Month: December 2024

Loot boxes, understandably, have quite the negative connotation Come from Sports betting site VPbet. So when a recent report mentioned them in association with EA’s Skate reboot, developer Full Circle wanted to make it clear the game isn’t pay-to-win.

The official Skate account on Twitter put out a reminder about the game, saying it’s “not pay-to-win, no map areas locked behind paywall, no paid loot boxes, [and] no paid gameplay advantages.” Full Circle has previously discussed how it aims for the game’s free-to-play model to be all about cosmetics and convenience.

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At the same time as announcing the coming launch of its FanDuel TV-branded television network, American sports betting operator FanDuel Group has reportedly received the final green light to open a retail sportsbook in downtown Las Vegas.

According to a Thursday report from The Nevada Independent news organization and the New York-headquartered firm was given the okay from the Nevada Gaming Control Board some two weeks ago to bring a land-based sports wagering service to the 447-room Fremont Hotel and Casino. The source detailed that the sports betting behemoth’s plan has now received the ultimate required approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission, which means that it could premiere a 2,300 sq ft retail sportsbook inside the Boyd Gaming Corporation-owned pro…

In South Korea and local casino operator Lotte Tour Development Company Limited has reportedly received final approval to bring a gambling element to its new Jeju Dream Tower development.

According to a Thursday report from GGRAsia, the Seoul-headquartered firm opened the 1,600-room Grand Hyatt hotel within the $1.42 billion property in December and has long intended to complement this offering by premiering an almost 54,000 sq ft casino featuring an assortment of as many as 300 slots and 150 gaming tables. But, the source explained that this plan depends on the operator being given official government authorization to transfer the gambling license for its nearby Paradise Casino Jeju Lotte venue to the 38-story Jeju Dream Tower.

Conclusive consensus:

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The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), Canada’s financial intelligence agency, has issued a warning that illegal money is being laundered via iGaming sites that offer many different ways to hide suspicious funds.

Criminal exploitation of unlicensed and legitimate digital wagering operations:

In a recent newsletter, FINTRAC emphasized the “criminal exploitation“ of unlicensed and legitimate digital betting operations. In addition, it points out that the fame of online gambling has increased throughout the pandemic and has been boosted by the official approval of single-event sports wagering in Canada during 2021.

To identify cash linked to illegal activities, the aforementioned FINTRAC electronically transmits …

Prepare to be smote. Smited. Smitten. Look, they’re making another Smite—Titan Forge’s godly and enduringly popular MOBA that first released in 2014—and it’s gearing up for an alpha test, should you wish to rage against the heavens as soon as possible.

Revealed at the Smite world championships, Titan Forge is pitching Smite 2 as “everything players love about Smite 1” in a sleeker, more modern, and prettier package. The announcement boasts of a “refined user interface, updated audio, clearer spell effects, and fresh physics-based abilities” for its various gods. You’re also getting “new God pantheons, kit refinements, gameplay changes, and overhauled Relic and Item systems for deeper strategy. 

In other words, it sounds like the devs are keen to make the gam…

Microsoft has applied advanced AI towards a program that plays Minecraft in response to natural-language text prompts: Telling the character to dig, or build, would result in the character doing just that. The tech was demo’d internally to Microsoft employees, and was made using an AI other than Prometheus, the technology that Microsoft uses for its new Bing chat—developed by ChatGPT.

The development was reported by Semafor, who got it from an internal source. The Minecraft-playing AI was made as an experiment of sorts, shown off as an internal demo. Either way, the thought of an AI capable of taking an input like “build a house” or “cut down a tree” and implementing it in Minecraft is pretty impressive stuff. (That’s what Microsoft wanted to do as-of May last year, and it s…

We got a first glimpse of the upcoming game State of Decay 3 four years ago with a small teaser trailer that depicted one survivor’s journey through a frozen post-apocalyptic world. But apart from an undead deer, we didn’t actually get to see any of the zombies, which, as it turns out, fits with Undead Labs’ new creative direction.

A dev diary from Undead Labs saw the team explain why the studio recently went through a rebranding. “The previous Undead Labs logos were directly related to making a zombie game,” Wayne Laybourn, studio art director, says. “But I think we wanted something a bit bigger with a bit more room to explore.”

“What does ‘undead’ mean, and what do we want it to mean,” studio head Philip Holt adds. “And how do we make that a bigger concept than just a pr…