speedrunners
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Discord makes it easier to jump into your friends' games
Gaming chat app Discord is quickly becoming a full-fledged social network. The latest move toward this is the ability to set a status for yourself and let folks know what game you're playing. More than that, Discord is launching an entire SDK (called "Rich Presence") so developers can directly integrate the app within their games, which should make joining your friends for a round of Call of Duty: WWII (one of the first supported titles) a little easier. "It gives players a clear at-a-glance understanding of what their friends are playing, how they are playing it, where they are at in the game and a one-click way to jump in and join," CEO Jason Citron said in a statement.
Speedrunners have already torn 'Prey' apart
Bethesda's Prey reboot has been out for less than a week and already players are posting some truly insane speedruns. Arguably the best is a 19:34 dash posted by "DraQu" on YouTube. It's a mesmerizing playthrough that uses the GLOO Cannon -- an early weapon that can slow down enemies and create small platforming blocks -- to access areas that would normally take hours to unlock. There's some trickery involved, carefully placing foam boulders to clip through the environment and scale parts of the spaceship developer Arkane Studios never intended people to see. Still, it's all within the confines of the game -- technically DraQu isn't cheating.
Watch your favorite games quickly conquered for charity here!
It's the long holiday weekend, we're smack dab in the middle of the summer drought for big game releases and you want to make it to Tuesday with all your fingers intact. That basically rules out lighting fireworks or playing a new game. And, let's face it, the chances of you actually playing anything you bought during the Steam summer sale are slim, at best. What's there to do? How about plopping down and watching a ton of video games beaten in record time, for charity?
Meet the high school dropout paving the way for indie eSports
It sounds like a classic Silicon Valley success story: A young, inexperienced entrepreneur drops out of school to pursue his dreams and ends up founding an influential, innovative company. Except, Alex Nichiporchik isn't from California; he's from Latvia. And he didn't drop out of college to follow his passion -- he dropped out of high school. Nichiporchik is the CEO and co-founder of tinyBuild GAMES, the studio behind No Time to Explain and SpeedRunners, and he's leading the indie charge into eSports. Professional gaming is new territory for small studios, which means Nichiporchik has made a lot of it up along the way, from hosting low-quality live streams to producing tournaments with the Electronic Sports League. "We didn't know what we were doing," he says, but "it took off" anyway.
Behold: The power of watching pros play video games
Awesome Games Done Quick is a yearly charity event starring the gaming industry's best and brightest speedrunners -- people who play games very well, with truly superhuman quickness. This January after 160 hours of live streaming on Twitch (a live video service dedicated to gaming), Awesome Games Done Quick raised $1.58 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Yep, people playing video games on camera raised nearly $1.6 million to help fight cancer. Sometimes, the world can be a great place.
Watch these awesome games played very well, very quickly, for charity
Let's say you aren't into gadgets or consumer electronics and would rather spend the coming week watching video games. Well, you can do that too and maybe help advance cancer research at the same time thanks to the latest edition of Awesome Games Done Quick. It follows the same format as before (folks speeding through games as fast as possible), too. No real surprises there. What's on tap? Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze and that's just today! You know what to do here: make a donation, support cancer research and watch some highly-skilled gamers run through your favorite titles as fast as humanly possible -- we've even embedded a live player after the break. Get to it!
Get games, streaming tools, apparel with Humble Awesome Games Done Quick Bundle
There will undoubtedly be dozens of cool gaming moments streamed during Awesome Games Done Quick's week-long charity event (which started today!), but why let strangers on the internet broadcast all the fun? Never mind if you don't have the necessary subscriptions – You can just pick up the Humble Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 Bundle, which features tools to help you get started with streaming as well as Steam keys for several games included within AGDQ's schedule (Mac and Linux support varies with each game). Those that celebrate the Humble Bundle series' pay-what-you-want pricing option by paying less than $6 will receive Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition, Shadow Warrior Classic Redux, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and Volgarr the Viking. Once $6 or more is contributed, Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut and SpeedRunners (along with its YouTuber packs) will be added to that, as well as a 30-day subscription to Twitch Turbo, which allows broadcasts to be archived for sixty days and is mostly ad-free.
SpeedRunners recruits YouTubers to help fight cancer
SpeedRunners, a PC game about superheroes racing one another, is now a game about YouTubers racing one another - or at least it is for the duration of a week starting on Monday, October 20, when developer DoubleDutch Games and publisher tinyBuild host the "King of Speed" tournament. "A couple of months ago we had this idea. The idea that cancer sucks. And we should do something about it, with speed and running," an email to Joystiq from tinyBuild states. "SpeedRunners became popular in large part because of YouTubers. Why not put them in the game and create a charity campaign?" To that end, eight YouTube personalities have been adapted to the SpeedRunners world and divided into two teams of four. Each team will sell as a DLC pack for $2.99. Once the King of Speed tournament is underway, player wins will accrue under their respective team's banner. The team with the most wins, well ... wins. The entirety of the winning team's DLC sales will be donated to fighting cancer, while 30 percent of all DLC will go toward the cause as well. If you don't want to play as any of the YouTube personalities but still want to help push a team to victory, playing as either SpeedRunner or The Falcon will also count toward the tournament tallies for their respective team. To see who's on which team, check out the full list after the break:
SpeedRunners reaches $1 million in sales, 162 years playtime
SpeedRunners, a game about superheroes racing one another to the scene of a crime, has racked up 162 years of total playtime and $1 million worth of sales, according to an infographic from No Time To Explain studio and SpeedRunners publisher, tinyBuild. You can check out the full list of facts after the break. Developed by DoubleDutch Games, SpeedRunners was released on Steam Early Access in August of last year. It gained a surge in popularity thanks in part to exposure from YouTube personalities such as Swedish sensation PewDiePie, and more statistics shared by tinyBuild attest to this; according to tinyBuild, 1 in 1,000 people in Sweden own a copy of the game. The final version of SpeedRunners is due for release on PC by the end of 2014 "... probably," according to tinyBuild. A free version will be available as well, with a console version sprinting to Xbox One in 2015.
Piracy inspires No Time To Explain developer to publish next game free
"I am pirating Battlefield 4 right now," an email from Tiny Build Games' Alex Nichiporchik began. That may seem a strange way to introduce a discussion about piracy - and it is - but Nichiporchik wanted to make a point: piracy, he argues, is not a black-and-white issue. In fact, it's because of piracy that Tiny Build Games will be publishing a version of SpeedRunners, a multiplayer-focused game developed by DoubleDutch Games where you play as a superhero racing other heroes to the scene of a crime, for free. Nichiporchik explained that the decision to release a version of SpeedRunners for free was due to the pirating community's reaction to their last game. "During the pre-Steam release of No Time To Explain, we simply created a version with pirate hats and put it on The Pirate Bay. Did it hurt us? Probably not. We got dozens of e-mails from people who found it via TPB and bought it afterwards, sending really positive comments about how funny the joke was. ... The press coverage spiked our sales. Don't buy into developers blaming piracy for lost sales, it's just silly." The free version of SpeedRunners that Tiny Build plans to launch won't be the full game, mind you. Nichiporchik wrote that he believes players will spend money - sometimes eagerly so - as long as they see value in a service being provided. In the case of Battlefield 4, the service is multiplayer. Nichiporchik wrote that he's pirating the game to see if it runs on his computer, and if it does, he'll "happily" buy the game off Origin. In the case of SpeedRunners, that service is online multiplayer. The free version will only support local multiplayer and offline bots. SpeedRunners is on Steam Early Access right now, so if you'd like, you can put your money down now, later, or, should you choose the free version, never. The choice is yours. Update: A sentence from an earlier draft of this story that further clarified Nichiporchik's reasons for piracy was accidentally omitted. It has been re-added to the post body.
