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Unknown Worlds Demands USD$300,000 (£249,000) from G2A; Borderlands 3 Will Not be Preloadable on Epic Games Store

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TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the trending stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Unknown Worlds demands USD$300,000 (£249,000) from G2A; Borderlands 3 will not be preloadable on Epic Games Store; and casual games studio JaffaJam launches.

Unknown Worlds demands USD$300,000 (£249,000) from G2A

Controversial key reselling marketplace G2A, which has previously come under fire for their advertising, publisher payment, and customer support practices, has announced that only 19 developers have signed up for it’s proposed key blocking tool. G2A previously stated that they would only develop the tool if a minimum of 100 developers signed up. The key-blocking function would allow developers to specify keys that they do not want to be sold on G2A, by marking them as giveaway codes or review copies.

The lukewarm reception to the tool has been attributed to the fact that it places the impetus on developers, rather than G2A itself, to give it the greenlight as well as maintain the list of keys that will be blocked on the platform. Unknown Worlds’ founder and director Charlie Cleveland was particularly scathing in his criticism, stating on Twitter that G2A’s reasons for holding off development of the tool were “a load of crap” and demanding that G2A pays the Subnautica developer USD$300,000 (£249,000), following an earlier promise to pay developers 10 times the money lost on chargebacks from keys illegally sold in the marketplace.

Borderlands 3 will not be preloadable on Epic Games Store

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Borderlands 3 will not be preloadable on the Epic Games Store prior to its launch on September 13th, according to a statement from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. This is despite Epic purportedly having "released pre-load functionality to third party games on the store" since May. Elaborating further on his initial statement, Sweeney said, “It’s Complicated. We’ve released support for file preloading which is sufficient for some games, but we aren’t certain it’s up to the demands of a blockbuster like Borderlands.”

Despite this, he expressed confidence that despite the lack of preloading, which eases demand on servers as fans are not downloading titles at the same time, Epic servers will be able to handle the increased demand when Borderlands 3 goes live.

Casual games studio JaffaJam launches

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JaffaJam, a hyper-casual games studio staffed by a range of industry veterans from Disney, Marvel, Sony Pictures, and Zynga, has launched in New Zealand. The studio has a modular toolset within Unity, dubbed Bubblegum, which integrates ‘complex functionality’ such as procedural-generation and localisation.

Notably the company has a vision to fine-tune the monetisation of hyper-casual games by profiling players in-game preferences. In a press release marking the launch, a JaffaJam spokesperson said, “JaffaJam’s vision is to perfect the way free-to-play games are made and monetised by building profiles of player preferences and serving them individually targeted experiences, consistently growing a network of fans by constantly improving a pipeline from prototype to market for both its own games and those of development partners”