If you’re wondering what’s going on with classification boards around the world now that CERO in Japan has been temporarily closed, it’s business as usual.

An update from IGN reveals the ESRB in America has been working from home in recent weeks. So far, it’s had no issues assigning ratings remotely. Here’s an official statement:

Thanks to a good deal of advance planning, since March 16 ESRB has been operating remotely due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We have seen no delay in assigning ratings. We will continue to assign ratings remotely for as long as required.

Over in Europe, the European games rating agency PEGI is also working remotely. The impact of the resulting measures has been minimal:

In short: yes, we are currently working remotely with minimal impact on our operations. When this situation started to unfold across Europe a couple of weeks ago, we quickly found a way to continue our daily operations by working remotely. Given that PEGI (in Brussels) works with two independent administrators that are located in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and they deal with publishers all over the world that we do not have to meet in person, cooperating remotely has always been part of our daily routine. But now it happens from homes instead of different offices.

We informed the companies using the PEGI system that, until local authorities announce a change to the current measures, we will be working like this. But until now, the impact of the pandemic and the resulting measures has been minimal.

Unless something major happens or there is a problem on the publisher or development end, games in these regions will continue to be rated.

Can you believe it? Playtonic’s unlikely duo Yooka-Laylee is now three years old! The original game of the same name was first released on the 11th of April 2017 after a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. And although it never saw the light of day on Nintendo’s Wii U, it did eventually show up on the Switch.

To celebrate this special milestone, the game’s publisher Team17 has released the following tweet, asking fans to share their favourite moments so far with these characters.

In this short time frame, Yooka-Laylee has made a cameo in the fighting game Brawlout and appeared in the side-scrolling sequel, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. If you haven’t tried out the second game yet, now is the perfect time. It’s currently on sale on the Switch eShop for just $20.09 / £16.74.

Earlier this week, Playtonic also rolled out a new update for the Impossible Lair, making it a little bit easier. A second update will follow this on 14th April, and adds in an 8-bit soundtrack.

On behalf of everyone here at Nintendo Life, happy birthday Yooka-Laylee. Share your own favourite memories of these characters and their games in the comments below.

Want to calculate the standard deviation of a column in your Pandas DataFrame?

In case you’ve attended your last statistics course a few years ago, let’s quickly recap the definition of variance: it’s the average squared deviation of the list elements from the average value.

You can do this by using the pd.std() function that calculates the standard deviation along all columns. You can then get the column you’re interested in after the computation.

import pandas as pd # Create your Pandas DataFrame

d = {'username': ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl'], 'age': [18, 22, 43], 'income': [100000, 98000, 111000]}

df = pd.DataFrame(d) print(df)

Your DataFrame looks like this:

Here’s how you can calculate the standard deviation of all columns:

print(df.std())

The output is the standard deviation of all columns:

age 13.428825

income 7000.000000

dtype: float64

To get the variance of an individual column, access it using simple indexing:

print(df.std()['age'])

# 180.33333333333334

Together, the code looks as follows. Use the interactive shell to play with it!

Standard Deviation in NumPy Library

Python’s package for data science computation NumPy also has great statistics functionality. You can calculate all basic statistics functions such as average, median, variance, and standard deviation on NumPy arrays. Simply import the NumPy library and use the np.var(a) method to calculate the average value of NumPy array a.

Here’s the code:

import numpy as np a = np.array([1, 2, 3])

print(np.std(a))

# 0.816496580927726

Where to Go From Here?

Before you can become a data science master, you first need to master Python. Join my free Python email course and receive your daily Python lesson directly in your INBOX. It’s fun!

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This week at Bungie, the final bunker opened.

A third and final Seraph Bunker has opened on Io. The new Bunker points players to partake in the Seraph Tower event and new Legendary Lost Sectors on the Jovian moon. Guardians also made a new discovery in the bunker about Rasputin’s efforts to track our enemies.

We’re one month into Season of the Worthy and we’re not done yet. Grandmaster Ordeal is only a few weeks away, but before we share more on that, let’s talk about a new charity initiative coming up next week.

Making a Difference

As the world responds to the outbreak of COVID-19, many of us have been urged by our local governments to stay home. Containing the spread of the virus is one of the best things we can do to protect our fellow humans. If you’re a gamer, you’ve been training for this moment for your whole life. If you possess the heart of a Guardian, however, you might be wrestling with the urge to do more!

This is the question we’ve been asking ourselves at Bungie:

Is there something more we can do to help the real-world heroes who are confronting this crisis head on? 

We’ve arrived at an answer that we think is very exciting. We’d like to share it with you – and even welcome you to join us in helping to make the world a better place. On Monday, you’re invited to join us in our game rooms to talk about it.

Bungie’s COVID-19 Fundraiser 

Monday, April 13 

10:00 AM Pacific 

Players of Bungie games have never backed down from a fight. We’ve banded together to support the survivors of floods, earthquakes, and wildfires. You may even have a memento to commemorate the role you played in some of those initiatives. On this occasion, when it seems like the world needs help more than ever, we have an emblem to mark the Guardians in our community who choose to throw their lot in with our efforts.

On Monday, we’ll reveal how you can earn this emblem to display proudly in game. We’ll talk about this charitable call to action, who will benefit, and the impact that we will have together.

Join us for the conversation. Join us to make a difference.

Grandmaster 

In a few weeks, we’ll debut a new difficulty selection for The Ordeal called Grandmaster. It will test your fireteam’s coordination, communication, builds, and skill like no other activity in Destiny to date.

Here’s a look at a few of the goals we had when approaching Grandmaster after we saw how the rest of The Ordeal was received:

To attempt Grandmaster, you will need to be Power Level 1025 which is 15 Power above the Pinnacle cap but will be 25 Power below the activity which will be set at a Power Level of 1050. We’re also going to have something similar to the Contest mode we introduced for Crown of Sorrow. You will gain no extra advantage for being higher than 1025. We wanted to require a mixture of pinnacle rewards and artifact power to get you prepared for this, but not make you feel like you had to put in a ton of extra hours over-leveling the activity.

We’re introducing some new modifiers along with some familiar ones, including Extinguish (if your team wipes, it sends you back to orbit) and Limited Revives (you start with a small pool of shared team revives and you get more every time you kill a Champion). We don’t want to spoil everything, so there are a few other wrinkles we’ll let you discover when it goes live.

Does this sound like a worthy challenge so far? We hope it does, and as a reward, you’ll have increased chances of being awarded Exotic armor and Masterworking materials. But the main draw of the mode is the new Seal and title available for beating each of the Grandmaster Ordeal Strikes once during the Season: Conqueror. We want this to be one the most challenging titles to get, but we want it to be approachable for anyone to try who puts in the time and dedication with their team during a given Season.

Grandmaster Ordeal will begin on April 21.

Iron King 

The second coming of Iron Banner for this Season is already upon us. Lord Saladin will be setting up shop at the top of the Tower and you’ll have another shot at finishing the quest and earning the new Bow.

Bonus Valor gains are also enabled throughout the week.

Iron Banner and bonus valor begins at 10 AM PDT on April 14, running through 10 AM on April 21. 

Weekly Challenge Accepted

Pleas welcome in the Player Support team with the latest on known issues we’re tracking.

This is their report.

TRIALS WEEKLY CHALLENGE UPDATE

Last week, we released Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.8.0.2. As part of the hotfix, we resolved an issue where Trials of Osiris Weekly Challenges were not being reset properly. We believed the issue would be resolved later that week when Trials of Osiris went live, but the issue persisted, causing players who didn’t have their Weekly Challenge to not receive any rewards on their third, fifth, or seventh win.

Starting this Friday, April 10, all players are expected to have their Weekly Challenge available to them when Trials of Osiris becomes active.

CLAN CREATION AND EDITING

Players may notice that they are unable to create or edit their clans in Destiny 2. While we investigate this issue, players can still join or leave Destiny 2 clans at any time.

PC CRASHING UPDATE

On Tuesday, we worked with Valve to issue a small update to Destiny 2 on Steam that should resolve a crashing issue players have been receiving. This small update is also helping us to determine what is causing the BEAVER error code to appear more frequently.

BEAVER ERROR CODES

Since Season of the Worthy began, we have been seeing a significant increase in the following error codes: ANTEATER, BEAVER, BEETLE, and WATERCRESS. While we continue to investigate the cause of these error codes, we have implemented fixes that have helped reduce the number of BEAVER errors on Steam, which you can see illustrated in the chart below. We understand how frustrating and painful it can be to receive this or any error code, and we’re working intensely on further mitigations.

KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

• Fully upgrading any Seraph Bunker sometimes doesn’t unlock the associated Warmind Security Triumph. This issue is expected to be resolved in our next update.
• Warden of Nothing doesn’t give platinum rewards if one of the Unstoppable Champions is killed by a train.
• The Dynamic Charge perk doesn’t activate on Symmetry if shot through Citan’s Ramparts assisted Assault Barricade.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Showtime

Movie of the Week:  I Collect Motes Not Deposit Them

Honorable Mention: Don’t Tell Zavalla

If you do end up winning, please make sure you put a link to your bungie.net profile page so we can send you the emblem.

We’re looking forward to the charity stream next week. It’s always a pleasure seeing our community show off the amazing things you can do when given the opportunity to support a great cause. Guardians truly share some of the heroic qualities of their in-game counterparts.

<3 Cozmo 

Fallout 76: Wastelanders is Now Available for Pre-Purchase and Pre-Load on Steam !

In Fallout 76: Wastelanders, people are now coming back to West Virginia. Embark on a new quest for the Overseer, forge alliances with competing factions, and uncover the truth of what’s hidden in the mountains.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

The world is complicated.

I like attempting to decipher the truth from the noise.

I also happen to be a game designer/developer and enjoy finding and analysing relevant stats. Valve recently posted some graphs showing that more games than ever are making at least $10,000 in the first 30 days of Launch on Steam. Great news for independent digital creatives. They had various ways of analysing the stats and you can read more in their original post. Here’s a nice graph they made, taken from the appendix of that article.

I thought it might also be useful to add some context to those figures as the number of games being released on Steam has also been increasing in recent years.

Below is a table showing the percentage of new releases that hit the above metric of making at least $10k in the first 30 days of launch. Please keep in mind this is an indication of trends rather than the precise results for the following reasons:

• I’m estimating the number of games that hit $10k based on squinting at the above bar chart!

• The bar chart above excludes games that are free to download.

• I’m cross referencing those numbers with Steam Spy’s numbers for total releases in each year, which does not exclude games that are free to download. Because of this we would expect the percent of releases reaching this metric to be higher than in the table below, especially in recent years as more freemium games get released. However, freemium games are still the minority of releases on Steam so let’s not worry too much about this for now.

Here’s a bar chart of the same table data so it’s easier to visualise.

We can clearly see that, as you might expect, as more games become available on Steam, a smaller percentage of them are able to achieve revenue of at least $10,000 in the first 30 days of launch.

Should Indies Get Out The Pitch Forks and Tweet Valve With Great Vengeance and Furious Anger?

No.

In my opinion, Valve have taken on a very difficult task, and one that I respect. As I see it they are trying to battle natural macro behavior. In a previous article I briefly touched on the Pareto principle. It’s a strange phenomena that tends to crop up in many avenues of society. Essentially, perhaps because of our innate behaviours of forming hierarchies, worshiping the same idols and copying what those around us do, most of us tend to talk about the same things, play the same games, listen to the same music and [insert activity] as those in our perceived community. This means you get a small number of “big winners” and a large number of “small winners” if winning means achieving popularity in any given domain. In other words, it’s not “Steam’s Fault” if the most popular games massivly oveshadow the other games.

You can read an article by Stardock, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, to hear some more interesting thoughts on the Pareto Principle, the changing landscape of Steam and their response to it as a creative business.

So how are Valve combatting the effect? They are introducing various new discovery tools and algorithms that, in theory, will only display games that an individual user is likely to genuinely enjoy. So even if game X is the current top selling game of the week, a user who shows no interest in that “style” of game should not see it on their Steam front page. Instead they’ll see games that interest them. This is fairly new ground that Valve have yet to perfect. But they are definitely trying and I commend that. As an anecdotal aside I think Spotify do a good job of recommending tracks and artists based on user preference and Youtube do a moderately good job of recommending content based on user preference.

I should point out my bias though. Myself and two comrades released a niche game on Steam which we thought might get some downloads at release and then drop to 0 soon after launch. However, we have been pleasantly surprised to see that it has consistently been shown to Steam users every month and consistently gets bought and downloaded. Due to this modest success, we’ve been able to attract some publishers who want to push it out onto more platforms. So my personal perspective is that I’m grateful to have the opportunity to follow my creative passions (I like designing games that try and make people feel connected to each other) *and* have a platform that helps us to monetise our creations every month through their automated systems.

False Assumptions?

I think some of us have an assumption that “a level playing field” is possible. By that I mean a world without “top 10” charts and where the disparity between the rich poor does not continue to spiral. However, I now question that assumption. It might be more likely that the sum of human activity looks very much like a scaled up version of our basic tribal instincts where we want to belong to a group and feel the same as those around us. The more interconnected and fast moving our societies and social/financial networks are, the more quickly the big winners surface and become dominant in their field because they can amass more followers at a rapid rate of acceleration.

Practical Strategies

So what does this all mean on a practical level if you are  a small studio trying to sustain yourselves with the content you create? There could be various strategies. Here are a few different approaches:

Don’t try and compete in saturated markets/platforms. Find emerging markets/platforms and enjoy the relative fame there while you can before the larger organisations move in and dominate. We saw this happen with Apple’s App Store and in the PC space there have been several new platforms springing up in recent years that you could investigate. There are always new opportunities to take advantage of.

Figure out how you can beat the larger organisations at their own game. This is obviously very challenging and perhaps foolhardy. However, if you have a good understanding of what customers really need/want and you have an efficient design/production approach you might discover what you *don’t* need to build into your products. This will allow you to prioritise what your audience wants and build it with a smaller team, ignoring costly features that traditional studios still assume are necessary.

Don’t try and be the star. Instead of wanting the limelight for yourself and rolling the dice to try and make that happen, build tools that allow others to follow their dreams.

Rather than attempting to create your own network or following, make use of an existing one. Find an emerging network/service/product and build your content on top of it to give that audience more ways to enjoy the core product.

Work with larger partners. An established publisher or investor would not expect all their projects to make a profit. If they’ve calculated their risk portfolio well, the hits they have will far outweigh the cost of the losses. On the flipside, if you are relying on your single project to be a hit, you’re playing a risky game.

Ignore anything to do with shifting business landscapes. Follow your creative instincts, place your bet and go all-in. You might get lucky, someone has to! (Don’t actually do this unless you are young and have a wealthy family who can/will support you if you go broke!)

Ok that’s it from me for now, I don’t often use Twitter but I do have an account so you can message me @HoneyTribeStu (although it might take me a while to respond)

Cheers,

Shaz Yousaf