Sonic Mania surpasses 1M sold worldwide The retro Sonic the Hedgehog reimagining has now sold over 1 million copies worldwide, eight months out from its release.

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  Nintendo Switch hardware exploits cannot be patched out Two hardware-based exploits for the Nintendo Switch have been released, allowing for users to run custom homebrew apps and games on the console.

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  Xbox is starting to let players link their Discord and Xbox accounts Xbox has announced a cross-platform partnership with Discord that allows its players to link the two accounts and display the console game they’re playing in Discord’s desktop and mobile client. 

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  Obituary: Longtime industry veteran Jay Moon Moon played a critical role in a wide variety of notable games that sprung up during the 1990s and was a founding member of the Turok: Dinosaur Hunter dev Iguana Entertainment.

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  How Squidlit's devs authentically recreated a Game Boy game in 2018 In a recent chat with IndieGames.com, Squidlit devs Alex Barrett and Samantha Davenport open up about how they designed the game so it could conceivably run on a Game Boy -- in 2018.

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  Blog: Expressing values on a logarithmic scale Linear interpolation is undeniably useful, but sometimes values are better expressed on a logarithmic scale (music notes, zoom factors), and logarithmic interpolation is a better fit.

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  Kartridge announces new dev-friendly revenue terms Kartridge will provide developers with additional revenue entitling developers to 100 percent of revenue earned on their first $10,000 in sales.

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  Blog: Turning a fun concept into a hit Our game C.A.T.S. has more than 100 million installs. We want to share how we landed on the idea for the game, and how we removed some design risks early on in development.

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  Tencent investing $15M to help establish Fortnite in China Tencent is investing more than $15 million in Fortnite to ensure Epic Games' popular battle royale shooter succeeds in China. 

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1 Blog: Lessons from five years of VR locomotion experiments A five year retrospective on lessons learned from inside the history of VR locomotion by industry pioneers at Cloudhead Games.

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  Blizzard brings paid mods to StarCraft II with 'Premium Arcade' initiative The developer is introducing what it calls 'Premium Arcade' maps, which are user-made creations that've been cooked up by leading members of the modding community.

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  Creating a fake OS that feels like home in Secret Little Haven Secret Little Haven developer Victoria Dominowski chats about how she designed the fake, Mac OS 9-inspired operating system of her game, and why it was important to make it feel safe and welcoming.

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3 Barlog: God of War's 'single shot' camera trick was a tough sell for devs "40 percent of the team came to me after the game was done, and they played it, and they finally...said, ‘oh I get it now'," God of War lead Cory Barlog recently recounted to Polygon.

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  Video: Exploring modular AI In this 2016 GDC session, programmers Kevin Dill, Christopher Dragert and Troy Humphreys discuss the concept of modular AI using examples from shipped titles.

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1 Maxis renames The Sims 4's in-game 'insane' trait to 'erratic' Though the developer did not comment on the change (or even mention it in the patch notes), the switch follows criticism of the trait’s name and its relationship to mental illness.

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1 Quantic Dream takes legal action against French media for negative press Detroit: Become Human developer Quantic Dream is suing French media outlets Le Monde and Mediapart for reports on the studios' working conditions published back in January.

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  Get a job: Cold Iron Studios is hiring an Associate Producer Cold Iron Studios is looking for an Associate Producer with at least one shipped game under their belt to track, prioritize, and support development tasks as a member of its California-based team.

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3 Don't Miss: 7 works of interactive fiction that every developer should study Gamasutra reached out to several esteemed creators of interactive fiction, and asked them for their recommendations of great works of IF that are instructive exemplars of what the medium is capable of.

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  Hearthstone executive producer Hamilton Chu leaves Blizzard A second high-profile member of the Hearthstone development team has left Blizzard as Hamilton Chu departs to “start something new.”

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2 GOG is getting more Steam-like with addition of new social features The digital games platform GOG has introduced a batch of new social features to its web client like a gameplay feed and new player profiles.

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  Blog: How Tencent dominated the $22B games deals market Tencent participated in >$4 of every $10 invested and >3/4 of all M&A value for games globally in the last 12 months. Plus Q1 saw total games market record >$2.1B investment and >$14.4B M&A.

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  Sponsored: How Shopify enables game developers to monetize with merch If you're not selling merchandise from right inside your game, you may be leaving money on the table. Corey Pollock explains how Shopify can help game devs take advantage of the rapidly-growing merchandising segment.

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2 Blog: Why try-fail cycles are vital for telling interesting stories Games as power fantasies result in success after success for player character, which is exacltyl why a try-fail cycle is vital if you want to tell interesting stories.

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1 Terminal Reality is suing Microsoft over shadow and lighting patents While primarily known as a developer, Terminal also created a variety of game engines, including the Infernal Engine that's at the heart of this case. 

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1 Blog: Let's talk about scriptable render pipelines in Unity I did some research and wrote an upcoming experimental Unity feature: Scriptable Rendering Pipelines. Why? Because it concerns you, it concerns me. It will eventually change the way you have to work.

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