Stealing gaming's lunch

Booting up. It’s back to school Tuesday for the remaining groups of lucky kids who stretched out their summers.

Did you know that back to school dates can vary drastically by region? In fact, more than 70% of students are butts-in-seats before the end of August. This return smoothing certainly helps to prevent an annual swan dive in gaming demand.

That’s a lot of extra gaming for the September folks.

— Jason Liu, Tim Rhyne, Derek Neville

HEADLINES

Former PlayStation head warns of “new” entrants. Shawn Layden, former PlayStation head warns of outside threats to the gaming industry. Layden hopes that gaming will have disruption from within as opposed to being upended by FAANG+. We’ve seen this play out most recently with Netflix’s new gaming content.

MrBeast shills new gaming ‘super league’. In his latest video, MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) announced a new esports league, “Creator League”, with a roster of the who’s who in content creation. At first glance, it seems like a way for the creator’s respective communities to engage in competition. The launch is not without controversy — CdawgVA is already looking to pull out after it was discovered that NFTs are in play.

HUD

• 📱 Nintendo quietly launched Pikman Finder, a browser-based AR mobile game. It’s unknown if they’ll continue the development of this game or if it was primarily an add-on experience for Nintendo Live attendees.

• 📈 Starfield already topping sales charts as players pay for its early access. Additionally, the game has already been beaten in two hours, 51 minutes, and 42 seconds by a speedrunner. The game’s official release is still a day away.

• ♥ “Never forget to tell the people you love that you love them.” This was Valorant professional Axeddy’s message prior to reports of his teammate Santiago ‘Daveeys’ Ruiz’s passing, a day after turning 23.

MAJOR W

• 📆 The upcoming Tokyo Game Show released their streaming schedule.

• 😈 Rumors spinning that Diablo IV crossover event may happen in Warzone’s upcoming season 6 and The Haunting.

• 🚢 Player builds Millennium Falcon in Starfield.

F IN THE CHAT

• 🐕 Man’s best friend may be extinct in Starfield.

• 🏴‍☠️ Pirate Expansion confirmed NOT coming to World of Warcraft.

• 📝 After a 28-year run, Microsoft is removing WordPad from future releases of Windows.

CAREER CORNER

• Animation Programmer — Larian (Dublin)

• Backend Developer — Bethesda (Montreal)

• Generative AI — Nexon (California)

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