The saga of the acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues, and this time it is Microsoft that scores a rather important point: the CMA, or the antitrust authority of the United Kingdom, has declared that it agrees with Microsoft, at least on the concern, mainly expressed by Sony, that Call of Duty could become an Xbox/PC exclusive franchise. However, the victory is not yet complete: the authority is still not entirely convinced about the future of the cloud gaming industry. We will have to wait until the end of April for a final decision.

The official note from the CMA (you can read it in its entirety by following the SOURCE link at the bottom of the article) essentially says that in the light of the “new information presented by Microsoft, the conclusion is that overall the transaction will not cause a substantial reduction in competition in the console video games in the UK”. In essence, Microsoft has managed to demonstrate mathematically that the choice to make the franchise exclusive to its platforms would constitute an economic loss in “every plausible scenario”.

Indeed, the CMA admitted that its financial math model was wrong, as Microsoft had suggested, and decided to correct it and revise the accounts. It is interesting to note that all this is even upstream of the ten-year contracts offered to both Sony and Nintendo – indeed it explains quite clearly why the company has not had too much trouble putting them on the plate.

Microsoft has won a battle, we can say, but the war is still long and complicated. Not only on the British front: the EU commission announced a few days ago its intention to postpone its final decision to May because it needs more guarantees from Microsoft. And the US front still represents a gigantic question mark.

source: gov.uk

Capcom promises that it will release a Resident Evil 4 game demo before the full release launch. Starting Friday, March 10, 2023 they have finally released the free demo version of Resident Evil 4 Remake .

This demo is titled “Chainsaw” which includes the initial opening of the game which has been adjusted in such a way. The good news is that there is no longer a time limit like before, so players can spend as much time as possible exploring all the content that the demo has to offer

There are two difficulty levels in the Resident Evil 4 Remake demo, Survival and Experience. Survival for new players, then Experience is a real experience for old Resident Evil players as it will re-imagine the original game in 2005.

If interested, you can download the demo directly to the digital console store for both PS 4/5 and Xbox Series and for PC via Steam.

The PC version of the Resident Evil 4 Remake demo is around 10GB in size.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is a project created to meet the expectations of many fans and will be released for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5 and Xbox Series on March 24 or 25 2023.

Tomorrow will be World Lego Day. As a symbolic date, the day on which the first patent relating to the legendary colored bricks was filed by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, son of Ole, the founder of the company. The patent was filed on January 28, 1958, to be precise, but it is interesting to observe that the Lego brand already existed for more than 20 years. Ole Kirk Christiansen, in fact, was a carpenter who had named his handcrafted wooden toy store as such. “Lego” comes from a typical Danish phrase, namely “Leg Godt”, which roughly means “play well”.

1958 was the decisive year for Lego: the company, which in the meantime had evolved and expanded and had begun to adopt plastic as a raw material alongside wood, took five years to find the right combination of materials, molds, and measures of the interlocking system of the bricks to guarantee the right compromise between usability, stability, and versatility.

Lego has always had an extremely high standard of quality: tolerances are practically zero and systems to make sure that each brick is exactly as expected are very sophisticated. This obsession with quality has been one of the winning elements that have allowed the group to establish itself on the market, even at the expense of objectively not exactly popular prices: how many times have you found a defective or missing piece in a pack? We bet the vast majority of you enthusiasts will answer “zero”.

Due to their extremely versatile nature, in which very few are the limits beyond the player’s imagination, Legos have become a fundamental part of popular culture that goes far beyond the “children’s toy” context in which they were born. We’ve done everything with it – working table lamps, covers, and even complete computer cases, customizable mechanical keyboards, and even a 1:1 scale reproduction of a Bugatti Chiron and a Lamborghini Sìan.

In fact, we could say that recognizing and satisfying slightly more grown-up fans has been one of the key factors that have allowed the company to grow further over the past few years. We could identify at least three key initiatives in this sense:

• The development of sets specifically aimed at adults: made not necessarily to play with, but to be displayed as an ornament, carefully choosing the subjects and dimensions based on popular cultural trends with the reference target. Let’s think, for example, of the Architecture line (the Eiffel Tower even exceeds 10,000 pieces), of the very recent Botanical Collection, or of the iconic car and vehicle models such as the Bugatti Chiron, the Porsche 911 Gt3 RS, the Vespa or the Fiat 500.
• Partnerships with brands and franchises are super popular and appreciated in popular culture and beyond. From here were born strands such as Lego Star Wars (especially the huge and very expensive Ultimate Collector Series), Lego Harry Potter, and the most famous vehicles in the history of cinema (from the legendary DeLorean in Back to the Future to Dom Toretto’s Dodge Charger in Fast & Furious, passing through the Ecto-1 of the Ghostbusters and the Tumbler of Batman).
• Engage the community with the Lego Ideas initiative, where the most interesting projects of ordinary enthusiasts are transformed into real and mass-produced sets. Absolute masterpieces have come from here, including the reproduction of the typewriter, the house of Mom I Lost the Plane, the NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket, and the Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.
• And then of course there are all the parallel initiatives that expand the brand into other contexts, especially the cinematographic/television one (The Lego Movie is particularly appreciated!), video game (the very recent success of the Lego Star Wars saga).

In short, the advance of the Danish bricks seems intent on anything but stopping. And what better way to celebrate them than building a beautiful set? We already have a precise plan: