Friday is weekly: a digest of what the team has seen, read and listened to, and wants to share with you

Baldur’s Gate 3, the 2023 GOTY is Belgian!

We have good reason to be proud! For the first time since the creation of the award, it is a Belgian video game which has been crowned Game of The Year. Last night, it was Baldur’s Gate 3, developed by the Flemish studio Larian which gleaned the prestigious title at the Game Awards held at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

Amongst the multiple nominations, Baldur’s Gate 3 stood out from the crowd by being nominated in eight different categories. And the Belgian role-playing game won the prizes of ‘Best Narrative’, ‘Best Performance’, ‘Best Community Support’, ‘Best RPG’, ‘Best Multiplayer Game’, and the ‘Players’ Voice’. 

A genuine richly deserved landslide. Amongst the other winners, we will note several categories won by Alan Wake 2 and the victory of Super Mario Wonder as ‘Best Family Game.’ Spider-Man 2, one of the overwhelming favourites, won no awards, despite 7 nominations.

Imminent closure of Twitch in South Korea

The mainstream streaming platform Twitch will soon be taking its leave of South Korea. The especially surprising decision was announced at the beginning of the week and has shaken the community of Korean streamers and its followers to the core.

The reason cited is relatively disquieting since, according to the Amazon-owned streaming service, it comes down to the high operating costs which were impossible to control, and that was true despite the efforts made by Twitch to minimise expenditure.

This closure will strongly impact the Korean streamers who will have to migrate to other platforms to maintain their online presence. Which will also oblige their communities to follow them and thus adopt different habits. A drastic change which could, in the end, strongly impact the gaming landscape of this Asian country where video games are extremely popular.

The Japanese optical fibre pulverises the data transfer speed record

The development of internet connections has reached new heights in Japan with a transfer speed calculated at 22.9 petabytes per second.

To give you some idea, that represents 2,750,000 gigabytes, in other words, a quarter of the data of the whole of the internet in one second! This performance represents an increase of over 1,000 times the capacity of the optical communications systems currently in place and places the country first in terms of the speed and reliability of internet connections.

Whilst optical fibres have for a long time been considered the norm, this new technology promises flow rates which are thousands of times faster, redefining connectivity standards. The innovation race in the domain of telecommunications continues to surprise, and Japan is clearly in the lead.

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