Sony and Square Enix will release a VR Kingdom Hearts experience for free this Holiday season. Called Kingdom Hearts: VR Experience, players can relive moments and music from the series for 10 minutes. Based on screenshots, you can fight Heartless and rewatch the cutscenes from all of the Kingdom Hearts games. Hopefully, this isn’t canon in the series. The game will only be available on the PlayStation Store.
Riot continues to dig themselves in a deeper hole. This summer, there were several reports of sexism against women and sexual misconducts at the HQ. Riot promised to do a better job at representing their female employees and started with a female only event at PAX West. That led to more controversy as people on the League of Legend subreddit complained that Riot is sexist and preventing males from seeing Riot’s panels. Two Riot employees stated on Twitter that the subreddit is “filled with manbabies.” Systems designer Daniel Klein and communications associate Mattias Lehman—both outspoken advocates for gender diversity at Riot were fired after their statements on the community (Kotaku). Now Riot just released several people’s emails…including me.
September 8-9th is the NA LCS Finals in Oakland Oracle Arena. Players who purchased the balcony seats for the event received an email stating that they’ll be relocated.
Over 200 people were CC instead of BCC-like most massive email launches. Blind Carbon Copy protects the email privacy. It also prevents people from REPLY ALL all recipients and prevents spam from being spread.
While Riot and the NA Events team promises to offer the affected compensation, it is still undetermined. We received better seats for the tournament closer to the stage but I still feel the effects of people sending memes and email responses.
People are trying to bring esports and professional gaming to a worldwide audience as it’s becoming more popular. People and or teams are competing all around the world and are representing their sponsors similar to physical sports teams. Some teams represent their countries similar to the Olympics such as the Asian Games. Earlier this year, gaming companies such as Riot, Blizzard, Epic, and the ESL, met with the Olympic Forums to discuss potentially having esports as an Olympic competition. The hopes would be the “government to help recognize esports as its own discipline” according to the CEO of Riot Games, Nicolo Laurent. Unfortunately, the Olympics will not allow any video games to be an Olympic event that has “killing” according to International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach.
While Esports may be in the Olympics in the future, Bach strongly stated “We cannot have in the Olympic program a game which is promoting violence or discrimination…They, from our point of view, are contradictory to the Olympic values and cannot therefore be accepted.” While people rebutted by stating some Olympic games involved dangerous weapons such as fencing, Bach said: “sport is the civilized expression about this.” Any games involved with “killing” for points/score will likely be denied by the Olympics in the near future. This would prevent popular esports titles from being an Olympic game such as Fortnite, Overwatch, League of Legends, and PUBG.
If esports was legitimized by the Olympics, it would benefit the players. Players would able to receive their Visas more easily to travel internationally for tournaments. Many players and team owners must pay for the visas. This can lead to potential delays that may prevent the players from competing. It would also give teams and players more sponsors for financial support. It can also lead to more television broadcasting opportunities for video games. Below are the hours viewed on Twitch and YouTube. If channels begin streaming video games, it could lead to people actually watch tv.
How do you feel about video games not allowed in the Olympics?
China has always been strict on video game releases. As a country with massive censorship and regulations, video games are difficult to release. This month, China started a video game freeze to prevent new game releases which made many studios and developers nervous. China has the highest sale potential outside of the United States. The gaming industry in China was expected to have over $24 billion in revenue in 2018 according to Newzoo. Unfortunately, China recently announced they will start regulating video game releases.
Chinese president, Xi Jinping, stated the game regulations are ruining children’s eyes. A recent growth in myopia (nearsightednesses) in China has caused great concerns. While reports from the BBC and Professors state it may due to excessive studying and lack of sunlight, the Chinese government believe it’s a different goat.
The regulations are still blurry at the moment but expect heavier censorship from China. New video game releases will be heavily moderated and limited and reduce the number of online games available. In response to the changes, Tencent’s stock has dropped by 5% in a single day. Tencent is a game publisher in China and they own Riot (League of Legends) and has huge stock in Epic (Fortnite). They were supposed to release Monster Hunter World in China but it was pulled off the market due to “complaints.” The removal may have been due to the proposed video game regulation.
The Gaming News Corner 