Kliuless? Gaming Industry ICYMI #5

Over the years, the value-add of Steam's once uniquely comprehensive suite of services has become fragmented

Beginning with voice chat, Discord quickly expanded to become gamers' preferred destination for most social and community features

The rise of streaming and influencers has shifted the power of product discoverability into the hands of platforms like Twitch

Epic, now with the biggest game in the West, should parlay its high user traffic, successful Android self-distribution, and of course its powerful Unreal engine into an all-too-sweet packaged deal developers 

Yes, there will be more publisher-run platforms, but there will also be other better player-focused platforms too, like Discord

After the dust settles, I foresee an overall better ecosystem for both developers and players alike

[KL: Lots of great insight here on current state of Japanese market]

"For all the misgivings that may exist about cloud streaming as the inevitable future of gaming as a whole, as a solution to this specific problem - the question of how to put a game built for PS4 onto a significantly lower-spec system without compromising the experience too badly - it makes perfect sense. If there's a market for this and the business model can be made to make sense (thus far it seems to make some sense for publishers but is pretty rubbish for consumers, so some tweaking is likely required), then it could be a pretty good answer to some of the questions over the position of Switch in the market overall"

“Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege climbed the chart from the ninth-ranked position in July to become the third best-selling game of August[.] Performance was driven by the free-play period that ran August 16-to-20 in conjunction with the Six Major Paris 2018 Esports tournament and associated retail and digital promotion"

Related: More than 1,000 jobs lost to studio closures over the past year

Related: Mouse and Keyboard Support for Xbox One Developers

[KL: Highly encourage downloading the free demo "MHST The Adventure Begins" to experience the game's amazing production value firsthand on mobile]

[KL: 太吾绘卷 The Scroll of Taiwu is especially impressive given that its Chinese only]