Yet another week has flown by, this time full of newly discovered Zelda: Breath of the Wild glitches and an awful lot of discussion surrounding Joy-Con drift, but now we can sit back, relax, and talk about our weekend gaming plans.

Members of team Nintendo Life have done just that below, and we’d love for you to get involved by leaving a comment and voting in our poll. Enjoy!

Gavin Lane, staff writer

I’d like nothing more than to sit down with Fire Emblem: Three Houses this weekend and really dig into a series I haven’t touched since Awakening, but after my holidays it’s time to save some pennies and play something in the backlog instead. After racking up a triple-figure hour count in Awakenings, I never got around to Fates or Shadows of Valentia, despite the latter being brought to the west by top localisation house 8-4, and with all the Three Houses hype I’m jonesing for some SPRG action. Fortunately, there’s plenty of that on Switch and I haven’t yet touched Into The Breach, so that’s my bag for the weekend.

Mind you, I saw a great deal on Shadows of Valentia the other day (now’s the time to pick up 3DS carts on the cheap, people!), but going back to that handheld might be tough after Switch. We’ll see how the mood takes me on Saturday morning as I wander my local department store…

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

Another super-busy weekend doing boring, adulty home stuff means I might not get a great deal of gaming time, but I did finally get around to uploading my first ever Super Mario Maker course yesterday (I know, I don’t know what took me so long either).

Instead, I’ll likely keep an eye out to see how other players get on with my level to improve for further creations. If you want to check it out, feel free: 6G7-9KR-5TF. It’s called ‘Super Goomba 64’ and has you figuring out how to use power-ups to take out 64 of the pesky little blighters before reaching the goal. Make sure to let me know what you think!

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer

As the week draws to a close, that can only mean one thing: it’s Nazi punching time. Well, actually, it’s more smashing them in the face with a hatchet or blowing their heads off with a shotgun blast, but that’s just how Wolfenstein: Youngblood rolls. The FPS spin-off arrives on Switch this week and I’m already deep into our review playthrough, but I only received review code on Thursday so you’ll have to wait until next week to see how this ambitious shooter fares in the wake of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

Elsewhere, I’ll also be continuing to play through the extra content in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. That’s another big multiplatform hit that’s about to drop on Switch. Expect the official verdict on this tactical adventure next week as well. Who says we don’t spoil you with #content?

Liam Doolan, news reporter

I was intending to play Fire Emblem: Three Houses this weekend, but at the time of writing, I’ve been unable to track down a retail copy of the game. It’s supposedly sold out at every store in my location, so I’m either going to search around some more over the weekend or resort to the digital version.

On the plus side, at least I’ll be able to spend some extra time with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Super Mario Maker 2 and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. If I get really desperate for a Fire Emblem fix, I might even play one of the older games on my 3DS.

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

The Summer of Switch exploded onto eShop this week! This weekend will be comprised of overdoses of Wolfenstein Youngblood, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Fantasy Strike, Mighty Switch Force! Collection, Raiden V: Director’s Cut and… the original DOOM trilogy!? God Mode on!

My game of the week is the ridiculously ambitious Fire Emblem: Three Houses. To see the whole series evolve from its 8 and 16-bit origins to this magnum opus is humbling stuff. But will I ever be able to experience everything this game has to offer? If not, it will surely not be for lack of trying!

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

This week, MachineGames and Arkane Studios launched a pair of new Nazi-hunting slaughterfests. In VR, the pair teamed up to make Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, and on traditional platforms, they’ve launched Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a co-op first-person-shooter that puts players in the shoes of BJ and Anya Blaskowicz’s twin daughters.

Casting a pair of teenage heroes and setting up a two-player story means the game is a less solemn affair than its predecessors, but it also means everything from the gunplay to the levels has been recreated and re-imagined to be more cooperative and more replayable.

To learn more about how MachineGames and Arkane took on the task of reinventing Wolfenstein for a co-op playstyle, we reached out to executive producer Jerk Gustafsson.

A lot of it has to do with the decision to make Youngblood a cooperative experience as that has forced us to think in a much more non-linear fashion, not only when designing gameplay and levels, but also how we approach the game narrative. 
 
The foundation was however laid a few years earlier when we began development of New Colossus. One of my main “we should’ve done that differently” from the New Order development was that we didn’t allow players to revisit locations for completion (to find missed secrets and collectibles etc.) without having to restart and play through the game from the beginning.

 
This led me to adding the “complete the game within the game” statement to the key focus areas of New Colossus game design. But this came with a price, and a rather costly one too, as our primary focus continued to be on story and the campaign that guided our player through that narrative. Everything related to “complete the game within the game” became secondary and we ended up with scope cuts that forced us to make design decisions that were more focused on timesaving than good user experiences.
 
A good example is the wheelchair ride at the very beginning of the game. In the fiction, this map was part of the submarine hub, but there was no way we could make it fit into memory (to easily allow for players to revisit the area for missed collectibles) and at the same time we couldn’t justify the work of adding a separate loading into the map as there was basically nothing for players to do there (re-adding Nazis for combat wouldn’t have made sense in this specific area anyway).

The design solution to this, to avoid removing collectibles altogether from the wheelchair ride, was to double-up on those collectibles inside the vault of the submarine so that players at least could go there to find their missed out collectibles and “complete the game within the game.” This is just a small example, but all the problems we encountered with the revisited location design shows a lot of the complexities of the business we’re in – the solution to one of the problems we had with New Order basically became one of the main concerns when looking at New Colossus post-mortem.
 
Even if the ability to revisit locations provided value to the game, we still had to ask ourselves if it was worth the work required or if it would have been better to put all of our efforts into the campaign for a more polished and potentially even longer core experience, especially considering the fact that the majority of our players only experience that part anyway.

Youngblood draws a lot of learnings from this and we have added systems to the game that not only accommodate collaboration between players, but also gives players the freedom to tackle missions in any order they want. And this time both the game and the narrative design supports that freedom.
 
The open-ended structure is part of the core experience of Wolfenstein: Youngblood and yes, you can “complete the game within the game”.

To be honest, a lot of our level design has been based on assumptions. We’ve been quite time-sensitive too as the production window for Youngblood has been shorter and it took us about half a year to properly get the second player into the game. Basically, all level blocking was done without the ability to test with a second player. Of course, we’ve had the advantage of parts of the team being world-class experts in the field of level design, which has been tremendously helpful. 
 
Going back to those assumptions, the two main starting points for us were 1) to rework our enemy spawn system to accommodate two players existing within different locations of the map and 2) focus on the possibility of collaboration with alternative routes and different ways of approaching combat scenarios. This led to slightly larger and more complex combat spaces than we’ve done previously as well as necessary gating methods to allow enemy spawn/de-spawn between areas.

And while there’s been lots of improvements made to the maps over the course of development, our assumptions proved to be fairly accurate as the co-op combat experience within our maps worked surprisingly well and was fun from the very first time we had the ability to play together. 
 
While there will always be things that could have done differently with the knowledge you have at the end of a production cycle, I’m happy with the result and what the team has accomplished to provide an enjoyable co-op experience.

Most likely, I would say. For several reasons. First and foremost we need to adapt to how the business is changing with this new generation of gamers that consumes content in other ways than just playing. People participating through viewing, as an example, has been growing quite significantly over the last few years. Which means we as developers need to deliver experiences that are not only fun to play, but also fun and engaging to watch. A more open structure with an emphasis on player choice provides better opportunities for us to achieve that.
 
Another change that will have a big impact is streaming – as games will become a lot more accessible and reach a wider audience when streamed directly to tablets and TVs without the requirements of additional and expensive hardware (with the exception of controllers).  
 
For us, the more open game structure of Youngblood is a step in a new direction. And yes, I believe we can achieve experiences with a strong focus on player freedom while still maintaining the high-quality narrative we’ve become known for. A combination and a design approach I definitely think is appealing for gamers.

A number of different games. I probably draw a lot more inspiration from other games than I’d like to think. As game designers and creative developers we always want to create something unique, but what I’ve learned over all of these years is that it will happen regardless. I very recently talked to Marty Stratton from id Software about this – as I find it quite interesting that both of our studios have reimagined these classic first-person shooters with DOOM and Wolfenstein in a very retro fashion and yet they are so extremely different from each other.
 
One of the main reasons for that is of course that we are two completely different studios with different cultures and design approaches. If let’s say, MachineGames would develop a DOOM game, even based on the very same design documentation, it would still be a completely different game than the one developed by id Software. And this is important – today we feel confident and comfortable enough to know that whatever we do and whatever inspiration we draw from others, we will always deliver a unique MachineGames experience.

 
Youngblood is such an experience, but at the same time it’s also the game that differs most from all other games we have in our catalog. We’ve been developing these story-driven single-player experiences for almost 20 years now and it’s not only the co-op of Youngblood that makes it differ, it’s the female protagonists (we’ve been working with only male heroes and anti-heroes since the first Riddick game), the open-ended mission structure, level progression and character customization, real-time cut-scenes and an AI companion that accompanies you while playing solo. There are so many things we do differently, but still, in its core it remains an over-the-top, kick-Nazi-ass Wolfenstein experience.
 
While we’re on this inspirational subject I would like to add that I’m a big fan of Ubisoft titles like The Division, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon and I love to play them in co-op, something I definitely have used as a source of inspiration for Youngblood co-op. When it comes to solo experiences my game of the year, and I believe one of the best games I’ve ever played, is Metro: Exodus. It’s an incredible and overall very inspirational game. I also have lots of internal favorites that I draw inspiration from – specifically Arkane titles like Prey and Dishonored. Working with the Arkane Lyon team on Youngblood and Cyberpilot has been a wonderful experience and a great privilege.

This is one of the great benefits of being part of the same organization. The ability to share experiences with and learn from the creative talent of our sister studios. Something that we’ve done quite a lot over the years, but never before as extensively as the collaboration with Arkane Studios Lyon on these two new Wolfenstein games. 
 
We started talking about doing something together as our French colleagues were releasing Death of the Outsider and we were in the very end phase of the New Colossus production. Basically, it was good timing and we also had full support from the production team over at Bethesda. 
 
To both of our teams, this was a truly great opportunity that would allow us not only to draw learnings from each other, but also to broaden our respective expertise with gaming experiences outside of our comfort zones. Co-operative gameplay with Youngblood and virtual reality with Cyberpilot. 
 
And even though we, from the very beginning, had clear ownership of respective titles – MachineGames was running Youngblood development and Arkane Lyon was heading the Cyberpilot project (they have several VR enthusiasts in the studio who were really excited to work on a Wolfenstein VR title) – both of our teams have been well-integrated in the combined efforts of developing both of these games. This means all aspects of game development from start to finish – from production and design, to content and code. ​

Machineames and Arkane Lyon also have the benefit of operating within the same time zone, which definitely is one of the key parts of making the collaboration run smoothly. In addition, as two European studios, we do share a lot of cultural similarities and the way we manage our teams, as well as our production pipelines, are also quite similar – and now, as the collaboration on these two Wolfenstein titles are coming to an end, we are probably even closer in the way we approach game development.

Newsbrief: The Epic Games Store has finally starting rolling out cloud save support for a select number of titles.

One eagle eyed Reddit user clocked the new functionality in the settings for Moonlighter and This War of Mine, prompting Epic founder Tim Sweeney to confirm the news on Twitter.

The feature has been in the pipeline for a while now, with Epic previously promising to implement cloud saves at some point in July.

Although the company has technically hit that target, Sweeney explained there’s still a “bit more work to do” before the feature becomes available across the board.

Ghost Recon Wildlands has received one last, major free update before the October 4 launch of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and it’s added a whole new way to play. Mercenaries, a new PvPvE free-for-all mode playable on Xbox Live (Gold required), drops eight players into Unidad territory and challenges you to call for a rescue chopper, make your way to an extraction point, and be the first to escape. You’ll drop in without any items, gear, or weapons (except for a knife), but anything you can loot on-site will give you an edge as you match wits with other players and Unidad troops.

Each Mercenaries match unfolds in three phases, with the first being Recon. Here, your goal is to seek out intel, which can lead you to the locations of radio transmitters that shrink the size of the possible extraction zone, and help you narrow down where the chopper will appear. Intel can also pinpoint the location of a valuable loot cache, deploy a vehicle to your position, or reveal the positions of other players for a limited time. It’s up to you to choose which one is the most strategically valuable to you.

The player who activates three transmitters first will discover the extraction zone, triggering the next phase of the match, Helicopter Deployment. Once this phase begins, the chopper will begin to fly toward its landing zone. Only the player who activated the transmitters will know its location, but other players can still use transmitters to narrow down their search. When the chopper lands, its position will be revealed to all players, so get ready for a confrontation.

You can’t just climb into the chopper once you arrive; instead, you’ll need to fill a gauge by staying near it, extracting only when it’s full. You can’t fill the gauge while any other players are nearby, so you’ll need to defend the LZ from all comers. The good news is that your extraction gauge has checkpoints, so if you need to leave (or respawn), you won’t necessarily start over from scratch.

In addition to pushing players to loot gear and weapons (much of which is hidden behind new destructible doors), Mercenaries introduces a new health and armor system. Weapons that inflict penetration damage will cause you to start bleeding, at which point you’ll gradually lose health unless you can patch yourself up. Any medkits you find will heal your wounds and stop any bleeding, while bandages will just stop the bleeding. Syringes, meanwhile, won’t stop bleeding but will restore your health, buying you more time to find a bandage or medkit. To better protect yourself, you’ll want to scavenge some armor, which adds an armor meter to your health gauge that absorbs a percentage of any damage you take.

Complete a match of Mercenaries, and you’ll be awarded the Lone Wolf costume as thanks for trying the mode. You’ll also earn a Mercenary Patch for your first win, and subsequent wins can gain you the following items:

• Three wins: Mercenary Pants
• Five wins: Mercenary Heavy Vest
• 10 wins: Jacket Army Mercenary
• 15 wins: Mercenary Heavy Vest with Shoulder Pads
• 25 wins: Mercenary Backpack

Mercenaries is available now for all Ghost Recon Wildlands players on Xbox One, and caps off a long series of new modes, special events, and other free content updates that have been added to the game since launch. Jump in and start looting – that chopper only waits for the best.

© 2019 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Mojang has released 1.14.3. This release includes many bug fixes and some feature changes to make your lives easier… or harder depending on what they are.

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.

• Items can now be repaired by crafting them together again

• Reverted the enchanting system to how it was before 1.14

• Torches, lanterns and pressure plates can now be placed on glass panes and iron bars

• Lanterns can now be attached below iron bars and glass panes

• Saturation is no longer required for the “How did we get here?” advancement

• You can now turn off raids with ‘/gamerule disableRaids true’

• Patrol changes:

  • Vindicators are no longer part of patrols

  • Doubled the minimum time to spawn from 5 + (up to 1) minutes to 10 + (up to 1) minutes

  • Patrols no longer spawns if the block light level disallows monster spawning

  • Patrols are now allowed to spawn in any biome except mushroom biomes

• Villagers that are panicking now have a bigger chance of spawning Iron Golems, assuming they can occasionally work and sleep

• “Last slept” and “last worked” is now saved properly for Villagers

• Farmers now spend more time farming when they are working

• Farmers can now always give away food even if other villagers don’t need it

• Improved performance

• Fixed bugs

• MC-47699 – Blazes are able to see a player through blocks

• MC-72390 – Rcon is not thread-safe

• MC-74407 – Villager inventories can get into a state where villagers cannot do anything useful

• MC-93892 – Fire/Flame arrows and fireballs set player on fire even when blocking with shield

• MC-110004 – Enderman/blaze don’t drop experience when hit with splash/lingering potion

• MC-123836 – Double blocks aren’t loaded in structures

• MC-124170 – Performance issue with particles causing lag

• MC-129491 – Advancement location trigger works inconsistently for structures added in 1.9 or later

• MC-138053 – Gamerule spectatorsGenerateChunks being false prevents chunks from being loaded

• MC-139257 – Server crash on reload when worldborder is modified.

• MC-141301 – Illager patrols spawning on blocks mobs shouldn’t spawn on, such as slabs, carpets, stairs, etc.

• MC-142360 – Pillagers patrols can spawn pillagers on top of trees inside a leaf block

• MC-143369 – Wandering trader text implies trades refresh

• MC-144107 – Miscalculation of camera position in windowed mode on Linux

• MC-144507 – The legs on cats clip through to the top of the model

• MC-144929 – When there is water above a water source, other water sources adjacent to the water source flow outwards

• MC-145863 – Villagers breed even if there are not enough beds

• MC-146433 – Double Chest does not display custom name

• MC-146835 – Illager captain spawned from raids will still give the bad omen effect to its killer, causing raids to never end

• MC-147619 – Foxes that trust a player will still avoid wolves and other players they’re angry towards instead pursuing them

• MC-147851 – Villagers frequently run right into mobs they’re “trying” to avoid

• MC-148600 – Zombie pigmen will spread their anger forever if they can continously respawn

• MC-148610 – Hostile mobs spawning on top Trapdoors, Glowstone and Sea Lanterns

• MC-148986 – Low-tier enchants from lv.30 standard enchanting setups

• MC-149372 – Game crashes when opening a 1.13.2 world

• MC-149443 – Iron golems spawn too often

• MC-149518 – Skylight appearing under blocks

• MC-149877 – Baby foxes suffocate when jumping under blocks

• MC-150319 – I can’t load up my minecraft world after doing /kill

• MC-150401 – Chickens suffocate if jumping while under a solid block

• MC-150954 – Pillager Patrol spawn is way off. Spawning too close to each other, in odd biomes, and too frequent.

• MC-151079 – An employed villager quickly becomes unemployed and employed when he works, even if his workstation has not been deleted.

• MC-151084 – Chunk rendering is slow and random in 1.14.1 (pre 1)

• MC-151144 – Hostile mobs in lazy chunks no longer count towards mob cap, breaking mob switches

• MC-151185 – Game crash after breaking villager point of interest

• MC-151337 – Mob spawn rate too high

• MC-151346 – Crash while F3 menu tries to access tags while /reload-ing

• MC-151395 – Farmers create Bread ONLY when they pick up at least 3 wheat AT ONCE

• MC-151566 – Pillagers patrols can spawn outside world border

• MC-151710 – Enties not functioning in forceloaded chunks

• MC-151753 – More than one raid can happen in a village

• MC-151771 – Villagers don’t try to run away from zombie villagers

• MC-151772 – Mob cap in the hundreds to over 1000 per player.

• MC-151802 – Spawning causes massive TPS CPU load on a flat world.

• MC-151989 – Players in Survival do not get Dolphins Grace effect if Dolphin cannot path to Player

• MC-151995 – Patrol Leaders spawning without banner

• MC-152044 – Baby trader llamas disappear immediately

• MC-152053 – High client-side lag when pistons activate

• MC-152228 – Can not /summon trader llama

• MC-152542 – Resource Warning “Codepoint ‘1ed0’ declared multiple times in minecraft:textures/font/accented.png”

• MC-152638 – Villager trade GUI does not close when a major change happens to the Villager, leading to free trades and quick stock refreshing

• MC-152810 – Cat’s natural spawning causes Null Pointer Exception

• MC-153221 – dragon fireball causes FPS to crash

• MC-153222 – Broken/Incorrect recipe files cause a data pack not to load with nothing in log

• MC-153470 – Language map does not close internal ‘en_us.json’ file after reading

• MC-154000 – When dispenser places shulkerbox it decreases its stack twice.

• MC-154080 – Wandering Trader trade GUI does not close when the Wandering Trader changes dimensions allowing you to trade infinitely

• MC-154081 – Opening survival inventory when opening world crashes game

• MC-154092 – Zombie Pigmen lose aggro even when they’re in range and have a line of sight

• MC-154239 – NPE server crash when painting entities spawned with mob spawn eggs are saved

• MC-154328 – The Village Siege (Zombie Siege) never happens

To install the release, open up the Minecraft Launcher and click play.

Cross-platform server jar:

Report bugs here:

Happy Bungie Day!

7’s up, Guardians. Years ago you, the community, made 7/7 the unofficial celebration of everything Bungie. Fast forward to today, we’ve kept the name but it’s become the official celebration of all of you, the best community in the solar system.

We hope you’ll join us today in taking a moment to reflect on all of the unforgettable fireteams, friendships, and families that you’ve made over the years. Each one has contributed to building this amazing community into what it is today.

Thank you for everything, Guardians.

Moments of Triumph

Starting July 9, 2019, Moments of Triumph for Year 2 of Destiny 2 will become available. Players will be challenged to complete triumphs that span content throughout the solar system, from the Dreaming City to the EDZ. This year will be fairly straight forward: Complete in-game triumphs, unlock rewards.

Rewards

So, what’s available day one? We’ll have Triumphs for players to complete throughout various activities and releases. Players who own Destiny 2 will have the ability to earn all in-game rewards. In order to earn the 2019 Moments of Triumph T-shirt offer, players will need to own Destiny 2: Forsaken. To complete all 2019 Triumphs and unlock their title, players will need to own the Destiny 2 Annual Pass.

Triumphs

Solstice of Heroes Triumphs

Solstice of heroes will also bring some new loot for players to earn this summer. Keep your eyes peeled, we’ll have a blog article on July 24 to show off the upcoming event!

Moments of Triumph will be available from July 7 through August 27, 2019.

Refreshing Stock

If you make a purchase this week, you will receive a code for the Sign of Celebration emblem, available through July 13.

Formal Attire

Before we go, we want to say thank you again for being such an amazing community. We’ve gone through our archives of concept art and hand-picked a few pieces for you to adorn your screens with.

Oh, and don’t forget…

Happy Bungie Day. We’ll see you starside.

<3,

Bungie

IBM has a long history of working with the open source community. Way back in 1999, IBM announced a $1billion investment in Linux. IBM is also credited for creating one of the most innovative advertisements about Linux. But IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat raised some serious and genuine questions around IBM’s commitment to Open Source and the future of Red Hat at the big blue.

Red Hat CTO, Chris Wright, took it upon himself to address some of these concerns and answer people’s questions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. Wright has evolved from being a Linux kernel developer to becoming the CTO of the world’s largest open source company. He has his pulse on both the business and community sides of the open source world.

Red vs Blue: Some of the most pressing questions asked during the AMA were around the future of open source and Red Hat at IBM. Red Hat has its unique identity and branding. You will often see people walking with their red hats on at open source events, you may even notice some permanent tattoos.

One Redditor asked if there were any plans to overhaul Red Hat branding to make it blue or purple, Wright said, “No, Red Hat is Red. We just announced the evolution of our logo in May, no plans for any other changes. We like the new logo and so do the associates who already got tattoos of it!”

Kubernetes: A Redditor asked about the future of Red Hat OpenShift and OKD (the Origin community distribution of Kubernetes). Wright assured that the acquisition doesn’t have any effect on OpenShift and OKD. Wright said that Red Hat is focused on delivering the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform – OpenShift – without changes.

As far as community engagement is concerned, “…upstream first development in Kubernetes and community ecosystem development in OKD are part of our product development process. Neither of those change,” he said. “The IBM acquisition can help accelerate the adoption of OpenShift given the increasing scale and reach in sales and services that IBM has.”

Conflict of Culture: IBM and Red Hat are two companies with different, and often conflicting cultures. While Red Hat employees are allowed and encouraged to contribute to open Source, IBMers do not have the same level of freedom. One ex-IBMer asked, “IBM has traditionally had very strict policies regarding contributing to non-IBM open source projects. I understand that Red Hat’s culture is quite different in this regard; do you see IBM loosening up in this regard? Or will only the Red Hat division operate differently?”

Wright said that Red Hat would continue to operate the way it does with respect to allowing Red Hatters to contribute to open source projects.

IBM’s CTO of Open Source, Chris Ferris pitched in and said that for the past 5 years or so, the policy for IBMers contributing to open source on their own time was relaxed such that they could do so with their manager’s permission.

“In fact, we have been on a steady trend over the past 5 years or more to reduce the process barriers to both contributing to, and consuming open source and we continue to review our policies periodically. With the acquisition now complete, IBM has chosen to adopt the same policy towards contributing to open source on one’s own time as Red Hat has had historically. This is one important way that the Red Hat culture has benefited IBM developers.”

Adam Kaplan, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, contributed to the AMA and said that Red Hat employees are free to contribute as they see fit, even if a said contribution goes against Red Hat’s business objectives.

Future of Fedora & Gnome: Red Hat is among the leading contributors to many open source projects that are being used by the larger open source community. Some Redditors expressed fear about the future of such projects that won’t be bringing in any revenue for IBM.

One user asked about Fedora, which is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Wright assured that Fedora and its path stays the same. “It is an important community Linux distribution and Red Hat’s involvement will continue to be the same.”

Red Hat is one of the major contributors to Gnome, one of the biggest desktop environments for Linux and BSD. When asked about the future of Gnome, Wright said that nothing will change. “Certainly not to what we have contributed. More importantly, our future contributions will follow the same pattern,” he said. “We contribute to open source projects that are part of our product portfolio and focus on the areas that are important to our customers, which includes not just features but also long term maintainability (this becomes important in a codebase when you talk about architectural changes).”

Sunset at Oracle: Some Redditors drew a comparison with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. “I guess the biggest concern among the “Linux community” in general is that Red Hat might go down the path Solaris did after Oracle’s acquisition. IBM is viewed as an old school company, a bit like Oracle in that sense. We have learned through press that IBM’s plan is to use Red Hat to change IBMs perception and not the other way around. Hope it’s true. How do you guys plan on addressing such concerns?

Wright said that Red Hat would continue to run as an independent company and the team would continue to do what it does best: engage with customers, partners, and open source communities to build open-source solutions.

“Those solutions focus on our hybrid cloud strategy. A key part of the acquisition is for IBM and Red Hat to work closely together to advance our customers’ journeys to an open hybrid cloud. You’ve seen mention of IBM’s plans to use Red Hat platforms as part of their offerings, so this is the other key piece here.  We stay independent, we share a vision, and IBM is building from our core platforms,” he said.

Addressing a similar question that IBM has a history of buying companies and then breaking them up, Wright said, Red Hat will remain committed to the upstream work it does across the board.  “It is a fundamental part of how we develop our software products. Things like Network Manager create desktop usability, and can even be the impetus behind more core distro improvements. The IBM acquisition doesn’t change this at all. I see the future of Red Hat as staying focused on our core mission and continuing to evolve with (upstream first!) open source and our customer’s needs,” he said.

IBM nukes all Open Source at Red Hat: One Redditor asked what stops IBM from going nuclear and dismantling all of the open source work Red Hat has done?

Wright said that the reality of software is that open source has become the de facto means by which software is developed. “I often refer to this historic acquisition as an acknowledgment that open source has won. So, a simple way to look at this is the $34b value is about how important open source is to IBM’s strategy…again, open source has won!” he said, “Another way to look at it is the value that we’ve created with Red Hat is synonymous with open source. We wouldn’t exist without open source, it’s core to our strategy. And we (both Red Hat and IBM) are deeply vested in Red Hat’s continued success.”

Take Away

People should remember that by design, open source is protected from any such risk. If a company gets acquired and the code is at risk of being nuked, the community can fork the project and maintain it. Life goes on. Since everything that Red Hat does is open source, people can always take the code-base and maintain it themselves. open source code has escape velocities, it doesn’t go away with the companies that built it.

After reading the entire AMA, it’s fair to conclude that Red Hat is safe in the hands of IBM. It’s like a drop of color in a glass of water. The entire glass of water turns red. Red Hat has a very strong community-driven, open source culture. It’s very likely that IBM will be the one benefitting and transforming into an even more open source friendly company.

Rumor has it that one day Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst might become the CEO of IBM. When a Redditor asked the same question, whether Whitehurst will succeed Ginni Rometty as the CEO, Wright said, “I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but I think Jim is a great CEO!”

After a class action lawsuit was filed against Nintendo of America for its Switch Joy-Con “drifting” issues last week, the video game giant reportedly instructed support service representatives within this region to repair the controllers for free and refund customers who had previously paid.

A day later, we found out this free fix didn’t necessarily apply to certain regions outside of North America. Now, though, there’s a minor update for Latin America. It’s been reportedly confirmed by a Nintendo repair shop located in Costa Rica, that all Switch users in Latin America with faulty Joy-Con are able to get free repairs.

ResetEra user Atheerios further clarified:

“Nintendo has communicated every authorized distributor in LATAM to offer free repairs.”

If you’re located in Latin America and have a Switch Joy-Con with drift issues, visit Nintendo.com to find details for an authorised repair shop in your area.

Alternatively, you can try and resolve the problem yourself with our handy step-by-step guide and video.