PlayStation's revamped version of its video game subscription service went live on Monday, giving members access to a catalog of several hundred games both new and old. From a report: PlayStation Plus, once code-named Spartacus, is Sony Group's attempt to compete with rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass as both publishers jockey to be the Netflix of video games. The new service combines Sony's previous subscription offerings into a three-tiered system. The most basic level, Essential, costs $10 a month and replaces the old PlayStation Plus, offering two downloadable games per month, a smattering of discounts and access to online multiplayer games. It's the top two tiers that are new for PlayStation users. The Extra tier, at $15 a month, offers a library of about four hundred PlayStation 4 and 5 games, while the $18 a month Premium level adds a few hundred classic games to the pool, mostly from the PlayStation 3. The service only has around thirty PS1, PS2 and PSP games, which has been a disappointment for retro gamers.

"Even many Axie regulars say it's not much fun, but that hasn't stopped people from dedicating hours to researching strategies, haunting Axie-themed Discord channels and Reddit forums, and paying for specialized software that helps them build stronger teams..."

Bloomberg pays a visit to the NFT-based game Axie Infinity with a 39-year-old player who's spent $40,000 there since last August — back when you could actually triple your money in a week. ("I was actually hoping that it could become my full-time job," he says.) The reason this is possible — or at least it seemed possible for a few weird months last year — is that Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well....

Axie's creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the "play-to-earn" video game. "We believe in a world future where work and play become one," it said in a mission statement on its website. "We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution." By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

If you think the entire internet should be rebuilt around the blockchain — the vision now referred to as web3 — Axie provided a useful example of what this looked like in practice. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an Axie investor, predicted that 90% of the gaming market would be play-to-earn within five years. Gabby Dizon, head of crypto gaming startup Yield Guild Games, describes Axie as a way to create an "investor mindset" among new populations, who would go on to participate in the crypto economy in other ways. In a livestreamed discussion about play-to-earn gaming and crypto on March 2, former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang called web3 "an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition" and "the biggest weapon against poverty that we have."

By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3's utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.
The article does credit the company for building its own blockchain (Ronin) to provide cheaper and faster NFT transactions. "Purists might have taken issue with the decision to abandon the core blockchain precept of decentralization, but on the other hand, the game actually worked."

But the article also chronicles a fast succession of highs and lows:

• "In Axie's biggest market, the Philippines, the average daily earnings from May to October 2021 for all but the lowest-ranked players were above minimum wage, according to the gaming research and consulting firm Naavik."

• Axie raised $150 million to reimburse victims of the breach and repair its infrastructure. "But nearly two months later the systems compromised during the hack still weren't up and running, and the executives were vague about when everything would be repaired. (A company spokesperson said on June 3 that this could happen by midmonth, pending the results of an external audit....):

• Days after the breach it launched Axie: Origin, a new alternate version with better graphics/gameplay — and without a cryptocurrency element.

• About 75% of the 39-year-old gamer's co-players have "largely" stopped playing the game. "But at least one was sufficiently seduced by Axie's potential to take a significant loan to buy AXS tokens, which he saw as a way to hedge against inflation of the Argentine peso. The local currency has indeed lost value since he took out the loan, but not nearly as much as AXS."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Parker Lewis for sharing the article

Microsoft is working on Project Moorcroft, a program designed to bring early game demos to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The demos will be similar to the limited levels and early samples of games that fans would typically spend hours waiting in line to play at E3 or PAX. From a report: These early game demos have largely been lost in the transition to virtual game conferences during the pandemic, and they're key for indie developers trying to generate awareness for their titles. Sarah Bond, Microsoft's head of gaming ecosystem, describes Project Moorcroft as a way to bring back that E3-like experience. "Why don't we take Game Pass, and make it like the show floor?" says Bond. "Why don't we make it possible for a developer to take a piece, a level of their game, release it into Game Pass, generate excitement for what's coming, and also get that really valuable feedback as they're tuning and preparing their game for launch."

Crayta, a platform that lets players create, share, and play games with friends, is coming to Facebook Gaming's cloud-streaming service. The Verge reports: The collaborative game-building platform is built on Unreal Engine 4 and features a library of thousands of player-made games users can browse or add to with their own creations. While Crayta shares the element of game creation with Roblox, it also takes some cues from Fortnite, with the most obvious being its bright and cartoonish art. It also has rotating seasons, offers a battle pass, and lets users customize their own avatars. But probably one of the coolest -- and most unique -- things about Crayta is that it lets you share a game with just a single link, allowing your friend to hop right in from their browser. "A lot of times today, people think about the metaverse as 3D experiences you can have in virtual and augmented reality, but I think what Crayta shows is that you can both build and enjoy these kind of experiences really easily on all kinds of 2D environments including just within the Facebook App on phones and on computers," Mark Zuckerberg said in a video showing off Crayta's addition to its cloud gaming platform.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple is adding native support for the Nintendo Switch Pro and Joy-Con controllers in iOS 16. Riley Testut, one of the iOS developers behind AltStore, discovered the new controller support in a developer beta of iOS 16 that was released yesterday. The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller works "perfectly" according to Testut, and both Joy-Con controllers show up as a single device for apps and games to take advantage of. Nat Brown, an engineering manager at Apple, has confirmed the new controller support and even revealed there's a neat method to switch how the Joy-Cons work in iOS 16. You can dynamically switch between using both Joy-Cons as a single controller or two separate ones by holding the screenshot and home buttons for a few seconds.

Sony said Tuesday that Nobuyuki Idei, its former chairman and CEO who led the Japanese giant's push into the digital network business, has died of liver failure. He was 84. Kyodo News reports: In addition to enhancing Sony's presence in the digital and communications fields, he also focused on the entertainment business, such as movies, music and game consoles, laying the foundation for its current operations. Idei joined Sony in 1960, becoming president in 1995 and CEO in 1998. He served as both chairman and chief executive from 2000 to 2005. He stepped down as chairman and CEO amid lackluster sales in its appliance business, making headlines for naming Howard Stringer as his successor at a time when it was still rare for a Japanese company to be led by a non-Japanese CEO. Idei also contributed to the advancement of the internet environment in Japan, having been appointed to head the government's IT strategy council in 2000. [...]

Under Idei's tenure as CEO, the conglomerate launched its Vaio-brand personal computers and domestic internet service provider So-net. It also ventured into online-based banking services and the nonlife insurance business. But after its earlier success with sales of bulky CRT televisions, Sony was slow to transition to flat screens and was outpaced amid intense competition with South Korean and other overseas rival manufacturers. Company stocks plunged in 2003 in what was referred to as the "Sony shock," and sluggish growth for much of the following decade led Sony to focus on corporate restructuring initiatives.

Nintendo described the sentencing of a hacker earlier this year as a "unique opportunity" to send a message to all gamers about video game piracy. Axios reports: A newly released transcript of the Feb. 10 sentencing of Gary Bowser provides rare insight, directly from Nintendo, about the company's grievances. Bowser, a Canadian national, pled guilty last year to U.S. government cybercrime charges over his role as a top member of Team Xecuter. The group sold tech that circumvented copyright protections and enabled the Nintendo Switch and other systems to play pirated games. Authorities estimated the piracy cost Nintendo upward of $65 million over nearly a decade and even compelled the company to spend resources releasing a more secure model of the Switch.

"This is a very significant moment for us," Nintendo lawyer Ajay Singh told the court at the time, as he laid out the company's case against piracy and awaited the sentencing. "It's the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile," Singh said. "It's for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen." He noted Nintendo's losses from Team Xecuter's piracy and sounded a note of sympathy for smaller non-Nintendo game makers whose works are also pirated. And he wove in a complaint about cheating, which he said Team Xecuter's hacks enabled. Cheating could scare off honest players and upset families: "Parents should not be forced to explain to their children why people cheat and why sometimes games are not fair, just because one person wants an unfair advantage."

At the hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik noted that TV and movies glorify hackers as "sticking it to the man," suggesting that "big companies are reaping tremendous profits and it's good for the little guy to have this." "What do you think?" Lasnik asked Nintendo's lawyer at one point. "What else can we do to convince people that there's no glory in this hacking/piracy?" "There would be a large benefit to further education of the public," Singh replied. In brief remarks directly to Lasnik, Bowser said longer prison time wouldn't scare off hackers. "There's so much money to be made from piracy that it's insignificant," he said.

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling. Ars Technica reports: The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made "Neural Engine" system.

By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction -- even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones. The report notes that Metal 3 also includes "a new 'resource-loading' API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games." The same Metal 3 API benefits will also come to iPadOS 16 later this year.

"Yes, it's possible to get the game Doom running atop this system firmware," reports Phoronix.

Tom's Hardware explains: Originally known as LinuxBIOS, which provides a better clue to its utility value, Coreboot 4.17 supports new motherboards, delivers a new bootloader, supports AMD Platform Secure Boot (PSB), comes with a handful of fixes, and... a port of Doom.

Coreboot is a free and open-source BIOS implementation that supports numerous extensions known as Payloads. These Payloads add functionality to the minimal code that is the basis of Coreboot. Therefore, a great deal of customizability is available to Coreboot users to determine exactly what their BIOS ROMs contain via Payload choices.

To configure Coreboot for a usable setup, one might typically start by adding a bootloader, with a choice of eight available currently according to the official Wiki. Then there is support for various popular OSes, a handful of utilities provided as Payloads, and even some games. If your BIOS flash memory space is large enough, you could even shoehorn in a Linux distribution.
There's a few caveats. (There's no sound or "save game" feature, "and your system will hang on exiting the game.")

But their article still calls Doom "a great new choice if you are bored of the Grub Invaders (Space Invaders) and Tint (Tetris) clone Payloads, bringing 3D gaming to your BIOS."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sega has announced a sequel to its miniature Mega Drive (otherwise known as the Sega Genesis), and this one will feature both cartridge games and titles from the Mega CD add-on. In total, the tiny console will feature 50 built-in games, including the likes of Silpheed, Shining Force CD, Sonic the Hedgehog CD, Virtua Racing, and Shining in the Darkness. Unfortunately, as of now the device has only been announced for Japan; it's expected to launch on October 27th for 9,980 yen (about $75).

20 consumer groups from 18 European countries are launching a coordinated action asking authorities to pass regulations on loot boxes. From a report: The groups are lending their support to a new report from the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) entitled "Insert Coin: How the Gaming Industry Exploits Consumers Using Loot Boxes." The consumer groups are calling for a number of measures, including "a ban on deceptive design, extra protections for minors, and transactional transparency." The report accuses companies of exploiting consumers by using mechanisms that it claims are "predatory" and "fostering addiction." While calls for legislation on loot boxes have been taking place for a number of years, this new action is notable due to the number of nations being represented in a single coordinated campaign.

French officials are continuing their centuries-long battle to preserve the purity of the language, overhauling the rules on using English video game jargon. From a report: While some expressions find obvious translations -- "pro-gamer" becomes "joueur professionnel" -- others seem a more strained, as "streamer" is transformed into "joueur-animateur en direct." The culture ministry, which is involved in the process, told AFP the video game sector was rife with anglicisms that could act as "a barrier to understanding" for non-gamers. France regularly issues dire warnings of the debasement of its language from across the Channel, or more recently the Atlantic. Government officials must replace words such as "e-sports" and "streaming" with approved French versions, the new rule says.

Multiplayer games assign your opponents using "skill-based matchmaking," reports the Washington Post, "to fairly balance teams and maximize the enjoyment players get..."

But not everyone wants that. For example, the Post notes, "streamers want to put on a show." For Jordan "HusKerrs" Thomas, a popular streamer and competitive "Call of Duty: Warzone" player, skill-based matchmaking is a labor issue. It "negatively affects the top 1 percent of players/streamers the most because it forces us to 'sweat' or try hard for good content and to entertain our viewers," Thomas wrote in a Twitter DM. High-level play against skilled opponents in shooting games can be opaque or boring for casual audiences. By racking up high kill streaks or stringing together multiple crushing victories in less balanced matches, streamers can more clearly show off their skill to viewers....

Hate for skill-based matchmaking is hardly a phenomenon confined to top streamers or salty Call of Duty players. As awareness about these algorithms grows, communities in "Valorant," "Overwatch," "Apex Legends" and even more casual games like "FIFA" and "Dead by Daylight" have all, at one point or another, sharply criticized matchmaking for reducing their enjoyment of the game. In part, it's an easy scapegoat for frustrated players. As Vice's Steve Rousseau puts it: "The issue today is not that skill-based matchmaking exists, but that players are now aware of just how prevalent it is." Today, speculation about how matchmaking "truly" works has spawned several analyses as well as its own cottage industry on YouTube, where videos on the subject range from neutral explainers to rants delivered as if from the pulpit... The topic is a perpetual driver of viewership, in part because there are few satisfying answers available to players....

In a phone interview, popular "Call of Duty: Warzone" streamer and XSET content creator JaredFPS said he thought companies like Activision, the studio behind the Call of Duty series, base their matchmaking algorithms on more than a player's skill in any single game. "They know everything about you," said Jared, who requested The Post not publish his full name due to safety concerns. "They have information from every single Call of Duty ever made. They know how much money you've spent, they know if you spend money, they know if you use the buy station [in 'Warzone'] a lot ... the way your movement is, how many loadouts you buy ... they know all that information...."

As matchmaking strategies have advanced they have broadened too, using insights from fields like machine learning and data science to further refine player experiences.... Advanced statistics are then used to draw inferences about the plausible outcome of every game before it happens.
EA, Epic and Activision Blizzard are all "incorporating sophisticated techniques like machine learning to tune their matchmaking algorithms so that gamers are pitted against similarly skilled opponents." the Post reports.

But in the end what players are complaining about are their non-subjective player engagement metrics, and the Post calls that algorithm what it is: "a business strategy, designed to keep players coming back."

An anonymous reader shares a report: With the 2020 release of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've started to see the era of console games that finally make full use of TVs capable of 4K resolutions (i.e., "Ultra HD" 3840x2160 pixels) that have become increasingly popular in the marketplace. Now, though, at least one TV manufacturer is already planning to support 8K-capable consoles (i.e., 7680x4320 resolution) that it thinks could launch in the next year or two.

Polish gaming site PPL reports on a recent public presentation by Chinese TV and electronics maker TCL. Tucked away in a slide during that presentation is a road map for what TCL sees as "Gen 9.5" consoles coming in 2023 or '24. Those supposed consoles -- which the slide dubs the PS5 Pro and "New Xbox Series S/X" -- will be capable of pushing output at 8K resolution and up to 120 frames per second, according to TCL's slide.

In January, Sony bought Bungie for $3.5 billion, giving the company one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with Microsoft and the various game studios it owns. Now, according to Forbes, Sony "has a whole plan to integrate Bungie's live service-building philosophies into its other teams that are making games [...]." From the report: Bungie enjoys one of the major live service successes in the current era, 7, going on 8 years of Destiny as a hyper-engaging franchises, and Sony believes the lessons they've learned can translate into other places. Twelve other places, to be specific. Sony is apparently about to announce a massive slate of live service offerings to join its traditional single player fare. While high profile AAA Sony games like God of War and Horizon Forbidden West sell well and are praised by fans and critics, they are not ongoing revenue streams like live service games can be. For Sony, they feel like they're missing a rather large boat. The plan here is to ramp up to have 3 live service games by FY2022, 6 by FY2023, 10 by FY2025 and 12 by FY2025. Currently, the only game they even consider a live service title in their lineup as The Show 22. So uh, 12 by 2025? That seems... ambitious, even with Bungie on board to help.

An anonymous reader writes: Atari pulled the plug on the release of Marble Madness II almost exactly 31 years ago after the follow up to their hit game failed to perform well in location tests. For decades the only way to play this now sought after rarity has been on one of a handful of known surviving units when it was exhibited by a private collector at annual events.

That has all changed after the ROM mysteriously appeared on The Internet Archive and was subsequently emulated by MAME developer David Haywood. Ars Technica provides background information on this story and talks with a number of the digital archaeologists involved. They discuss the events that unfolded, speculate as to why the game may have failed, and look at what it means to the community.

Windows Central: For a few years, rumors have persisted that Microsoft was exploring building some form of streaming stick to offer Xbox Cloud Gaming via a more affordable dongle, similarly to Chromecast and Google Stadia. The first hint was Project Hobart. More recently, a code name "Keystone" appeared in an Xbox OS list, lending fire to rumors that Microsoft was continuing to explore additional hardware for the Xbox lineup. We can now confirm that that is indeed true, and it pertains to a modernized HDMI streaming device that runs Xbox Game Pass and its cloud gaming service. Microsoft is, however, taking exploring additional iterations of the product before taking it to market. In a statement provided to Windows Central, a Microsoft spokesperson described its commitment to lowering boundaries to Xbox content via low cost-hardware, while acknowledging that the existing version of Keystone needs a little more time to bake before going live.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is actively seeking a potential buyer or merger. Apple has reportedly been in talks with the company about buying EA out according to Puck. Disney and Amazon have also been in talks about purchasing the video game company. 9to5Mac reports: The Redwood City-based firm has published hits like Apex Legends, Madden, and The Sims franchise. According to Puck, EA ideally would like a merger so Andrew Wilson can remain CEO of the combined company. [...] EA's roots actually go back to Apple. Back in 1982, Apple's then Director of Strategy and Marketing, Trip Hawkins, left the company to start EA. A buyout wouldn't be Apple's first venture into gaming, however. The Cupertino company unveiled its gaming service Apple Arcade back in 2019. Through Apple Arcade, users can play ad-free games on their iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the late 1990s, Yoshitaka Murayama made a name for himself among a subset of video game fans by creating and directing Suikoden, a series of Japanese roleplaying games (RPGs) that became beloved for their scope and depth. A catchy way to think of them is "Game of Thrones" meets Pokemon. But in 2002, as the third Suikoden game was finishing development, Murayama quit his job at the game publisher Konami Holdings and went off on his own. In the two decades that followed, he didn't work on many games of note, leaving fans to wonder what had become of him. Eventually Konami abandoned the Suikoden franchise, perhaps believing that RPGs weren't lucrative enough. In the early 2010s, players started asking Murayama: why not fund a new RPG on Kickstarter?

In the summer of 2020, Murayama finally answered fans' wishes. He raised 481.6 million yen (around $4.5 million at the time) from more than 46,000 backers, with a Kickstarter for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series. It became the No. 1 video game on Kickstarter that year. Getting to that point was a long journey, Murayama told me in a recent interview. He said he only started seriously considering a Kickstarter after meeting up with some of his old collaborators, such as artist Junko Kawano, at a concert for Suikoden music. Murayama was also driven by the success of Nintendo's Octopath Traveler, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since its release in 2018. The audience for turn-based RPGs had been "shrinking," Murayama said, but Octopath Traveler proved that âoethere is a promising marketâ for games like his.

TikTok has been conducting tests so users can play games on its video-sharing app in Vietnam, part of plans for a major push into gaming, Reuters reported Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter. From the report: Featuring games on its platform would boost advertising revenue as well as the amount of time users spend on the app -- one of the world's most popular with more than 1 billion monthly active users. TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, also plans to roll out gaming more widely in Southeast Asia, the people said. That move could come as early as the third quarter, said two of them. A TikTok representative said the company has tested bringing HTML5 games, a common form of minigame, to its app through tie-ups with third-party game developers and studios such as Zynga.