The head of the Blizzard Entertainment Community Development Department, Saralyn Smith, spoke about the role of the gaming community in the company’s work and ways of cooperation between game creators and their fans. Smith spoke at the Devcom conference taking place these days in Cologne.

Hi-Rez Studios has announced the creation of three independent divisions: Titan Forge Games, Evil Mojo Games and Heroic Leap Games. Each studio will focus on its own project.

The Steam administration continues to struggle with low-quality content. The new rules of the platform restrict the access of games to the achievement system and registration in the game catalog until it reaches a certain level of trust of players. To do this, the title needs downloads and gaming sessions of real Steam users.

Valve has announced the rejection of censorship in games released on the Steam platform. The company said that they do not want to decide for gamers which games they should or should not play. Therefore, Valve allows you to publish titles on Steam with any legitimate content, with the exception of projects created for the sake of outright trolling.

The head of Microsoft Studios, Matt Booty, told MCV about the strategy that the company adheres to in the development of the gaming direction. According to him, Microsoft is interested in online games and gaming services.

Patrick Soderlund, Executive vice President of Electronic Arts, said that the company “cannot afford” the mistakes they made with the loot box system in the online shooter Star Wars Battlefront II. This concerns the future of the MMO thriller Anthem and other projects of the company.

The creator of the analytical service Steam Spy Sergey Galenkin told about the problems in the work of the resource. He tweeted about it on the service. According to Galenkin, the collection of up-to-date data is difficult due to the fact that Steam has closed access to users’ game libraries.

“Toxic” players are one of the main problems of most modern online games. Ubisoft spoke about countering the rude and interfering behavior of gamers in the tactical team shooter Rainbow Six Siege.

Square Enix announced a personnel reorganization of the board of directors. The new board includes developers who participated in the creation of a number of flagship tiles of the company.

Apple has denied some developers the placement of games and applications in the App Store due to the use of Apple branded emojis in the interface of their products. The reason for the refusal was also the emoji on the demo screenshots of the application page in the store.

Ubisoft has canceled a planned increase in the price tag for the online shooter Rainbow Six: Siege due to user dissatisfaction.

Blizzard will search for “toxic” gamers in Overwatch by videos on YouTube and other social media. Having identified a rude and aggressive player, the developer can restrict the operation of his account without waiting for a complaint from other players.

Anthem‘s online action game could decide the future of BioWare. If the project fails, Electronic Arts is able to disband the company’s offices in Austin and Edmonton. This is stated in the column of Kotaku editor-in-chief Jason Schreier.

Apple has introduced restrictions on the use of loot boxes in iOS games. The company obliged developers to disclose to users the probability of receiving each type of items before buying a loot box.

Valve intends to stop issuing Steam store game keys to the authors of “gambling-like projects” created for the sake of manipulating the trading platform’s capabilities.

The G2A game key store promised to open the sellers’ data to customers and work more transparently in the future.

The Apple Store has started to reject applications that advertise their price in the name, icons, screenshots or previews.