Events company ReedPop, which has been partnering with the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) for the past 14 months, will not be working on future E3 events. Reedpop has a good track record with live events, most recently organising PAX West in Seattle the past weekend, but didn’t run a single E3 in that admittedly short timespan, with this year’s event being cancelled due to a lack of involvement from the industry’s big players.

Further to this, there will be no E3 in 2024. Well, no traditional E3. The ESA has told the Los Angeles Convention Center, where it’s always held, that there will be no show next year, though it has stopped short of saying there will be no E3 at all. If there is, which I highly doubt, expect a very pared-back digital-only offering. 

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Canadian programmer Gary Bowser was charged with severe fines and jail time after a Nintendo lawsuit accused him of “conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices”—piracy, to unspool the legal speech—in 2020. Bowser was a member of Team-Xecuter, a group of hackers who had facilitated the use of various ROMs (read only memory—shorthand for a pirated game program) since 2013.

Bowser was absolutely part of a criminal exercise—but he is also a 54 year-old man with chronic pain, one who will have to pay “25-30%” of his earnings to a massive corporation that reported a net profit of 271.2 billion yen (approx. $1.85 billion) over a six month period last year. As a company, Nintendo will barely notice—as a person, Bow…

Marcus Lehto is the co-creator of the Halo games and, until 2012, was a senior creative on every Halo game made by Bungie. After that he left to set up on his own with the studio V1 Interactive (which made the shooter Disintegration), before joining EA in 2021 and founding Ridgeline Games, a Seattle-based developer that was working on a new Battlefield game with more of a story focus.

I say “was” because unfortunately Ridgeline has become one of the latest victims in a brutal period of game and tech layoffs. At the end of February EA announced that it would be closing the studio, and laying off all of its staff. Around the same time, Lehto announced he would be leaving the publisher. And he’s not a happy camper.

“Gut punched to see EA lay off my t…

I love virtual reality, and I’ve talked it up to many a friend, family member, and colleague. But even I must admit that paying $3,000 for a VR headset is a bit too rich for my blood—a lot too rich for my blood, actually. Yet that’s how much Apple is said to be charging for its first VR/AR headset.

I have no doubts in my mind that Apple’s headset will be a sleek, impressive device. It’s said to have been in the works for over half a decade now, and Apple tends to do hardware pretty darn well—it doesn’t even pain me a bit as a PC gamer to admit that. I do have some questions about the eventual ecosystem of software for Apple’s VR headset, as the company tends to keep its ecosystems locked down, but we’ll find out more about all of that very soon.

Apple is…

“Mad lad puts Neverwinter Nights into Baldur’s Gate 2 for some reason” was my coworker Joshua Wolens’ summation of Andrey Balabokhin’s truly confounding mod project, NWNForBG, which seeks to demake BioWare’s 2002 D&D RPG in its more critically acclaimed 2000 D&D RPG. The result is not how I’d recommend enjoying either game, but it’s one of the weirdest and most fascinating mod projects I’ve seen in a minute.

There aren’t really screenshots or discussion of the mod I could find out there, so my curiosity could only be sated by a direct hands-on experience. Getting there, though, proved a vexing odyssey into Baldur’s Gate 2’s funky modding ecosystem and NWNForBG’s own quirkiness.

Installing NWNForBG itself was relatively simple, but it also requires the BP-BGT Worldmap…

Activision Blizzard stopped releasing new Call of Duty games on Steam in 2018, opting to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 exclusive to Blizzard’s Battle.net platform on PC. That store exclusivity strategy ended just last year with Modern Warfare 2, and according to Microsoft’s lawyers, the whole thing was a “resounding failure.” That might be a slight exaggeration, though.

In a court document filed today (related to the recent hearing over Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard), Microsoft’s legal team affirms the notion that Call of Duty’s Battle.net exclusivity ended because it wasn’t performing like Activision Blizzard had hoped—but what success would’ve meant is stated in terms of Battle.net’s success, not CoD’s, which leads me to quibble with it a bit.

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