Whats happened this week
Been a while since we’ve done one of these, but there isn’t much crazy news out there to get a decent length podcast out, so what better way to still get that fix of gaming news than through a good old fashioned blog post!
SCREEN AUSTRALIA ANNOUNCES OVER $3 MILLION IN SUPPORT OF THE DIGITAL GAMES INDUSTRY:
Not that long ago we reported on the fact that the Victorian Government was looking to invest some serious funding into the video game industry, as well as other creative areas such as animation. Well, now we’ve started to see the fruits of that investment, with the first wave of studios that have been granted Screen Australias ‘First Nations Games Studio’ fund, which was launched back in early May to help support games studios that were being helmed by First Nations game developers. The two game developers that have each been granted $300,000 AUD are GUCK and Awesome Black, who are among some of the first development studios to be granted these funds, which is a first of its kind here in Australia.
This announcement comes directly after the Federal Government introduced the new Digital Games Tax Offset, which aims to incentivise smaller studios and projects that have budgets over $500,000, with a 30% tax incentive. The investment is also paired up with $12m over four years, starting from 2023/2024, which aims to help continue supporting small independent studios through Screen Australia.
You can read more about what specific projects this funding is going towards here!
CS PLAYERS THINK THEY’VE FIGURED OUT COUNTER-STRIKE 2 RELEASE DATE:
Earlier this year in March, Valve shockingly announced that they have been developing Counter-Strike 2, and to many players surprise, it was actually in a very playable state. So much so, that some lucky gamers were granted access to early previews of the game, to test out what changes had been made.
Well, now that more and more people have had access to the early previews, CSGO fans have think they’ve cracked Valves code on when the game is officially releasing. One ex-CS professional player, hobshy, thinks he has figured out that the game could be releasing on either the 5th of August, or the 24th of August, all because he… found some clocks on one of the maps.
Now, being realistic this is just a texture of a clock, and doesn’t really mean anything. Knowing Valve, they have a release date planned, but having seen the scale of changes they’re looking to make to that game, the official release of the game could still be a good couple of months away. We’ll just have to wait and see what Gaben has to say in the coming weeks.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 is one of Xbox's most-played games right now:
Even though the game is 20 years old (holy shit am I that old…), Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 just can’t seem to quit, as its recently become one of the most populated online games on Xbox Live this past week.
After a recent fix to the servers that the classic Call of Duty games are held on, games such as Black Ops 1 & 2, and Modern Warefare 2 & 3 have seen a massive spike in player numbers, as it has now become much easier to find fully packed out multiplayer games. What used to take anywhere between 15-45 minutes to find a full lobby, can now take just seconds. And guess what I’ve been doing the past couple of days. Taking way back to 2013, and running some Black Ops 2 with the boys like its high school all over again. And man is it fun.
Well, I think that covers most of the “exciting” things that have happened this week, but I’m sure as I’ve written this a bunch of fun news has dropped. But instead of reading more news after you’ve just read this, why not sit back and watch out latest gameplay video that got put up late last week?
