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Excessive and unpaid overtime, zero-hour contracts and a pervasive culture of homophobia and sexism - these are the three top issues to be tackled by a new video games industry branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB).

It's Christmas! So developers across the land are adding virtual seasonal gubbins to their games as a service. Treyarch is no different. It's kicked off a Christmas event in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and as part of that snowballs are in Blackout, the game's battle royale mode.

Blizzard is cutting back on Heroes of the Storm - shrinking the game's team and cancelling its big esports events.

Katamari Damacy is a special sort of game. So special in fact, that it sidetracked me from writing this several times, playing the game in an absent-minded daze, marvelling at how 塊,the Kanji for katamari, already looks like a small prince rolling stuff up. It worms itself inside your brain by giving the mundane a unique sort of whimsy.

Microsoft has announced a new initiative to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund through Minecraft, starting with the launch of the new Paws and Claws costume pack.

Tim Schafer's classic point-and-click biker adventure Full Throttle is currently free on GOG.

It's Christmas! Sort of. And that can only mean one thing: pie! But also seasonal sales, and on the latter front, it's Nintendo's turn, arriving with a selection of festive discounts for a wide array of games on Switch, 3DS, and Wii U.

Daybreak Games has announced PlanetSide Arena, a battle royale take on the PlanetSide franchise.

Street Fighter 5's in-game ads went live this week - and they make a mockery of the series' famous character design.

If you're into your Minecraft you may have heard of Hypixel - it's one of the biggest Minecraft servers in the world and home to some seriously dedicated creators.

Metro Exodus comes out a week earlier than announced, on 15th February 2019, to be precise.

UPDATE 13/12/18: We've now got a final release date with the 1986 driving game due on January 10th in Europe.

Nintendo's Switch has been a genuine surprise - a hybrid console based on a mobile chipset that has delivered some remarkable tech showcases: the Doom 2016 port was a mini-revelation while the Wolfenstein 2 follow-up was even more mind-blowing. But these were streamlined 60fps games pared back to 30fps, and built around an eminently scalable engine - a state of affairs that doesn't fully apply to Studio Wildcard's Ark: Survival Evolved, which seems to have been dragged kicking and screaming onto the Switch hardware with some good - and some very bad - results.

Silver Lining, the third and final DLC for Marvel's Spider-Man, will arrive in time for Christmas - on 21st December.

Back when I was eleven, Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap contained a lot of firsts for me. It was the first game I ever played on a console. It was, as far as I can remember, the first game I played in which you pressed up to go through a door. Most importantly, it was the first game that made me feel wonderfully lost in the sheer breadth and richness of the world that it created.

Monster Boy is back! After the recent Dragon's Trap remake, we've been gifted a spiritual successor to Wonder Boy 3 - which Christian Donlan calls a "vital updating of a classic" in our Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom review.

I spent all of yesterday morning and a fair amount of early afternoon refreshing the App Store and waiting for Brawl Stars to drop. Brawl Stars is the latest game from Supercell, the Clash Royale developer, and I've been excited about it for a while. Nobody does three minutes of multiplayer fun better than Supercell, if you ask me, and there's a peculiar kind of modest lavishness - I know that's not possible - to the way the team puts games together. What do I mean if "modest lavishness" is a bust? I mean that the features of their games are simple to get your head around - they seem so simple initially that you can't imagine much fun coming from them. But they're delivered with an astonishing attention to the way things feel, right down to the menus - and the underlying depth, as it slowly reveals itself, is wonderfully dizzying.

Pokémon Go's long-awaited PVP Trainer Battles are finally live but, like anything in Pokémon Go, the feature has launched with some issues.

We have an odd relationship with gambling in the UK. You'd be hard-pressed to find a high street or city centre that doesn't have at least a couple of bookmakers' shops mixed into it, offering bets on everything from horse racing and football to whether or not Kate Winslet will cry if she wins an Oscar (yes that was a real thing). But how does esports fit in?

Konami has launched a free-to-play version of PES 2019.

Developer Lince Works has revealed that its stylish supernatural stealth game Aragami will launch on Switch, in both digital and physical forms, next February 22nd.

Epic has announced that it will making its suite of cross-platform tools, originally created for Fortnite, free for use by all developers, starting next year.

Rare has released a brand-new update for its multiplayer pirate extravaganza Sea of Thieves, primarily aimed at bug fixes for the recent Shrouded Spoils expansion. However, it's also managed to sneak in some seasonal treats too, just in time for Christmas.

Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy 15's multiplayer expansion, known as Comrades, will finally get its previously announced standalone release today, December 12th, in the US, and tomorrow in the UK.

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is back with a new console port, finally arriving on PlayStation 4 a full 12 months after its debut as a timed-exclusive for Xbox One (where the title has transitioned to Microsoft's Game Pass subscription service). Available for £24.99/$29.99, we went into this one wondering whether the PUBG Corporation has managed to resolve the lingering issues with the Xbox One code, and the extent to which the port may have been changed or even improved over the existing game.

Yesterday, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 received a substantial update to all platforms, the latest season started on the PlayStation 4 version, and Activision released the game's first premium DLC after it leaked the day before.

Gabriel Sloyer spent five years acting on Red Dead Redemption 2.

A new batch of NES titles came today to the Switch's Online Service - as expected - and they've brought with them a couple of cute surprises.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has earned critical acclaim and some fantastic sales since its launch around the world last Friday - but also criticism for its scrappy online multiplayer modes.

It's been about 24 hours since Epic introduced the latest change to the ever-evolving Fortnite - and in that short amount of time, it has managed to pretty much unite the game's community, although perhaps not in the way you'd think.