ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has reportedly laid off hundreds of employees from two video game studios at locations in China.
According to a South China Morning Post report (courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz), people familiar with the matter said the Beijing-based social media company has downsized game development jobs at Shanghai’s Wushuang Studio by rendering them redundant or transferring employees internally after 101 Studio shut down in June. They also claim that it has also cut off game development jobs at Jianang Studio in Hangzhou, though there was no word if the employees affected went through similar avenues at Wushuang.
Sources said that ByteDance’s gaming department will maintain its operations at its Shanghai office. However, it will focus on supporting game titles that have already launched.
Reports of the layoffs come over three months after TikTok began investing in video games, testing them on young audiences in Vietnam and placing minigames in the app in an effort to diversify its revenue streams. Last February, ByteDance launched a stand-alone website for its flagship gaming studio Nuverse, which already has several games in its portfolio, including One Piece: Blood Routes.
Despite ByteDance’s heavy investment in the gaming industry, reports of redundancies and transfers come amid woes wrought by the Chinese government’s crackdown on video games. The censors already scrutinize every detail in games presented to them, from their plot down to the characters’ outfits — as they have done with Genshin Impact — to ensure that the content doesn’t offend the country’s culture. They are now going so far as to reduce the number of new game licenses they issue, leaving developers concerned that some of their projects will never see the light of day.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.