Gaming

A lengthy antitrust investigation into PC games geo-blocking in the European Union by distribution platform Valve and five games publishers has led to fines totalling €7.8 million (~$9.4 million) after the Commission confirmed today that the bloc’s rules had been breached. The geo-blocking practices investigated since before 2017 concerned around ...

‘We are definitely fearful of Apple’s ability to completely disrupt/affect the growth of a game’ Lucas Matney @lucasmtny / 14 hours Many VCs historically avoided placing bets on hit-driven mobile gaming content in favor of clearer platform opportunities, but as more success stories pop up, the economics overturned conventional wisdom ...

If you’ve been following the gaming space — or just the state of the world, generally — over the past 12 months, this shouldn’t come as a major surprise. Spending saw big increases pretty much across the board in 2020 as a homebound populace sought comfort and distraction in gaming. ...

Pokémon GO creator Niantic has acquired a small SF gaming startup building a league and tournament organization platform to help gamers create their own communities around popular titles. Mayhem was in Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch and went on to raise $5.7 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Other backers ...

The gaming industry has had plenty of watershed moments in 2020 as consumer entertainment habits have shifted in response to the pandemic. One trend has been the crystallization of MMOs as social entertainment hubs that serve more needs for users than ever before. Following my survey of gaming-focused investors on ...

Roblox is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies in the world after a monster Series H raise brings the social gaming platform a stratospheric $29.5 billion valuation. The company won’t be private for long, though. The $520 million raise led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group ...

Twitch also temporarily suspended the president’s channel in June. At the time, it told TechCrunch, “Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch. In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed.” ...

Also: Who is really mispricing companies? So it turns out that Roblox is worth $29.5 billion. That’s the lesson the market learned this week when the gaming platform company announced that it had raised $520 million in an epic Series H. For a company valued at just $4 billion last ...

We last polled our network of investors on the topic of gaming infrastructure startups back in May just as it was becoming clear what pandemic opportunities were in store for gaming startups. Accel’s Amit Kumar told us at the time that “social and interactivity layers spanning across these games” were ...

This has been quite a week. Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened: Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats. A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% ...