On this week’s episode of How Games Make Money, ID@Xbox director Chris Charla joins host Jeff Grubb to talk about publishing indie games. ID@Xbox is Microsoft’s dedicated indie-developer program. And Charla has helped to oversee it since it replaced Xbox Live Arcade in the early days of Xbox One. Now, he is talking about how his team plans to continue helping developers as Microsoft…
Google today announced that Chrome for Android’s context menu will show “Fast page” labels for webpages deemed to have good performance. The label will be determined using Google’s Web Vitals, an initiative the company announced in May to provide web developers and…
Epic says Apple threatens ‘catastrophic’ response in two weeks if Fortnite doesn’t comply with rules
August 18, 2020
Epic says that Apple has threatened to cut off its access to all iOS and Mac developer tools as retaliation for sneaking a new payment option into Fortnite last week — a stunt that ended in the app being banned from the App Store and Epic filing a blockbuster antitrust…
Nintendo will show 20 minutes of indie Switch games tomorrow
August 17, 2020
Although it’s been almost a year since the last full-blown Nintendo Direct, the company has run a number of smaller digital presentations since then. The latest is another Indie World Showcase, which Nintendo will stream at noon ET on Tuesday.
It’ll include about 20 minutes of details on indie games that are coming to Nintendo Switch. It’ll likely focus on second- and third-party titles, so…
Epic’s Fortnite standoff is putting Apple’s cash cow at risk
August 17, 2020
Apple and Epic Games have gone to war, with the two companies clashing over Apple’s App Store policies. Epic, in protest of Apple’s 30 percent fee for any digital transactions on its iOS platform, attempted to circumvent things with a direct payment option in Fortnite…
Activision has teased its Call of Duty 2020 game, believed to be Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, in the Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale spinoff.
The publisher hasn’t revealed it yet, but Doritos accidentally leaked information and the title about the next game…
GamesBeat Decides 159: Epic vs. Apple, Halo delay, and NPD
August 15, 2020
GamesBeat Decides is here once again to shout that you’ve activated Tim Sweeney’s trap card. That’s right, Epic pulled some Yu-Gi-Oh moves on Apple and Google this week, and now we all have to choose the billion- or trillion-dollar corporation we’re gonna root for. It’s appalling!
In other news, Warner Bros. Interactive reveals it’s going to talk about Suicide Squad and WB Montreal’s…
When the news broke yesterday that Apple and Google banned Epic’s super-popular game Fortnite from their app stores, most people focused on the bans — how could this happen? — and Epic’s nearly instant, comprehensive lawsuits against both tech giants. Given how…
EA rebrands its subscription game services as EA Play
August 15, 2020
Electronic Arts rebranded its subscription game services — EA Access and Origin Access — under the EA Play brand name.
The big video game publisher said that the EA Access and Origin Access subscription game services would get this new name and look starting August 18.
Apple has finally met its Fortnite match
August 14, 2020
Epic Games executed its most ambitious Fortnite live event yesterday, leading both Apple and Google to remove one of the world’s most popular games from their app stores. It was a well choreographed sequence of events designed to highlight the power Apple and Google hold over app stores, especially Apple’s walled garden. Epic Games has now filed lawsuits against both Apple and Google in a…
