Women of XBOX UK – International Women’s Day 2021

Following the first video last October, the Women of Xbox UK group has once again brought together women from across Xbox to discuss their experiences in the games industry. Celebrating International Women’s Day and reflecting this year’s theme of #ChooseToChallenge, this edition of Women of Xbox UK features Louise O’Connor (Everwild Executive Producer, Rare) in…

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Studio Festivities!

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We’ve just held our annual Playground Games Festive Fun Day. In what has become a Playground tradition we dress the studio and invite the team and their families to celebrate the festive season. With the bar set high from last years inflatable grotto, complete with Santa and elves, the Operations Team excelled themselves and setup…

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Gamasutra – Parallax window textures

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Gareth Harwood, Technical Art Director, at Playground recently spoke with Gamasutra about streaming in open-world games, highlighting  parallax textures in Forza Horizon 4. In the article Gareth goes into detail on how he and his team came up with a modular building solution to achieve a smaller memory footprint and how they implemented the parallax…

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The Game Awards 2018

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This year Forza Horizon 4 was nominated in two categories at The Game Awards, best Sports/Racing and best Sound Design. I’m delighted to say that we won the the Sports/Racing Award, which also had nominations for FIFA 19, NBA 2K 19, Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 and Mario Tennis Aces, a tough category! Aaron Greenberg, Head…

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Golden Joystick Awards 2018

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We recently attended the Golden Joystick Awards in London at the Bloomsbury Big Top with the ceremony hosted by Danny Wallace. This year Forza Horizon 4 was nominated in two categories and we were thrilled to win Best Xbox Game! The Golden Joystick Awards have been going since 1983, making it 35 years old and…

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#GiveWithXbox

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We’re huge fans and supporters of the work of SpecialEffect, a charity who enable people with physical disabilities to play video games, and we’re delighted that they are including in Microsoft’s #GiveWithXbox campaign to raise up to a million dollars for charities this holiday season. The following video shows how SpecialEffect made it possible for…

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Forza Horizon 4 – Community Update

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With now over 3.6million players, the success of Forza Horizon 4 has seen the community coming together to produce amazing races, photography and designs. The creativity levels have been raised yet again to show off the world’s fastest assets – and by that, we don’t just mean the sheep. It’s been wonderful to see all…

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Industry Workshops 2018

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Last weekend saw our annual journey to Industry Workshops at The Old Truman Brewery in the East End of London. Industry Workshops is one of the UK’s largest game and film events bringing together professionals from around the world to share their knowledge over three days. Playground was there speaking to developers about opportunities at…

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