Video Game Deep Cuts: The Astro Genius, Redeemed This week's highlights include a rave for Astro Bot VR, why game devs aren't getting Genius Grants, and a delightful Red Dead Redemption recap, among others.

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2 Rockstar states overtime is 'optional' for studio that sometimes pulled 50-hour weeks According to Rockstar head of publishing Jenn Kolbe, the company's QA studios will not be required to work mandatory overtime shifts in the future.

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  Video: The development process of Klei Entertainment's Shank In this GDC 2011 session, Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng talks about the development process that gave birth to Shank, which would propel Klei onto the global game-making stage.

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1 After five years of waiting, Sixense will refund its VR controller Kickstarter backers After five years, Sixense is refunding all Kickstarter users who backed the Sixense Stem, a virtual reality motion controller which was first pitched back in 2013.

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  Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 introduces special in-game items to support veterans Activision Blizzard announced a new in-game pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, where 100% of proceeds go toward supporting veterans find high-quality careers.

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  Weekly Jobs Roundup: Square Enix, Schell Games, and more are hiring now! Here are just some of the many developers looking for artists, designers, programmers, and more right now on the Gamasutra Job Board.

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  Steam surpasses 30 million domestic users in China Steam has surpassed more than 30 million users in China following the partnership between Valve and Chinese publisher Perfect World to bring the platform overseas.

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5 Devs air grievances with Steam reviews, regional pricing, and dev support An insightful read from Polygon gathers feedback from several game devs about Steam’s review system, regional pricing, and overall developer support.

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  We're talking to Sunless Skies writer James Chew at 3PM EDT Join us for a chat with one of the writers behind Sunless Skies.

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  Learn the ins and outs of FDA approval for VR/AR games at XRDC! At XRDC later this month, industry vet Noah Falstein will discuss the challenges of FDA approval for AR/VR games, as well as more general hurdles in creating the latest generation of games for health!

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  Blog: Designing the boss battles in Shovel Knight- Part 3 In the third and final batch of exclusive material from David L. Craddock's 'Shovel Knight' book, the author discusses how developer Yacht Club Games designed the Tinker Knight boss battle.

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  Splash Damage ends Dirty Bomb live development According to a post from the company, Dirty Bomb looks to be another case of a live game with costs that started to outweigh its income, an unfortunate inevitability for most live free-to-play games.  

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  XRDC Q&A: Owlchemy Labs' Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer explore VR interactions Devin Reimer and Andrew Eiche of Owlchemy Labs share their thoughts on what's changed in VR interaction design.

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  Games as a service drives huge market value spike for EA, Activision The combined market value of U.S. publishers EA and Activision has grown by $79 billion since 2012, largely thanks to the success of the games-as-a-service model.

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  Blog: Lessons learned after making Anodyne with Sean Han Tani Sean Han Tani is a composer, independent game developer, writer and teacher. In a recent appearance on the Game Dev Unchained podcast, he explained what he learned from his debut project, Anodyne.

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3 The four atoms of cooperative video games Ubisoft Quebec level designer Thierry Lauret outlines four types of ways to design and play PvE co-op video games.

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  Video: How Gauntlet paved the way for class-dependent multiplayer In this GDC 2012 talk, Gauntlet creator Ed Logg, who also designed Centipede and Asteroids shares his thoughts on creating the game that paved the way for many popular titles.

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  Skybound CEO aims to finish out The Walking Dead with '100%' former Telltalers In an AMA held on Reddit, CEO of Skybound Games Ian Howe and former creative director at Telltale Kent Mudle answer questions from players to try and shed light on the Telltale deal.

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  Rockstar Games clocks the average employee's workweek at 42-45 hours Rockstar Games shared employees’ self-reported hours spanning from January to September of this year in the wake of outcry over crunch.

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  Sixth annual Day of the Devs line-up features over 70 games Double Fine and iam8bit announce the 70 games which will be present at the sixth annual Day of The Devs.

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  Get a job: Amnesia dev Frictional Games is hiring a Tools Programmer Frictional Games is expanding its tech team and looking for a tools programmer who will help make its HPL engine better, prettier, and more intuitive.

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  SteamVR now supports motion smoothing in beta The feature aims to help devs compensate for dropped frames in Steam-hosted VR games by anticipating frame jitter and masking those dropped frames.

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6 Don't Miss: Looking back at Left 4 Dead's dynamic AI With both L4D games hitting Xbox One via backward compatibility, take a look back at this 2013 blog about the unique way the series’ AI system fueled the procedural narrative of the classic zombie game.

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  Dota 2 now dynamically discloses loot box odds in-game Dota 2 players can now click on an arrow right next to one of the game’s purchasable “treasure” loot boxes to see the odds for rare, very rare, and extremely rare drops.

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  Facebook sponsors cutting-edge XRDC talks on VR art and AR design From designing effects in Facebook's Spark AR platform to rendering work created with the VR art tool Quill on Oculus' standalone Quest headset, these are XRDC talks you won't want to miss!

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