It’s been a rough year for the games industry. An estimated 9,000 people have been laid off in the industry this year, affecting employees at companies like Embracer Group, Epic Games, Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Frontier, Codemasters, BioWare, Paradox, and many more. We’ve also seen the shuttering of numerous studios, including Volition, Free Radical, and Shadow Gambit creators Mimimi Games. Layoffs have also affected companies adjacent to video games, like Hasbro, which laid of 1,100 people two weeks before Christmas.

Hence, it’s nice to have some positive industry news to write about for a change. Rather than joining the seemingly endless layoff brigade, Games Workshop has given its employees an end-of-year cash bonus of £2,500. That’ll buy a few prezzies.<…

When Diablo 4 players aren’t smashing bosses into the ground in one swing or becoming invulnerable with an amulet, most of their time is spent squinting at loot. Now that items pour out of every chest and monster since season 2, your inventory gets stuffed real quick, and the process of sorting through all that gear has become one of the game’s worst activities.

Blizzard is aware of the issue and plans to fix it with a massive rework to item stats in season 4. But in the meantime, when season 3 launches next Tuesday, items will drop at a higher item power more often, which should at least make all that time scanning your inventory more valuable.

In Diablo 4, item power determines how high the stats on gear can roll, whether they’re Legendary or Rare. There are breakpoints at…

Apex Legends is in it for the long haul. The game’s developer, Respawn Entertainment, just opened a new studio in Madison, Wisconsin, with an eye to keeping the Apex series going for another “10 to 15 years,” according to game director Steven Ferreira. As someone who has never been able to answer the question ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ I guess I admire his foresightedness.

In a chat with GamesIndustry.biz, Respawn bigwigs Daniel Suarez, Ryan Burnett, and Ferreira said that the Wisconsin studio would focus on Apex’s live services development: “Building the live service of Apex is a constant cycle of trying new things and experimenting,” said Ferreira, “and that’s what Wisconsin is going to give us”. 

In particular, Ferreira namechecked stuff “like Legend …

Helldivers 2’s systems aren’t perfect—and while I’ve not had this problem often myself, enough players have complained about receiving unjust boots from their games that there might be room for improvement.

In case you’re unaware, the game’s current system for dealing with problem players is to give the host unilateral control over who stays and who gets sent to their nearest democratic officer for re-education. Which has its ups and downs.

When it comes to positives, this system lets folks quickly and efficiently deal with troublemakers—the slow process of a vote kick can take a while, during which a team-killing menace could set your whole crew on the backfoot, or lock in an extraction before your squad’s ready to depart. 

On the negative side, this …

Building a city in the sky in 2020’s Airborne Kingdom was a mostly chill experience—while you were in a constant war with gravity as you attempted to expand your city while keeping it aloft and balanced, there were no traditional enemies to fight. It was also a relatively short game that could be fully completed in about 10 hours.

That’s all changing in its sequel, Airborne Empire, which is due out in early access later this year and now has a free demo as part of Steam Next Fest. The once-friendly skies are now peppered with enemy planes, cannonballs fired from forts on the ground, and other airborne enemies to contend with while you grow and manage your flying city.

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There’s also a much bigger world to explore, which means the airborne city builder will take …

Generally speaking, when you’re talking about “mechs,” you’re talking about massive machines of war in games like Battletech or Iron Harvest. Lightyear Frontier is an unusual but fun-looking twist on that formula: It’s a farming sim, and your mechs are farm machines—the fusion-powered, bipedal tractors of the future. Autocannons are out, irrigation hoses are in.

The gameplay reveal at the 2022 Future Games Show looked promising, but today developer Frame Break announced that it has decided to delay the early access launch that was planned for this spring. A new release target has not been set.

“With Lightyear Frontier, we want to make sure that you feel powerful and engaged in the mech while starting your own homestead, constructing a variety of structures, farming exo…