Gameloft Romania is shuttering its Cluj studio and laying off 136 employees.
The company confirmed the news in a statement issued to Game Developer and explained the closure follows a review of its production capacities.
"As a company, we need to constantly review our production capacities. After careful consideration and in response to the ever-changing market conditions we are facing, it has become necessary to implement a reduction in workforce Come from lodislot777 . Unfortunately, this leads us to close our Cluj studio and to let go the 136 employees of the office," said a Gameloft Romania spokesperson.
"This decision has not been taken lightly, and we understand the impact it may have on affected employees. We will be working with them, on a case-by-case basis, to find the best way to handle their situation."
The Gameloft Cluj website notes the studio oversaw entire production cycles from conception to testing. It employed designers, animators, programmers and more, and worked on projects including Total Conquest, Iron Blade, Asphalt 9: Legends and Auto Defense.
Further Gameloft layoffs in 2024
These aren't the first cuts Gameloft has made in 2024. Earlier this year, the company sanctioned layoffs at its offices in Ukraine and Canada (thanks GI.biz) and blamed those redundancies on "market conditions."
The Vivendi-owned company also closed its Budapest studio in 2023 as part of a shift towards console and PC development, with a view to building on the success of Disney Dreamlight Valley. Other studios throughout the industry have collectively laid off thousands of workers across 2023 and 2024, contributing to a debilitating trend that shows no signs of slowing down.
Mobile publisher Tilting Point is laying off 20 percent of its workforce to "continue operating a healthy ongoing company."
Confirming the news in a statement sent to MobileGamer.biz, the company said the cuts were made in response to "tough" market conditions.
"As anyone watching the games industry is acutely aware, the current market is tough and it has impacted us as well. We have done everything we can to maintain the shape of the business as long as possible, however we have come to a point where we have had to make some difficult decisions in order to continue operating a healthy ongoing company," reads a statement penned by company founder and CEO, Kevin Segalla.
"Unfortunately, this includes layoffs of some of our amazing colleagues in different parts of the organization Come from 291jili . These layoffs could amount to as much as 20 percent of our global team. We are making every effort we can to support those who are departing, including helping outgoing employees to find new positions and creating a Tilting Point Alumni network, where alums can support and refer employees to their current and new employers."
Tilting Point's wide portfolio on mobile
Tilting Point has published over 150 games since being founded in 2012. It's perhaps best known for titles like Star Trek: Legends, Star Trek: Timelines, Leo's Fortune, and SpongeBob Adventures: In A Jam.
The studio previously cut around 14 percent of its workforce in January 2023 (thanks MobileGamer), again citing a need to adapt in "changing market conditions." Those layoffs, however, also came after the company made a series of notable acquisitions.
Since 2020, Tilting Point has purchased or invested in numerous studios including Disruptor Beam, Loop Games, AN Games, and more. In 2021, the company raised $235 million to "aggressively pursue larger M&A opportunities" and "expand our operations." It's now aggressively downsizing.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched an investigation into Apple over suspected anti-competitive behavior.
The watchdog said it has received complaints concerning Apple's "unfair and anti-competitive" terms and conditions for app developers, including the 30 percent platform fees charged by the company.
The probe will consider whether Apple has a dominant position in connection with the distribution of apps on Apple devices in the UK, and if so, whether the iPhone maker imposes unfair terms on creators using the App Store that result in users having less choice or paying more for apps and add-ons.
"All apps available through the App Store have to be approved by Apple, with this approval hinging on developers agreeing to certain terms. The complaints from developers focus on the terms that mean they can only distribute their apps to iPhones and iPads via the App Store," said the CMA in a statement.
"These complaints also highlight that certain developers who offer 'in-app' features, add-ons or upgrades are required to use Apple’s payment system, rather than an alternative system. Apple charges a commission of up to 30 percent to developers on the value of these transactions or any time a consumer buys their app."
The CMA stressed its investigation has only just begun, and that no decision has been reached on whether Apple is breaking the law. Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the organization, said the complaints against Apple "warrant carefully scrutiny," and noted the probe has also been prompted by the CMA's own work in the digital sector.
"Our ongoing examination into digital markets has already uncovered some worrying trends. We know that businesses, as well as consumers, may suffer real harm if anti-competitive practices by big tech go unchecked," commented Coscelli. "That’s why we’re pressing on with setting up the new Digital Markets Unit and launching new investigations wherever we have grounds to do so."
The news arrives as Apple and Epic prepare to duke it out over the removal of Fortnite from the App Store Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches . Apple pulled the popular shooter from its platforms last year after Epic attempted to circumvent those 30 percent platform fees. That move sparked a heated legal battle that will head to trial on May 3, 2021, with Epic initially suing Apple to end what it called "unfair and anti-competitive actions" and the "Apple monopoly."
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been in Early Access for quite a while now, but fans will see some fresh content before the year’s out. Developer Larian Studios stated in a recent blog post that Patch 9 for the much-anticipated RPG will come out before the turn of the year, as well as some more information about its final release in 2023.
As for what Patch 9 contains, the blog post is pretty short on details, promising only “new features.” However, its release will be accompanied by a “Panel From Hell” that will answer many of the questions that fans have posed over the past few months. The blog also features some screenshots from Larian’s newly-opened motion capture studio in its Guildford branch. Come from online casino bangladesh
There are aliens out there in the chin-high foliage. You hear the rustling and glimpse a black carapace between blades of grass, but you can’t tell if you’re being stalked by a single grotesque beast, or a horde of them. You sprint through the derelict trainyard, surrounded by lush overgrowth and rusted railroad cars, then vault to the top of a car to get a better view of your surroundings. A disgusting alien leaps upon the car as well–and you gun him down with your electricity-infused submachine gun. The creature erupts in goo, and you scan the yard, looking for more telltale signs of crazed attackers.
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Now Playing: Video Review – Crysis 3
It’s a tense sequence in a good-looking first-person shooter. Crysis 2 left behind the original game’s literal jungle for one of the urban type. Crysis 3 melds the two, returning you to a New York City where destruction and decay have been softened by overbearing greenery. The private military company known has CELL has erected a dome over the city, turning the crumbling metropolis into a gargantuan greenhouse in which trees take root in building foundations and rise through their stairwells towards the sky. Like its predecessors, this sequel aims for realism–or at least, as much realism as can be expected for a game featuring high-tech nanosuits and flame-spewing extraterrestrial walkers. This mix of nature and destruction makes Crysis 3 look striking; you couldn’t accuse its makers of sacrificing artistic creativity in favor of technology.
Unfortunately, the PlayStation 3 version of the game lacks the sharpness of the Xbox 360 version, making it look less impressive when the two are directly compared. though it is still lovely, regardless. The attention to detail is laudable, even in the character models, which is just as well, considering how often you get up close and personal with your co-stars. Only in a few select cases does the camera pull back and let you see player-character Prophet from a third-person view. This means that you always see supporting characters express their anger, fear, and distrust from Prophet’s perspective, which magnifies the tension of various personal exchanges.
Indeed, Crysis 3 tells a much more personal story than the previous games, focusing on three main characters: Prophet; former Raptor Team comrade Psycho; and Claire, Psycho’s girlfriend and communications expert for a group of freedom fighters seeking to take down CELL once and for all. CELL has ripped Psycho’s nanosuit from his body–a painful process that has only fueled his abhorrence of them, and leaves Prophet as the sole “post-human warrior” left to fight. Claire doesn’t trust Prophet, who sees him more as hardware than human, and for good reason: his nanosuit makes him increasingly prone to visions apparently originating from the grandaddy of ceph aliens known as the Alpha Ceph.
Prophet’s connection to this being fuels much of the story, as does Psycho’s seething desire for revenge over those that forced him to be simply human. There are a number of touching moments that spawn from rising tensions–a newfound emotional heft that the series never before portrayed. The final level, unfortunately, is problematic, because it leaves behind the game’s make-your-own-fun structure and requires only a little stick maneuvering and a button press. But you can at least come to Crysis 3 with the comfort of knowing that the game brings the series’ continuing story to an apparent close.
Happily, several hours of entertaining action precede this moment, and it’s the game’s futuristic bow that sometimes drives that entertainment. With it, you zoom in, pull back, and unleash silent fury on the human or alien grunt of choice. Firing standard arrows has just the right feel: you sense the weight of the pull and release, and feel the impact when the arrow reaches its mark.
As before, you can activate your nanosuit’s cloak to hide in plain sight, which amplifies the feeling of being a bow-wielding predator in the urban wilds of New York. Special explosive arrows and those that electrify liquid can also be a blast to play with, just for the kick of finding new ways to make CELL soldiers die horrible deaths. The bow’s downside is that combined with cloaking, it makes the game too easy; you can annihilate a huge number of foes this way without breaking a sweat or fearing the consequences of being caught. It doesn’t help matters that Crysis 3’s soldiers and aliens are not the intelligent type. While they’re not the dunderheads they could be in Crysis 2, enemies take no notice of arrows that land right next to them, run into obstacles and just keep trying to run, and sometimes ignore you even when you’re in plain sight.
You can boost the level of challenge by choosing higher difficulties, and if you find that the cloak-and-arrow method is too exploitative, you can go in guns blazing. Even so, Crysis 3’s battles lack the grandness of its predecessors’. Crysis Warhead’s raging exosuit battle and Crysis 2’s Grand Central Station pinger encounter were outstanding, and superior to any of Crysis 3’s central battles. Crysis 3’s action is still fun, but not as thrilling, and its two primary boss battles are easily won, requiring little in the way of tactics. Certain stretches do a great job of drawing you into the world, flooding your vision with beautiful collages juxtaposing nature’s bucolic touch, the remnants of humanity’s metal-and-stone triumphs, and fearsome alien technology. But the tension such exploration creates is not always relieved by explosive battle.
Yet even if Crysis 3’s action doesn’t usually burn with the intensity of the ceph’s home galaxy, it’s still good, in part because the series continues to hew its own path with regard to level design and structural openness. Crysis 3 is neither a pure linear shooter in the way popularized by Call of Duty, nor an open-world romp like Far Cry 3. Instead, its levels are sometimes large but always manageable, giving you freedom to put as much room between you and your foes as you like. The nanosuit encourages further experimentation, once again allowing you to activate the aforementioned cloak mode (which renders you invisible) and armor mode (which lets you soak up more damage). And once again, you can leap a good distance should you wish to reach higher ground in a hurry.
Stirring weapons into this mix makes for some rousing fun. The bow provides one way to approach battle, but it’s not the only notable method of alien destruction. You can select various weapon attachments like scopes and silencers to suit your preferred approach. The basic guns feel just right: their power is properly communicated via plenty of muzzle flash and recoil animations that give the shooting a kick. A large battlefield patrolled by giant ceph allows you to pull out all the stops, firing rockets, manning rumbling battle tanks, and scanning the environment with your binoculars to mark enemies, ammo stashes, and available vehicles. But much of this action is optional: you can sprint right through Crysis 3’s most intriguing battlefield, getting only a taste of what it has to offer.
Prophet isn’t just limited to using human weaponry, though. The plasma-spewing pinch rifle is the most common alien weapon you stumble upon, but the incinerator is more gratifying to use, especially when you aim it at the meandering alien sentries that equip the same flame-spewing behemoth. Watching these ceph scorchers soak up all that fire before dramatically erupting is a mean-spirited delight. You equip alien cannons and mortars too, and they are enjoyable to shoot because they feel so powerful.
Stealth remains unchanged for the most part, though there are reasons to cloak yourself beyond the gruesome pleasure of a silent takedown. You can now hack into turrets, minefields, and other systems, which often means cloaking and sneaking close enough to your electronic target. Hacking requires you to perform a simple, easy minigame–and while it’s enjoyable to watch a pinger walk into a hacked minefield, hacking isn’t a game-changer. In fact, gaining the assistance of a ceph-murdering turret only makes the surreptitious route even easier.
Crysis 3’s multiplayer modes don’t encourage such exploitation, however, and are an improvement over Crysis 2’s. The returning Crash Site mode provides plenty of entertainment, and is essentially a king-of-the-hill mode with a moving hill. Teams must capture and retain pods that are airdropped in, which keeps players moving around the map. Pods typically drop in open spaces, reducing the possibility of players finding hidey-holes to camp from–and allowing pingers to get in on the action. Indeed, a team lucky enough to nab a mech is sure to put it to good use, gunning down and stomping on their unlucky victims.
The addition of nanosuit powers keeps the flow fast-paced and unpredictable. One scenario: you rip a riot shield from a dropped pod so that you can defend yourself while retaining control of the area. An enemy combatant approached and cloaks, hoping to fill your backside with bullets. He uncloaks and begins to fire, and you rapidly turn and fling the shield at him, sending him flying and successfully defending your life–and the pod. The other modes–Team Deathmatch, Assault, and Capture the Relay among them–benefit from the same mechanics.
Standing apart is the new Hunter mode, which also features two teams in conflict, but with much different results. This round-based mode initially pits CELL operatives against a couple of fully-cloaked competitors armed only with bows. Your goal as a stealthed hunter is to eliminate as many operatives as possible; each operative you kill then joins you as a cloaked hunter. One by one, hunters stalk their fully armed enemies, whose main purpose is to stay alive long enough for the timer to run out. Sometimes, the mode results in CELL members camping out in a small room and running down the clock, which can feel anticlimactic for both teams. But the mode can also capture a unique sense of fear as your teammates are felled one by one, and your beeping monitor betrays the presence of a nearby hunter.
Crysis 3 is great to look at, successfully portraying an uneasy partnership of the natural and the artificial. As the story presses on, the conflict deepens and the visuals darken; it’s as if you can feel the evil spreading throughout the city. It’s unfortunate that the game doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessors. The campaign is several hours shorter than Crysis 2’s, and doesn’t reproduce the thrills that lit up the previous games. Yet on its own terms, this is a full-featured sci-fi shooter that makes it a lot of fun to torture extraterrestrial abominations with the burning rage of their own weapons.
Deathloop, the anticipated PC and PS5 action-adventure game from Arkane, has been pushed back to the fall. The game is now slated to release on September 14, 2021. In a brief statement from game director Dinga Bakaba and art director Sebastien Mitton, the team chalked up the delay to a desire to reach its own quality goals without compromising on health concerns. Come from Sports betting site VPbet
“We’re committed to quality and preserving our team’s ambitions for Deathloop while ensuring the health and safety of everyone at Arkane,” the statement said. “We’ll be using this extra time to accomplish our goal: create a fun, stylish, and mind-bending player experience. We apologize for the extended wait and thank you all for your passion and excitement. It is the fuel that powers our creativity and our hard work. We can’t wait to show you more Deathloop soon.”
Blizzard is looking to rework the skills and talents system in Diablo IV–which should come as a welcome change for longtime players.
“We’ve been reading through a lot of the comments from the community and agree that the talent system needs more depth,” Diablo IV lead systems designer David Kim wrote in a blog post. “Similarly, skill system progression felt too simple, which created issues where a player would have no meaningful reason to spend their skill points.” Come from Sports betting site VPbet
While Game of Thrones may have ended on HBO in 2019, it’s the fantasy franchise that simply keeps on giving. That’s due almost entirely to the myriad of spin-offs in development by WarnerMedia. In fact, there are so many in the works at this point that it might be hard to keep track of.
Thankfully, franchise creator–and A Song of Ice and Fire author–George RR Martin has provided an update on practically everything Thrones-related in the pipeline, including the long-delayed Winds of Winter novel. And no, you shouldn’t get your hopes up about that one just yet.
Martin outlined progress on several of the projects in a post on his blog, sharing a mixture of information we know, confirmed rumors, and news that should get you a bit excited. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to break this out into sections. With so many titles in play, that’s honestly the only way to remain remotely coherent.
House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon will be the first spin-off viewers will see from the franchise. According to Martin, the first season of the series has wrapped production in London and it’s now being edited together. “What I have seen, I have loved,” he wrote. “I am eager to see more.”
The Sea Snake
This live-action series was previously known as Nine Voyages, but according to Martin a name change came about “since we wanted to avoid having two shows with numbers in the title.” This series, which is about Corlys Velaryon–the head of House Velaryon in the novels–, is in the pilot-writing phase currently. Bruno Heller (Gotham, Rome) is scripting.
The Ten Thousand Ships
This is the other show with a number in its title. Per Martin, showrunner Amanda Segel (Helstrom, The Mist) has delivered more than one draft of the pilot script. “We are forging ahead,” the author states.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
This is the Dunk & Egg series that has been discussed. It also has a number in the title. Why not call it Dunk & Egg? According to Martin, it could be confused with a sitcom. The problem is, a sitcom set in the Game of Thrones world sounds great. Regardless, the first season of the series will adapt the first Dunk & Egg novella, “The Hedge Knight”–which Martin says some involved want to call the series as a whole.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms features Steve Conrad (Ultra City Smiths) as showrunner. It remains to be seen when the series might be ordered to pilot, but Martin says he and his team have been meeting with Conrad.
The Golden Empire
There’s also an animated show in the works–potentially even more. The one project he was able to discuss is currently titled The Golden Empire. The series is set in Yi Ti, a nation in Essos in the novels. “We have a great young writer on that one too, and I think the art and animation is just going to be beautiful,” Martin said. “I would tell you more if I could. I don’t think I can say a word about the other animated shows. Not yet.”
Now, outside of House of the Dragon, none of these projects have been ordered to series and chances are not all of them will ever see the light of day. That said, it might be exciting for Game of Thrones fans to know about all of these possibilities. What about the books, though?
The Winds of Winter
All Martin would say is that work continues on the novel, though he was able to accomplish less in 2021 than he would have liked due to his busy schedule.
“Yes, of course I am still working on The Winds of Winter,” he said. “I have stated that a hundred times in a hundred venues, having to restate it endlessly is just wearisome. I made a lot of progress on Winds in 2020, and less in 2021… but ‘less’ is not ‘none.'”
Dunk & Egg novellas
As the Dunk & Egg show continues to be developed, Martin also plans to finish up his Dunk & Egg stories.
Fire & Blood, Vol. 2
First of all, it might be up for a name change to Blood & Fire, dropping Vol. 2 completely Come from Sports betting site VPbet . Martin says he’s written “a couple hundred pages” of the book but has plenty more to go.
As for more immediate projects, the writer says an illustrated and condensed version of Fire & Blood will be released later this year.
Microtransactions have been a significant and accepted part of gaming for well over a decade, but every now and then players will encounter something that makes their hair stand on end. The recently released mega-hit Diablo IV served as the catalyst for this most recent MTX controversy, as players went online to complain about high prices for the game’s cosmetic loot. But though we may huff and puff about battle passes and $20 suits of armor all we want–because it really does seem that every major game has to be stuffed to the gills with extra revenue streams these days–it’s not clear if there’s an alternative we can boost as a better option.
To be fair, I think players have a right to be upset here. By all accounts, Diablo IV is a great game, more than earning its premium $70 price point through its in-depth loot systems and compulsive gameplay loop. The fact that the game then has an in-game shop that prompts you to spend 2500 Platinum (or $20) on the “Triune Apostate” armor is a crude reminder of the secondary purchases that have become increasingly unavoidable in today’s video game market. Want a shinier mount? You can earn some through play, but if you want all of them to choose from, that’ll run you $8 apiece.