On Friday a story by F*ck No Videogames alleged that the some of the developers behind the "mass murder" action game Hatred might be tied to extremist groups in Poland. Another report from Player Attack reiterates these allegations and expands on much of the information contained in the first report.

Sony Online Associate Art Director John Roy passed away on October 14th 2014. The cause of his death is unknown as of this writing.

Roy has worked in various positions at SOE since 1998. He started out as a Lead Artist at SCEA; in August of 1998 he took on the role of Assoc. Art Director at SOE. Roy has worked for Sony for nearly 18 years and has contributed to such games as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and many of SOE's biggest MMO titles.

EMP Museum passed along word today that it will celebrate the opening of its newest exhibit with the "Indie Game Revolution Launch Party" on November 7, 2014. EMP has partnered with UK-based indie video game collective the Wild Rumpus to curate a gaming party that’s part indie arcade, a "sound and visual extravaganza."

All are welcomed to attend. New and unreleased games from Wild Rumpus will be at the event, along with titles to be premiered in Indie Game Revolution, sponsored by Nintendo.

Organizers of the 2015 Canadian Video Game Awards announced that tickets are for sale to the public now. This year's awards ceremony will take place Friday, November 21st at The Carlu in the heart of downtown Toronto. The presentation will feature videogame actor voice actor Mark Meer from the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, as it's host.

Epic Games was quick to distance itself from Hatred, a game revealed this morning from Polish developer Destructive Creations. The game described by its creators as an "isometric shooter with [the] disturbing atmosphere of mass killing," was apparently built using Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and featured the Epic logo in its debut trailer.

Speaking to Polygon, Epic said that it asked the developer to take its logo out of its trailer and other marketing material.

Video-game themed military charity Operation Supply Drop announced the launch of a new mentorship program to support veteran-owned businesses, with a focus on the video game and entertainment space. The goal of the program is to encourage other veterans to look at starting their own businesses after returning home from a long deployment overseas.  HeroCrate is the first veteran-founded company that Operation Supply Drop has partnered with as part of this mentorship program.

Robin Hunicke, the game designer and producer responsible for creating Journey at thatgamecompany, has been hired by the University of California Santa Cruz as Associate Professor of Art & Game Design. Hunicke will officially join the faculty in January 2015 and be in charge of leading the new undergraduate program in Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz.

Evolution Studios says that it may be able to turn on some of the features that are currently disabled in DriveClub. Last night on its Facebook fan page the studio said that continual upgrades to the servers are making performance better for players.

"Continual upgrades to the DriveClub servers are building a steady increase in performance, meaning that we're getting more and more players connected," the studio wrote on Facebook.

Despite reports that popular game development suite Unity is up for sale, the company says that it currently has no plans on losing its independence.

"We have no plan to sell Unity," said co-founder and CTO Joachim Ante in a new post on the official Unity forums.

Ante's response relates to a rumor that first surfaced on CNET last week.

Evolution Studios says that it has not ruled out offering compensation to DriveClub owners in order to make up for the game's less-than-stellar launch. According to a series of tweets from game director Paul Rustchynsky, the developer is considering a number of options.

In response to a question about compensation for early adopters affected by the game's rough launch, Rustchynsky offered the following:

@pauldshelley We're considering all of our options right now.

Last night organizers of IndieCade 2014 handed out awards honoring such indie studios as Double Fine, Little Wins, and Down to the Wire. There were more than 1,000 submissions from developers, and over 30 nominations for the awards this year. IndieCade is an annual event held in Los Angeles that celebrates independent developers and the wonderful games that they make.

Hack 'n' Slash from Double Fine took the Grand Jury Award, while Loveshack's Framed won the Visual Design Award, and N++ from Metanet Software was given the Special Recognition Awards.

CNET is reporting that the makers of the popular game development suite Unity are "gearing up for a sale." One of those suitors, according to "people familiar with the matter," is Google, and the company supposedly had talks with at least "one would-be buyer in recent months."

GitHub revealed that it will give free access to a suite of development tools that small-scale game makers may find useful. The only catch? You have to prove that you are a student.

The offer is part of the GitHub Education initiative, and is available to students over the age of 13 and currently enrolled in an academic program. If you can do that, you can get access to project development help and tools like the Crowdflower crowdsourcing platform, a hosting plan with the DNSimple DNS management service, and free access to Unreal Engine 4.

Earlier this week we reported that a "bomb threat directed at the offices of Gearbox Software"  led to Plano, Texas police clearing the area on Friday while it searched for an explosive device. It turns out that the bomb threat was not directed specifically at Gearbox, according to this Polygon report.

On October 3rd Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford sent out a series of tweets - with photos - showing that someone called in a bomb threat to the company's headquarters in Dallas, Texas. While the call turned out to be a hoax, the Dallas police made sure that the areas was clear and safe before letting employees get back into the building or to their nearby vehicles.

The police department has not released details on where the call might have emanated from.

Below are Pitchford's tweets:

Japanese developer Westone Bit Entertainment is facing bankruptcy after nearly 30 years in business according to a report in Game Watch Impress (as translated by Sega Nerds).

Westone is best known for creating the 1986 8-bit hit Wonder Boy (released in America as Adventure Island) and the popular Monster World series released on the Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16.

Angry Birds developer Rovio says that it will have to cut 16 percent of its workforce. The company announced plans this week to downsize its staff by cutting around 130 jobs from its workforce in Finland. The cuts are apparently due to a lack of growth in recent months.

In his latest note to the Star Citizen community, Cloud Imperium Games founder Chris Roberts reveals that public funding for the space simulation game has reached a staggering $55 million.

Bandai Namco Games America has teamed up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) for Breast Cancer Awareness Month with the launch of its Ms. PAC-MAN Pink Ribbon Campaign. Headlined by special DLC featuring Ms. PAC-MAN, this effort is aimed at raising funds for NBCF to help women with early detection, education and support services related to breast cancer.

Dan Adelman, the guy that used to be in charge of Nintendo's indie program, was let go by the company in early August. Today we learn from Gamasutra that Adelman is helping developer Tom Happ with Axiom Verge. Adelman says that he is handling the business- and marketing-related stuff for Happ's upcoming game.

In the wake of the Yogscast-backed and Kickstarter-funded game Yogventures giving up the ghost and being canceled by developer Winterkewl Games, another Yogscast -backed developer was put forward to provide gamers who backed that other project some recompense. While the company still plans to do that, it looks like it is going through some short-term problems with funding that will in turn force it to lay off half of its staff.

The United States District Court for the Central District of California has invalidated the patent claims of McRO, Inc. (d.b.a. Planet Blue) against Activision and other parties in the video games industry. The two patents invalidated by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu concerned processes for "automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expressions of 3D characters."

Several major publishers doing business in the United Kingdom have teamed up with the British government to fund a whole new generation of game designers, according to Gamasutra. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Ubisoft Reflections have teamed up with the British government to back The Next Gen Skills Academy, which will fund video game developers, visual effects and animation professionals.

Riot Games has deployed a new update that puts in place a method for better controlling "toxic" League of Legends players from ranked matches, Eurogamer reports.

At least three analysts who follow the video game industry say that Blizzard's cancelation of Titan this week may have cost the company tens of millions of dollars.

Last year, with the help of the gaming community and companies like Sony Online Entertainment, game-related charity Extra-Life raised more than $4 million dollars to help battle serious ailments affecting children like cancer and cystic fibrosis. This year SOE has renewed its commitment to the cause with the goal of making 2014 a banner fundraising year for the charity.

inXile Entertainment revealed this morning that its crowd-funded spiritual sequel to the classic Interplay role-playing game Wasteland has generated $1.5 million in sales in the four days since it launched. The crowd funded post apocalyptic RPG sequel launched on Steam last Friday for PC, Mac, and Linux. So far, the game is getting fairly good reviews from both critics and fans.

"We are ecstatic that the style of game we love so much has been embraced so well," said inXile founder Brain Fargo.

Organizers of the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo (SIEGE) announced that Depression Quest developer Zoe Quinn will deliver a keynote on developing "gameplay mechanics for everyday systems" Oct. 3. On Saturday, Oct. 4, Whyville creator Dr. James Bower will also deliver a keynote on what "traditional entertainment games can learn from educational games."

Chucklefish, the developer behind the popular space adventure RPG Starbound, claims that it has earned enough money to be in continual development for nine more years. Chucklefish financed development of its "Terraria in space" adventure game through Steam Early Access and through pledge drives on the official Starbound website.

Over the weekend Double Fine took some heat from fans after it announced that it was releasing version 1.0 of Spacebase DF-9 next month, and effectively killing the benefits of those who bought the game through Steam Early Access.

Those who bought the game via Early Access were not pleased with this news because - as they see it - the game has gone from an early alpha state into a full blown release without a beta period.