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New gaming platform will debut one short game each day of the year
A new gaming platform called Meditations could be a great fit for people who love playing those random online games a few minutes a day to decompress. It promises to launch one new "tiny game" every day in 2019, each one accompanied by text to serve as a "meditation, distraction, lesson or inspiration." According to creator Rami Ismail, each one is inspired by and will only be available on that particular date. Ismail, who's also chief of Dutch indie game studio Vlambeer, said he played a short game in 2017 that made him wish he had one "like it for every day of the year." He then enlisted hundreds of developers to make his vision a reality over the course of 2018.
Game developers take a stand against Trump's immigration ban
The opposition to the Trump administration's immigration ban has spread far and wide. Video game developers are joining the chorus against what some see as an unconstitutional policy put forth with no thought or consideration of the outcome. For a number of studios, that means making donations to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the non-profit organization that successfully challenged the ban in court over this past weekend.
Steam is turning into the App Store and that's OK
Steam changed the video game industry in the same way Netflix changed television. Digital distribution was a natural evolution for gaming in the early 2010s, allowing PC players to skip the midnight-release lines at Gamestop and purchase new titles with the click of a button. While Steam wasn't the first hub to offer digitally distributed games -- Valve debuted it in 2003 -- it quickly gained a massive following and by 2011 was undoubtedly the largest platform for finding, buying and playing games on PC, Mac and Linux. Today, Steam hosts more than 10,000 titles and nearly 160 million active users per month, according to Steam Spy and EEDAR. Steam is Netflix on pixelated, interactive steroids.
OUYA developers sound off: successes and failures of the dev kit, one month out
You still can't touch an OUYA. Not until March, at the earliest, and that's only if you're a Kickstarter backer. However, one lucky group of folks already has access: game developers. Those among us who shelled out $700 -- as well as the 10 lucky studios who won that contest -- got an early jump on a pre-rooted OUYA dev kit, while those of us who dropped $95 (or more) are left in the lurch. Of course, those early units aren't exactly the couch-friendly consoles we expect to arrive in a few months, but they are representative of the final hardware. And let's face it -- the OUYA is important. A crowdfunded, extremely inexpensive, open-source game console? That's not exactly the standard (heck, Sony's PlayStation 3 debuted with a $500 baseline). The OUYA is essentially taking the low-cost / high-performance aspect of mobile gaming and moving it into a TV-friendly space, and that concept has even spawned some imitators (the likes of which we'll assuredly see more). But what do we know about actually using the OUYA? Beyond basic specs and a sporadic showering of images, we've never actually touched the thing. With that in mind, we asked a trio of developers who've spent the last month with their dev kits how they feel about the console thus far, and we've compiled their thoughts below. One month out, how does the OUYA dev kit stack up for developers? Let's find out!
