Diablo Immortalwas supposed to debut in China on June 23rd, but those who have been waiting for the game in the country will need to wait longer. NetEase, which co-developed the game with Blizzard, has pushed back the release date indefinitely. It wrote in a blog post that "the development team is making a number of optimization adjustments."
However, there are other factors at play. NetEase found itself in the bad graces of China's censors over a post on its Weibo social media service that seemingly referenced Winnie the Pooh, according to the Financial Times. The cartoon character is used to mock Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the wake of a screenshot of the post (which read "why hasn't the bear stepped down?") gaining traction, the official Diablo Immortal Weibo account was banned from posting anything. Discussions related to the post were also wiped from the service.
Currently, Diablo Immortal does not have a release date in China, though NetEase still expects to ship the game in the country. It promised players an "exclusive thank-you package containing legendary equipment" as a makegood for the delay.
The PC and mobile title debuted in other territories this month. According to reports, it raked in $24 million in two weeks as a result of its aggressive approach to monetization. China is the biggest gaming market on the planet and not being able to release Diablo Immortal there would likely have a severe impact on the game's expected revenues. NetEase declined to comment to the Financial Times. Engadget has contacted Blizzard for comment.
It's not the first time a game developer has run into issues with Chinese regulators over a Winnie the Pooh reference. Publisher Indievent lost its license to sell Devotion in China, leading it to cut ties with developer Red Candle Games, which included a blatant dig at Xi in the game itself. The studio, which is based in Taiwan, later started selling a DRM-free version of Devotion on its own storefront.
It might not be the full-on Direct fans have been hoping for and expecting, but Nintendo will host its next showcase on June 22nd at 10AM ET. The stream will focus on Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and will feature around 20 minutes of details on the long-awaited sequel.
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 20, 2022
Nintendo previously planned to release Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in September, but it brought the action RPG forward to July 29th. Splatoon 3 now has that September slot. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes place after the events of the previous two mainline games, though it has a new cast of characters. This time around, developer Monolith Soft is bumping up the number of party members from three to seven.
As Sony occasionally does with its State of Play series, Nintendo sometimes holds a Direct that's dedicated to one game or franchise, such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or Pokémon. Nintendo opted not to run a full Direct — which typically includes looks at a variety of first- and third-party games — around the time E3 would have taken place. However, reports suggest a full-fledged Direct is coming next week.
It’s a weird year for video games. We’re 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.
Right now, the video game space is made up of delays, big promises and more delays. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to — between indie and AA developers, cloud libraries and mobile games from Netflix of all companies, this period of transition will still be packed with plenty of things to play.
The 2022 holiday release calendar definitely looks thinner than it did a few months ago, but the first half of the year was fairly busy with games like Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Gran Turismo 7, Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. And those are just the well-funded releases with big, shiny ads — the year has also been good for indie and AA titles like Neon White, The Quarry, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, Sifu, Tunic, OlliOlli World and Salt and Sacrifice already available. The summer’s peppered with even more small but fantastic-looking games, like the cyberpunk cat simulator Stray, Sam Barlow’s Immortality and the wildly anticipated Cuphead DLC, all due out by the end of July.
Studio MDHR
Weirdly enough, Netflix is also helping to fill in the gaps with a new push into mobile gaming, and its latest titles are a treat. Poinpy, the new game from the creator of Downwell, is particularly addictive. Netflix is also publishing the next titles from the studios behind Monument Valley and Alto’s Odyssey, and all of them are free, without ads or microtransactions, as long as you have an active Netflix subscription.
On top of all that, mid-tier publishers like Devolver and Annapurna have a steady stream of strange, high-quality games coming out at all times. And, of course, there’s Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Premium, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and even Google Stadia — cloud-gaming services that bring hundreds of classic and new titles to essentially any device with a screen.
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So, yeah, there are plenty of fresh games heading our way this year; it’s just that there won’t be many AAA blockbusters out of Microsoft or Sony. Whether we like it or not, these studios set the pace of the industry, and gaps in their release schedules can make it feel like development has stagnated across the board. And right now, there are a lot of AAA gaps. What makes it worse is the fact that Microsoft and Sony have announced and then abandoned multiple huge projects over the past few years, giving all of us something concrete to miss in every showcase.
In late 2019 and 2020, Microsoft announced massive games including Fable, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Everwild, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, and it hasn’t said much more about these projects since. On top of that, there’s everything going on at Bethesda, the largest brand under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Bethesda’s shiny new sci-fi RPG, Starfield, was delayed out of 2022 earlier this year alongside Arkane’s online vampire shooter, Redfall. Meanwhile, it looks like Elder Scrolls 6 has at least five more years left in development, and Fallout 5 may not come out until the next console generation. The biggest Xbox exclusives still landing this year are High on Life, As Dusk Falls and Pentiment, three mid-sized games, two of which were literally announced this month.
Sony is in a similar situation. It has more AAA exclusives hitting the market in the second half of this year than Microsoft, with Forspoken, God of War Ragnarok and The Last of Us remake on the calendar, but there are still plenty of unknowns in the PlayStation lineup. Final Fantasy XVI was a highlight of the PS5 announcement stream in 2020, but we just got a release window of summer 2023 for that one. There’s been zero to little information about other games Sony’s had in the works for years, including Wolverine, the Knights of the Old Republic remake and Spider-Man 2. A standalone multiplayer mode for The Last of Us is still MIA, and we’ve yet to get details on the “multiple game projects” that Naughty Dog is also working on.
There are a couple of big cross-platform games due to come out this holiday season, including Hogwarts Legacy and The Callisto Protocol, but fanfare for these titles has been fairly muted so far.
As for Nintendo, it’s playing by its own rules, as always, and it has Splatoon 3 and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on the roster this year, plus whatever it announces during its next Direct showcase. It has its own troubles of course — Breath of the Wild 2 was pushed back to 2023, and then there’s Metroid Prime 4, which was announced in 2017 and… yeah.
Nintendo
The sense of insufficiency in the industry this year is the result of the console makers announcing things too early, with too much fanfare and too many impossible release windows. Of course the pandemic didn’t help, but as it stands, these studios promised the world and then went quiet on multiple massive franchises, and the silence is particularly deafening as we enter an anemic six months of AAA releases. Thankfully, there are so many amazing indie games available right now and coming later in 2022, and between cloud, mobile and PC services, there are more ways to play these titles than ever.
As Jonathan Blow would say, time is a construct anyway, and thinking of life in terms of weeks, months and years is a futile effort to logically contain chaos. Long story short, there’s a lot to look forward to in the video game universe. It may not all be coming this year — or the next, or the next — but with more games to play on more platforms than ever, we should all be plenty entertained.
Two weeks after release, Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal has earned approximately $24 million for the troubled studio, according to Appmagic. In an estimate it shared with GameDev Reports, the analytics firm said the free-to-play game was downloaded almost 8.5 million times over the same timeframe, with 26 percent of downloads originating in the US. The bulk of Blizzard’s revenue from Diablo Immortal has also come from America. To date, US players contributed about 43 percent of all the game’s earnings.
To put Immortal’s earlyfinancial success in context, Hearthstone, the only other mobile game Blizzard has out at the moment, earned about $5 million in May. Despite the vocal backlash to Immortal’s monetization systems, it’s probably safe to say no one expected the game to fail out of the gate. Instead, the worry for many fans was a scenario where Immortal was so successful for Blizzard that it went on to inform how the studio monetizes its future games.
For the time being, that fear seems unfounded. Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson recently said Diablo IV would feature a different set of monetization systems than Immortal. “To be clear, D4 is a full-price game built for PC/PS/Xbox audiences,” he tweeted after the game’srecent showing at Microsoft’s recent Summer Game Fest presentation. Separately, Blizzard announced this week Overwatch 2 would do away with loot boxes.
Since the start of the year, Google has tried to publicly pressure Apple into adopting the GSMA’s RCS messaging protocol. The search giant’s campaign has involved everything from not-so-subtle jabs at I/O 2022 to long Twitter threads from the head of Android. Now the feud has expanded to include Drake.
In a tweet spotted by 9to5Google, the Android Twitter account shared an “unofficial lyric explainer video” for “Texts Go Green,” the third song from the rapper’s latest album. The song features Drake singing about a toxic relationship. Both the title and chorus of “Texts Go Green” refer to what happens when an iPhone user blocks someone from contacting them through iMessage. The service defaults to SMS and the blacklisted individual will lose all the benefits of iMessage, including read receipts if the other person had them enabled previously.
Calling the song “a real banger,” Google says the “phenomenon” of green text bubbles is “pretty rough” for both non-iPhone users and anyone who gets blocked. “If only some super talented engineering team at Apple would fix this,” the company says in the video. “Because this is a problem only Apple can fix. They just have to adopt RCS, actually.”
The irony of Google’s video is that doesn’t accurately explain the meaning of “Texts Go Green.” In the context of the song, iMessage’s incompatibility with RCS is a comfort for Drake. “Texts go green, it hits a little different, don't it?” he sings. “Know you miss the days when I was grippin' on it / Know you're in a house tonight just thinkin' on it / I moved on so long ago.”
But, hey, whatever it takes for Apple to adopt RCS, right?
An advocacy group is calling on Meta to allow Facebook users to list more than one romantic partner in their profiles. In a letter the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy (OPEN) sent to the social media giant on Thursday, it said the current design of Facebook’s relationship status feature is “exclusionary” towards people who practice ethical non-monogamy. The group has asked that Meta allow users to tag all their romantic partners.
“At best, this restriction perpetuates the erasure and marginalization of non-monogamous relationships; at worst, it harms non-monogamous users by perpetuating social stigmas around the validity and authenticity of their relationships,” OPEN said.
A Meta spokesperson told The New York Times the company is reviewing the letter and noted that Facebook already allows users to mention on their profile that they’re in an “open relationship” with one or more people. The timing of the request may seem curious given Facebook’s declining daily userbase, but it’s in line with the growing number of people who find themselves in non-monogamous relationships. According to data cited by OPEN, about four to five percent of American adults practice ethical non-monogamy.
If you have a tendency to talk to people you don't know on LinkedIn, you may want to take extra care. According to a CNBC report, the company has acknowledged a "recent uptick of fraud on its platform," and this time the scams involve persuading users to make investments in cryptocurrency. It's been deemed as a "significant threat" by Sean Ragan, the FBI's special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento field offices in California, who spoke to the outlet.
CNBC said the schemes typically began with someone pretending to be a professional and reaching out to LinkedIn users. They would engage in small talk, offering to help users make money through crypto investments. First, they would tell their targets to go to an actual crypto investment platform, but "after gaining their trust over several months, tells them to move the investment to a site controlled by the fraudster." Thereafter, the money is "drained from the account."
According to victims interviewed by CNBC, the fact that they trusted LinkedIn as a platform for networking lent credibility to the investment offers.
Ragan told CNBC that "the FBI has seen an increase in this particular investment fraud," which the outlet said "is different from a long-running scam in which the criminal pretends to show a romantic interest in the subject to persuade them to part with their money."
Linkedin
In a statement published yesterday, LinkedIn encouraged users to report suspicious profiles. The company's director of trust, privacy and equity Oscar Rodriguez told CNBC that "trying to identify what is fake and what is not fake is incredibly difficult."
LinkedIn's article urges users to "only connect with people you know and trust" and to "be wary of... people asking you for money who you don't know in person." The company added "This can include people asking you to send them money, cryptocurrency, or gift cards to receive a loan, prize, or other winnings."
It also lists "job postings that sound too good to be true or that ask you to pay anything upfront" and "romantic messages or gestures, which are not appropriate on our platform" as signs of potential fraud attempts.
The company isn't fully relying on its users reporting suspicious accounts as its only defense against scammers on its platform. "While our defenses catch the vast majority of abusive activity, our members can also help keep LinkedIn safe, trusted, and professional," Rodriguez wrote in the statement. LinkedIn also reported that "96% of detected fake accounts and 99.1% of spam and scams are caught and removed by our automated defenses."
After more than a year, Peacock is finally close to bringing Bill Nye back to TV screens. The NBCUniversal service has revealed that The End is Nye will premiere on August 25th. The six-episode series will have Nye explore disasters (natural and otherwise) while showing how science can help prevent and survive these calamities.
Nye serves as an executive producer in addition to hosting. The production team will seem very familiar if you're a fan of science documentaries or sci-fi. Brannon Braga (of Cosmos, The Orville and Star Trek fame) serves as director and showrunner, while Seth MacFarlane (also from Cosmos and The Orville) is both making cameo appearances and producing through his Fuzzy Door outfit.
The series comes roughly five years after Netflix's Bill Nye Saves the World, and follows a similar template. It's an effort to restore optimism about science, not to mention counter myths and otherwise push for a society where evidence and objectivity matter. This might not recapture the vibe of Bill's Science Guy days, but it might not have to if it gets the message across.
Epic Games has added a long-awaited feature to its store: user ratings. The company says that only those who have played a game for at least two hours will be able to rate it on a five-star scale. Not everyone will be able to rate a game either. Epic will randomly offer players the chance to score a game after they finish a play session. The company believes this approach will prevent review bombing and make sure ratings are from people who are actually playing the games.
An overall rating will be calculated based on players' scores and this will appear on a title's Epic Games Store page. The aim, of course, is to help users figure out whether a game's worth playing. Store pages already featured critics' reviews to help folks make a decision about whether to buy or download something.
Epic says it likely won't ask for ratings on every game or app and the randomization approach will help it avoid spamming players. That seems like a good call. It's a little annoying, for instance, that Microsoft asks for feedback after every Xbox Cloud Gaming session.
Epic Games
In addition, Epic may ask you to answer a poll after a game session. There's a broad range of questions, including the likes of whether a game is better to play with a team or how challenging the combat is.
Epic will use data from polls to create tags for store pages. Eventually, tags will be used on category pages and to create tag-based categories for the home page. The idea is to improve discoverability and help people gain a better understanding of what to expect from a game.
Separately, Epic is releasing a set of cross-play tools for developers. Epic Online Services now offers an overlay that can merge Steam and Epic Games friends lists and help players find their buds, send friend requests and hop into multiplayer sessions with cross-platform in-game invites.
Epic has broader ambitions for cross-play support beyond Steam. It's working to support other PC launchers, as well as macOS and Linux. It will add cross-play tools for consoles and mobile to the SDK further down the line. Several of Epic's own games — including Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout — have full cross-play support.
This week, Devindra and Cherlynn dig into the story around Google engineer Blake Lemoine’s interview with the Washington Post and his belief that the company’s LaMDA language model is alive. What does it mean for AI (or anything else) to have consciousness? Do people understand AI, and what other areas of concern should we as a society consider as machines become more sophisticated and human-like? Then, we recap some of the biggest gaming news this week, as well as some wacky gadget announcements.
Listen below, or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!
First look at gameplay from Bethesda’s Starfield RPG at Summer Games Fest – 25:39
Capcom announces Street Fighter 6 with a gorgeous trailer – 29:22
Hideo Kojima’s next game will be for Xbox – 32:55
Overwatch 2 early access coming on October 4th – 33:43
US proposes legislation to ban sale of location data – 34:14
Sony released a $3,700 Walkman – 38:42
Working on – 43:13
Pop culture picks – 44:34
Video livestream
Credits Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar Producer: Ben Ellman Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos, Luke Brooks Graphics artists: Luke Brooks, Brian Oh Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
