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The Federal Trade Commission announced today, March 14, that it has finalized its order for Epic Games to pay $245 million to settle claims that Epic "used dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases and let children rack up unauthorized charges without any parental involvement."The Commission voted 4-0 to approve the order, which was first announced in December 2022. You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.Size:640 × 360480 × 270…

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has hit Fortnite developer Epic Games with a £201million ($245million) fine, due to the company allegedly letting children “rack up unauthorized charges without any parental involvement”. The order was announced today (March 14) and states that Epic Games must pay the fine due to “dark patterns” that allegedly tricked players into making unintended game purchases. The FTC claimed that Epic used design tricks to get players “of all ages” to unintentionally make in-game…

Indie Souls-like Bleak Faith: Forsaken has been heavily criticized for supposedly ripping off animations from Elden Ring. After Bleak Faith's PC release on March 10, 2023, Twitter user Meowmaritus shared a video of the two games side-by-side, comparing what appear to be nearly indistinguishable animations. Despite the claims, Bleak Faith's developer Archangel Studios denies the accusations, pointing to the Epic Marketplace as the source of certain assets used in the game.Meowmaritus is a Dark Souls modder…

Call of Duty Mobile will be supported "for the long haul," Activision has confirmed following reports that the popular mobile title will be phased out in favor of the upcoming Call of Duty Warzone Mobile.In a statement to the game's account, Activision said COD Mobile is an "important part of the entire Call of Duty franchise and our overall mobile strategy." The statement went on to say it expects to continue to support the game with a "robust roadmap of fresh new CODM content, activities, and updates…

In a community Q&A answered by Sons of the Forest developers Endnight Games, the developer of the survival success story has hinted at a few plans for the game’s path to 1.0 release. Endnight is keeping most of their cards close to their chest, but a lot of the details are focused on plans for companions Kelvin and Virginia. You can see the entire Q&A, with questions harvested from the game’s Discord and Reddit communities, in the below video (via PC Gamer.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t30hgqKRuPM “We have…

Believe it or not, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The game continues to sell millions of copies every few months, and its multiplayer mode--GTA Online--gets updates on a weekly basis. Rockstar North design director Scott Butchard has reflected on GTA Online's 10th anniversary this year, saying the team never imagined what the game would become."When we started out, I don't think we could have ever dreamed we'd still be going 10 years on. The success of GTA Online…

What Is Distributed Tracing? The rise of microservices has enabled users to create distributed applications that consist of modular services rather than a single functional unit. This modularity makes testing and deployment easier while preventing a single point of failure with the application. While applications begin to scale and distribute their resources amongst multiple cloud-native services, tracing a single transaction becomes tedious and nearly impossible. Hence, developers need to apply distributed tracing…

Bring joy to your fellow developers by making your software easy to use through environment and build automation. With code examples in Python and Hatch.Photo by Carol Jeng on UnsplashMost developers hate legacy software, why? “Legacy” in our industry means a codebase that has been in service for many years, usually the original developers are no longer in the company, and nobody is able to really maintain it.Some important ingredients in the legacy software recipe are: lack of documentation, hard-to-understand code,…

Horror studio creeps into the indie gaming scene Blumhouse Productions, the film production company behind a litany of modern horror classics, has announced the establishment of new division Blumhouse Games, with which it expects to oversee the development and publishing of independent horror releases on PC, console, and mobile platforms. The new gaming division plans to work alongside indie developers with the creation, marketing and publishing of their own titles. Following its initial movie model, Blumhouse Games is…

In 2012, two former students from Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Northern Dutch city of Groningen, took a major gamble. They made a list of 100 companies they’d like to work for — including Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Uber — and hacked them. As you can imagine, this little stunt certainly got their attention. Now, $159.4M in investment later, their cybersecurity company, HackerOne, reached unicorn status in 2022 and counts big players like Nintendo, AT&T, Hyatt, GM, and…