Activision Blizzard reports Q3 net bookings down 3% YoY to $1.83B vs. $1.7B est., and MAUs down 6% YoY to 368M; Modern Warfare II made $1B+ in its first 10 days (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Andy Chalk / PC Gamer:
Blizzard will require Overwatch 2 and Modern Warfare 2 players to use SMS Protect, a 2FA system, to combat toxicity, but won’t accept prepaid and VOIP numbers  —  Just like Overwatch 2, you’ll need to attach a phone number to your Battle.net account to play Modern Warfare 2—and prepaid phones aren’t allowed.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Nvidia unveils its first SaaS and IaaS offering, Omniverse Cloud, a services suite for artists, developers, and enterprise teams to build and run metaverse apps  —  Nvidia today announced its first software- and infrastructure-as-a-service offering — Nvidia Omniverse Cloud …

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Discord debuts Activities to bring group experiences like playing games and watching videos to Voice Channels, an App Directory, Premium App Subscriptions, more  —  Discord announced a number of upgrades to its platform today, including activities where users can play casual games with each other.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s blockchain technology startup Lamina1 releases a whitepaper on building an open metaverse, dubbed Theee Metaverse  —  Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1 blockchain technology startup dropped a white paper today on building the open metaverse.  It’s quite the manifesto.

Brendan Sinclair / GamesIndustry.biz:
EA reports Q2 revenue up 4% YoY to $1.9B, vs. $1.94B est., net income up 2% YoY to $299M, and net bookings down 5% YoY to $1.75B  —  The “most successful launch” in series history helps publisher finish Q2 with revenues up 4% but bookings slide 5%  —  Electronic Arts reported its earnings …

Josh Horwitz / Reuters:
Chinese government data shows chip imports fell 12.4% YoY to 47.6B units in September; in January to September, domestic chip production fell 10.8% YoY to 245B  —  China’s chip imports fell 12.4 percent in September, according to official customs data published on Monday …