Video: Why Dark Souls is the 'Ikea' of games In this GDC 2017 talk, producer and consultant Justin Fischer goes over the framework for establishing a competitive advantage like the ones made by Dark Souls and Ikea. 

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  Improbable CCO Bill Roper departs to join indie studio Author Digital Chief creative officer of Improbable Bill Roper announced that he's leaving the company to start a new position at the Seattle-based indie games studio Author Digital. 

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  Com2uS acquires majority stake in visual novel developer Day 7 South Korean publisher Com2uS has acquired a majority stake in the mobile studio Day 7, which is known for developing romantic visual novel games. 

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  Get a job: Insomniac Games is hiring a Designer Insomniac Games is looking for a designer who is well versed and passionate about today's game design to join its team in Durham, NC.

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  Tencent introduces streaming rules to stay on the up-and-up with Chinese law Tencent has announced a handful of rules for streamers playing Tencent games, a move that aims to keep the company on the right side of Chinese regulations that recently went into effect.

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3 Don't Miss: The origins and evolution of Darkest Dungeon's Affliction System Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman of Red Hook Studios: "We wanted to capture the human response to stress. Any person can break under pressure, and people break in different ways."

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  Organizers of unsanctioned Fortnite festival facing lawsuit from Epic Games Epic Games has issued a claim against Exciting Events, the organizers of a recent and unsanctioned Fortnite festival hosted in the UK over the weekend. 

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  Alt.Ctrl.GDC Showcase: Coal Rush Coal Rush creates competition out of running a train, having players scoop coal, change tracks, and scare wildlife off the tracks with its locomotive controls

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  The Making of GDC: What are Community Spaces, anyway?? In this "Making of GDC" blog post, GM Katie Stern opens up about the process of establishing "Community Spaces" at GDC, and what organizers are doing to help attendees find their place at the show.

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  Sony is readying to shut down PlayStation Vita production in Japan The company has posted a warning on the Japanese website for the two remaining PlayStation Vita models that cautions "shipments are scheduled to end soon."

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  See how Ubisoft tested The Division with automated players at GDC 2019! The folks at Ubisoft know something about testing big open-world games, and at GDC 2019 next month they're presenting a cool talk all about improving game testing through automation.

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  Blog: Creating a sustainable PR program for your mobile game Here's a brief explainer on how to create a sustainable PR program around a mobile game's development, broken out in 3 phases.

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  Nitro Games begins layoff talks, could cut workforce in half Finnish mobile studio Nitro Games could lay off over half of its workforce in an attempt to reduce operating costs.

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  Revenue and profit up as Paradox experiences best year to date "Continuous updates and expansions give our games a long life, both in terms of number of players and recurring revenue."

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1 Blog: What is a meta-game? A question I hear pretty often is, "What is a meta-game?". There are two pretty similar but also quite distinct and different answers which we're going to talk about.

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2 Breaking down categories of action in strategy games Brandon "wayward" Casteel offers a theory of how players' actions operate in the context of strategy games.

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Designing new, exciting places to clean up gore in Viscera Cleanup Detail's new DLC The developers behind Viscera Cleanup Detail -- in which players clean up the gory remnants of violent sci-fi encounters -- talk about the design of the recent DLC, The Vulcan Affair.

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  Wizards of the Coast shares community-building tips at GDC 2019! Come to GDC 2019 and learn how to more effectively build communities for your games and market your brand on a variety of platforms, direct from the Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons people!

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  Road to the IGF: Zachtronics' Opus Magnum Opus Magnum has players creating machines for developing potions and poisons, tinkering with parts and mechanisms to refine perfect alchemical devices.

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  Blog: Pitching your game to prospective investors Rebekah Saltsman is the co-founder of indie developer-publisher Finii, and she's going to run through some pitching tips that might help you when meeting prospective investors.

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  Respawn has already banned over 16,000 cheaters from Apex Legends Community manager Jay Frechette broke the news on Reddit, and told players the studio is keen on the idea of a dedicated reporting tool.

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2 Razer Game Store shutting down after 10 months Razer didn't specify exactly why it has decided to turn its back on the storefront, simply explaining the decision is part of its wider "realignment plans."

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  Blog: How is our small video game blog managing on Patreon? If you were ever interested in the behind the scene numbers of a small gaming blog's Patreon, then I'm going to open up my wallet and show you everything that's in it.

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  Video Game Deep Cuts: A Romance Crackdown, Wu-Tang Style This week's highlights include a piece on Chinese romance games for women, new titles from Crackdown 3 through Metro Exodus to Anthem, and the weird history that led to the Wu-Tang fighting game.

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  Watch System Era's Brendan Wilson break down the making of Astroneer System Era co-founder Brendan Wilson dropped by the GDC Twitch channel to discuss the making of Astroneer.

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