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Activision Lays off About 30 People, Saying There Will Be Fewer Licensed Games This Year

Even the massive money-making game publisher Activision lays off people from time to time, as the company confirmed today that they’ve cut about 30 jobs from their global work force. Kotaku first heard that the cuts were affecting Treyarch, the studio behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, but a spokesperson for Activision said that…

Sony Registered Domains For Something Called ‘PlayStation Cloud’

On Friday, Sony registered domains for URLs based on something called “PlayStation Cloud,” as discovered by Kotaku sleuth Superannuation today. The domains include playstation-cloud.com and playstation-org, among others. The domains were registered by someone from Gaikai, the cloud gaming service that Sony bought last year. Gaikai allows people to play games via cloud-based Internet streaming.…

A Batty Seven-Minute Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Trailer Cut By Hideo Kojima

While Hideo Kojima didn’t direct Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, he did direct this trailer, and it shows. For one, it’s seven minutes long. Seven minutes long! It’s also batshit crazy and somewhat spoilery (stay away if you don’t want to see anything that happens in the first few chapters of the game). Revengeance came out…

Disney Interactive taps Buzz Lightyear to tease a new mobile game based on the Toy Story franchise. Looks smashing.

Embracing Piracy Is One Of The Best Decisions These Developers Have Made

Ever wonder how much a developer benefits from promoting a game on The Pirate Bay? The folks behind the Zelda-like Anodyne revealed the specifics behind their recent promotion, and get this: TPB drove way more sales and awareness than reviews and videos alone did. To be specific, the promotion involved spending $7 to have a…

FarmVille 2 More Turkish Delights Kitchen Recipes: Everything You Need to Know

As with almost every theme in FarmVille 2, the second set of Turkish Delights items is here alongside a series of new Crafting Kitchen recipes. Of course, only one of the recipes is technically “free” to create, as the other two require ingredients earned via premium trees. Still, there’s quite a bit of coins to…

Let’s Look At What Sony’s Past Console Reveals Could Say About Tomorrow’s PS4 Reveal

As you might have heard, Sony’s (most likely) officially announcing the next PlayStation tomorrow. This isn’t the first console reveal Sony has done, though. Let’s think back to those times. What information was Sony willing to part with during their very first reveals for their other big consoles? It might give us some insight into…

The PBS NewsHour looks at violent video games tonight, in a segment that includes your Kotaku EiC. Livestream at 6pm ET

Assassin’s Creed 3’s Hero Looks Different—and Cooler—in Its New Alternate Reality DLC

After a really long wait, the Tyranny of George Washington DLC for Assassin’s Creed III drops today, bringing with it an evil version of the United States’ first president. This trailer shows Connor’s alternate, first-nations look in action as well as new abilities for him to wield. The Infamy, part 1 of the three-chapter expansion,…

Morning Star Alpha is No Ordinary Comic Book Game Tie-In

This spring, developer Industrial Toys plans to redefine the mobile first-person shooter with the sci-fi epic Morning Star, but first it’s going to redefine the interactive digital comic book tie-in with Morning Star Alpha When Industrial Toys founder and president Tim Harris contacted me about the upcoming announcement of a supplemental stand-alone app based on…

2K Sports Duct-Tapes MLB 2K13 to NBA 2K13 and Sells It For $80

Last year, 2K Sports did a shrewd thing, bootstrapping its flagging MLB 2K series to its best-in-class NBA 2K in a combo package announced a month before the baseball game was due for release. The publisher is doing the same thing again this year, but listing the bundle for $10 more. The combo pack is…

Hotline Miami, the indie smash hit of 2012 on PC, is coming to PS3 and PS Vita this spring.

Halo 4‘s Next Map Pack Arrives on Tuesday

A poorly kept secret since November is official now: the Majestic Map Pack, the latest series of multiplayer maps in Halo 4, will indeed be available on Feb. 25 for 800 Microsoft Points ($10). The maps, consistent with a leak earlier this weekend, are Landfall, Monolith and Skyline (above). Longer descriptions may be seen here,…

Free cat inferno simulator Jones on Fire hits iOS on Thursday. Celebrate with the chiptune dubstep trailer of joy.

Star Wars Pinball Launches Next Week on Five Different Platforms

Star Wars Pinball‘s first three tables—The Empire Strikes Back, Boba Fett and The Clone Wars—will release next week on a slew of mobile and console platforms. Pricing and release dates are different for all of them, so pay close attention. First, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita gamers may also buy the set of three for…

Blizzard announced the dates for this year’s BlizzCon: Friday Nov 8th, and Saturday Nov 9th.

Get a Load of Gears of War: Judgment’s New Weapons and Multiplayer Features

Sure, the clip above is just a reel that rattles off bullet points of stuff in Gears of War: Judgment. But what makes it sing is the snarky narration provided by Fred Tatasciore, the guy who voices main character Damon Baird. Without him, this would just be a soulless rundown of ways of shooting, things…

What’s Most Impressive About Nvidia’s New $1,000 Graphics Card? How It Sounds.

On Thursday Nvidia’s latest “most powerful graphics card in the world” hits the market—the Kepler-based GeForce GTX Titan. Packed with a ridiculous number of CUDA cores, all the Teraflops you can eat and innovative features like display overclocking, it’s sure to impress the hell out of people that watch performance monitors and keep their frame…

Rayman Legends‘ Online Challenge Mode will be Released Free on Wii U in April

Acknowledging the profound disappointment at the delay of Rayman Legends release on the Wii U—a holdup that seems to have no other reason than to wait for the Xbox 360 and PS3 editions to launch this fall—Ubisoft Montréal has decided to release the game’s Online Challenges mode early, for free, to all Wii U users.…

The Room, Apple’s iPad Game of the Year, Is Getting a Sequel

Today, the developers behind The Room announced that they were working on a sequel to their hit game. Slated for a fall release, The Room sequel will take players to “an altogether more spectacular place.” The first title hit last September, and went on to sell 1.75 million copies via iTunes. A free update will…