Good morning Pixelkiners! College athletes have settled a lawsuit with Electronic Arts after the athletes weren’t compensated for appearing in EA’s NCAA game series. I’m not sure in what world EA and the NCAA thought they could get away with using athletes’ likenesses and not paying them for it, but hey we all learned a valuable lesson today! EA will be dishing out $60 million to the players, who could started getting compensated as soon as September.
The School’s Out Summer Sale is happening right NOW. If you want fun, award-winning educational apps for a sick discount, this is an awesome chance to nab them. The sale includes The Counting Kingdom, which we already adore, and seven other great apps as well. Check out schoolsoutsale.com.
Angry Birds 2 is coming out on July 30! Wait, you’re saying, don’t you mean Angry Birds 200? No, the other many, many, Angry Birds games don’t count as sequels—they’re just spin-offs. We don’t know a darn thing about Angry Birds 2, but there’s a really cryptic trailer. Watch it here.
Leadership at Nintendo is currently being held by Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda, but Nintendo has yet to appoint an official president after the passing of Satoru Iwata. Courtney has a pretty solid theory about who it’s going to be, and we discuss it in this week’s episode of The Issue.
Video-game pricing has always been a source of mystery for people who don’t make games. A really exciting earnings call for Ubisoft investors cleared up why digital copies cost as much as physical copies, even though they take up infinitely less space. It’s kind of obvious now that I’m thinking about it: physical copies need to be sold first, so they can’t drive digital prices down until there’s a low enough stock of physical copies on shelves. The more you know! Read more about video game prices in my write-up on Pixelkin.
Origin, EA’s online store, is changing its name! Now it’ll just be your EA Account, because “Glitchy Imposition on my Time and Sanity” wasn’t a catchy enough name.
A new research study shows that male gamers kinda resent losing to ladies. The study looked at the way that gamers spoke to each other in Halo 3. Turns out the guys’ comments toward other guys would stay relatively the same, but if a woman was close in skill or better than the guy, his positive comments towards her would drop off considerably. This was one small study, but it’s not surprising that guys would react that way when we’ve all been raised to think “playing like a girl” is an insult. Realizing our inherent biases will hopefully help us make a more inclusive gaming culture.
The Minecraft movie is being directed by Rob McElhenney, the creator of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” I bet you didn’t think you’d hear that sentence today.
