A World of Warcraft mobile game has reportedly been quietly canceled due to financing disputes. From a report: According to Bloomberg, the upcoming smartphone game had been in development for three years but has now been canceled due to a dispute between Activision Blizzard and NetEase. "The two companies disagreed over terms and ultimately called a halt to the project, which had been kept under wraps," said a source close to the deal. The project, referred to as "Neptune" by those working on it, was said to be a Warcraft spin-off, set during a different period to World of Warcraft. It's unknown whether it would have directly tied into either Warcraft, Warcraft II, or Warcraft III. The good news is that it's not Warcraft Arclight Rumble -- the upcoming mobile "tower offense" game due to release later this year. As far back as February this year, Activision Blizzard revealed that it was working on multiple mobile Warcraft titles, and this was thought to be one of the big reasons behind Microsoft's acquisition of the company for a reported $69 million earlier this year. Now, it looks as though those mobile games may be up in the air -- after all, the extent of Activision Blizzard's working relationship with NetEase following this high-profile cancellation is uncertain. Another of Activision Blizzard's mobile games, a Pokemon Go-style AR game, was also canceled.

US consumer spending on video game products has fallen by $1.78 billion in Q2, according to market research firm NPD. Overall, spending in video gaming in the US totaled $12.35 billion in the recent quarter, down 13 percent year over year. The Verge reports: The findings follow both Microsoft and Sony reporting revenue declines in gaming as the pandemic growth slows. [...] While overall spending on gaming has clearly declined across the industry in Q2, subscription content "was the only segment to post positive gains," according to NPD. That growth is despite Sony launching its revamped PlayStation Plus subscriptions at the end of the quarter.

Hardware unit sales were led by Nintendo Switch in the second quarter, according to NPD, with the PS5 generating the highest dollar sales. Despite the declines in spending amid high rates of inflation and following a big period of growth "consumer spending continues to trend above pre-pandemic levels," says Mat Piscatella, games industry analyst at NPD. "However, unpredictable and quickly changing conditions may continue to impact the market in unexpected ways in the coming quarters."

Today, the long-running PC and gaming accessory maker Logitech announced plans to launch its own cloud gaming handheld device. Android Authority reports: Logitech stated it will partner on the software side with China-based Tencent Games for the new device. It is also working with Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming services so that its device should support hundreds of high-end PC and console games out of the box. It's possible that other cloud gaming services like Google's Stadia and Amazon's Luna could support the device as well, but no concrete details on that just yet. No other details have been revealed, but there is a web page Logitech set up where you can enter your email to receive further updates.

Andrew R Chow and Chad De Guzman, reporting for Time: Samerson Orias was working as a line cook last year in the rural Philippines when his friend told him he could make way more money playing a new video game. Orias was earning about 4,000 pesos a month (about $80, a little less than half the national minimum wage) making takoyaki -- Japanese octopus balls. His friend told him he and others were pocketing up to $600 a month playing Axie Infinity, a game fueled by cryptocurrency and NFTs. Orias, now 26, desperately needed an escape hatch from his financial woes: his mother had had a stroke and required medication, and electricity and grocery bills were stacking up. So he plunged into Axie, doing battle with cartoon monsters for hours deep into the night. He soon began earning cryptocurrency, which he converted into pesos, allowing him to take better care of his mother and his home. At the same time, thousands of young people in the Philippines were jumping headlong into the game.

For a brief moment at the peak of crypto's astonishing 2021 boom, these young Filipino players were fulfilling a longtime dream of crypto's most ardent evangelists: that "play-to-earn" blockchain games like Axie could lead the way to a more equitable, opportunity-rich global economy. Fourteen months later, most Filipino players, including Orias, have exited the game nursing anger and anxiety -- and, in some cases, thousands of dollars down. Orias grew to hate playing the game. It was boring and stressful, he says, a common refrain among the dozen players TIME interviewed for this story. "I felt fatigued all the time. I became more aggressive in every aspect of my life," he says. The story of Orias and Axie Infinity serves as a cautionary tale for crypto and its bombastic rhetoric about changing the world. Many crypto thought leaders, when rebutting criticism about the unsavory aspects of the space, point to its impact in developing countries. But Orias and others say that Axie Infinity reinforced predatory systems and gave them false hope. Innovative metaverse ideas like Axie Infinity offer immense promise -- but also tangible peril for those who feel they have no other option but to take the plunge into the digital unknown. The game initially made a huge impact in the Philippines. At one point, players there made up 40% of the game's user base.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, Analogue announced that it's launching Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on the Pocket as a part of its larger strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era. The original Spacewar! was created in 1962 by a cadre of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft duke it out in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons that were designed to be quiet when pressed so your opponent couldn't hear when you were firing missiles.

To bring Spacewar! to the Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code from the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! itself, both of which are in the public domain, alongside OpenFPGA software. Emulating 60-year-old software came with some interesting challenges. "The PDP-1 had some unique characteristics about it, having a 1024x1024 vector display with a unique way of generating the image," said Analogue CEO Chris Taber in an email to The Verge. "It was a bit tricky to accommodate this." Alex Cranz of The Verge had the opportunity to play Spacewar!: "Spacewar! looks a little different on the Analogue Pocket. Lines are crisp and clean with none of the ethereal glow the original green CRT provided. The AI for your opponent is nonexistent, but there's still something really fun about accelerating toward a star and then using its gravity to whip around it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still really feel like you're fighting some war in space."

Former Xbox executive Peter Moore has said his team "encouraged the console wars" during his Xbox 360-era tenure -- as a way to drive competition between Microsoft and Sony. Eurogamer reports: This competition has helped the industry, Moore continued, and saw Microsoft continuing to commit to video games despite the Xbox 360's costly "Red Ring of Death" debacle. "We encouraged the console wars, not to create division, but to challenge each other," Moore said, speaking on the Front Office Sports podcast (thanks, IGN). "And when I say each other I mean Microsoft and Sony. "If Microsoft hadn't of stuck the course after the Xbox, after the Red Rings of Death, gaming would be a poorer place for it, you wouldn't have the competition you have today."

Moore helped launch the Xbox 360, following years of service during the Dreamcast era at Sega. Memorably, he announced Halo 2's release date via a tattoo - though sources disagree on whether the stunt was faked. "If we didn't resolve Red Rings of Death the way that we did I know darn well there'd be no Xbox today," Moore continued, referencing the infamous circle of error lights which showed on failed Xbox 360 hardware. Estimates differ, though millions of consoles were believed to have been affected.

A study of 39,000 video gamers has found "little to no evidence" time spent playing affects their wellbeing. From a report: The average player would have to play for 10 hours more than usual per day to notice any difference, it found. And the reasons for playing were far more likely to have an impact. Well-being was measured by asking about life satisfaction and levels of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. The results contradict a 2020 study.

Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute -- but with a much smaller group of players -- the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier. "Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies. "But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Stadia hasn't been as successful as the Internet super-giant wanted it to be. While the game streaming service did end up getting its foot in the door for a little while, it hasn't been making waves since its release, and many have theorized that Google would end up scuttling the service entirely in the relatively near future. This idea isn't without precedent, either, as Google is known to shut down underperforming services in surprisingly short order, and Google Stadia, in particular, isn't doing all that well in the grand scheme of things. The latest rumors suggest that the plans to shut down Stadia may be further along than some would think, with Google aiming to close it down before the end of 2022.

Google Stadia was originally announced in 2019, and while it was presented as the next big thing for gaming, it barely made a splash in the end. According to Twitter account Killed by Google, which keeps track of all the services that Google closes down, it might not be long before Stadia's time is up. It's a "he said, she said" situation, to be fair, but according to the account holder's sources, Google may shut down Stadia "by the end of summer." The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Although PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have always been extremely close in their tech specs, features, and performance, one area where the Microsoft console established an early lead was in its compatibility with a range of modern displays and display technologies. That gap is finally now set to be closed. After PS5 was updated with support for variable refresh rates in April, Sony has now confirmed that the system will finally be able to output at 1440p resolution. The new feature is introduced in a system software beta available to invited users today, which Sony expects to roll out to everyone "later this year."

Also included in the beta are a bunch of interface customizations, including the ability to group games together in folder-style Gamelists. Although most modern TV sets have 1080p or 4K resolutions, compatibility with 1440p (also known as QHD) matters because it's a very popular resolution for gaming PC monitors. There are a lot of these displays around, many with features like VRR, that PS5 owners will be happy to finally use to their full ability. Games which support 1440p will display at native resolution, while games that display at 4K will supersample down to 1440p for a smoother image.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After a public controversy four years ago, Rockstar, the maker of Grand Theft Auto, is reinventing itself as a kinder, gentler company. But employees aren't sure it can still produce the chart-topping caliber of game the studio has become known for. The development of Grand Theft Auto VI has been slower than impatient fans and even longtime employees have expected, despite morale across the company being higher than ever, according to many staffers. Between the company's new direction and the 2019 departure of Dan Houser, who led creative direction on many previous games, all indications suggest Grand Theft Auto VI will feel very different than its predecessor.

The game will feature a playable female protagonist for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter. [...] Industry analysts anticipate that the next Grand Theft Auto will be out sometime in Take-Two's 2024 fiscal year, which runs from April 2023 through March 2024, but developers are skeptical. The game has been in development in some form since 2014. Although there are loose schedules in place, people interviewed for this article said they didn't know of any firm release date and that they expect the game to be at least two years away. [...] The game's new map is now focused on a fictional version of Miami and its surrounding areas. Rockstar's plan is to continually update the game over time, adding new missions and cities on a regular basis, which leadership hopes will lead to less crunch during the game's final months.

Microsoft is speeding up the boot time of its Xbox consoles. In the latest Xbox Insider test builds of the Xbox dashboard, the cold boot startup time has been reduced by around 5 seconds for Xbox Series X / S consoles. Microsoft was able to speed up the boot sequence by creating a shorter bootup animation. From a report: Xbox testers noticed a faster bootup time recently, and Microsoft confirmed the changes on Friday. Josh Munsee, director of Xbox integrated marketing, says the company created "a shorter boot up animation (~4s) from the original boot up animation (~9s), helping to reduce the overall startup time." The changes aren't limited to Xbox Series X / S consoles, either. "Xbox One generation consoles are booting noticeably faster with these changes," explains Jake Rosenberg, senior product manager lead at Xbox.

"Moria, along with Hack (1984) and Larn (1986), is considered to be the first roguelike game, and the first to include a town level," according to Wikipedia.

And long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR remembers: At the dawn of the computer era there were some games that borrowed from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons to create an experience like no other. It brought you into the world and you could be one of those characters, roam around, fight monsters, level up your characters. One of the more popular ones that would add to that was Moria (As in the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings) You quest was to kill the Balrog at the end.

This week one of the creators, Robert Alan Koeneke, who wrote Moria because he wanted a Rogue like game to play while at school at the University of Oklahoma, passed away. It has inspired many games and RPG's since.

I played Moria on the Amiga for hours and hours. His contributions to computer game history will always be remembered.
"Koeneke was working on version 5.0 of Moria when he left the university for a job," remembers NME, "though he made Moria open source so others could work on the project." In an email posted by Koeneke to a mailing list for Angband (a subsequent popular roguelike derived from Moria) in 1996, the developer reflected on his legacy.

"I have since received thousands of letters from all over the world from players telling about their exploits, and from administrators cursing the day I was born... I received mail from behind the iron curtain (while it was still standing) talking about the game on VAX's [an early range of computers] (which supposedly couldn't be there due to export laws). I used to have a map with pins for every letter I received, but I gave up on that...!"

While Koeneke never developed another video game, his influence on the gaming industry cannot be understated as his work directly inspired games like the Diablo series.

Those interested in playing the original Moria can do so here.

Thursday the first trailer appeared online for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — and 15 million people have watched it. "Here's the thing. We're a team of thieves..." actor Chris Pine says in a voiceover. "We didn't mean to unleash the greatest evil the world has ever known. But we're going to fix it."

The video's description explains that "A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and playful spirit of the legendary roleplaying game to the big screen in a hilarious and action-packed adventure."

The trailer also features Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant, and a Druid that can turn into an Owlbear.

But at Comic-Con's Gaslamp Quarter there were also photo ops inside the legendary gelatinous cube, at a pop-up tavern serving glow-in-the-dark Dragon's Brew. The official "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Tavern Experience" drew this rave review from Esquire. "Rest assured, friends, if the actual Dungeons and Dragons movie is anything like the tavern, it'll be a rocking, hilarious, self-aware, and — most importantly! — a fun trip." The team behind Dungeons and Dragons rigged the bar so that it would rumble like hell and fill with smoke whenever a dragon appeared on a massive video screen at the front. (We were supposed to infer that the tavern was under attack....)

Save a grog for me.
"Based on what we've seen, this movie looks like it's going to be a whole lot of fun," writes CinemaBlend: If you're hyped up for the campaign Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is promising here, you can take your place at the metaphorical gaming table starting March 3, 2023.
As the movie's trailer asks, "Who needs heroes when you have thieves?"

An anonymous reader writes: When the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) debuted in 2010, the kill screen was the game's final, unbeatable boss. Players pushed to get the highest score possible before level 29, at which point the game's pieces started falling at double speed. It seemed humanly impossible to keep up with the falling shapes, which would pile up on players' screens and spell death for their game. But in the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic Tetris. In the 1989 NES version of Tetris, which is still standard at competitive tournaments, players make it well into level 30 and beyond. This new generation of talent, made up of mostly teenagers, has not only breathed new life into a 30-year-old game, but also completely upended expectations of what's possible within it.

From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible. The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score. Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them. This meant maintaining "maxout pace" where players would complete enough "Tetrises" (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.

In 2010, players organized the first CTWC, largely in response to the world's first indisputable maxout, accomplished by Harry Hong (other players like Thor Aackerlund and Jonas Neubauer claimed to have maxed out as well, but the proof wasn't definitive). The desire to find out who the best Tetris player in the world was on, and soon, Neubauer began building a very strong case for himself. In the final match of this 2010 tournament, Neubauer, who went on to win seven of the first eight world championships, beat Hong, the only player to interrupt Neubauer's reign by beating him in 2014. Over the first eight years of CTWC, maxing out before level 29 shifted from being an impossible frontier to a badge of honor for the game's elite. It was still a notable accomplishment until the scene began to shift in 2018, when Joseph Saelee, a then-16-year-old from Visalia, California, began dismantling records and set the stage for a new generation's influence on the game. "In March 2018, only five months after picking up the game, Saelee maxed out for the first time," reports Polygon. "As The New Yorker reported, he set records for most lines cleared in one game and fastest time to 300,000 points. Then he started to achieve what other experienced players had deemed impossible. He survived past the game's kill screen, becoming the first player to make it to level 31 and 32 -- then 33 through 35."

If you have been on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool -- it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine's monitor -- but it's hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app consistently ranks alongside global blockbuster franchises like Counter-Strike or Dota. From a report: The epiphany will come when you begin to read Wallpaper Engine's many reviews. More than 200,000 of them are written in Chinese, stretching from 2016 to 2022. And these reviews almost all talk about one thing: porn. Or more specifically, about using the software as a cloud drive and a video player for exchanging adult-only content.

Online porn is banned in China, so people there have to get creative to access it. Steam is one of the only popular global platforms still available in the country, and its community features, international high-speed servers, and increasingly hands-off approach when it comes to sexual content have made it an inevitable choice. Chinese users now make up at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine's global user base, MIT Technology Review estimates. Last year, users in China suddenly needed to use VPN services to access certain Steam services. As the reviews show, now they are afraid they may soon lose this rare community, either because of platform content moderation or the possibility that China might block Steam altogether.

Nvidia has just announced that GeForce Now is picking up support for 120fps gameplay on all Android smartphones, after previously limiting the functionality to only a few select models. 9to5Google reports: GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that allows players to stream PC games from marketplaces such as Steam and the Epic Games Store, among others, to virtually any device. It's a great way to expand the gaming experience on your PC over to a mobile phone or your TV, or just to play games that your PC isn't powerful enough to run on its own. The service is free, but you can pay to get longer sessions and better quality.

Last year, the service picked up its RTX 3080 tier, which offers the power of the still-hard-to-find graphics card, but through the cloud. While it's a pricey option, it was quickly found to be the gold standard of cloud gaming thanks to minimal input latency, higher resolution, and faster refresh rate. It's that faster refresh rate that's boosting GeForce Now for Android players this week, with 120fps expanding to all Android phones with faster refresh rates. If your phone has a 120Hz display, you can now stream games at 120fps. The official list of supported devices can be found here.

Nvidia says that the expanded support will arrive "over the coming weeks" and that the experience could vary from device to device.

After trying, and failing, to acquire the popular chat platform Discord for $10 billion, Microsoft has opted for the next-best thing: directly integrating Discord's voice-chat capabilities into Xbox consoles. Ars Technica reports: The news arrived on Wednesday on Xbox Blog, and it clarified that for the time being, Discord access would be exclusive to the optional "Xbox Insider" tier of early, beta, and preview console OS updates. That update is already going live in waves to Xbox Insiders today, and it adds a new tooltip to the system's "chat" sidebar: "Try Discord Voice on Xbox today!"

[...] Sadly, this week's rollout of Discord on Xbox is a bit limited. The biggest issue is that there is no formal Discord app or interface on Xbox. You will need to keep a smartphone handy to initiate a "handoff" of your Discord session. Get ready for an annoying first-time setup process. Should you have an updated Xbox on the Insider OS track, its new "Try Discord Voice" prompt will initiate an account-sync process, which requires using a mobile Discord app to take a photo of a QR code displayed by your Xbox. (You'll need to re-do this if you've done so before, due to it adding a new level of credential for voice chat.) With this in place, when you are about to join a voice channel on Discord, a new "try voice chat on console" prompt will appear. Tapping through this will then, ugh, create another handover to Microsoft's dedicated Xbox app on either iOS or Android. Yes, if you want this to work, you need to install the Xbox app on your mobile device (and Discord will suggest you do so, if you haven't yet). This facilitates the key technical aspect of forwarding all Discord audio to your Xbox hardware.

With all that in place, presto: You can now talk to any participants in the Discord voice channel you chose directly on your Xbox. Its menu interface supports either muting or changing the volume level of every other user in the voice chat channel you chose, which is appreciated as a quickly accessible option during frantic gameplay. A one-button toggle in the menu allows chatters to switch between Discord voice chat and a particular game's dedicated voice-chat channel. (This is useful when you're talking to friends while in the midst of random online matchmaking, then need to turn on in-game voice chat for a second to confirm a strategy to your current teammates before going back to discussing souffle recipes with buddies.) All greater Discord control, sadly, goes back to your smartphone...

Mojang has drawn a line in the sand against NFTs in Minecraft, saying in an update posted today that NFT integration with the game is "generally not something we will support or allow." From a report: The update begins with a quick rundown of what NFTs are, including a note about their extreme volatility, before laying out the current policies on Minecraft servers. The overall goal of those policies, Mojang said, is "to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content." NFTs, on the other hand, are specifically designed to "create models of scarcity and exclusion," which obviously conflicts with that principle. And so, they're out.

"To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset," Mojang wrote. The update was apparently prompted by the fact that numerous Minecraft-associated NFTs and play-to-earn servers are already available, taking advantage of the gap in official policy and dividing the community into "the haves and the have-nots," Mojang said.

The UK government has decided video game loot boxes will not be regulated under betting laws, despite it finding a link between them and gambling harms. From a report: In a long-awaited call for evidence, it instead told the video game industry to take action to protect young people. It says it will step in if firms do not act, and also wants loot box purchases to be restricted to adults, unless approved by a parent or guardian. One academic said he was "dismayed" by the government's approach. Loot boxes are an in-game feature involving a sealed mystery "box" -- sometimes earned through playing a game and sometimes paid for with real money -- which can be opened to reveal virtual items, such as weapons or costumes. They have come under fire in recent years, with consumer groups in 18 European countries backing a report calling them "exploitative" in May.

Bungie, the developer of Destiny 2, is now officially a part of Sony. The Verge reports: The PlayStation maker had announced its intent to acquire the gaming studio in January, and now, that acquisition is complete. At the initial announcement, Sony said (pdf) the deal was worth $3.6 billion, but in an SEC filing on Friday, it said the deal was worth "approximately" $3.7 billion. Though it's now under the Sony umbrella, Bungie will "continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games," Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a blog post from the original announcement of the acquisition. And future games in development won't be PlayStation exclusives, Bungie's Joe Blackburn and Justin Truman said.

But Sony does plan to lean on Bungie for its "world-class expertise in multi-platform development and live game services," which "will help us deliver on our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in January. Sony views live service games as a critical part of PlayStation's future, as it plans to launch more than 10 new live service games by March 2026.