Borderlands 3 went way over-budget and ate up the big bonus checks employees were promised years ago.

A new expose from Kotaku's Jason Schreier gives a rare glimpse at the inner-workings of games industry deals, particularly Gearbox's internal employee pay policies. Gearbox isn't like other independent studios. Developers make lower wages but Gearbox offers a 60/40% royalty split to its employees. Workers get to take home 40% of royalties, and the rest goes to Gearbox. This incentivizes working hard to make games as profitable as possible; the more a game sells, the more royalty cash flows into worker's wallets.

The should've happened with Borderlands 3, a mega-hit that's sold over 8 million copies to date and stands as the best-selling Borderlands game of all time. But instead of paying out large bonus checks, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford told the workers their bonuses would be a lot smaller than expected. The royalty money is drying up fast.

With E3 2020 cancelled, many publishers are moving towards digital-only streams to replace the June event. Even E3's showrunners are trying to pivot towards some sort of digital venue. But Bethesda says it won't be participating.

Today Bethesda exec Pete Hines confirmed the publisher won't have a digital event in June. The reason is simple: Coronavirus has significantly disrupting Bethesda's plans. That means no Starfield info, no Ghostwire Tokyo gameplay footage, no Deathloop content or an update on the anticipated Wolfenstein 3. And maybe, just maybe, Prey 2. Bethesda will instead stagger its announcements out across 2020 and may not be attached to the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 sizzle reels that may come in June 2020.

"Given the many challenges we're facing due to the pandemic, we will not host a digital Showcase in June. We have lots of exciting things to share about our games and look forward to telling you more in the coming months," Hines said on Twitter.

President Trump's coronavirus task force warns that up to 240,000 U.S. citizens could die from coronavirus exposure--and that's part of the best case scenario.

In yesterday's press briefing, the Trump administration delivered some sobering messages. President Trump warned Americans the next two weeks would be "very painful" as coronavirus deaths are expected to peak in mid-April. The best case scenario for total coronavirus deaths is in the hundreds thousands. The task force expects at least 100,000 people to die from the coronavirus in the United States, and deaths are expected to hit over 2,000 on April 15.

Without mitigation guidelines like social distancing, that number skyrockets to the millions.

The new Viking-themed Assassin's Creed game is coming in 2020, and now we have an idea what period of the Viking Age it'll be set in.

Ubisoft's next Assassin's Creed game might be it's biggest yet. The game, codenamed Kingdom, is an ambitious open-world title set in the brutal age of the Vikings. It's due out this year with cross-gen releases including PS5 and Xbox Series X. Norse mythology offers tons of potential with lots of strange gods and creatures. Now a leaked achievement list could set the game's time setting while confirming big boss battles.

The achievement list originates from 4Chan and could easily be faked. But if it's genuine, the list points at an 9th century setting for the game. We originally predicted Kingdom would take place during Charlemagne's conquest of Europe under the Holy Roman Empire. Now it looks like the game could take place shortly after Charlemagne's death in the 9th century.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood's co-op play might've been a test run for MachineGames' next big Wolfenstein sequel.

A new MachineGames job listing could hint at a return to classic deathmatch multiplayer with the next Wolfenstein, or maybe an online co-op mode similar to Youngblood. The job listing calls for a level designer that has experience with creating multiplayer levels, strongly hinting Wolfenstein 3 will have some sort of MP action. Bethesda confirmed Wolfenstein 3 was in development as far back as 2018, but MachineGames has yet to make a formal announcement.

Up until Youngblood, which introduced online co-op and microtransactions, all Wolfenstein games have been over-the-top singleplayer-only campaigns with tons of violence, action, and massive production values. But ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, has made a marked shift towards monetization and adapting core IPs into replayable live service-esque titles.

It has finally happened, Adult Swim has released the launch date for the last five episodes of Rick and Morty Season 4.

The trailer was released onto the official Rick and Morty YouTube Channel and teased the release of the highly-anticipated final five episodes of season 4. If you didn't know, Adult Swim decided to cut Rick and Morty Season 4 into two parts, and after the announcement of the division, the news went quiet on when we would be getting the final five episodes.

In the above trailer, we see multiple never-before-seen scenes of the final five episodes of season 4, and it seems that the end-half of season 4 will be extremely similar to the first half of season 4. What I mean by 'similar' is that the back half of season 4 will have all that fun, random, scientific hilarious stuff that we saw throughout the first half. So, basically, everything you want with Rick and Morty will be there in the final five episodes of season 4.

Astronomers have released a paper revealing that they have discovered the exact diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.

The paper has been released by astronomers from Durham University in England, and more specifically, astrophysicist Alis Deason and her colleagues released the paper on arXiv.org. According to the paper, the Milky Way's exact diameter is 1.9 million light-years, with a margin of error of 0.4 million light-years. Rosemary Wyze, a fellow astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, spoke to ScienceNews in regards to the Milky Way's new diameter measurement.

Here's what was said, "help astronomers tease out other galactic properties." The new measurement of the Milky Way should help astronomers gain a much more precise understanding of how many more galaxies are revolving around the Milky Way. At the moment, there are about 60 known galaxies surrounding the Milky Way, but since this new measurement has been made, that number is likely to grow. If you are interested in reading more on this discovery, check out this link here.

Valve has been extremely quick at updating Half-Life: Alyx considering it was released just a week ago, with the first patch (v1.1) adding in Continuous Turn as an option -- and now, v1.2 has been released.

The new 1.2 update for Half-Life: Alyx lets you switch movement controls between the left and right hand -- no matter what hand is being used to hold your weapon. You'll need to visit the in-game menu, then the SteamVR controller setup to choose which hand you'd like as your default for a weapon.

Half-Life: Alyx also gets the usual bug fixes and less crashes in the new 1.2 update, while performance has been improved just a bit with "better detection of low-memory situations". Half-Life: Alyx will update automatically through Steam.

Pokemon GO developer Niantic has just acquired 3D mapping startup 6D.ai, where the acquisition will see them building out "planet-scale" augmented reality, or AR.

6D.ai will infuse into Niantic and use its 3D environment reconstruction and persistent AR objects that will advance AR-based games and apps in a big way. Niantic burst onto the scene with Pokemon GO, but imagine planet-scale Pokemon GO where you see dragons and other creations flying around and landing on buildings, right in front of you -- in augmented reality.

Niantic said it knows "better than anyone" about this type of AR, while 6D.ai boss Matt Miesnieks said there "couldn't be a better team" for 6D.ai to join. Niantic is ramping into the future of AR, when everyone is allowed back outside after the global COVID-19 quarantines and lockdowns lift.

We've got the United Nations warning us that they are concerned of global food supply shortages, and now the Federal Reserve estimates that the worst of the job losses to Americans could get much worse.

According to estimations by Federal Reserve's St. Louis district project that total employment losses would mount to 47 million, which means the US would see a 32.1% unemployment rate. St. Louis Fed economist Miguel Faria-e-Castro wrote in a research paper last week: "These are very large numbers by historical standards, but this is a rather unique shock that is unlike any other experienced by the U.S. economy in the last 100 years".

Faria-e-Castro had some what he calls "back-of-the-envelope" calculations: these numbers don't add in the workers who will drop out of the work force. This means that the dizzyingly high unemployment estimations could be a tiny bit better, as well as fact that they don't estimate how the recently passed government stimulus will help.