Netflix Games has thrown its weight behind generative AI less than two weeks after shuttering its only triple-A development studio.

The streaming giant has appointed Mike Verdu as its new VP of GenAI for Games so it can capitalize on what it calls a "once in a generation inflection point for game development and player experiences." Verdu previously served as VP of Netflix Games but earlier this year revealed he would be taking on a new role at the company. At the time, he said his new position would champion "innovation in game development."

Speaking about his new role on Linkedin, Verdu waxed lyrical about the potential of generative AI and said the technolo…

"Like diamonds, games are forever." That's Kongregate co-founder and COO Emily Greer, speaking to an audience at GDC Tuesday morning about what she considers the best practices for monetizing (and satisfying!) free-to-play game players. Kongregate focuses on games with long-term potential that maintain steady profitability, rather than on games that drive in immediate spikes of revenue before trailing off. The result of this seems to be working well for the company: 90 percent of its revenue comes from the 4 percent of players who have had more than 100 game play sessions on the portal. In a session at GDC's Free-To-Play Summit, Greer shared what she called her six habits of highly effective F2P — or, in other words, the six things free-to-play developers shou…

The online game company Nexon has released financial results for the first quarter of its 2017 fiscal year, ending March 31, 2017. 

During that first quarter, the Japanese company clocked revenue at ¥74.8 billion ($659.7 million), for both a 30 percent increase year-over-year and a quarterly record high since the company’s 2011 IPO. 

Operating income came higher than Nexon expected at in at ¥39.8 billion ($351 million), but net income failed to reach earlier predictions and landed at ¥19.9 billion ($175.5 million) for the quarter. Nexon attributes this quarter’s results to strong performance in its Japanese and Chinese markets, as well as to the success of its mobile games Hit…

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Senior Programmer – Engine/Graphics, Sony Computer Entertainment America

Location: Santa Monica, CA

Sony Santa Monica is seeking a senior engine/graphics programmer to join the team behind the critically acclaimed God of War games.

In this role you work on …

The Toys for Bob office in Novato, California, is closing down as a result of the recent Microsoft layoffs.

Microsoft is laying off 86 workers from the Activision Blizzard studio, known for developing Skylanders and Spyro Reignited, and closing down its physical office.

San Francisco Chronicle broke the news after spotting a state filing detailing the office closure. It means the fate of Toys for Bob under the Microsoft umbrella is currently unclear, although Windows Central managing editor Jez Corden has heard the studio itself will endure.

Toys for Bob was acquired by Activision Bli…

The Lamplighters League developer Harebrained Schemes is undergoing a change in leadership. The studio announced today that Mike McCain, who previously directed BattleTech and Shadowrun: Dragonfall while at the company, is now returning to replace co-founder Mitch Gitelman as executive producer.

According to a post posted on Harebrained Schemes' website, Gitelman informed employees that he was stepping back into an advisory role in late 2023 (the news was publicly delayed while the company spun up a new blog).

“This is a ridiculously talented team," Gitelman said in a statement. "I’m proud of them…

Netflix has shuttered its Southern Californian AAA game studio Team Blue after less than two years of operation. As reported by Game File, along with the studio closure, three of Team Blue’s most notable hires have also left the company.

Blue was Netflix’s fifth internal game studio, and said to be working on a new AAA IP while "pursuing a big-budget multi-device strategy."

Since 2022, the studio had attracted industry attention by hiring senior developers from Blizzard, Bungie and Sony Santa Monica—producer Chacko Sonny, creative director Joseph Staten and art director Rafael Grasseti.

…

As part of a string of announcements centered around its upcoming Unreal Engine 4, Epic Games has revealed that its popular game engine will (eventually) support web-standard HTML5, allowing the deployment of graphically-rich games that, in theory, can run on any device that can display a web page. The way it was described to us, Unreal Engine 4 games running in browsers will be able to achieve near-native performance to the hardware it's running on, thanks to the elimination of UnrealScript's bottleneck. The company doesn't have much to show yet — in fact, the only proof-of-concept demo it has right now is running in Unreal Engine 3, which will not support HTML5 — but it's clearly laying the gr…

When Nexon America CEO Min Kim first visited the U.S., he had no idea that PC gaming cafes didn't exist in the same way that they did back in Korea. This was quite a shock for him. Korea was already well into free-to-play games, and PC gaming cafes were a big part of this movement. This caused problems for the business models that Kim was familiar with. "They're all over Korea," he explained at DICE Europe today. "PC cafes are actually a way for companies to monetize in Korea – it's part of the business model." "There's so many things the cafe would do," he continues. "It would market the game for you. There's user interface things taken care of because players are sat next to each other. These natural supports, you don&#…

Over two years after launch, the PlayStation VR2 is getting a price cut: starting in March, the VR headset will permanently retail for $399.99 in North America, €449.99 in Europe, £399.99 in the UK, and ¥66,980 (or $447.19) in Japan.

This is the first sale for the peripheral, which was originally $550 when it launched in February 2023. Sony has bragged about it outselling the original PlayStation VR, but there were reports not long after release claiming the console maker halted production until it sold more of its initial stock.

Price cuts for PlayStation hardware has been somewhat infrequent and short-lived th…