Daily Gaming News: August 4, 2020

Lots of stuff going on lately. Be sure to check out the Big Meanie Games’ deep-dive into the League of Legends LEC Controversy and enjoy the latest news in gaming, sponsored by…well, no one. *crickets*

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate brings cloud gaming to Android devices September 15

Microsoft’s Cloud gaming service (formerly called Project xCloud) is coming to Android devices under the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate moniker. Launching September 15, the service will let you play more than 100 games such as Minecraft Dungeons, Destiny 2, Tell Me Why, and Yakuza Kiwami 2.

There are two things to note: first, iOS is excluded (this is for Android phones and tablets), and second, the launch will cover only 22 markets initially: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs $14.99 per month and currently has a promotion for $1 for the first month.

As a mobile game dev, this sort of scares me because it’s Even More competition in the space. Thanks, Microsoft!

China will soon require real names to play video games

So China has this rule where anyone under 18 years old is only allowed to play 90 minutes on weekdays and 3 hours on holidays. That was established in 2019, and now the country is about to add a new rule to its repertoire: a new state-run system will force users to log into games with their real names.

Draconian, smaconian.

Larian Studios announces…an event to unveil Baldur’s Gate 3’s release date

As much as I love Larian Studios and their Divinity: Original Sin games, their latest move to announce an event to announce the release date for Baldur’s Gate 3 reeks of…I don’t know, Lebron James and The Decision? It’s just completely unnecessary. Just tweet out the damn release date already.

Oh yeah, the official release date event is on August 18.

Analogue Pocket sells out in 15 minutes

We’ve mentioned Analogue’s Pocket device a couple of times on Daily Gaming News, and it turns out we clearly spurred tons of people to go out and preorder it  a lot of people were interested in it as well. IGN reports that the Pocket preorder sold out in 15 minutes flat, which Analogue blamed on Shopify’s shipping calculator.

The company encouraged interested buyers to sign up for email notifications to get alerts for the next batch of Pockets. Or, in other words: “better luck next time”.

The Pocket is a portable device that plays all Game Boy cartridges out of the box, and can be connected to converters that allow other pocket console games to be played.

Blizzard employees are passing around an anonymous spreadsheet with salaries and raises

Staff at Blizzard aren’t happy with their pay these days (I mean, who isn’t?), according to the results of a 2019 internal survey. So they started passing around an anonymous spreadsheet listing salaries and raises that were given in an attempt to highlight wage disparity within the company.

You might remember from a previous Daily Gaming News segment that mentioned that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick made $28 million in 2019 (his total compensation was estimated at $40 million though), while Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa earned a measly $2.4 million dollars. Contrast that with Blizzard employees on the bottom rung – we’re talking game testers and customer service reps – making minimum wage.