A 28-year-old man in Siberia has filed a lawsuit against Fallout 4 developer Bethesda claiming the game was “so addictive” that it caused him to lose his job.
According to RT News, the Krasnoyarsk-based player downloaded the game and proceeded to play the game excessively for three weeks, during which he frequently stayed home from work, and stopped speaking with friends and family. During this time, his wife asked him for a divorce, which led him to retreat into the game further. As a result of his prolonged emotional and psychological dependence, the man was eventually fired from his job. He also claims the game caused him to stop eating and sleeping.
The man believes Bethesda Game Studios and Russian localization firm SoftClub should have put a warning label on Fallout 4 to infom him it would be a potentially addictive product. For not doing so, the man has asked for 500,000 rubles (about $7,050 USD) as compensation for his emotional distress.
“If I knew that this game could have become so addictive, I would have become a lot more wary of it,” the man said in a statement. “I would not have bought it, or I would have left it until I was on holiday or until the New Year holidays.”
This case, should it go to trial, would be the first hearing regarding video game addiction seen by a Russian court. The result could set a legal precedent in the country as to whether players could sue developers for the psychological impact of their products. Meanwhile, game developers are currently facing similar legal challenges: In the U.S., Hawaii resident Craig Smallwood has sued developer NCSoft for not placing a warning label on its MMORPG, Lineage 2. Smallwood claims that his 20,000 hours logged into the game caused extreme depression and anxiety, for which he was eventually hospitalized.
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.
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