While Seattle’s PAX Prime 2015 is underway, the gaming industry has come out in full force for the massive conference. It comes on the heels of a notable week in gaming news. Here are this week’s biggest gaming stories.

Borderlands and Assassin’s Creed are heading to a theater near you.
Video game adaptations have long been elusive material for Hollywood movie producers. While there are countless games with incredible universes, deep stories, and cinematic moments, only a few have made it to the big screen. Fewer have achieved any sort of meaningful financial or critical success.
But all that may be changing, with two big developments in the world of game-to-film translations. This week, Yahoo! provided our first look at Michael Fassbender in costume for Assassin’s Creed. Rather than take on the identity of Altair or Ezio, Fassbender will be playing a new member of the AC universe.
The film will tell the story of Callum Lynch, a bartender in the near future who discovers that one of his ancestors was a master assassin in 16th-century Spain. Marion Cotillard (Inception, Iron and Bone) is set to co-star, in a production directed by Justin Kurzel. This same trio is coming hot off their adaptation of Macbeth, set to release later this year. Assassin’s Creed is set to release on December 21, 2016.
Meanwhile, LionsGate Films (the studio behind the The Hunger Games and Divergent series) have announced plans for a movie based on video game developers Gearbox’s hit Borderlands franchise. Producer Avi Arad (The Amazing Spiderman, Blade) is heading the project alongside his son, Ari Arad.
LionsGate executives promised in a press statement that the film would have “the same in-your-face attitude that has made the series a blockbuster mega-franchise.”
Google officially steps up to Twitch with YouTube Gaming
Longtime fans of live-streamed gaming content have often decried the lack of real competition in the marketplace. For the longest time, Twitch has reigned supreme and held a near-monopoly over the biggest talent, events and games. It’s that dominant market placement that spurred a billion-dollar acquisition by Amazon, and now big competition from the biggest name in online video.
Launched this past week, YouTube Gaming is a new live-streaming hub for gaming-focused content. While YouTube’s live broadcast feature has been available for a few months, this is the first targeted effort at using it to usurp the Twitch empire. The new service has a few distinct advantages over the competition, as well as some key policy differences. Unlike Twitch, YouTube’s player works natively in HTML5, rather than the buggy & increasingly insecure Flash. It also boasts a sharp interface that makes going live easier than ever and allows users to replay streams while they’re still broadcasting.
However, there’s an important distinction. While YouTube has brought in plenty of successful gaming channels, it’s always been prone to content flags from copyright holders. The site’s ContentID system automates the process of identifying copy-written material (helping to ensure pirated content doesn’t plague the service). However, these flags have often been contested with many companies claiming dubious ownership over various works.
Getting flagged means any ad revenue that a video generates will be lost until the dispute is settled, an intensely unfriendly practice for content creators. Pair that with the growing potential seen in streaming as a career, and YouTube may turn away the audience capable of making YouTube Gaming a standard.
Follow Chris Berg on Twitter, @Mushroomer25

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Youtube enters the Game Streaming race, but ContentID could stop players from participating.