The news, part two:

Awesome Games Done Quick raises a record $3.5 million for charity
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/awesome-games-done-quick-raises-a-record-dollar35-million-for-charity/
(...)
The Games Done Quick Twitter account has announced that the 2022 instalment of AGDQ raised a whopping $3,431,680 for Prevent Cancer, an organisation dedicated to prevention and early detection of the disease. This makes it by some distance the most money one of these events has raised so far (further donations have been made subsequent to the below tweet's total figure).

Activision Blizzard denies report that CEO Bobby Kotick blocked release of internal discipline report
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/nearly-40-activision-blizzard-employees-have-been-removed-since-july-over-misconduct-claims/
A new Wall Street Journal report says Activision Blizzard has fire or pushed out 37 employees since July 2021 as part of the company's investigation into complaints of sexual harassment and other workplace misconduct, while 44 more have faced other forms of discipline. The report also shows that the company has collected roughly 700 reports of possible workplace misconduct—some of them separate reports about the same incidents—over the same period.
>> The "other" Activision-Blizzard news is down below.

Logistics players in MMO wargame Foxhole 'go on strike'
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/logistics-players-in-mmo-wargame-foxhole-go-on-strike/
(...)
As reported by NME, 1800 Foxhole players have signed an open letter from the "Logistics Organization for General Improvement,'' or LOGI, outlining eleven issues with the role they would like Siege Camp to address. The developer did not respond to LOGI by their deadline of January 10, so it's organizers have requested that signees stop playing the logistics role, going "on strike" as it were and potentially starving players in other roles of ammunition, weapons, and the like.

Blaseball is being made into a two-player competitive card game
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/blaseball-is-being-made-into-a-two-player-competitive-card-game/
Blaseball is not quite baseball. As we explained in 2020, It's "a simulated baseball league with the occasional Hellmouth" which wrapped up its ninth season with a goddamn JRPG boss fight. In 2021 Blaseball evolved into a "massively co-operative tactical strategy game" that somehow saw a team sucked into the nether realm by a black hole. Something like that, anyway.
Soon all of that strangeness will come to the corporeal realm as Blaseball: The Card Game, a competitive game for two players, each of whom will lead a Blaseball team through the top and bottom of the ninth inning. It's being developed by board game company Wayfinder Games in partnership with Blaseball developer The Game Band, but will be completely separate from and have no interactions with the Blaseball website.

Fortnite teases the return of Tilted Towers on Twitter
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/fortnite-teases-the-return-of-tilted-towers-on-twitter/
Tilted Towers was an infamous landmark from Fortnite's earlier days: a dense, multilevel area with high spawn rates for gear but also plenty of places for enemies to hide, leaving it a high-risk, high-reward drop zone and a natural setting for tense, memorable firefights. It's seen some variations and throwbacks in various updates over the years, but has been MIA for some time.

DICE is working on a fix for Battlefront 2's invincibility glitch
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/dice-is-working-on-a-fix-for-battlefront-2s-invincibility-glitch/
In October of last year Star Wars: Battlefront 2's blasters-and-lightsabers power fantasy started degenerating into something out of a bad dream. All of the players in a match would sometimes find themselves unable to die. Dealing damage sees them stuck at 1hp indefinitely, like they've engaged Buddha mode, and even the game's out-of-bounds triggers would fail to kill players, leading to immortal lightsaber dance parties under the world geometry.
As reported by IGN, the problem is exclusive to PC, and may be occurring more frequently as time goes on. Thankfully, DICE is aware of the issue and seems to be taking steps to address it. Community manager Kevin Johnson, responding to a thread on Battlefield 2042's (another DICE title) subreddit, claimed that "progress was made towards getting a fix in place." We still don't have word of when this fix may come, however.
>> Took them a while to do something. But, of course, they've been busy with 2042.

God of War hotfix takes aim at 'out of memory' errors
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/god-of-war-hotfix-takes-aim-at-out-of-memory-errors/
God of War finally launched on PC last week, and it is very good. (...)
Of course, there's no such thing as a completely flawless launch, and some users have been reporting out of memory errors, even on high-end rigs. After digging into the complaints, Sony found that most of the reports were coming from people with new 12th-Gen Intel CPUs with integrated graphics. Disabling those integrated graphics was an effective (but obviously not ideal) workaround, but now a hotfix is available in an "experimental" branch on Steam that will hopefully provide a more user-friendly solution.
>> Maybe this hotfix will solve your problems, zero.

Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/microsoft-will-acquire-activision-blizzard/
Microsoft has announced it will buy troubled developer and publisher Activision Blizzard.
The landmark acquisition is valued at around $68.7 billion, being bought out at $95 a share. It's Microsoft's biggest acquisition to date, and once the transaction closes it'll make the company the world's third-largest in gaming by revenue.
>> BOOM! The (probably) biggest news of the year. Let's hope MSoft doesn't try to make their own store again because, with Bethesda and now Acti-Blizz, they would succeed this time around. Too bad they aren't firing Kotick. Anyway, here's the thread about this surprise, made by SKMBlake.

One of the biggest gaming news of the year, no doubt about it. Between Bethesda and now Acti-Blizz, console players have no other option but getting an Xbox to play most of the games they love.

And we'll see how it affects PC gaming.

(Sorry that I also posted this bit of news, I couldn't check the thread before posting them and didn't see your post)

Why are you sorry, JEMC. You keep this thread going. Yea big bomba bombshell news. 

Last COD i bought was Black Ops 4. I super like the Blizzard side of the company though. I mean they have not been all great recently but the potential and ips are there. I honest don't feel that good of a deal either as games coming to game pass. 

Atleast with Blizzard games. The money they charge for them. You get 10 times back in return most times as they support their games over years, or atleast they used to. So i mean if their games are good, i'd just prefer buying them. 

NVIDIA establishes a new CPU R&D group in Israel

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-establishes-a-new-cpu-rd-group-in-israel

The seeds being planted


NVIDIA GeForce GT 1010 has been tested in Geekbench (spoiler: it’s slow)

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-gt-1010-has-been-tested-in-geekbench-spoiler-its-slow


AMD rumored to launch Radeon RX 6X50XT Navi 21/22 cards with 18Gbps memory in Q2 2022

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-rumored-to-launch-radeon-rx-6x50xt-navi-21-22-cards-with-18gbps-memory-in-q2-2022


High-Performance CPUs & GPUs From Intel, AMD, NVIDIA To See Up To 20% Price Hike In 2022

https://wccftech.com/high-performance-cpu-gpus-from-intel-amd-nvidia-to-see-up-to-20-price-hike-in-2022/

With some luck, this MS acquisition will hopefully mean Activision/Blizzard games coming back to Steam. Either that or MS will go the opposite route and put their games on Windows store and Battle.net only. Or nothing will change but that's the least likely option.

One thing I will say is that I think Sony is gonna need PC revenue now more than ever. MS buying Activision Blizzard will cut Sonys revenue they would normally get from Activision/Blizzard buyers which is a pretty notable chunk. Call of Duty and etc sales on Playstation is pretty big on a yearly basis. So I can see Sony perhaps taking their porting games to PC more seriously as time goes on.

One advantage Sony has is they are still a Japanese company even if Playstation feels like they are largely western. So while the companies in the west could be a bit too expensive for Sony... Perhaps they can buy companies that are in Japan? Regardless of which, I do think Sony needs to buy companies so that MS doesn't buy them first...

My last CoD was... World at War, for the Wii. A present from my brother. I don't remember much about that game except that the controls sucked.

But yeah, CoD is still huge, and it could affect Sony if MSoft decided to keep that game to themselves like they're doing with Bethesda. And maybe this brings some changes to Blizzard that make it finally get out of the hole they've digged themselves into.

That's my biggest fear. Back when MSoft tried to compete with Steam, it didn't have much to offer other than Gears of War and Forza, but now they have a huge list of IPs that would move lots of gamers to their store.

Let's hope they keep things as they are, maybe bringing some Acti games to Steam, and focus on getting more people on GamePass.

The question now is, what will Sony do? They need to do something to counter this movement and there are only two possibilities for that: EA or Take-Two.

Sony will certainly need to start buying companies otherwise the longer they wait, the more companies MS will gobble up. The question is whether or not Sony has enough money to buy EA or Take-Two or Ubisoft/etc. Sony's other businesses has been kinda meh afaik. Mobile has been yikes worthy, movies has been affected by covid lockdowns and such and they seem to want to get into the car making business which needs a lot of funding. While Playstation is a success, idk if Sony has anything that gives them nearly limitless funds like Windows and Azure that MS has. Heck, Sony even uses Azure... Not to mention, I am sure the share holders are looking at how much MS is willing to spend and if the time comes, they would probably ask a lot more than the game company is probably worth.

So there's a lot of factors into it but I also don't think Sony has much of a choice but to buy a big profile company. Cause every time MS buys a gaming company, it's another part of Sonys revenue gone. Call of Duty for example is a huge chunk of revenue on Playstation due to 30% cut and once MS makes it exclusive, that's a lot less money for Sony.

I forgot about Ubi, lol.

The problem with the other divisions is one that Sony has been facing for years, and it doesn't look like it will change in  the future. And that's why they should invest on the Playstation brand to purchase one of the remaining big studios, because they 're facing less revenue from that part and, if Playstation stops bringing the money, Sony is in trouble.

They can't live out of the Spiderman movies alone, after all.