Legal Troubles Abound

Helldivers 2 Players Scammed by Fake Steam Listings:

On the 2nd of March, a warning was sent out on discord from the Helldivers 2 team. Several steam games had been imitating Helldivers 2 to trick unlucky shoppers. This included changing
their name, the game art, and even the developer/publisher tags. Similar fakes have popped up for Palworld and Last Epoch – so it seems popular multiplayer games are the best target for this scam. Buyer beware. All of the games involved in this have been removed, but the developers behind them are still operating on steam, which is…questionable.

Australian Studio Torus Games ceases production

On the second of March journalist Jack Ryan reported that Torus Games would be ceasing production and had laid off eight staff members. Torus Games is a Melbourne studio founded in 1994. Their website boasts of producing or contributing to 146 video games over its 28 years of operation. They’ve worked on franchises like Duke Nukem, Doom, Barbie, and Sonic. Studios closing their doors has become awfully common in the past year, but it’s particularly sad to see another Australian studio fall victim, especially one with such a long history. Thankfully, founder Bill McIntosh says it isn’t for good. In a statement to Game Developer he said “Torus isn’t being wound up. We’re basically hibernating until we work out what our next opportunity will be. It’s a good chance for us to rethink what we should focus on.”

Switch emulator creator settles Nintendo lawsuit for $2.4m

At the end of February, Nintendo sued the developer of Switch emulator “Yuzu” for facilitating piracy. Yuzu doesn’t actually provide pirated games, but it is the most common way people will
access them. For example, Nintendo claims that more than 1 million people used Yuzu to access Tears of the Kingdom illegally and before its release date. On March 4th, we found out that Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, reached a settlement with Nintendo, and now owes them $2.4 million. Additionally, Yuzu is being discontinued and they must surrender information about its development to Nintendo. They announced this on their discord server, saying: “Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.” This post also said they would be shutting down their related Patreon, Discord server, and websites.

Balatro removed from sale over ratings mistake:

Popular, poker-inspired game Balatro was temporarily removed from the switch store in several countries including Australia and New Zealand. A statement from Playstack Games attributed
this to an overnight change in rating from 3+ to 18+ due to a mistaken belief that the game promotes and provides instruction about gambling. They state emphatically that “Balatro does
not allow or encourage gambling. Balatro was developed by someone who is staunchly antigambling, and painstaking care has been taken to ensure that the game does not feature
gambling mechanics of any kind.” They have been working hard to resolve this issue and expect the game will return to all stores by the 9th of March.

Upcoming Game Releases:

•March 8: WWE 2K24 comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC
•March 8: Unicorn Overlord comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo
Switch
•March 12: Contra: Operation Galuga comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox
Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch
•March 13: Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One,
Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch