Amazon claims to be spiking listings for pirated games Amazon is now saying it's taking down listings for pirated copies of Frostpunk and Surviving Mars.

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  Video: How to thrive and grow as an indie studio In this 2018 GDC session, Weather Factory's Alexis Kennedy discusses the lessons learned while building Failbetter Games, and how those lessons were taken into account when founding a second studio.

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1 Credit card thieves reportedly using Clash of Clans to launder money Credit card thieves are allegedly using the mobile games Clash of Clans, Clash Royale and Marvel Contest of Champions to launder hundreds and thousands of dollars via account selling.

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  Encouraging collaboration among players in Sea of Thieves In a recent interview with The Guardian, lead designer on Sea of Thieves Mike Chapman discusses the evolution of how players went from competing against each other to collaborating.   

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  Get a job: Slime Rancher dev Monomi Park is hiring a 3D Environment Artist San Mateo-based Monomi Park is looking for a 3D Environment Artist well-versed in 3D modeling, texturing, shader creation to contribute to the development of Slime Rancher and its future titles.

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  HTML5 game publisher FRVR secures $3 million in funding FRVR, a game publisher that deals heavily in HTML5 titles, has secured a $3 million investment at the close of its seed funding round.

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  Fortnite has collected $1 billion from in-game purchases Epic Games’ Fortnite has earned over $1 billion so far from in-game purchases alone according to a report published by market research firm Superdata.

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  Promethean AI aims to take the grunt work out of worldbuilding through AI Headed by former Naughty Dog technical director Andrew Maximov, Promethean AI tackles the mundane, non-creative side of worldbuilding to help artists and devs.

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  Don't Miss: Applying lessons from Warcraft's world to Overwatch arenas We spoke to Blizzard's Aaron Keller about the design of Overwatch's first-person shooter arenas, and how lessons he learned from designing maps for World of Warcraft still matter today.

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  Tencent awarded $2.9M in case against dev of alleged League of Legends clone A Chinese court ruled that Tencent was owed roughly $2.9 million following a lawsuit filed against Mobile Legends developer Moonton.

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1 Xaviant to delist The Culling 2 after rocky launch, opts to support The Culling 1 instead Xaviant has announced that it is delisting the recently released game and instead focusing its efforts on reviving and supporting the day-one build of the original The Culling.

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  French game designer Muriel Tramis awarded Legion of Honor French game designer Muriel Tramis has been awarded the Legion of Honor, the highest order of merit available to civilians and military personnel in France.

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  Blog: Crowdfunding and video games in 2018 - A mid-year update Market intelligence expert Thomas Bidaux looks into the performance of video games projects on Kickstarter and Fig.co.

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  Pokemon Go developer Niantic acquires Seismic Games Seismic is comprised of industry veterans from studios like Activision and Pandemic, and has worked on mobile and VR titles like Marvel: Strike Force and Blade Runner Revelations.

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1 Blog: Studying the level design of The Last of Us: Part II Gameloft level designer Ovidiu Mantoc analyzes some of the design beats showcased in the recent gameplay trailer for The Last of Us: Part II.

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  Devs weigh in on the best ways to write and design characters Game devs Chris Avellone, Obsidian's Carrie Patel, and Guerrilla's Dan Calvert chat with Gamasutra about how they and their teams write and design characters -- from start to finish.

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1 Blizzard does away with World of Warcraft Battle Chest pricing An update to the Blizzard store appears to confirm that purchasing the base game of World of Warcraft will no longer be required, only a subscription to the game.

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  Video: Populating the open world of Horizon Zero Dawn In this GDC 2018 talk, Guerrilla Games' Daniel Calvert explains how the studio approached the challenges of making characters for Horizon Zero Dawn.

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1 Pirated copies of Surviving Mars and Frostpunk sold on Amazon It was discovered over the weekend that Amazon had temporarily sold pirated copies of PC games like Frostpunk and Surviving Mars.

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  Get a job: ZeniMax Online Studios is looking for a Mobile Backend Engineer Zenimax Online Studios is looking for someone to work closely with the mobile games team to design and maintain a custom backend infrastructure as a member of its team in Maryland.

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3 Don't Miss: How 1979 Revolution: Black Friday drops players into a real crisis In this 2016 interview, developer Navid Khonsari details the personal experiences that inspired him to tell the story of the Iranian Revolution in his award-winning game 1979 Revolution: Black Friday.

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1 PAX 10 reveals Praey for the Gods, Shift Quantum, and more for 2018 showcase The folks behind PAX 10 have revealed the 10 games set to be featured in the annual showcase at PAX West this fall.

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  Back catalog games continue to drive growth for Ubisoft as Q1 sales hit $466M Even beyond just back catalog titles, most categories reported in Ubisoft’s quarterly release saw a significant increase when compared to the first quarter of the 2017-2018 fiscal year.

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1 Blog: Creating scriptable objects with Unity As you might've guessed, the main objective of this blog post is to give you an idea about how to handle ScriptableObject in Unity.

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  GDC 2019 announces call for papers, submit your talks now! Now is the time to submit your talks for the 2019 Game Developers Conference!

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