The KBMOD Uplink: February 28, 2013 – Gearbox Embezzling Funds?, Remember Me, Cliffy B Speaks Out

There is some weird, wild stuff going on in the gaming world these days. As I was leaving for work, some bombshells were dropped all over the gaming landscape. Here are a few of them.

-In what is either a poor publicity move or a tremendously damaging indictment of Gearbox, Aliens: Colonial Marines is back in the news. According to Tom’s Hardware an unnamed ex-Sega executive is alleging that Gearbox used funds from Sega allocated for Aliens: Colonial Marines and instead funded Borderlands, Borderlands 2 and Duke Nukem Forever with that money. This essentially doomed A:CM to the pile of crap you see today. The unnamed source is also saying that a lot of reporting on the sordid development path of A:CM is true. As of the time of me writing this, the blogger post by the ex-Sega employee has been removed. This could end up being a massive news story if even a shred of this is true. Keep your eyes on this one.

-Cliff Bleszinski isn’t one to hold back his thoughts. The former lead over at Epic games and co-creator of the Unreal engine has since left Epic, but that hasn’t stopped him from waxing poetic on the gaming industry. Cliff published a blog post today on the backlash towards EA’s decision to add microtransactions to all future titles. I actually defended this practice in the Uplink. The industry is changing and as choices become more numerous for gamers, the big budget developers and publishers need to stay solvent. In the blog post linked above, Cliff makes more sense of this for you than I ever would have. I highly suggest giving it a read as it has changed my perspective on the matters of nickel and diming gamers, DLC and microtransactions.

-Lastly, we have more news on action game Remember Me from Capcom. We now have a release date for the game: June 4th, 2013. Accompanying this news is a pretty amazing trailer detailing more of the setting the game takes place in, as well as the memory stealing mechanics of the game. Check it out: