Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. As ever, it's been a busy week of new games arriving and details of upcoming releases emerging. Before we get to some of those though, the nominees for the second annual Indie Game Awards were announced this week.
There's a nice mix of big hitters and smaller, but equally worthy titles among the Game of the Year contenders. Those are:
Google and Disney have finally reached an agreement, a couple of weeks after YouTube TV lost access to Disney channels that include ESPN, FX and ABC stations.
X has finally revealed its long-promised chat platform, which replaces the service's basic DM functionality with features more like the messaging capabilities on other mainstream apps. The update adds voice and video calling, file sharing and the ability to edit and delete previously sent messages, as well as privacy-focused features like end-to-end encryption and screenshot notifications.
The US Department of Justice has announced that five people have pleaded guilty to helping North Koreans defraud US companies by pretending to be US-based remote workers.
By all appearances, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 features a not insignificant amount of AI-generated art, Kotaku reports.
Nearly a decade after going offline, Vine is (sort of) back and, in a truly bizarre twist, Jack Dorsey is at least partially responsible. An early Twitter employee has released a beta version of a rebooted Vine — now called "Divine" — that revives the app's six-second videos and includes a portion of the original app's archive.
South Korean games publisher Krafton recently announced its transformation into an "AI first" company, which typically means that human jobs are about to go on the chopping block.
The most recent Switch 2 software update looks to have bricked many third-party docks and related accessories, according to users across the internet and a report by Kotaku. We don't know if this was an intentional move by Nintendo or simply an accident.
