Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! This one’s pretty wide-reaching, all things considered, but once again it touches everyone in gaming, including us MMORPG nerds. And so, the headlines.
The EU is cracking down on cash shop currency bundles that just so happen to be misaligned with the number needed to buy a thing. Several major companies are being targeted by some of the EU’s regulatory bodies, including Activision Blizzard, Mojang, Riot Games, and Ubisoft, over the monetization practice that sees piles of cash shop currency that end up just over the amount required to purchase a specific item, thus leaving a small pile of practically useless funny money in the digital pocket.
Steam’s player concurrency has set yet another record this past Sunday, with a headcountof over 43M players online at once. And that’s just the number of people on the platform specifically; the number of players in a game also broke a new high of over 14M. This sets a new concurrency record for the platform that, rather interestingly, happened after the recent Steam Autumn Sale, though major releases like Aion 2 and the big splashy update forDeadlock may have helped contribute.
Nvidia is reportedly ending RTX 5090 production according to acouple ofleakers who cite a notice from an unnamed factory. Specifically, the GB202 GPU dies that have been used in the 5090 graphics card are apparently being used instead on RTX Pro workstation GPUs that are utilized by AI data centers, a shift that effectively ends production on the 5090. We should point out that this is an unverified leak, with no formal confirmation from Nvidia itself, but if this holds true, this means that the RTX 5090’s price will very likely go up, and the highest power GPU for PC gamers will end up being Nvidia’s RTX 5080 16GB. Ain’t AI grand.
