4 Valve makes Windows games playable on Linux with Steam Play update A new update to Steam Play means that Linux users will be able to play more Windows versions of Steam games in the near future.

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  Video: How the nemesis system in Shadow of War was designed Monolith Productions' Chris Hoge describes how the nemesis system in Middle-earth: Shadow of War was expanded upon to give players an antagonistic relationship with their enemies.

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1 Zynga to develop a Star Wars mobile game following Disney partnership Zynga announced today that it has struck a multi-year deal with Disney to develop an unannounced mobile game based in the Star Wars universe. 

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  Scammers are still trying to snag free games from indie devs Emily Morganti, who handles PR for adventure games, speaks to Kotaku about key scammers and the negative impact they have on indie devs and freelance reviewers.

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  Get a job: Cold Iron Studios is hiring a Sr. Content Designer for an Alien game Cold Iron is seeking an experienced Sr. Content Designer to join its world-class team in creating a shooter set in the Alien universe for consoles and PC.

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  Starbreeze sets sales record in a quarter devoid of new releases The company also pulled its profit out of the negative range thanks to a boost from the sale of the Dead by Daylight publishing rights.

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12 Don't Miss: Perfecting the axe recall mechanic in God of War With God of War players flocking back to check out the New Game+ update, take a look at this blog post explaining how much care the dev team took to make Kratos' axe throws feel astonishingly satisfying.

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  Analyst: More players are making in-app purchases (with less nudging) A new report from Liftoff seeks to trace user acquisition trends in recent mobile game history, offering devs a peek at the ebbs and flows of spending habits in the mobile games space. 

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  THQ Nordic team-up brings select Microsoft Studios games to Steam Microsoft has penned an agreement with THQ Nordic that will see the two companies give five Microsoft Studios-published games both Steam and physical releases.

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  At XRDC, see how Unity bridges the gap between AR design & engineering At XRDC Unity's Andrew Maneri will reveal the company's new augmented reality tech called "reasoning APIs": equal parts coding, puzzle solving, and adventure-game-style ingredient substitution.

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Mobile dev Gismart forms publishing partnership with Appodeal The pair are particularly interesting in signing casual and hyper-casual games, alongside music, entertainment, and utility apps.

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3 Blog: Unity data management with CastleDB Unity's inability to fully separate game data from code is an issue that all developers eventually run into. After juggling ScriptableObjects for a few years, I've found a better way.

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1 Until Dawn dev Supermassive is creating a horror game anthology The studio has just announced plans to release a series of standalone, cinematic horror games dubbed 'The Dark Pictures Anthology.'

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  HTC confirms price and launch date for Vive Wireless Adapter The t-shaped adapter, which can turn the HTC Vive and Vive Pro into wireless headsets, was first unveiled back in January.

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  Blog: Honest reflections on Patreon from a game media creator Launching a crowdfunding effort can be a source of anxiety. It's a mark of confidence in your work, but it's also stressful. This post discusses my experiences using Patreon.

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1 Meet some of the indie devs quietly pushing the JRPG genre forward "There’s a big problem in indie games where everybody is just trying to remake their favorite games," says YIIK dev Andrew Allanson in this look at modern indie JRPGs. "We try to fight against that."

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  Video: How Riot partners with players to positively impact the world In this GDC 2018 talk, Riot Games' Jeffrey Burrell and Tash Elliott discuss the extensive research Riot Games has done to understand the underlying social values their players have across the world.

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2 Amazon removes its 20 percent preorder discount on games Two years after the perk was introduced to Amazon Prime members, Amazon has announced that it will be discontinuing its 20 percent preorder discount on physical copies of video games on August 28.

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1 Despite millions of downloads, publishers won't sign the sequel to Velocity 2X FuturLab, the studio behind 2D shoot-em-up game Velocity 2X, details the struggle of trying to find a publisher to sign a sequel despite millions of players having enjoyed the first game.

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  Get a job: The Game Band is hiring a Platform/Build Engineer LA-based The Game Band is looking for a Platform/Build Engineer to create tools and systems to advance its in-development builds toward a polished, technical release across multiple platforms.

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5 Don't Miss: Creating dynamic audio in the destructible levels of Rainbow Six: Siege In this deep dive, audio director Louis Philippe Dion explores how the Siege dev team used strategically placed nodes to calculate the flow of sound in ever-changing, destructible battlegrounds.

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  Citing 'Sony's plans to discontinue the Vita,' Bloodstained dev cancels port Kickstarter darling Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has been delayed into 2019 and is no longer coming to Sony’s neglected handheld system.

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  Speaker Q&A: Iman Mostafavi and Zombie Gunship Revenant AR's life on mobile At XRDC 2018, learn more about how the developers of Zombie Gunship Revenant AR overcame a slow launch on the Google Play store.

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1 Valve's nearly $25M The International prize pool sets esports-wide record Once again, Valve has beat out its own record-setting numbers from the previous year’s event to launch its annual Dota 2 tournament with a record-breaking prize pool.

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2 Capcom has shipped 10M copies of Monster Hunter: World Between digital sales and units shipped, Capcom says that its most recent Monster Hunter game has moved 10 million copies across all platforms. 

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