Wednesday, 2 October 2024

Game News Round-Up

Daily curated games-industry news digest for 2 October 2024.

General4 stories

Unreal 5.5 Preview 1 Released

  • Key features include Megalights - Enables you to use orders of magnitude more lights than ever before—all movable, dynamic, with realistic area shadows and the ability to light volumetric fog. A tech demo showed over over 1,000 shadow-casting lights in real time running on PlayStation 5
  • Many features have moved to production ready (such as the Skeletal Mesh editor)
  • New features include a PCG-esque character creator ("Mutable plugin"), Nanite Skeletal Meshes being more readily available .etc
  • Better curve support in animations / ability to manually select animation data from "choosers"
forums.unrealengine.com
Free Games / Subscription2 stories

New Xbox Game Pass titles for console, PC and Cloud have been revealed

  • Arriving:
  • MLB The Show 24 (Console) – October 2, Game Pass Standard
  • Open Roads (Console) – October 2, Game Pass Standard
  • Sifu (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 2, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard
  • Mad Streets (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 7, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard
  • Inscryption (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 10, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard
  • Leaving (October 15th):
  • Dyson Sphere Program (PC)
  • Everspace 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • From Space (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • F1 Manager 2023 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Scorn (Cloud, Console, and PC)
VGC
Business4 stories

Crunchyroll alumni launch indie publisher Shorelines Games

  • New label to focus on systems-based titles that "have a very clear narrative throughline"
  • CEO Kawamura previously was general manager at art products company Too Corporation Americas. He's formerly worked at the likes of Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Perfect World, Crunchyroll, and more.
  • COO Zha most recently was CEO of marketing agency Infinitize, having previously held roles at Rakuten Viki, Melwood Global, and Crunchyroll as well.
GamesIndustry.biz