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Video Game IPs – what happens when a studio closes

I’ve been thinking about the layoffs and studio closures today. We lost a lot of talent this year, and we also lost some amazing studios (Volition being the one that struck me the hardest personally, having enjoyed their games since 1995 with Descent, Freespace (which I still fire up to this day regularly), Summoner and more).

A question was raised to me recently by a few people was: “what about those IPs? What is happening with them?”

Right now, based on what I have been told behind closed doors and what I know, I can foresee that most of these IPs won’t go on sale — just yet. We will unlikely see a firesale like we did back in the THQ / Atari days, largely because of two reasons:

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Documenting Accessibility

Image of a Guide to Documenting Accessibility

Unfortunately, accessibility is still an afterthought in many projects, even though fixing it later is usually a lot more expensive than doing it right from the beginning. Documentation is an effective means to help teams keep an eye on accessibility in every step of the process. But what do you need to consider?

Stéphanie Walter summarized how designers can document different aspects of accessibility and user interaction requirements. If you don’t have the time to document everything in your design mockups, Stéphanie suggests to focus on the things where there might be the biggest issues and misunderstandings.

Link: https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/a-designers-guide-to-documenting-accessibility-user-interactions/

The Trends that Defined the Games Industry in 2021

2021 is nearly in our rear view mirror. The real world has, quite frustratingly, knocked on the video game industry’s door and said “hello! We’ve come here to stress you out again.”The pandemic, for what it’s worth, has not abated. But the spread of vaccines and loosening of public health restrictions have meant a slow adaptation to new normalcy. We must then instead turn our attention to the massive engines of finance that have rocked and rolled the video game industry for twelve months, the legal cases that have come to inspire everything from worker organization to (potential) platform policy changes, and the work being put in by game developers to make the wider industry a better place to be. Here are the trends that defined 2021 for game developers.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/culture/best-of-2021-the-trends-and-events-that-defined-the-year-for-game-developers

Fixing the “NO DC” issue on NVidia graphics cards – at least for now

The ‘NO DC’ watermark has been an issue for over a year with NVidia drivers – will we finally see the end of it?

Some of you may have noticed that whenever you play a game, or even work within an application within Windows that uses any kind of GPU acceleration that you sometimes see a “NO DC” in the top left corner of your game.

A method that was widely shared on reddit and also NVidia’s own forums was about deleting the “nvdrssel.bin” file from “C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Drs” – and to be honest, deleting any kind of driver dll always sounds lke a bad idea, right?

I friend of mine mentioned a possible solution which I’d like to discuss…

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How to GraphQL

GraphQL enables a client to specify exactly what data it needs from an API, so instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server exposes a single endpoint and responds with precisely the data a client asked for. If you want to wrap your head around GraphQL, here are two great resources to get you started. How to GraphQL is a free open-source tutorial to take your GraphQL skills from zero to production. Divided up into two parts, part one covers the core concepts of GraphQL while part two gives you a broader understanding of the GraphQL ecosystem.

Read more: https://www.howtographql.com/

Global AI Survey: AI proves its worth, but few scale impact

Do you use AI in your company yet? Adoption of artificial intelligence continues to increase, and the technology is generating returns. The findings of the latest McKinsey Global Survey on the subject show a nearly 25 percent year-over-year increase in the use of AI in standard business processes, with a sizable jump from the past year in companies using AI across multiple areas of their business. A majority of executives whose companies have adopted AI report that it has provided an uptick in revenue in the business areas where it is used, and 44 percent say AI has reduced costs!

Read more: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/global-ai-survey-ai-proves-its-worth-but-few-scale-impact

UK Gaming worth more than video and music combined

Interesting: The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the UK’s entire entertainment market, according to a new report by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).

The industry is worth £3.86bn ($4.85bn) – more than double its value in 2007, and makes it more lucrative than video and music combined. The games market has grown, despite the fact that the physical console and PC games market shrank slightly in 2018, and digital also had a modest 12.5% growth.

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