Welcome to the first post-PAX AUS Sunday gaming news. A full report of the convention will be up tomorrow, so look forward to it!
- World of Warcraft has shed another 600000 subscribers in the past quarter. This continues the game’s long-running contraction, reducing subscriber numbers from a peak of just over 12 million to 7.7 million. The news comes in a week where Activision-Blizzard managed to extricate itself from parent company Vivendi, who had been using the successful division to prop up its other businesses.
- Fez creator Phil Fish had a bit of a meltdown on Twitter and decided to cancel Fez II. The meltdown was in response to Marcus Beer, who questioned Fish and Jonathon Blow’s silence on Microsoft’s recently updated policies regarding independent game development on the XBox One. Fish said, via Twitter, that he was getting out of games because he was “sick of the abuse”.
- The Deus Ex movie is still a thing. According to the film’s writer, C. Robert Cargill, the movie “[is] not a video game movie, it’s a cyberpunk movie.” This should bode well for those of us worried about the overall quality of game-to-movie adaptations. They’re looking to a pretty impressive source for inspiration: Ridley Scott’s 1983 cyberpunk classic, Blade Runner.
- Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is one of the year’s more intriguing titles, a game that successfully captures the feeling of 1980s action movies, and the video games that were inspired by them. Game Informer has an interview with Dean Evans, the creative director behind the game, going into how they managed to convince Ubisoft to produce the title, and how they took their inspiration from the decade of the permed hair.
- Here’s a video of Laura Shigihara doing an a capella version of ‘Lament of the Highborne’, the song from World of Warcraft that you can here whenever you level a Blood Elf:
[youtube id=”OiA-IPBOq5k” width=”600″ height=”350″]
This week’s picture is of the dinosaurs that have invaded my local shopping centre because dinosaurs. Photo taken by me.
