EA has announced plans to stop selling FIFA Points in Belgium following government pressure over loot boxes. In FIFA Ultimate Team, you can spend real world money on FIFA Points, which can then be used to buy card packs.

Steam, unquestionably, needs a sizeable competitor. With a significant monopoly on the PC games market, such that present rivals like GOG and Humble barely take a dent out of its audience, Valve is able to take an infuriatingly lackadaisical approach to many aspects of Steam. Something to scare them into action would be marvellous. And while not optimistic, I’d hoped that maybe Epic, with their lorries full of money, might be able to try. Except, with yet another exclusivity announcement today regarding Metro: Exodus, they’re going about it entirely the wrong way.

It’s the perfect time to get prepped for a 2019 filled with gaming! Starting today, you can save $50 on any Xbox One bundle, including Xbox One X, the world’s most powerful console, and Xbox One S, the best value in gaming and entertainment. And there’s no shortage of amazing bundles to choose from at a participating retailer near you.

Anthem's VIP demo has been fraught with problems. Players have been unable to log in to the game, or have faced an infinite load screen when moving between in-game areas. Others have struggled to get stable performance, even with top-end rigs, and some of the PC settings—such as adjusting resolution—don't work properly. Developer BioWare has now apologised for the problems, explained why they happened, and outlined some of what it is doing to fix Anthem ahead of its next month's release.

From the first days of development right up until launch day and every day since, Rare's Sea of Thieves has been driven by its earliest brainstorming session mantra: "players creating stories together." For many fans, this directive has been what has made the game so special since it launched on Xbox One and Windows last March. For others, the "tools, not rules" design was off-putting, which left the game as a success among its close-knit community, but a perceived flash in the pan for many others.

Guerrilla Games‘ picturesque canalside office was originally intended to house 190 people, its technical director Michiel van der Leeuw tells me as he rushes through the building in search of an empty room. But the Amsterdam-based game developer has grown rapidly over the past few years, filling every nook and cranny of the place, and now it’s bursting at the seams. Next year, it plans to move uptown. Right now, its 250 employees make do.

The Resident Evil 2 remaster released last night, and the PC version took just a few hours to become one of Capcom’s most-played Steam games ever. Last night, the game’s player count peaked at more than 55,000 players, and is still performing well this morning. According to Steam’s own game stats, Resident Evil 2 reached a concurrent player peak of 55,164, making it the ninth most-played game on the platform last night, just behind Team Fortress 2 (which is somehow still pulling in the best part of 60,000 players ten years after its release).

When Ubisoft brought the Far Cry series to the United States with Far Cry 5 and depicted the local populace as a militant cult bewitched by a charismatic, but crazy, leader that preached about the end-times to a mass following of loyal devotees, it drew some heat, with some alleging it of taking a political stance against Donald Trump and his base.

In a surprising twist this morning, Nintendo made an incredibly transparent announcement. Development on Metroid Prime 4, it read, had halted and was to begin again under Retro Studios, the United States-based developer of the original Metroid Prime games. In a statement delivered by Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s General Manager of Planning and Development, we learned that although Nintendo found it very regrettable, the company didn’t feel the current progress of Metroid Prime 4 was up to their standards for the series.

Metroid Prime 4's development is restarting from the beginning with the help of Retro Studios, developers of the original Metroid Prime games. Announced by Nintendo, the decision was made because this fourth entry "has not reached the standards we seek in a sequel to the Metroid Prime series." Due to this reason, Nintendo has decided to have producer Kensuke Tanabe "work in trust and collaboration with the studio that developed the original Metroid Prime series, Retro Studios in the United States, and restart development from the beginning."

Netflix is reportedly developing a live-action Resident Evil series, according to Deadline. The streaming service declined to comment on the report, which says the project is in the early stages of development. Per Deadline, "the plan is for the series to expand the Resident Evil universe and deepen the existing mythology. I hear the series will keep the basic premise, which also served as a setup for the movie franchise. The drama series will explore the dark inner workings of the Umbrella Corporation and the new world order caused by the outbreak of the T-virus."

Yesterday, the official Fallout Twitter account announced that leather Fallout 76 jackets were being sold in the Bethesda store. At a price of $276, the lambskin leather jacket is bright blue with yellow piping, a big 76 on the back, a small 76 on the front, and lined with "silky, shiny taffeta fabric." Deep breath: So, you probably remember the Fallout 76 'bag-gate' fiasco in which customers who purchased the $200 Fallout 76 collector's edition...

Kingdom Hearts 3 will offer two different gameplay modes that prioritize performance or visuals. You are free to pick between any of them depending on your tolerance to the frame rate. As Kingdom Hearts 3 is out on January 25th in Japan, it is now playable through the digital pre-order on PlayStation Store. For the rest of the world, they will have to wait until January 29th.

A lot of game developers say they want to unionize -- but will they?

Anthem is just around the corner and all month long we’ve been covering it as part of IGN First. For our big deep dive this month, we got the opportunity to go to BioWare and play over 20 hours of Anthem in a work-in-progress state. With that knowledge we’ve returned to share what we learned in order to give you a better understanding of what Anthem is going to be like, and how to decipher some of its lesser-known aspects – especially if you intend on spending any time in the upcoming demo. While some of this you may already know if you’ve been following Anthem, some of it you likely don’t, so let’s get into it.

Ever since the most recent Star Wars game cancellation at EA, there has been a ton of discussion surrounding the publisher and its use of the license. Over the weekend, an older story began doing the rounds again, reminding the world that at one point, Bioware was working on a Knights of the Old Republic reboot.

Gary Whitta, writer of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, has not minced his words when discussing the recent cancellation of yet another Star Wars game at EA. The title was originally under the directorship of Uncharted’s Amy Hennig but the game, codenamed Ragtag, was reviewed internally and cut back, resulting in Amy leaving the project. Visceral Games, the chaps behind the classic Dead Space who working on the project were shut down and Ragtag became Orca, a much more focused, smaller project. It seems Gary saw the original version of the game and he’s not happy with EA.

Fight Party Games

Bethesda’s first Fallout 76 patch this month addressed more than 150 different bugs and problems. Hot on its heels, however, is a second patch which is due to release later in January. Now, Bethesda has given fans some details about what will be included in that upcoming update. According to the studio, players should expect it by the end of the month, and it will include; “another big wave of fixes.”

Fortnite's V-Bucks are only good for two things: buying (allegedly stolen) emotes and if you're real sinister, scamming people on Twitter. Or so that's what we thought. A new report via the Independent claims that the game's currency is also being used as a money laundering tool on some weird parts of the Internet. Because, of course it is. This is 2019.