Blizzard Expands

Good Evening. You cannot raid licensed Rust costumes from your local party stores or online retailers. Adele noted this as she had to make a homemade Rust-inspired costume for her son.

—Derek Neville, Tim Rhyne

MAIN QUEST: No iOS, No Problem.

Epic Games launched Fortnite OG on Friday and it led to Fortnite's biggest day, with a record 44.7 million players and 102 million hours played. This was achieved without iOS being an available platform. The reintroduction saw 6.1 million concurrent players and 787,000 peak Twitch viewers, marking the highest viewership in nearly a year for Fortnite.

Epic Games will strategically leverage a 4-week nostalgia trip by reintroducing previous game elements each week and provide developers with a more manageable task of repurposing existing materials rather than creating entirely new content.

Step Back: This successful reactivation campaign of Fortnite allows Epic Games to expose its player base to UEFN (Unreal Editor For Fortnite) and other user-generated content features that were not present at Fortnite’s original launch. Their increased focus in this area is key for competing with their primary competitors: Roblox and Minecraft.

HUD

• 🤝 Microsoft’s Xbox and Inworld AI have announced a multi-year partnership that will focus on creating tools for game designers. The planned tools include the ability to prompt initial ideas and output “detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more” and an AI character runtime engine that would allow game dialogue to be adaptive to individual player actions.

• 😈 Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, will be released towards the end of 2024 and promises a new class “never before seen in the Diablo universe.” The news comes alongside the announcement of next month’s seasonal event and weekly challenge dungeons coming in Season 3.

• 🌍 World of Warcraft announced its next 3 expansions that collectively will be referred to as The Worldsoul Saga. The first will introduce the usual new quests, zones, and items alongside the feature “Warbands” that aims to aid players with account-level progression, including shared banks, reputations, flight paths, and more across an account’s characters.

MAJOR W

• 🎥 After being delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes over the past months, HBO CEO Casey Bloys announced that the second season of the hit The Last of Us adaptation will begin production in early 2024.

• 🔨 Early this year it seemed The Last of Us multiplayer game had been put on ice by Naughty Dog. However, game director Vinit Agarwal confirmed via a Twitter post that they are still working on the game.

F IN THE CHAT

• ⏩ Early Access for the Modern Warfare 3 campaign was available this weekend, and many players were feeling underwhelmed after completing it, pointing to how quickly they completed it.

• ©️ GameToTop Corp. released Burnout over the weekend to the Switch. The company is not affiliated with EA’s series and has a history of its games being “eerily familiar” to other titles.

CAREER CORNER

• Manager, Video Gaming - NFL (New York, NY)

• Engineering Lead - Epic Games (Cary, NC)

• Brand Partnerships Manager - Growth, Gaming - TikTok (Austin, TX)

HIVE MIND

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