Continuing its series of reports on popular YouTube personalities taking money to promote games, Gamasutra offers details of a recent survey that shows how developers feel about the whole issue. In its survey of developers Gamasutra asked a handful of questions about paying for coverage, if they would consider paying for coverage in the future, and if any traditional media outlets had ever asked them for money.

Developer Facepunch Studios has agitated the Rust community simply by announcing that it is working on several other game ideas. It all started when it announced a prototype for a new game called "Riftlight," an arcade space shooter with action-RPG elements. Fans of Rust, the popular action survival game that was released on Steam Early Access, are angry because Rust is still in development and unfinished. Fans see it as Facepunch taking focus away from that game to work on this new game.

While CD Projekt Red has not been afraid to include sexual content in its The Witcher series of action role-playing games, the Poland-based developer says that sex scenes in general should be tactful. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will contain sex scenes, according to level designer Miles Tost, but they will not be overdone or be tacky. These scenes will not be interactive either.

Here's a bizarre story: apparently two developers working on Far Cry 4 witnessed an animal sacrifice while doing research for the upcoming shooter.

According to this Polygon story, two Ubisoft developers took a trip to Nepal to do research for the fictional Himalayan setting in the game - Kyrat. While there they witnessed a goat being sacrificed as an offering to Kali, the Hindu goddess of change and destruction..

CCP Games has promoted EVE Online Senior Producer Andie 'CCP Seagull' Nordgren to the role of executive producer  on the company's flagship MMO property. In her new role, Nordgren will oversee all aspects of EVE Online’s production from the company’s Reykjavik headquarters.

The latest version of Oculus Rift for developers (DK2) has begun shipping to buyers, but there's some question as to whether those who purchased a DK2 will get one in this first batch of shipments. In early June Oculus VR community manager Andres Hernandez indicated that the company was unlikely to be able to fulfill all deliveries on schedule in July after receiving over 45,000 DK2 pre-orders.

According to Gamasutra's Game Developer Salary Survey 2014 (PDF), layoffs were on the rise in 2013. This is in contrast to prior years where the number remained slightly down or close to flat. Around 14 percent of developers surveyed said they were laid off in 2013. That's up slightly by two percent from 2012.

Film company Lionsgate Entertainment has invested an undisclosed amount of capital in Finish developer Next Games. Next Games is a game studio based in Helsinki, Finland that was formed last year by former Rovio, Disney and Supercell developers. The studio raised $6 million in its first round of public funding, and is currently working on a free-to-play mobile game based on AMC's The Walking Dead show called No Man's Land and another undisclosed project.

Cliff Bleszinski's newly launched game development studio, Boss Key Productions, has confirmed its first round of employees. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based developer has hired senior staff members that have worked at such studios as Epic Games, Red Storm, Neversoft Entertainment and Irrational Games.

The European Women in Games Conference will open its doors officially on Sept. 10 and will feature two keynote speakers (so far), organizers announced today. This year's event will take place at London South Bank University, in London England.

Topics being focused on this year relevant to women already in the games industry or trying to break in include setting up your own games company, games industry career advice on to how to encourage more school children to consider a career in the games industry, and much more.

Yesterday, Kickstarter suspended West Games' crowd-funding campaign for Areal, a first-person sci-fi themed shooter billed as a spiritual successor to GSC Gameworld's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The crowd-funding campaign has been mired in controversy since it launched, with former employees of the original and now dissolved S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

According to Gamasutra's Game Developer Salary Survey 2014, men working in the video games industry here in the United States made an average of $85,074 in 2013, while women in the same jobs made an average of $72,882. According to Gamasutra, women made 86 cents on every dollar that men made in the U.S. game industry.

While this is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, the pay gap between men and women is less than the national average: in the U.S. overall, women make 77 cents on every dollar that men make, according figures from a 2012 Census Bureau survey.

Winterkewl Games tells in this lengthy article that it will disband. Winterkewl was the developer behind the Yogscast-backed Kickstarter project Yogventures, which raised over a half a million dollars from over 13,000 backers. Last week Yogscast announced that the game had been effectively canceled but promised to give backers a copy of a similar game being developed by Nerd Kingdom called TUG, an open-world sandbox which it is now partnering with instead.

Riot Games is cracking down on League of Legends players who think it is cool to use slurs and those who engage in "unsportsmanlike behavior" by handing out 14-day or permanent bans.

In a thread on Reddit, Riot's Jeffrey Lin provided some more clarity, and explained that manual reviews of complaints are present to ensure people are not unfairly banned.

Last week popular gaming-related YouTube group Yogscast announced that Yogventures was no longer in development. Kickstarter backers were told they would receive a Steam key for TUG, a similar game whose developer Yogscast had now partnered with instead.

Ashley Johnson who voiced the lead character Ellie in The Last of Us, has criticized Ubisoft over the company’s recent statements about the lack of playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed: Unity multiplayer.

Recently SteamDB published an open letter to Valve from members of Steam’s developer community concerned with some of the company’s security practices. The letter signed by 16 individuals from the Steam developer community complained that Valve does not offer rewards or bounties to security researchers who discover exploits.

Despite some controversy associated with Areal, a spiritual successor of sorts to the STALKER series, the Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign from West Games is a success, raising $64,291 with three days to go. West Games was asking for $50,000 initially and there was some doubt that it would raise it.

In an article on Gamasutra, game developer and president of Game Mechanics John Ardussi claims that 150,000 views of a YouTube video featuring a game only generates about 10 game sales.

Ardussi did not detail how he came to this conclusion, and not all games have that kind of sales performance as it relates to YouTube exposure. In other words, mileage may vary.

But Ardussi still has doubts that YouTube exposure generally stimulates sales in any significant way.

A new website launched for a company staffed by former Infinity Ward employees who plan on making games for virtual reality devices such as Oculus, mobile devices, and current-generation consoles. The company is called Reload Studios, and according to the site, it is staffed by former Call of Duty artists, producers, and developers.

Nexon and Wargaming, two juggernauts in the MMO gaming space, and Zynga CEO Don Mattrick have teamed up with UK-based investment fund London Venture Partners to create an early-stage seed fund.

Saints Row series developer Volition has asked the city of Champaign, Illinois, for around $200,000 in tax breaks and incentives, or - it says - it may have to move its headquarters out of the bustling downtown area of the city. Volition moved to its current location in 2004, and is has plans to expand, hiring around 100 new members.

Mind Candy founder and CEO Michael Acton Smith announced via a YouTube video that he is leaving the company. Smith founder the company in 2004 and saw great success with its popular mobile game Moshi Monsters. But smith says that the great success the company experienced forced him to spend less time developing games and more time handling the business side of things. His departure from the company is a return to getting back to the art of making games.

The BAFTA Young Game Designers competition has its first female winner: 16 year-old Rhianna Hawkins, who won the Game Concept Award for her concept game, Tomatos Role. The other big winner of this year's honors was 15 year-old Adam Oliver, who won the Game Making Award for AlienX after reaching the final stages of the competition for the third time. Oliver made the final ten for the Game Concept Award in 2010 and 2011.

The rumors continue to mount that Crytek UK is in bad shape financially and morale is getting lower and lower. Today's news won't help; according to Kotaku, Homefront: The Revolution's game director has now left the company.

Tony Hawk developer Neversoft commemorated its final day this week as the merger with Activision's other wholly-owned studio, Infinity Ward, is completed. Neversoft employees performed ceremonial logo burning, highlighted in a series of pictures and messages posted on Twitter. According to employees on Twitter, studio lead Jole Jewett - who is set to retire - gave staff member custom knives on their final day as Neversoft. Neversoft studio director Scott Pease will also retire.

Blizzard president and a co-founder Mike Morhaime says that his studio is making a concerted effort going forward to create more diverse and inclusive game characters and content. Morhaime made his comments in response to an open letter aimed at him and Blizzard complaining about under-representation of females and ethnic minorities in the company's games.

According to this Gamasutra report, Ben Hanson, the lead content designer of the Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed expansion and other SWG products, has passed away. The news of Ben Hanson's passing came from former colleague Raph Koster, who also worked on the Star Wars MMO.

We've seen "rock simulators" and goat simulators, so I suppose it isn't that much of a stretch for a games journalist to want to make a "games journalist simulator." That's exactly what games journalist Jason Evangelho tells web site Siliconera; he has teamed up with Game Informer writer Daniel Tack to create "Game Journalism Simulator."

GameStop CEO Paul Raines says that yesterday's news that the company wants to get more involved in the development process in order to bring exclusive content to the retailer may have been slightly misunderstood. The Raines interview with Time that comes on the heels of comments from a financial analyst with R.W. Baird who reported that GameStop management was discussing the possibility of ramping up the company's participation in game development during a recent investor meeting.