What confusion?

Good Morning. Apparently it’s National Pet Bird Day today. While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to have a pet bird (chirp, chirp, chirp 😑), there are quite a few famous pet birds in the gaming world. Chocobo racing, anyone?

Here’s a list of famous birds in gaming. How many have you encountered?

— Jason Liu, Derek Neville

MAIN QUEST: Macron’s about-face on gaming

In a lengthy post on X, French President Emmanuel Macron showered video games and the gaming industry with praise. This latest position seems like a reversal of his remarks made in June where he partially blamed video games for France’s rioting and unrest.

• In June, Macron stated that video games had ‘intoxicated’ young rioters during the period of unrest after the police killing of Nahel Merzouk.

• In this new post, Macron mentioned Fortnite, Roblox, and Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft being a prominent French company) as vehicles for connection and storytelling.

• The post feels in part an appeasement to the gaming industry (poked the bear a bit too hard) and a forward-looking statement on new channels for economic growth.

Step back: Associating video games with violence is nothing new in the political sphere. What’s changing now is the blurring of lines between gaming and modern social interaction and experiences (e.g. Roblox’s plan for work meetings, dating). It’s hard now to paint the gaming industry in broad strokes and politicians are taking note.

HUD

• 🙇‍♂️ Unity has apologized for the ‘confusion and angst’ caused by the announcement of their Runtime Fee and will be making changes to the policy.

• 📈 Titanfall 2 received an update out of the blue that fixed its multiplayer matchmaking and brought players back, with a peak of 22,000+ players.

• 🙅‍♀️ NexusMods removes Starfield mod that enabled users to remove pronouns options.

MAJOR W

• 🥇 Apple believes iPhone 15 Pro will be the ‘best game console’.

• 💻 The price for GeForce RTX 4070 graphic cards has begun to drop, possibly due to the $500 AMD Radeon RX 7800.

• 🤥 Lies of P has a “generally favorable” Metacritic score so far, 1 day prior to its release.

F IN THE CHAT

• 🤪 Mortal Kombat 1 fans are teasing the Switch’s graphics… but most are happy that the game is at least available on the device.

• 😡 Who is the most annoying character in gaming? ‘Booger kid’ from Wind Waker currently in the lead.

• 🔨 A Destiny 2 bug over the weekend allowed players to craft game-breaking weapons, and developers had to push back their original timeline for fixing it to make sure only the “illegal” weapons are deleted.

CAREER CORNER

• Product Marketing Manager, Platforms & Partners — Unity (Bellevue, WA)

• Product Manager, Diablo IV — Activision Blizzard (Irvine, CA)

• Development Tester — Ubisoft (Sherbrooke, QC)

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