Shortly after the announcement of the release date for Binding of Issac Rebirth’s next big DLC, Afterbirth; the BoI fan community have announced a big fan-made DLC pack of their own.

The BoI community are known for the thriving modding that a good deal of people within it get up to, so it’s probably not such a big surprise that this is happening. Titled Antibirth, it’s almost equal in size to Afterbirth, with two new characters, over 16 new boss monsters and over 90+ new items for Issac and the other characters to find, equip and warp themselves with. The biggest thing of all that it adds though is a ‘true’ co-op mode, in which both players will control a character instead of the main player being a character and the secondary player just a floating baby familiar of some odd appearance. There’s also an original soundtrack and a secret new chapter for those who dare to seek it out. So, it’s fairly impressive an effort.

As a mod for the base game though, Antibirth and the official Afterbirth DLC cannot run at the same time, although it is possible to use the same base game to run each pack at separate times – Afterbirth saves will not be affected by Antibirth runs either. The team behind Antibirth are planning to get their pack supporting all the DLC eventually though, including the upcoming Afterbirth. Heck, given that Afterbirth is introducing a function where the best fan-made mods get added to the game permanently they might even get help from the game’s makers themselves on that front.

For now Antibirth is only available on Windows machines. The team behind it are planning to improve upon and update the pack as time goes by, so hopefully Mac and Linux users will be able to play it without having to use a virtual machine in the future.

Antibirth will be free to download when it launches on December 20th. There’s even a trailer for it as well as an official site, so keep your eye on this one. It promises to be quite amazing.

Payday 2’s been going for a long while now, mainly because just when you think you’ve seen the last of it, Overkill Software bring out a new DLC for it.

This time, the DLC is the Scarface Character and Heist DLC Packs – and yes, that means it’s based around the film. Check out the trailer:

The new playable character is Tony Montana, wielding his famous gun alongside a chainsaw and a new ‘Kingpin’ class. What that means is that Montana can inject himself with adrenaline, allowing him to soak up more damage whilst mowing people down. Useful for those heists full of police pouring in from absolutely everywhere. Pacino’s not voicing the character unfortunately, but the voice actor who portrayed the character in Scarface: The World is Yours is there to fill in.

The Scarface Heist Pack also adds a new heists to the game, in which the player team can infiltrate the Sosa Cartel mansion from the Scarface film, hoping to steal back what was taken as well as taking out the Sosa to boot.

The Scarface Heist Pack is retailing at around $6.99/£4.99 while the Character Pack costs $4.99/£3.99. And if only one person in the party owns the Heist pack, everyone can play that mission which is pretty sweet.

You have to admire Overkill’s dedication to their heist game, adding more and more content on top. They’ve made the game stick around a lot longer than anyone would have originally guessed.

Fans of HiRez Studio’s 3rd person action MOBA SMITE will know that the developer loves to runs sales, in game events and generally just throw things at players. This is partly due to the fact that they want you to spend money on skins. But, when the skins are as generally high quality as the ones HiRez turns out, you can’t really blame them. With the holidays here, HiRez is ratcheting up the in-game goodies even more.  From Saturday Dec 17th at 5 a.m. EST until Tuesday, December 20th at 5 a.m. EST players can earn triple worshippers, experience and favor in SMITE. This makes the weekend the perfect time to work on your mastery levels with Nike and that pesky Fafnir. 

And if that wasn’t enough for you, once Triple Everything Weekend ends on the 20th, the 7 Days of Saturnalia Event will begin. Similar to Triple Everything Weekend, thjis second event will offer Double Everything as well as free gems for completing quests themed around the in game pantheons. From HiRez themselves:

Beginning Tuesday, December 20th until Monday, December 26th, join in the 7 Days of Saturnalia once again! Indulge in free Gems, Pantheon Chest Sales, and double Experience/Worshipers all week long.

Each day, there will be a new Pantheon specific Quest players can participate in that will yield 25 Gems upon completion. That means you can earn up to 175 Gems during Saturnalia! Each Pantheon Quest and Pantheon Chest will be available for 2 days.

Kudos to HiRez for giving players a full ten days of Christmas gifts, especially those who might still be trying to earn some gems and finish off those Odyssey purchases in order to get that sick Anubis Tier 5 skin. Go log in and own some people on the Battleground of the Gods people, HiRez is literally throwing gems at you to do so!

In what seems a massive vote of confidence in the watchability of eSports for the mainstream, Riot Games and BAMTech have just announced a long-term partnership. For those unaware, BAMTech is a subsidiary of Major League Baseball’s media group, with the remit of commercialising partnered content and delivering it to viewers worldwide on new media platforms, like streaming. So it seems to be quite the big deal.

The new broke earlier on both the Wall Street Journal and Nasdaq with the details of the deal being laid out. BAMTech will pay a minimum of $300 million for the “exclusive” rights to stream and monetise League of Legend competitions through to 2023 – which suggests that they will no longer be broadcast on Twitch but the details of that aren’t clear yet. Riot’s co-founder Marc ‘Tryndamere’ Merrill has assured people on Reddit that the deal is not “platform exclusive” though, so it’s looking likely that Twitch will still play host to streams of future LoL competitions.

Riot are hoping to make use of BAMTech’s expertise in sponsorship and advertising for the benefit of League of Legends eSports competitions and the fans’ ability to watch and engage with the content. “We’ll… be collaborating to push the boundaries of the eSports viewing experience, elveraging BAMTech’s best-in-class technology to create additional possibilities and opportunities for fans to access, and connect with, League of Legends.”

Revenue beyond the $300 million will be shared by BAMTech with Riot when the mainstream company begins to make money out of the deal, although percentage shares are not known at this moment. It is a sign though that eSports are on their way to becoming something more widespread and a lot less ‘niche’ than they once were possibly.

This year is Ubisoft’s 30th anniversary, and earlier this year at E3 the company announced that they were planning to celebrate this milestone by giving away copies of some of their games. Each month one game was added for free onto Ubisoft’s Uplay platform for the PC, and each month as the new game was uploaded the game for last month was taken down and with it your chance to grab it if you hadn’t already.

Now Ubisoft have given everyone another chance to grab the games they might have missed, by offering all the games as a bundle for this weekend only. Logging into your Uplay on your computer or heading over to the Ubi30 website will let you claim the bundle for youself, for seven free games. There’s also a badge for Uplay accounts available too.

The games, for those who don’t know, are:

• Prince of Persia Sands of Time
• Splinter Cell
• Rayman Origins
• The Crew
• Beyond Good & Evil
• Far Cry Blood Dragon
• Assassin’s Creed III

If you want these games, you have until Sunday to claim them, so be quick.