Greetings, Pixelkiners! More Star Wars. More Star Wars. This time Disney Infinity has revealed a Play Set, called Rise Against the Empire, that is based on the original Star Wars trilogy that you know and love. The starter pack has Luke and Leia, with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and even Darth Vader sold separately. Again, the new Disney Infinity 3.0 will be out in the fall, and we’ll be learning about another Star Wars Play Set soon, so stay tuned.
The Games for Change festival happened in May, and they just released their stats! Games For Change brings together tons of people involved in games, from academics to developers, to philanthropists and more. This year participation was split 50/50 between men and women, and 21 countries were represented. Cool beans. Check out their sick infographic for more.
Some PlayStation 4 owners have been experiencing deactivations of their home PS4s. Sony doesn’t have the best policies to deal with this—if your PS4 gets hacked and deactivated, you have to wait six months to use their online reactivation feature. I talked to a family who struggled with this problem, and I list some suggestions for changes that Sony could implement to help people protect their accounts. More on Pixelkin.org.
We have a book recommendation! Greg Toppo’s “The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter” is a round-up of the current thinking about games and education. And not just games in schools! In a recent NPR appearance he talks about increased literacy from video games. We don’t necessarily think about it in the same way as reading a book, but yeah, reading all that video game dialogue is reading. He talks about a lot more than that, so check out our article to get the details.
Amazon is getting together a team of top game developers to do something ambitious for PC games. Previously, Amazon Game Studios has made some solid mobile games. Some are now on iOS as well as Amazon devices. They want to use their newly acquired Twitch.tv as well as Amazon web services to revolutionize video games, which is a pretty tall order. We’ll let you know how it goes.
That’s it for this week! Subscribe to our news channel to stay on top of the latest updates. Have a great weekend!
