders servers are down again. Reports of outages with the extraction shooter began around 10AM PST and seem to be persisting over an hour later. I just tried to log in and hit a “queue” for the first time since launch day, suggesting a lot people are trying to login at the…

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Galaxy Princess Zorana is like if you made BG3 passive checks into a whole game, a great tale of political intrigue, and will give you like 4,000 ways to die embarrassingly

The reign of Galaxy Princess Zorana was unhappy and unproductive. Fortunately, it was also short—ended in its infancy when Her Imperial Highness took a javelin straight through the skull in some kind of space-football game organised by the Pope. The people of her interplanetary demesne were presumably quite relieved, once they’d recovered from the initial…

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