When the COVID-19 pandemic went global, the world as we knew it changed. From work culture to habits, the video games industry was also severely affected.  Employing more than 3,500 people all around the world which include three studios in China — Shanghai, Chengdu and Xian — Virtuos was affected when the lock

This here's a guest post that goes with our Best 30 Games Of 2022 feature. Check out Nat's Twitch work here. She's also the EIC of The Magic Rain. When everything normal about the world was uprooted two years ago, like many others, I turned to streaming as a source of comfort and variety. First beginning as a viewer

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking to block Microsoft Xbox from acquiring Activision Blizzard for US$68.7 billion. The reason for FTC's decision is because they claim that the Microsoft Xbox Activision Blizzard deal would give them too much of a monopoly in the games industry and "would enable

Oh dear, it looks like China will be left without a bunch of Blizzard games early next year. Activision Blizzard will suspend World of WarCraft, Overwatch 2, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and WarCraft III: Reforged in China after 23 January 2023. According to an official statement, Activis

Blizzard seems to have a ton planned for the end of 2022. First up, it's Diablo 4. According to a recent Reddit thread (via Wowhead) detailing a few leaked dates, players can pre-purchase the PC and console action RPG game on 9th December 0:00 GMT+8 (8th December 12pm PT). This announcement will be made at The Game

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that the forces of the Horde and the Alliance will have another chance to bring a fitting end to one of World of Warcraft’s most iconic villains starting from 27 September 2022 (GMT+8), when the company releases Wrath Of The Lich King Classic, the authentic re-creation of WoW’s

Developer Proletariat has shut down its battle royale spellcasting game Spellbreak after its 2020 launch. The game will shut down in Early 2023. While there is no exact end date yet, any currency that's bought for the free-to-play game can still be spent in the shop. However, real-money purchases have now been disab

Sometimes it's fine to cut your losses. That's what Lost Ark has done with its recent banhammer actions. Over the past week, the game has lost about 300,000 players according to SteamDB numbers. The game's North American/European publisher Amazon Game Studios have battled the problem of botting and cheaters for quit

Netflix Geeked, Netflix’s home for all things genre entertainment, is prepping their second annual Geeked Week. Geeked Week 2022 is a free five-day virtual event celebrating Netflix’s genre series, films, and games that runs from 6 June to 10 June 2022. You can expect tons of exclusive news, new trailers, celebrity

Activision Blizzard still can't catch a break. Even if its mobile RPG Diablo Immortal is fun to play from the get-go -with great controls and simple-yet-satisfying loot-hunting action mechanics- it's still facing public backlash during its launch week. The game's negative reviews/review-bombing on Metacritic makes t

Blizzard has announcecd that its multiplayer shooter Overwatch has reached a Twitch viewership milestone. Overwatch has reached over 1.5 million concurrent views, the highest day ever for the series on Twitch. This is due to the recent release of the Overwatch 2 beta PvP, not to mention the many people watching othe

If you know JRPGs, you should damn well know the Final Fantasy series. This series, and arguably Dragon Quest but no one gave a s*** until the late 2000s, help shape everybody's perception of JRPGs. Created by former Squaresoft/Square Enix developer & producer Hironobu Sakaguchi, the series started off as a despera

2022 is starting out with a seismic shift in the games industry. Microsoft has announced that they have agreed to purchase Activision Blizzard. According to the announcement, this means that Microsoft will now own Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, Beenox, Demonware, Digital Legends, High Moon Studios, I

World Of Warcraft Shadowlands Content update 9.2, Eternity’s End, will be the final major content update for Shadowlands expansion, bringing its story to an epic conclusion as the heroes of Azeroth attempt to thwart the Jailer’s plans to unmake reality. A few of the new features teased in the announcem

World of Warcraft Classic players will get to start fresh with a new character, starting from level one, when the Season of Mastery realms goes live globally at 6am GMT+8 on 17 November 2021. Similar to WoW Classic’s launch, players will be able to log onto the servers ahead of when they’re going l

We reported a few days ago about Diablo 2: Resurrected ever-recurring online server outages. Turns out Blizzard has a temporary solution for it: player queues. That's right: due to the game's legacy code conflicting with modern-day network adjustments, Blizzard's developers will be implementing player queues in a re

Update [16/10/2021]: We've added why the outages have been happening. Following our Diablo 2: Resurrected server outage and login issues story a couple of days ago, players from all over the world are really making their frustrations heard. The outages are due to the game's authentication servers, which started a

During a recent Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker preview event (via Easy Allies), director Naoki Yoshida said that that Final Fantasy XIV has now surpassed 24 million players. The game is now the most profitable Final Fantasy game in the series; of all time basically. Yoshida revealed that the game's player count has hi

A while ago, we reported about the departure of former Diablo 4 director Luis Barriga. Turns out his replacement is new game director Joe Shely. Shely is a long-time Blizzard employee with game designer credits on Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, and World of Warcraft expansions. He's also the design lead for Diablo 4 sin

While the Diablo 2 remaster is updating a lot of the game's look and feel for 2021, the game's loot system is still left intact. According to Blizzard and developer studio Vicarious Visions, the old standard of co-op players sharing a single universal set of spoils still remain. The process of adding a modernized "s