Twitch abruptly blocked in China & delisted from local iOS App Store Video streaming platform Twitch has suddenly hit a wall in China, as the Twitch website is currently inaccessible in the country & the Twitch iOS app has been removed from Apple's regional App Store.

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  Ex-BioWare GM Aaryn Flynn is now Improbable's North American GM of games Former BioWare GM Aaryn Flynn has joined up with the folks at British tech firm Improbable, makers of the SpatialOS game server platform, to serve as their North American general manager of games.

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  Video: Game design lessons worth learning from collectible card games At GDC 2011 game designer Skaff Elias (who worked on a number of Magic card sets) offers insight on how you might apply the best practices of CCG design to your own games, be they physical or digital.

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1 Blizzard cracks down on third-party data-tracking apps in Overwatch Blizzard has warned users that further use of third-party data tracking applications for Overwatch will lead to bans on their accounts.

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31 Don't Miss: 7 combat systems that every game designer should study We reached out to several designers for their take on the games that introduced truly memorable innovations to hand-to-hand combat systems.

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  Get a job: Heart Machine is hiring a Gameplay Engineer As a critical anchor for the project, you’ll be crafting code for character interactions, NPC interactions, scripted sequences, combat, environmental interactions and much more.

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  Monster Hunter: World grabs top prize at Japan Game Awards 2018 Japan’s Consumer Entertainment Supplier’s Association has shared the winners of its 2018 Japan Game Awards, held this year at the Tokyo Game Show.

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3 Blog: Understanding the primary concepts of QA I want to dive in to the primary concepts of QA and attempt to draw a general conclusion as to what 'quality' is, and what it means to control, assure, or develop it.

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  Sony officially ending Vita production in Japan in 2019 After winding down support for the Vita for some time, Sony has officially announced plans to discontinue production of the handheld in Japan next year.

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  PlayStation Now begins offering downloadable PS2 & PS4 games PlayStation is expanding its pay-for-access streaming game library PlayStation Now to allow subscribers to download PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 2 games directly to their consoles.

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  Learn about AR and VR's unique therapeutic potential at XRDC 2018! Come out to XRDC in San Francisco next month to learn from leaders at forefront of therapeutic VR/AR aps about treating chronic pain, improving mood with neurofeedback, and more!

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2 Political extremism and gunplay meet in The Church in the Darkness Columnist Katherine Cross examines the upcoming The Church in the Darkness, a game that confronts the complicated themes surrounding political extremism.

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  Blog: Realism and legibility in open-world level design The design underpinning Breath of the Wild's open world come from what may be a surprising source: urban planning. This article examines how these principles lend Hyrule a high degree of legibility.

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1 Valve will start helping developers moderate their Steam communities It's a change that will hopefully take some pressure off game developers, who've until now had to moderate individual game discussions themselves.

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  Tilting Point drops $29M into Star Trek Timelines developer Disruptor Beam The $29 million deal between the companies will help fund Star Trek Timelines and development on a new game from Disruptor Beam.

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  Marvel's Spider-Man sold over 3.3 million units in first three days The PlayStation 4 exclusive was developed by Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive creator Insomniac Games, and launched just under two weeks ago on September 7. 

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  Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu halting work due to ill health The veteran maestro announced the news in a short blog post, where he explained that an increasing workload has left him physically and mentally drained. 

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  Blog: Understanding China's temporary game approval freeze China is the largest games market in the world, but has been hit by a temporary game approval freeze that has limited the number of new games being released this year. Here's what that means.

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1 How Exapunks dev Zachtronics finds the fun in hacking "I'm kind of uninterested in the kind of hacking games where you just connect to stuff," says Zachtronics' Zach Barth. "I kind of think that hacking, maybe, is just like entirely about being cool."

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  Mobile game dev Outfit7 opens new Barcelona studio Head's up, game devs: The mobile game makers at Talking Tom developer Outfit7 announced this week that they're opening a new studio in Barcelona, Spain.

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  Video: Lessons learned from trying to gamify death At GDC 2012, game dev Margaret Robertson explains how UK studio Hide&Seek was asked to make a documentary game about the discovery of a corpse in a busy London block of flats -- and what they learned.

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  343 FPS chief says no 'real-money loot boxes' in Halo Infinite According to the head of 343 Studios, Master Chief's next adventure won't include "real-money loot boxes."

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  Get a job: Hi-Rez Studios is hiring a Lead QA Analyst Hi-Rez is looking for a QA Lead to ensure our game products meet high standards of quality, reliability, usability, and performance through hands-on testing and problem reporting.

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  Rovio has an AR Angry Birds game coming to Magic Leap One Angry Birds developer Rovio is working with Resolution Games to bring a new Angry Birds slingshot game to Magic Leap’s new AR headset.

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  THQ Nordic picks up rights to Alone in the Dark and Act of War THQ Nordic continues the acquisition spree that recently nabbed the company the rights to games like Kingdoms of Amalur and Timesplitters.

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