"A newly-enhanced edition of the original Quake has been officially revealed by Bethesda at QuakeCon 2021," reports GamesRadar+ The updated edition of the classic 1996 first-person shooter is out right now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Nintendo Switch.

There's updated visuals, online and local multiplayer, and new content available in the enhanced edition of Quake. Two expansions for the original game — The Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity — are included in all purchases, as are the Dimensions of the Past and the brand new Dimension of the Machine expansions, the latter two of which are developed by Wolfenstein studio MachineGames.
"Those who own Quake on Steam or from the official Bethesda.net store can access the update for free," reports Ars Technica: The multi-platform release could be seen as positive news after Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, a move that generated worries about Microsoft/Bethesda exclusivity moving forward. For those who don't mind waiting, Limited Run Games will offer physical disc and card releases for the PS4 and Switch, respectively, including a pricey limited edition that comes in a box that looks like the in-game nail-gun ammo...

According to a press release, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game will run at full 4K and 120 fps once a future update goes live.

Programmer Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a former employee at Loki Software, one of the first companies to port videogames from Microsoft Windows to Linux, according to his Wikipedia page. He's still hosting many Loki software projects at icculus.org, "as well as several new projects created by himself and others."

He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement: I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game!

You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.

A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!

Apple's Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company -- despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed "Games Futures." From a report: The "need-to-know" document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed "the world's largest games platform." Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays -- all tied together by Google services and a "low-cost universal portable game controller" that gamers can pair with any device, even a TV.

After months of rumors and speculation, Kotaku has learned from sources that Rockstar Games may be remastering three classic Grand Theft Auto games. Currently, it appears these games will be released later this fall for a multitude of platforms, including the portable Nintendo Switch. From a report: For the past year, rumors have swirled on Twitter, Reddit, and various message boards that Rockstar is working on remakes or remasters of classic, PS2-era Grand Theft Auto titles. These rumors only grew in popularity as Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, used DMCA takedowns to remove classic GTA mods from the internet while announcing that the publisher had three remastered games in development. While Kotaku can't confirm what all of those teased remastered titles specifically are, we can confirm via corroborating details from three sources that GTA remasters are currently in the final stages of development.

Amazon.com withdrew a set of staff guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours and dictated how they could distribute them, according to a company email. Bloomberg: The longstanding policies within Amazon Game Studios had drawn criticism on social media over the last month after a Google engineer posted about them. Some game developers described the rules as "draconian." The old policies mandated that employees of the games division who were moonlighting on projects would need to use Amazon products, such as Amazon Web Services, and sell their games on Amazon digital stores. It also gave the company "a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license" to intellectual property rights of any games developed by its employees.

MojoKid writes: AMD officially unveiled the Radeon RX 6600 XT in late July but the cards have officially launched today, aimed at 1080p gaming. In a review at HotHardware, PowerColor is offering both a high-end Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil and its somewhat more mainstream "Fighter" branded counterpart, for example. Whereas AMD's reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 25895MHz, the PowerColor Red Devil peaks at 2428MHz (Game) and 2607MHz (Boost). Those higher GPU clocks result in higher compute performance and fillrate, etc., but the memory configuration and frequency are the same -- so in memory bandwidth constrained situations, performance won't be all that much different.

Performance-wise, with most game titles that use traditional rasterization, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is clearly faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 and previous-gen cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2060 Super. However, when you factor ray tracing into the equation, NVIDIA has a distinct and significant advantage still. The Radeon RX 6600 XT Fighter should sell for at or close to its $379 MSRP. PowerColor says that they should be readily available for gamers to purchase today.

People will no longer be able to play the digital version of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle in third-party apps, according to an announcement made by the Times on Monday. The Verge reports: Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site or on its own crossword app. Downloadable PDFs, in addition to the physical newspaper, will still be available for people who want to print and play. Until now, crosswords were available in the Across Lite .puz file format, so anyone with a Times games subscription could download a puzzle and open it in the desktop or mobile app of their choice. The change applies not just to future puzzles but to the archive of puzzles that are currently in the .puz format.

Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."

Activision Blizzard President J. Allen Brack is stepping down from the company after Blizzard was sued by the state of California last week for discriminating against women and fostering a "frat boy" culture that entailed sexual harassment and discrimination. He will be replaced by two executive vice presidents, who will serve as co-leaders. From a report: Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra, the former executive vice president of development and the former EVP and general manager of platform technology, respectively, will take the helm at Blizzard and share responsibility for development and operational accountability. The company is continuing to face an outpouring of stories of misconduct, and workers who organized a walkout have demanded a set of new rules for handling reports of sexism, harassment and discrimination.

The hackers who breached Electronic Arts last month have released the entire cache of stolen data after failing to extort the company and later sell the stolen files to a third-party buyer. From a report: The data, dumped on an underground cybercrime forum on Monday, July 26, is now being widely distributed on torrent sites. According to a copy of the dump obtained by The Record, the leaked files contain the source code of the FIFA 21 soccer game, including tools to support the company's server-side services. The existence of this leak was initially disclosed on June 10, when the hackers posted a thread on an underground hacking forum claiming to be in possession of EA data, which they were willing to sell for $28 million.

Developer Harrison Allen has developed a playable clone of Pokemon for the Pebble smartwatch, which was officially discontinued in late 2016 after the company was sold to Fitbit. Gizmodo reports: According to the game's developer, Harrison Allen, Pebblemon uses a graphics library they created that replicates Pokémon Yellow, which was the first version of the popular game series to take advantage of the Game Boy Color's limited color palette. As a result, while Pebblemon appears to be playable using the Pebble smartwatch's buttons (the wearable lacked a touchscreen), it's a smaller version of the original game featuring "various areas within the Johto region" but players will still "Encounter all 251 Pokemon from the Game Boy Color games" and will still be able to find items to help them out during gameplay.

Pebblemon is currently available through the Rebble.io repository, which was created shortly after the company died as a place to continue to allow users to maintain their smart wearables, and to give developers a way to distribute new apps. If you don't already use it, you'll have to jump through a few hoops to get it to play nice with your Pebble watch, but it doesn't appear terribly difficult. Alternately, Allen has provided all of his source code through GitHub, if you're in the mood to compile or adapt it into something else yourself. There are two things to keep in mind if you want to try Pebblemon out: it's only compatible with the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Round, and Pebble 2 models -- not the original version of the wearable -- and you're going to want to jump on this as soon as possible because there's a very good chance Nintendo's eager lawyers are already aware of the game, and are already working to wipe it off the face of the Earth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A cybersecurity company whose security researcher had once been harassed by Blizzard employees at a hacking conference charged the game developer a 50 percent "misogyny tax" when it sought a quote for security services, according to a new report from Waypoint. The researcher, Emily Mitchell, told Waypoint that she approached the Blizzard booth during the annual Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in 2015 to see if the major video game company had any open positions. Her shirt, which referenced [to] a security process known as "penetration testing," prompted two unnamed Blizzard employees to ask her questions laced with misogyny and sexual double entendre. "One of them asked me when was the last time I was personally penetrated, if I liked being penetrated, and how often I got penetrated," Mitchell said. "I was furious and felt humiliated, so I took the free swag and left."

Two years later, Blizzard approached cybersecurity firm Sagitta HPC (now known as Terahash) to request a quote on one of Sagitta HPC's password-cracking boxes. Mitchell, who was Sagitta HPC's chief operating officer at the time, saw Blizzard's request and immediately remembered what occurred at Black Hat USA 2015. After learning of the incident from Mitchell, Sagitta HPC founder and chief executive officer Jeremi M. Gosney responded to Blizzard's inquiry with a lengthy message decrying her treatment at the hands of Blizzard's employees. "[R]ather than dismiss you and tell you that we will not do business with you, we'd like to give Blizzard the opportunity to redeem themselves," Gosney wrote. (He eventually shared the email on Twitter with Blizzard's name redacted.) "We are committed to combating inequality, and I am calling on Blizzard to do the same. As you may or may not know, today is International Women's Day. And in honor of this day, we are attaching a few conditions if Blizzard wishes to do business with us."

These conditions included a 50 percent "misogyny tax" on any business Sagitta HPC did with Blizzard (to be used as a donation to three different organizations devoted to support girls and women in the tech industry), Blizzard becoming a Gold-level sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and a formal letter of apology from Blizzard executives to Mitchell in which they'd further dedicate themselves to supporting equality for women and sexual harassment training. [...] In 2017, the organizers of Black Hat USA, the Las Vegas hacking conference at which Mitchell was originally accosted, promised her that they would not allow Blizzard back as a sponsor for future events. As far as Kotaku can tell from historical information, neither Blizzard nor Activision have had a presence at the cybersecurity event since the year Blizzard staff harassed Mitchell. "Once this incident was reported to us, the Company began an investigation, promptly removed all unauthorized cameras, and notified the authorities," Activision Blizzard told Waypoint. "The authorities conducted a thorough investigation, with the full cooperation of the Company. As soon as the authorities and Company identified the perpetrator, he was terminated for his abhorrent conduct. The Company provided crisis counselors to employees, onsite and virtually, and increased security."

Playdate, the portable, one-bit gaming system with an analog crank as a primary control option, won't be shipping to those who preordered the console anytime soon. According to CNET, "shipping has been delayed to some point in 2022." From the report: There's only one place you will be able to get yourself a Playdate. You'll need to head straight to the Playdate website, and be ready to pay $179 for the console. This price is for just the console, and not its Stereo Dock accessory or Pen, which can be ordered separately. The only accessory available right now is a $30 cover, which is only available in a bright purple. The prices and availability for these other accessories have not yet been announced.

To avoid a PlayStation 5-style hunt for availability, the Playdate will not sell out. Instead, the ship date will be bumped incrementally back to match the company's ability to acquire the parts necessary to assemble the consoles. At the time this was last updated, shipping has been delayed to some point in 2022. Oddly enough, there is no set launch date for this console just yet. The Playdate is supposed to be shipping the first 20,000 units at some point in 2021. It's likely Panic will be giving more information on a shipping date in one of its video updates like the one we saw in June.

The PlayStation 5 just crossed a significant milestone. Sony has revealed that it has sold 10 million PS5 consoles as of July 18th, eight months after the system's November 12th debut. From a report: The company considered that no mean feat between the pandemic and ongoing chip shortages that reportedly held sales back. It's now Sony's fastest-selling console to date, outpacing the PS4 by nearly a month. Sales have slowed down since launch. Sony racked up 4.5 million PS5 sales in 2020, but sold 3.3 million in the first quarter of 2021 -- it took another four months to add 2.2 million to the tally. That's not surprising between supply constraints and the usual mid-year slump, but you might not see sales climb until the holidays. PlayStation chief Jim Ryan told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview that it was "too early to tell" which markets were the hottest given widespread demand, but pointed out that China was a pleasant surprise. The company sold out its PS5 launch stock "very, very quickly" despite a local market focused on mobile games and the free-to-play model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The official World of Warcraft Twitter account has announced that it will take immediate action to "remove references that are not appropriate for [its] world." While it didn't elaborate on what those references are, they may pertain to in-game elements connected to its senior creative director Alex Afrasiabi, as Kotaku has noted. Afrasiabi was singled out in the lawsuit filed by California authorities accusing Activision Blizzard of fostering a "frat boy" culture that's become a "breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women."

According to the lawsuit, Afrasiabi is known for hitting on and touching female employees inappropriately in plain view of other male employees who would try to intervene and stop him. He apparently has such a notorious reputation within the company that his suite was nicknamed the "Crosby Suite after alleged rapist Bill Crosby."(The lawsuit has misspelled Bill Cosby's name.) In addition, executives allegedly knew about his behavior but "took no effective remedial measures." Blizzard President J. Allen Brack talked to him a few times, the lawsuit reads, but gave Afiasiabi a slap on the wrist for the incidents. In response to the lawsuit and the company's "abhorrent and insulting" response to the accusations, some 800+ Activision Blizzard employees are staging a walkout on Wednesday, July 28th.

You can read the full message from the Warcraft team here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Activison Blizzard employees are staging a walkout on Wednesday, July 28th in response to the company's handling of sexual harassment allegations brought by the state of California. Employees will meet outside Blizzard's main campus in Irvine at 10AM PST. "We believe that our values as employees are not being accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership," the organizers said in a statement.

The news comes after California sued the renowned gaming studio and its publisher, saying women were subjected to constant sexual harassment and discrimination at work. One female employee allegedly died by suicide after having nude photos of her passed around the office. Following the suit, numerous employees took to Twitter to detail additional examples of harassment and discrimination. Former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime also issued a statement saying "I am extremely sorry that I failed you." The company denied the allegations, saying the lawsuit was merely "irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State's best businesses out of California." Employees are putting forward four demands as part of the walkout: end forced arbitration clauses in all employee contracts; implement new hiring and promotion processes to increase representation across the company; publish salary and promotion data "for all employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company"; and allow a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force to hire a third-party organization to audit the executive staff.

Valve expects that its recently announced Steam Deck portable gaming console will be able to run "really the entire Steam library" on its 1280x800 LCD screen at frame rates of 30 fps or higher. Ars Technica reports: That's according to a recent IGN video interview in which Valve Hardware Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said that "all the games that we wanted to be playable had really good [performance], a really good experience" in Steam Deck testing. Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais expanded on that statement by saying that "all the games that we wanted to be playable" means "really the entire Steam library." "We haven't really found something we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle yet," he added.

Griffais said initial prototype testing for the Steam Deck focused on older games in the Steam catalog and that there were "games that were coming out last year that just couldn't really run very well on the previous types of prototypes and architectures we were testing." On the finalized version of the hardware, though, he said the company has "achieved the level of performance that is required to run the latest generation of games without a problem." "The entire Steam catalog is available to people who have this device," Aldehayyat added. "That's where we knew we had a product that was going to deliver the experience we were looking for."

Aldehayyat attributed Steam Deck's wide compatibility in part to "future-proofing" internals that include a custom APU incorporating AMD's latest generation of GPU and CPU technology, as well as 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Griffais added that the performance scalability of modern PC games helps Steam Deck achieve a playable frame rate at its native 800p resolution (which is relatively low compared to desktop gaming PCs). "If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30 Hz target very well," he said. "If people start heavily favoring image quality, we might be in a position where we might have tradeoffs, but we're not in a position where we really see that yet." In a follow-up tweet late last week, Griffais clarified that the 30 fps target is the "floor" for what Valve considers playable: "games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far. There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf[ormance] vs. battery life."

"Fans of Japanese video games couldn't believe their ears as Olympic athletes paraded into Tokyo's National Stadium during the opening ceremony for the 2020 Games on Friday..." reports the Huffington Post. During the Parade of Nations section of the ceremony, "The orchestra was playing tunes from some of their favorite games." In a celebration of Japanese popular culture that is appreciated worldwide, the entry parade was set to tunes from games developed by Sega, Capcom and Square Enix. It kicked off with "Overture: Roto's Theme" from Dragon Quest. Next up was "Victory Fanfare" from Final Fantasy. The parade featured more tunes from Monster Hunter, Soulcaliber and Sonic the Hedgehog. According to Classic FM, the music from Kingdom Hearts was composed by Yoko Shimomura, who is responsible for the music for some of the biggest video games ever made. Fans were delighted to hear her work being incorporated into the ceremony.

While the list didn't feature widely recognized tunes from cultural juggernauts like Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, the music helped give a sense of atmosphere to the ceremony, which was held in almost an empty stadium due to coronavirus restrictions.
There's even an elaborate doodle at Google.com commemorating the Opening Ceremonies with an anime animation that leads to a multi-level 1980s-style videogame in which Lucky the cat competes in various sporting events. (Though the Huffington Post notes that in the real world, about 1,000 people sat in the 68,000-capacity stadium.)

The Washington Post reports the Japanese public "overwhelmingly opposed hosting the Olympics as a new wave of the pandemic hit the country." But unfortunately, host city Tokyo signed a contract agreeing the event could only be cancelled by the International Olympic Committee, and now "There's the possibility — once utterly remote — that Japanese voters could kick Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga out of power in parliamentary elections later this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GameSpot: Amazon [...] is now bricking high-end graphics cards with a beta for its MMO, New World, according to players. Amazon has now responded to downplay the incident but says it plans to implement a frame rate cap on the game's menus. According to users on Twitter and Reddit, New World has been frying extremely high-end graphics cards, namely Nvidia's RTX 3090. It's worth noting that while the RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,500, it's often selling for much more due to scarcity and scalpers, so players could easily be losing upwards of $2,000 if their card stops working.

Specifically, it seems that one model of the RTX 3090 is being consistently fried by New World. On Reddit, a lengthy thread of over 600 posts includes multiple users claiming that their EVGA 3090 graphics cards are now little more than expensive paperweights after playing the New World beta. The "red light of death," an indicator that something is disastrously wrong with your EVGA 3090, doesn't pop up consistently for players though. Some report their screen going black after a cutscene in the game while others have said that simply using the brightness calibration screen was enough to brick their card. Amazon Games says a patch is on the way to prevent further issues. "Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We've received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World," said Amazon Games in an official statement.

"New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing. The New World Closed Beta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We're grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."

New World is currently set to launch for PC on August 31.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The video game studio behind the hit franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush is facing a civil lawsuit in California over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and potential violations of the state's equal pay law. A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. "fostered a sexist culture" where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. (Activision and Blizzard Entertainment merged in 2008.)

Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges. Years after the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate targeted women in the video game world, the California lawsuit depicts an industry that can still be unwelcoming and even hostile to female employees. "All employers should ensure that their employees are being paid equally and take all steps to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation," said DFEH Director Kevin Kish. "This is especially important for employers in male-dominated industries, such as technology and gaming."

The lawsuit alleges that Activision Blizzard's female workers who spoke to investigators "almost universally confirmed" that their time at the company was "akin to working in a frat house." Male employees drank on the job and came to work hungover, the lawsuit said. The alleged sexual harassment ranged from comments about women's bodies and jokes about rape to the unwanted touching of female employees by their male peers. The complaint, which was the result of a two-year investigation by DFEH, claims that the unequal treatment of women went beyond company culture to the more formal parts of their jobs. Women were allegedly paid less than men, both when they were hired and during the course of their employment. They were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases, according to the lawsuit. One woman said her manager told her she wouldn't be promoted because "she might get pregnant and like being a mom too much." The sex discrimination was even worse for women of color, the suit claims. At least two African-American women reported being singled out and micromanaged. Some of the women who came forward with complaints of discrimination or harassment faced involuntary transfers, were selected for layoffs or were denied certain opportunities, the suit said. In a statement, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said the company had worked to improve its company culture in recent years and accused the DFEH of not adequately trying to resolve the claims against it before resorting to a lawsuit.

"The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past," the statement read. "The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today."

In response to the company's rebuttal, former Blizzard Entertainment employee Cher Scarlett tweeted: "This is certainly LONG overdue. I would be hard-pressed to find someone that wasn't witness to sex in the game lounges, coke in the bathrooms during a cube crawl, or a woman who wasn't sexually harassed at least once. I am so proud of these women." Scarlett added: "Blizzard has claimed that the DFEH report is false/misleading/irresponsible. I can tell you that I knew what was going to be in this report before I read it because during my time there - for only a YEAR - I witnessed ALL OF THESE THINGS. AND NAME NAMES."

A video game developer is abandoning the Denuvo DRM platform for its upcoming game's PC version, blaming Denuvo-related performance issues for the decision. An anonymous reader shares an article written by Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech: Amplitude Studios, a French studio known for PC-exclusive 4X strategy games, had previously announced that its next game, Humankind, would ship with a Denuvo implementation in August 2021. This prompted a post titled "The day Amplitude broke my heart" on Amplitude's official forum, with a fan declaring their love of prior Amplitude strategy games and then expressing their disappointment that Humankind had a Denuvo tag on its Steam page. After pointing to their disagreement with Denuvo's practices, including the block of offline-only gameplay, the fan offered a reasonably levelheaded plea: "To be fair, I totally understand why Denuvo was chosen (probably by [Amplitude studio owner] Sega). I understand how important it is for sales to protect the game around release, but PLEASE Amplitude, PLEASE consider to remove Denuvo after some months!" This request lines up with other game publishers' decisions to remove Denuvo protections after a PC game's launch window has passed.

Amplitude co-founder and CCO Romain de Waubert de Genlis replied to the thread on Thursday, July 15, with a surprising announcement: the fan wouldn't have to wait "some months" to see Denuvo removed. Instead, Humankind will launch on August 17 with no Denuvo implementation to speak of. On his company's forum, de Genlis admits that business considerations played into Amplitude's original decision: "We've been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam this year, so we know we're going to be targeted by pirates, more so than any of our previous games," he writes. "If Denuvo can hold off a cracked version, even just for a few days, that can already really help us to protect our launch."

But ultimately, his teammates felt they couldn't justify its inclusion after running into issues. While de Genlis admits that there's a chance his team could have added Denuvo to the game without impacting PC performance, tests during the game's June closed beta showed the performance hit was too great—and that it's "not something we can fix before release. So, we are taking it out." In other words: when left with the choice between delaying the game to optimize a Denuvo implementation and to launch the game without Denuvo at all, Amplitude opted for the latter. "Our priority is always the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us," de Genlis writes. "Denuvo should never impact player performance, and we don't want to sacrifice quality for you guys." After this, the topic's creator edited the thread title to read, "The day Amplitude broke my heart (and how they reassembled it)."