Activision has kicked off the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout holiday event, and a "Winter Calling" calling event in Zombies, which unfortunately—but like previous Black Ops 4 newness—are only available on the PlayStation 4 to start. There's still a reason for those of us on Team PC to pay attention, however, as the announcement posted to Reddit also digs into why the PC release schedule for updates will sometimes lag behind consoles. 

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone announced earlier this month that he was parting ways with publisher Chucklefish and going it alone as a self-published indie. But it turns out that he's not really "going it alone" in the strictest sense at all. In fact, he's putting a team together to help him continue to work on Stardew Valley.

2018 HGC Finals | Photo by Blizzard

Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe put a number of interesting artifacts from his Sierra days up for auction a couple of weeks ago, including the source code for the original Leisure Suit Larry on 5.25" diskettes. Bidding quickly skyrocketed, but shortly after the auction went live it was canceled, as did a separate auction for the LSL2 code. 

The Stellaris: Megacorp expansion came out a week ago and Fraser seemed to like it quite a bit, if you can call being appalled by the bottomless depths of your own rapacious corporate excesses "liking it," and I guess he does. Anyway, it turns out that it will be game director Martin Anward's last bit of work on the game, as he announced yesterday that he's moving on to something else.

Discord, which started selling games through its chat platform in August, will allow developers to self-publish games with a 90/10 revenue split from 2019. This comes not long after Epic announced that it would offer a better split than Steam, only taking 12 percent of the game’s revenue. 

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain has become the first trade union to represent members of the games industry. The UK chapter of Game Workers Unite, the international pro-union activist group, has joined the IWGB as its games industry branch and will hold its first meeting this weekend. 

Epic Games wants you to pay attention to its new store, and it's not playing. As of right now, and until December 25, the outstanding underwater exploration sim (and horror game) Subnautica is free to take, and keep. This was previously announced shortly after the Epic Games Store launched. 

I am just on the cusp of diving into Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, so the arrival of a couple of free modes is rather timely. For the price of making a Bethesda.net account, you can get your hands on the new Black and White mode and Mission+ mode, along with the original pre-order bonus for Dishonored 2:  the Imperial Assassin’s Pack. They’re available for both Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider. 

Prolific Fortnite sleuth and leaker FNBRLeaks has closed its social media and GitHub accounts after apparently receiving a cease and desist letter from one of Epic’s lawyers. On Twitter, the account made a few final tweets before blinking out of existence, while a longer statement was posted on TwitLonger.