God of War wins Game of the Year at the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards Game dev veterans Amy Hennig and Rieko Kodama were also honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Pioneer Award (respectively) during the Game Developers Choice Awards tonight at GDC 2019!

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Return of the Obra Dinn takes Grand Prize at the 21st IGF Awards! Announced tonight, the 2019 IGF Awards featured an eclectic and impressive group of winners, from Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn to Cassie McQuater's Black Room and Zachtronics' Opus Magnum!

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  How Arkane built a roguelike atop an immersive sim with Prey's Mooncrash DLC Today at GDC, lead level designer Richard Wilson took the stage to explain how (and why) Arkane took a roguelike approach when developing its innovative Prey DLC Mooncrash.

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  Building an inclusive studio culture begins with retention Several developers discuss how game studios can shift their culture to be more welcoming and supportive of underrepresented employees.

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  Google Stadia supports the Xbox Adaptive Controller Google unveiled a controller alongside its cloud-based game streaming service Stadia this week, but players aren't locked into using Google-made hardware to play games on the service.

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  Cuphead is heading to the Nintendo Switch with Xbox Live support StudioMDHR announced this morning during the Nintendo Indie Showcase that Cuphead will be heading to the Nintendo Switch on April 18th.

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  The next Crypt of the Necrodancer game is set in The Legend of Zelda's Hyrule The indie developer behind Crypt of the Necrodancer is taking a crack at making its own Legend of Zelda game—with Nintendo’s blessing.

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  Opinion: Chez Stadia - Google's new cloud platform The announcement for Google Stadia was absolutely perfect and flawless. It also told us exactly nothing about the relevant aspects for content creators or consumers.

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1 After a worrisome start, Slay the Spire has sold more than 1.5 million copies MegaCrit’s roguelike Slay the Spire has sold more than 1.5 million copies since it first popped up as an early access title in late 2017.

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  Remedy, Quantic Dream, and other devs sign on for Epic Games Store exclusives This is a big deal because Epic seems to be ramping up its efforts to compete with Steam and other storefronts by wooing developers to the Epic Games Store. 

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  Epic lays plans for Unreal Engine ray tracing and physics revamps Epic hosted its usual 'State of Unreal' briefing at GDC today, and the big news for Unreal devs seems to be a new online services SDK, ray tracing support, and a big upcoming "Chaos" physics system.

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  Devs can now sell Epic Game Store keys on the Humble Store Today at GDC the team at Epic announced they've partnered with Humble to allow for Epic Games Store game keys to be sold on Humble's storefront, even if said games are Epic Store exclusives.

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  Epic expands its dev grants program with $100M in Epic MegaGrants Roughly four years after announcing its inaugural $5 million Unreal Dev Grants program, the team at Epic has announced a new $100 million successor: the Epic MegaGrants initiative.

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1 Stadia's biz dev director talks challenges, opportunities in new age of cloud games Gamasutra speaks with Jack Buser, director for games business development at Google, about the boxless future that Stadia is promising.

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2 The Oculus Rift S is a new PC VR headset with built-in tracking The Oculus Rift S makes use of Oculus Insight tracking technology to remove the need for bothersome external sensors, meaning it can deliver out-of-the-box room scale with minimum fuss.

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6 Update: Lucasfilm Games job postings apparently not linked studio revival Updated A new sub-division of Disney does appear to share the name of LucasArts precursor Lucasfilm Games, but a representative has confirmed no new company with that name is being formed.

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1 3 indie leaders share tips on keeping your small studio afloat without a hit Today at GDC three captains of indie-stry (Anemone Hug's Chris Langmuir, Temple Gate's Theresa Duringer, and Kitfox's Tanya x. Short) shared real talk about how to keep your small indie studio alive.

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1 Mapping out the subtle social cues throughout Hitman's level design “Apart from mocking everything up one of the most important things that we do in a game like Hitman is making life, making drama situations as we call them. We borrow a little bit from the world of theater.”

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  How simple mechanics and vignettes inspired Florence Creative director of Mountains Ken Wong delivers a postmortem of the studio's debut game, Florence.

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  'Care more about your streamers' advises Magic: The Gathering Arena dev “When you have happy streamers...you will get so much more than you could ever imagine," said Wizards of the Coast's Michelle Sutterfield today in a GDC talk on Wizards' community-building efforts.

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  How indie devs can form their own worker cooperative Given the current state of the games industry, there needs to be alternative ways to run indie and midsize studios. Worker cooperatives could be the solution.

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1 Pokemon Go's PvP was designed to appeal to players new and old--and it worked "Pokemon Go's always been about real-world social connections. We looked to this as a way to compliment our gameplay of players walking around and catching Pokemon together."

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  Google unveils first-party game studio led by Jade Raymond As Google took the wraps off its streaming game platform Stadia, the company also announced Stadia Games and Entertainment -- a new game studio headed up by industry vet Jade Raymond.

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27 'No console required': Google unveils streaming game platform, 'Stadia' At GDC 2019 this morning, Google detailed its long-awaited streaming game platform, dubbed Stadia.

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  How The Haunted Island: A Frog Detective Game subverted genre for laughs The Haunted Island: A Frog Detective Game developer Grace Bruxner discusses the process behind writing jokes for games without feeling stiff.

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