With the Rio Olympic Games beginning this Friday Blizzard is getting into the competitive spirit with their newest Overwatch update. An entire limited edition collection of Olympic-themed skins, sprays, voice lines and other goodies have been added to Overwatch’s loot boxes just in time for the international sporting competition.
All told there are over 100 different collectible items that are available through the Summer Games Loot boxes. Each box is guaranteed to contain at least one item from the new limited time set. These items are available via in-game loot boxes earned for leveling up through the regular progression system or by purchasing them for real cash. The Summer Games items will only be available August 22nd.
Everyone who logs into Overwatch from now until the 22nd receives a free loot box from the main menu!
Here is a detailed look at several of the exclusive Overwatch Summer Games skins:
I4U’s Luigi Lugmayr placed Niantic’s Product Marketing Manager, Yennie Solheim Fuller, at the center of the blame for Niantic’s poor communication with their fanbase.
Why is Niantic basically silent throughout the turmoil of viral growth that cause all kinds of issues?
The person who is responsible for PR and Marketing at Niantic gave birth two days after the launch of Pokemon Go. Yennie Solheim Fuller is on maternity leave.
First of all, I am not sure how Lugmayr decided that Fuller was responsible for the PR of Niantic. While she previously acted as the Marketing & Communications Manager when Niantic was still under Google, she left that position for her role as a Marketing Manager a year ago. Although she still may have been responsible for public relations before her maternity leave, there are no indications anywhere online that is the case.
Secondly, if Fuller gave birth two days after launch, you can bet that Niantic had months of time to plan for her absence. If Fuller had been in a car accident instead, Niantic wouldn’t have had months to prepare, and would she have still have been blamed? Though this is a rather moot point if Fuller was not in charge of public relations at all.
Lugmayr does state later in the article that “Because nobody at Niantic anticipated the extreme popularity of Pokemon Go, the company has likely not prepared a replacement for Solheim while she is on maternity leave.” Though this statement removes some of the blame from Fuller, it falls painfully short after blaming her maternity leave from marketing as the reason for Niantic’s public relations failure.
Lugmayr also fails to recognize that Niantic has been wellknown for its slow responsetimes and lack of communication with its community. The “silence” his article focuses on as a huge issue has been Niantic’s normal behavior ever since they launched Ingress in 2013.
Articles like this are extremely detrimental to the game industry and the women who are part of it. It is no secret that the game industry has problems with sexism and low amounts of female employees, only 22% according to IGDA’s 2015 survey. The women who are part of the industry are often victims of harassment, are paid less than men, and rarely receive maternity leave at all.
Calling Fuller’s maternity leave the “sweet reason” that Niantic is being unresponsive will make companies shy away from hiring women and providing maternity leave, and discourage other women from pursuing careers in games knowing that they may be unfairly incriminated for a failure of their company.
This shameful article not only places unwarranted fault on Fuller, but it features her image as the banner photo along with the jeering “sweet reason” in the title, effectively painting a target on her. Fuller’s Twitter is full of harassment and blame.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://twitter.com/YennieSolheim”>@YennieSolheim</a> You are doing a horrible PR & Marketing. Quit NOW!</p>— Réudrigo (@Aristeaux) <a href=”https://twitter.com/Aristeaux/status/759936407284527105″>August 1, 2016</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://twitter.com/YennieSolheim”>@YennieSolheim</a> so the reason that <a href=”https://twitter.com/NianticLabs”>@NianticLabs</a> has been silent since the game released is that ur on maternity leave?</p>— Venkat Krishnan (@krish_ven) <a href=”https://twitter.com/krish_ven/status/756236892056715265″>July 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
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Women in the game industry need support of the public and press, not to suffer attacks for failures outside of their control, especially while on leave. It is shameful that Lugmayr would make Fuller the scapegoat for Niantic’s habitual lack of communication. With a USA Alexa rank of 31239 and a global Alexa rank of 82870, one would hope that I4U would have better quality journalism than is contained in Lugmayr’s article.
Sony’s PlayStation Network plays host to a sale on Bethesda’s recent & past catalogue of digital titles for both the PlayStation 4 and PS3. This sale is in celebration of the upcoming QuakeCon convention, which will have events live-streamed this weekend from Texas.
Recent titles like iD Software’s Doom reboot and older critically acclaimed games like The Evil Within (2014) for PS4 have been heavily discounted. For FPS fans this is a great deal to save a huge chunk of change on DOOM, which hasn’t even been on the market for two full months.
Other titles from other developers under the Bethesda banner include discounts on the Fallout franchise. Last year’s immersive Fallout 4 gets a substantial temporary price-cut alongside DLC for the PS3’s Fallout 3.
Here is a partial list of the titles available. All prices listed are in Canadian dollars with PSN Plus (10% discount applied).
DOOM Franchise
DOOM (2016) Standard Edition – $39.99
DOOM BFG Edition – $19.99
DOOM Classic – $8.99
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 Standard Edition – $39.99
Fallout 4: Automatron DLC Add-On – $10.99
Fallout 4: Wasteland Workshop – $4.99
Fallout 4: Far Harbor Add-on – $26.24
Fallout 4 Digital Deluxe Edition – $104.99
The Evil Within
The Evil Within Standard Edition – $17.49
The Evil Within Digital Deluxe – $22.49
The Evil Within Season Pass – $14.99
Wolfenstein Franchise
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood – $12.49
Wolfenstein: The New Order – $14.99
Fallout 3 DLC (PS3)
Fallout: New Vegas Lonesome Road – $7.49
Fallout: New Vegas Courier’s Stash – $1.49
Fallout: New Vegas Dead Money – $7.49
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta – $3.79
Fallout 3: Broken Steel – $3.79
The full list of available titles in the Quakecon sales is available on Sony’s store website.
Isometric adventure Lumo will be getting a physical retail release this year. Lumo release earlier this year to wild acclaim on steam, The isometric puzzler has gotten high prise for emulating the style of 80s and 90s puzzlers in a modern environment. Now that game will get a physical release on the Ps4. The boxed edition of Lumo will release in the USA on PlayStation®4 system at participating retailers on August 30 priced at $19.99. In Europe, boxed versions for PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®Vita systems will be available on September 9, priced £19.99/€19.99.
“Lumo is a very special game to us,” said Martin Defries, Managing Director of Rising Star Games. “Having nurtured the project along its development journey and working so closely with the extremely creative talent at Triple Eh?, it is a game we wholeheartedly believe in and a game we want to continue to bring to as wide an audience as possible.”
Lumo has been showered with accolades and exceptional review scores, including a ‘4 star’ review from USGamer.net, ‘9 out of 10’ scores from PushSquare and PSNation, a ‘4 out of 5’ from GameRevolution, a Eurogamer ‘Recommended’, and a ’10 out of 10′ from GamesDen. It has been described as “a wonderful little thing, gorgeous and intricate,” (HardcoreGamer ‘4 out of 5’) and also “stunning” and “quite brilliant” (Retrogamer ‘9 out of 10’). Brokenjoysicks has not yet reviewed Lumo, but keep your eyes open and it may come later.
Niantic the developers behind Pokemon Gohave finally issued a rather lengthy statement addressing user’s complaints after the removal of the ‘steps’ feature that allowed trainers to track nearby Pokemon, the closure of 3rd party sites like PokeVision that allowed players to see real time monster placement and the lack of availability in South America.
This particular Facebook post comes after a number of users on the r/PokemonGO subreddit gained notoriety for successfully requesting refunds for in-game purchases. Users have reported receiving partial or full refunds for every dollar spent on Pokemon Go by claiming that the most recent update, which removed the steps feature, damaged the game and does not fulfill the original vision promised by Niantic.
Here are the instructions provided to iphone users by [Insert username] from reddit to get a refund on itunes. This particular thread exploded with over 3,000+ replies – ranging from outraged, doubtful of both Nintendo & Niantic to straight up finding the lack of communication humorous.
2.Login with your Apple ID user name (typically your email address) and password.
3.Select the appropriate tab—all, music, movies, TV shows, apps, or books.
4.Find the purchase you want refunded
5.Select Open item but not functions as expected
6.Fill in the description,
Niantic’s statement probably doesn’t bring the kind of news that many trainers were expecting: The changes 3-step has helped ease load on the servers in the early days of the game, but the feature was not functioning to Niantic’s “product vision” and thus had to be removed. Their lack of communication is apparently due to the fact that Niantic’s staff are working around the clock to improve Pokemon Go and as of publication Niantic is still hiring for a dedicated community manager for Pokemon Go.
As many of you know, we recently made some changes to Pokémon GO.
– We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve upon the underlying design. The original feature, although enjoyed by many, was also confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals. We will keep you posted as we strive to improve this feature.
– We have limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokémon GO to users around the world. The large number of users has made the roll-out of Pokémon GO around the world an… interesting… challenge. And we aren’t done yet! Yes, Brazil, we want to bring the game to you (and many other countries where it is not yet available).
We have read your posts and emails and we hear the frustration from folks in places where we haven’t launched yet, and from those of you who miss these features. We want you to know that we have been working crazy hours to keep the game running as we continue to launch globally. If you haven’t heard us Tweeting much it’s because we’ve been heads down working on the game. But we’ll do our best going forward to keep you posted on what’s going on.
Be safe, be nice to your fellow trainers, and keep on exploring.
The Pokémon GO team”
What do you think about Niantic’s statement? Do you have faith they will fix Pokemon Go before the player base leaves en mass?
