silverjacket shares a report from Science.org: [A]n AI has shown it can tag people based on their chess-playing behavior, an advance in the field of "stylometrics" that could help computers be better chess teachers or more humanlike in their game play. Alarmingly, the system could also be used to help identify and track people who think their online behavior is anonymous. [...] To design and train their AI, the researchers tapped an ample resource: more than 50 million human games played on the Lichess website. They collected games by players who had played at least 1000 times and sampled sequences of up to 32 moves from those games. They coded each move and fed them into a neural network that represented each game as a point in multidimensional space, so that each player's games formed a cluster of points. The network was trained to maximize the density of each player's cluster and the distance between those of different players. That required the system to recognize what was distinctive about each player's style.

The researchers tested the system by seeing how well it distinguished one player from another. They gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. To make the task harder, they hid the first 15 moves of each game. The system looked for the best match and identified the mystery player 86% of the time, the researchers reported last month at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). "We didn't quite believe the results," says Reid McIlroy-Young, a student in Anderson's lab and the paper's primary author. A non-AI method was only 28% accurate. [...] The researchers are aware of the privacy risks posed by the system, which could be used to unmask anonymous chess players online. With tweaks, McIlroy-Young says, it could do the same for poker. And in theory, they say, given the right data sets, such systems could identify people based on the quirks of their driving or the timing and location of their cellphone use.

Sony will continue producing PlayStation 4 consoles throughout 2022 as it navigates disruptions to the global supply chain that have limited output of its pricier PlayStation 5. Bloomberg reports: The Japanese conglomerate, whose flagship PS5 console has been in scarce supply since its debut in November 2020, told assembly partners late last year that it would continue making its earlier-generation machine through this year, according to people familiar with the matter. While Sony never officially announced when it would stop making the PS4, it had previously planned to discontinue assembly at the end of 2021, they said, asking not to be named as the plans are not public.

The strategy would add about a million PS4 units this year to help offset some of the pressure on the company's PS5 production, a figure that will be adjusted in response to demand, the people said. The older console uses less advanced chips, is simpler to make and provides a budget-friendly alternative to the PS5. Increasing production orders by adding the cheaper-to-make PS4 would also give Sony more leeway when negotiating with manufacturing partners for a better deal, two of the people said.

Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters. From a report: Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don't have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. "Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?" asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched. "Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft," reads another post in Microsoft's Halo Waypoint forums. "Forced crossplay is a mistake," says another Redditor, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an influx of cheating, largely because they're free-to-play titles so it's easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there's an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled. Warzone players on Xbox have been complaining about this forced crossplay for more than a year, with various forum posts and YouTube videos highlighting how irritating it is to be forced into crossplay. Most of the issues are related to PC cheaters, who have plagued Warzone for years before Activision finally added a new anti-cheat system in October with a kernel-level driver to catch PC cheaters. Now that cheaters are already ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games, the call to remove forced crossplay is certainly growing louder.

Days after detailing the technical specs of the PS VR2, Sony has updated the details of a patent to include language that says would "allow players to scan real-world items into virtual reality, making anything interactive in the VR space," reports Game Rant. From the report: This patent isn't actually anything new as Sony filed it on June 23, 2021, however, the patent office took issue with some of its claims requiring the tech giant to rework some details and resubmit. It would seem that, as of yesterday, Sony and the patent office have begun moving forward with the process following updates and revisions by Sony. [...] According to the patent mock-up, it seems as if players will be able to scan larger items than the handheld ones featured in the banana patent such as full-sized lamps. The only caveat seems to be that players will need to be able to have a 360-degree view of the item in order to bring it into the digital world. As the report notes, the patent is still being processed so we "shouldn't expect this tech to be featured in games any time soon."

The Entertainment Software Association is shifting the Electronic Entertainment Expo to an online-only event out of concerns around the pandemic. VentureBeat reports: "Due to the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees, E3 will not be held in person in 2022," the ESA said in a statement to GamesBeat. "We remain incredibly excited about the future of E3 and look forward to announcing more details soon." That means the show will likely take place online this summer for the second year in a row, as COVID-19 concerns pushed the June 2021 show into an online-only event and scuttled the 2020 event entirely. Asked to clarify if there will be an online event, the ESA said it is "excited about the possibilities of an online event."

Sony has announced some basic information about its much-anticipated next-generation VR hardware for the PS5, which it calls -- predictably -- PSVR2. Little was revealed about the device beyond its basic specs but it did confirm some features gamers will care about. From a report: The original PSVR was a competent, relatively affordable, easy to use device but fairly limited in terms of hardware: resolution, field of view and such. So Sony's announcement that the new one will be considerably more advanced will be very welcome. The PSVR2 was confirmed by Sony to have 4K HDR imagery, 2000x2040 per eye, and the field of view will also be wider than the original hardware at 110 degrees. A blog post that appeared after the live announcement confirmed rumors that it uses OLED and will have a 90-120Hz refresh rate. It will however feature eye-tracking and foveated rendering, must-haves these days. Eye-tracking for obvious gameplay and other reasons, and foveated rendering so that the notoriously resource-hungry VR rendering process can focus its cycles on the area where the player is looking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

China is continuing to hold off from issuing new game licenses to app developers producing for the App Store and other platforms, in regulatory inaction that has reportedly led to the shuttering of around 140,000 small game studios and related companies in the country. By contrast, 180,000 video game firms shut down during all of 2020. Apple Insider reports: Under Chinese law, game developers must be licensed in order to sell games in the App Store and in other app marketplaces. While regulators stopped issuing new licenses in late 2021, it seems that the ban on new licenses is set to continue into 2022. The National press and Publication Administration (NPPA), which issues licenses for games in China, is continuing to abstain from publishing lists of new approved games. Following on from a suspension that started at the end of July, the South China Morning Post reports it has now become the longest suspension of new game licenses since a nine-month blackout in 2018.

Regulators decided to suspend game license approvals in July as approvals for new games were considered "a bit too aggressive" in the first half of 2021, reports indicated. At the time it wasn't advised how long the hiatus would last, except that one unnamed source said it would be for "a while." The lack of a license means a game cannot be submitted to the regional App Store, nor can it be updated. Apple has been suspending updates and pulling games from the China App Store that didn't have a license from the NPPA since July 2020, to comply with local laws. The report speculates that the freeze "may be connected to a government crackdown on gaming addiction."

Each player gets 15 minutes for all moves (plus a 10-second-per-move increment) at the World Rapid Chess Championship.

But players only get three minutes for all moves (plus a 2-second-per-move increment) in the World Blitz Chess Championship.

So what happened? World chess champion Magnus Carlsen entered both events, and... A little-known 17-year-old from Uzbekistan made a clean sweep of Magnus Carlsen and the global chess elite on Tuesday, incidentally setting a world age record. Nodirbek Abdusattorov won the World Rapid championship in Warsaw, claiming en route the scalps of Magnus Carlsen and the No 1's last two challengers, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi...

After 21 rounds of three-minute games on Wednesday and Thursday, France's Maxime Vachier-Lagrave defeated Poland's Jan-Krzysztof Duda in a tie-break to win the World Blitz title. The 18-year-old world No 2, Alireza Firouzja, was third but Carlsen was well adrift in 12th place. He said: "Some days you just don't have it. I was nowhere near close to the level I needed to be today."

At 17 years three months Abdusattorov becomes the youngest ever world champion in open competition... After 13 rounds he was in a quadruple tie on 9.5 points with Carlsen, Caruana and Nepomniachtchi, but the regulations excluded Carlsen and Caruana from the play-off due to their inferior tie-breaks. An angry Carlsen denounced the rules as "idiotic. Either all players on the same amount of points join the play-off or no one does..."

[In the final play-off game] Abdusattorov easily drew with Black, then won the second game despite twice missing mate in two near the end.

Speaking of "play-to-earn" games, Paul Butler, writing in a blog post: In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely disconnected from any sort of value creation, and makes the case that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands. It's a thoughtfully presented case, but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.

I've recently been exploring the themes around web3 to see if there's a "there" there, and Graeber's book has been on my mind again. One of the most apparently successful examples of web3 that people point to, aside from art NFTs, is so-called play-to-earn games. The most successful of these is Axie Infinity, a trade-and-battle game reminiscent of Pokemon. In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world bills. That's obviously a good thing for them, but it also appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber's definition of a bullshit job.

[...] In contrast to other games in which in-game economies have developed, Axie Infinity puts players' opportunity to make an income and transfer it to the real world at the forefront. As they put it in their FAQ, what sets Axie Infinity apart is an ethos: "We believe in a future where work and play become one. We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities." These "economic opportunities" are essentially a wealth transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each. [...] By blurring the line between "player" and "worker," the game has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers aren't in it for the joy of the game? The same could be said about online poker or sports betting, to be sure, but we would rightfully recoil if those were positioned as a way to lift people out of poverty.

"[John] Madden, who died Tuesday, helped bring to life a series of football video games that have generated $7 billion in revenue since 1988," reports the New York Times. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Kellen Browning and Kevin Draper: Trip Hawkins first met John Madden in the dining car of an Amtrak train traveling from Denver to Oakland, Calif., in 1984, after Madden had agreed to lend his name and football prowess to a football simulation video game. Madden, the legendary coach and broadcaster, quickly made it clear who would be calling the shots. Because of the limits of computer processing power, Hawkins, who had founded the gaming company Electronic Arts two years earlier, floated the idea of a video game with seven-on-seven football, rather than the 11-on-11 version used in the N.F.L. Madden just stared at him, and said "that isn't really football," Hawkins recalled. He had to agree. "If it was going to be me and going to be pro football, it had to have 22 guys on the screen," Madden once told ESPN. "If we couldn't have that, we couldn't have a game."

The extra years spent developing a more realistic game, which was called John Madden Football and debuted in 1988 for the Apple II computer, paid off. Decades later, the Madden NFL series of video games continues to sell millions of copies annually, has helped turn E.A. into one of the world's most prominent gaming companies and has left a lasting mark on football fandom and the N.F.L. Although he coached the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl victory and was lauded for his work as a television analyst, Madden, who died Tuesday at age 85, is better known to legions of younger sports fans as the namesake of the iconic video game franchise that has generated more than $7 billion in revenue. "Every dorm room right now, every basement, every couch, there's people sitting down playing Madden," said Scott Cole, a longtime sports broadcaster who has called games for several years for the Madden Championship Series, the most competitive Madden NFL tournaments. Slashdot reader schwit1 first shared the news of Madden's passing.

Covid-19's knock-on effects have delayed development so much that most games we thought we'd be playing now have drifted into next year. From a report: I'm Keza MacDonald, the Guardian's video games editor. I have been a video games journalist for 16 years, and my extended family only recently stopped asking me when I was going to get a real job over Christmas dinner. I guess they've given up on me now. This December, as usual, the release calendar has been as sparse as the hairs on Agent 47's head. Last year we at least had Cyberpunk 2077's fiasco of a launch to distract us from the end-of-2020 doldrums; you can only hope that it will fare better when the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions are, finally, released in the spring. On the plus side, right now there is actually time to catch up on things without the distraction of shiny new things coming out every week. Absorbing myself in a video game has always been a good way to stave off end-of-year ennui in the festive perineum between Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Those Christmas games loom large in the memory -- one year it was Mass Effect 2, which I played for days straight wrapped in a duvet in my freezing cold Edinburgh flat; one Christmas as a teenager I persuaded my parents to get me Animal Crossing on US import and spent the subsequent days completely ignoring my family in favour of my new weird animal neighbours. (I've got my own kids now, and last year I did the same in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Some things don't change.) It's been a strange year for games, partly because the knock-on effects of Covid-19 have delayed the process of game development so much that most of the things we thought we'd be playing now have drifted into next year. Game development is an extraordinarily collaborative endeavour, especially when there are 100 or more people on a team, and working from home has slowed things down massively at a lot of studios with whom I've spoken.

According to journalist Liam Robertson, Nintendo had plans to release a Game Boy accessory called the PageBoy that would've used radio transmission technology "to let Game Boy Color owners search for information and read international news, game magazines, weather reports, sports scores, and even, most ambitiously, watch live television," reports Kotaku. "This tech would also allow users to contact and message other PageBoy owners. This radio transmission technology at the time was heavily used by pagers, which is actually where the PageBoy name came from." From the report: In a video out [yesterday], Roberston revealed a whole bunch of details and images of the proposed device for the first time. [...] Roberston spoke to some folks who worked on the PageBoy project with Nintendo about the device and how it came to be and what ultimately killed it before it saw the light of day. According to those involved, after a meeting with Nintendo of America in 1999, the company was excited about the potential for the PageBoy, and for the next three years, Nintendo worked with Wizard -- a group created to help manage the device -- to see if this add-on could actually be created and if it would end up being profitable.

While Nintendo was impressed by many of PageBoy's features, including the ability to send images using the Game Boy camera and even the potential for Nintendo to send live videos to PageBoy owners via the radio transmission tech, it ran into a major roadblock. The device relied on radio networks that only existed in a select few parts of the world, like the United States, greatly limiting the device's customer base. According to Robertson, he was told that Nintendo believed the key to Game Boy's success was how universal the hardware was, allowing users around the world to play the same games with the same features. So, because of this, Nintendo reportedly canceled the project in July 2002. However, as pointed out by Roberston, many of the ideas proposed by Wizard for the PageBoy would end up becoming a reality in the years that followed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an effort to restrict access to pirated ROMs illegally made available for its Switch console, Nintendo has obtained a UK High Court injunction against six internet service providers. Targeted against ROM portals with NSW2U and NSWROM branding, the two-year blocking order requires BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and others to block the sites after they failed to respond to infringement complaints.

If you haven't used your Ubisoft account in a while, there's a chance the game publisher might nuke your account for being inactive -- that's the reality one gamer said he discovered after stepping away from PC gaming for more than a year. From a report: "In 2020, I sold my PC because I was gaming way too much and it went a bit over the healthy way of doing it. I made a choice to work and attend school," a Norwegian gamer named Tor, who wished to be identified only by his first name, told PCWorld. He sold off his Core i7 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti machine, and began relying on his phone as his only piece of technology.

But by the summer of 2021, Tor decided to get back into gaming, so he purchased a new gaming PC, only to discover he was unable to log into his Ubisoft account. Tor told PCWorld he was able to reset the password, but eventually learned the account had been closed, taking several hundred dollars of purchased games with it. All Ubisoft titles from Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege series to Assassins' Creed and more were gone. But none of the other services he uses had been cut off. Only Ubisoft disappeared, he said. Ubi officials, however, flatly insist whatever happened in Tor's case isn't normal and that it has never deleted any account that hasn't been logged into in less than four years. The company also says any account that has a purchased game tied to it, would also not be up for closure at all. Despite what the company says though, Tor insists his account and games are gone. "Ubisoft told me they can't recover it. It's deleted, permanently locked," he said.

"Video game companies in North America have never successfully unionized," reports the Washington Post. "That changed December 16, when a union at the indie developer Vodeo Games was recognized by management." While video game companies rake in billions of dollars, their workers complain of unfair labor practices, long hours, sexual harassment and workplace misconduct... In the past, game workers would avoid speaking out publicly against their employer, as it could tarnish their reputation within the industry and make it difficult to find future jobs. But after decades of major gaming companies expecting employees to work 80- or 90-hour workweeks, and of workers fearing retaliation from management, Vodeo employees told The Post that the tide was changing...

What's happening in the games industry at Activision Blizzard and Vodeo is unprecedented. No single gaming company like Activision Blizzard has dominated the headlines with lawsuit after lawsuit for months before, topped off with an explosive Wall Street Journal report in November that claimed CEO Bobby Kotick did not inform the company's board of directors for years about sexual misconduct allegations. A petition calling for Kotick's resignation that was circulated among employees netted over 1,850 signatures... At least several dozen Activision Blizzard workers across the company are in the midst of their third work stoppage following a California state agency lawsuit that alleged widespread sexual harassment and misconduct at the company. The strike is on its third week as workers demand that management rehire 12 contractors from Call of Duty developer Raven Software and promote all Raven quality assurance testers to full-time status. Some in-person demonstrations have taken place at the quality assurance office in Austin, Texas.

Activision Blizzard management responded to employees in a Dec. 10 email that ongoing work toward improving company culture would be best achieved without a union...

Activision Blizzard's tumultuous battle with lawsuits, government investigations and worker protests has Wall Street analysts downgrading their rating of its stock. Unionization would further lower the company's market value, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter. "If they were to succeed [in unionizing], the company would have to determine whether to recognize the union or to bust it," Pachter said. "If only the hourly workers chose unionization, Activision could decide whether it is cheaper to recognize them or to export their jobs to a nonunion locale."

That possibility looms large for workers in the industry. "I do fear for my job," said Aubrey Ryan, a contractor working for Blizzard. "Even if I'm fired, I have been part of a movement that is going to change the games industry. I might not benefit, but future people like me will."
Some interesting quotes from two pro-union figures interviewed by the Post:

• "There's been a lot of groundwork that's been happening in the game industry over the last few years in terms of raising awareness about unions." — Vodeo designer Carolyn Jong

• "Vodeo has broken the ice on smaller studios. There are definitely folks at smaller studios that are realizing that unions are not just for triple A studios..." — a Southern California games-industry organizer

Game makers are increasingly selling virtual weapons and gear as NFTs, extending the trendy digital deeds' reach but rankling some players. From a report: More videogame makers are selling virtual guns, helmets and other gear in the form of NFTs, a move that is increasingly pushing the trendy digital deeds into the average household. Players have been paying for virtual goods in games like "Grand Theft Auto Online" and "World of Warcraft" for years, but turning those items into nonfungible tokens would let gamers trade and resell them, making them into potentially valuable assets. The change also could mean that players who buy an NFT in one game could use it later in other games, on social media and in other corners of the internet -- an important step in developing an economy for the so-called metaverse. "FarmVille" maker Zynga and "Assassin's Creed" creator Ubisoft Entertainment are among the first big, publicly traded gaming companies to say they are experimenting with the strategy. Electronic Arts, Playtika and others are also looking into NFTs' potential use for engaging players.

"We're doing this because this may be part of the future of gaming," said Matt Wolf, Zynga's new vice president of blockchain gaming. "This is all about community building." Nonfungible tokens are essentially digital deeds that verify the authenticity of the items they represent as unique. They are the latest internet-based collecting craze, and so far they have come in forms ranging from digital artwork and trading cards to virtual real estate and sneakers, as well as concert tickets and even sports highlights. The tokens are stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger that shows when they were purchased and for how much, and ensures NFTs can't be duplicated or changed. Amid all that activity, NFTs' advent in videogames holds particular significance because gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds. That makes them potential early adopters in the metaverse -- a virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play and shop and where technology experts say the ability to buy and sell NFTs will be key.

75% of the top 1,000 games run on Linux now, and the figure is even higher, at 80%, for the top 100 games. gHacks reports: Valve Software, the company behind the popular Steam gaming platform and smash hits such as Dota 2, Half-Life and Team Fortress, announced plans in 2018 to improve Windows game support for Linux. [...] The independent database protondb keeps track of compatibility using user reports. Compatibility has improved significantly in recent years. The site highlights compatibility for the top 10, top 100 and top 1000 games on Steam.

75% of the top 1000 games run on Linux now, and the figure is even higher, at 80%, for the top 100 games. Only the top 10 games are not well represented, as only 40% of them run on Linux without major issues according to the database. Users have submitted more than 150,000 reports for over 21,000 games to the site. Of these 21,000 games, more than 17,600 are working according to the site. Games on the database are ranked using a medal system. Platinum and Gold rated games run perfectly, and silver games may have minor issues. Bronze games may crash or have serious issues. Borked games won't work at all or are unplayable, and native Linux games are just the opposite of that.

Protondb has a search feature that Linux gamers may use to find out if games that they are interested in work well on Linux. All games that match the search term are returned, which means that you can search for entire series of games, e.g. King's Bounty, Final Fantasy or Civilization, and get all reported games and their compatibility rating returned. Compatibility is improving, and while there are still games that won't run on Linux, it is clear that compatibility has improved significantly in the past couple of years.

Colleagues across Ubisoft have names for the procession of developers who have departed over the past 18 months: "the great exodus" and "the cut artery." Across the company's global network of studios, which at 20,000-plus employees is one of gaming's largest workforces, many developers have decided it's time to quit. And many of their colleagues describe a flow of goodbyes that they've never seen before. Axios reports: Top-name talent is leaving, with at least five of the top 25-credited people from the company's biggest 2021 game, Far Cry 6, already gone. Twelve of the top 50 from last year's biggest Ubisoft release, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, have left too. (A 13th recently returned.) Also out are midlevel and lower-level workers as headcounts drop, particularly in Ubisoft's large and normally growing Canadian studios. LinkedIn shows Ubisoft's Montreal and Toronto studios each down at least 60 total workers in the last six months. Two current developers tell Axios the departures have stalled or slowed projects. One developer recently said a colleague currently at Ubisoft contacted them to solve an issue with a game, because no one was still there who knew the system.

Interviews with a dozen current and former Ubisoft developers cite a range of factors for the departures, including low pay, an abundance of competitive opportunities, frustration at the company's creative direction, and unease at Ubisoft's handling of a workplace misconduct scandal that flared in mid-2020. One developer with more than a decade of experience at Ubisoft before recently leaving said the company is "an easy target for recruiters," given the company's myriad issues. Said another now-former Ubisoft worker who was disappointed by directives from the company's Paris HQ: "There's something about management and creative scraping by with the bare minimum that really turned me away." Many spoke fondly of much of their time at the company, and one said they'd even consider returning, but the past year and a half was a breaking point. "Management says it's on top of it, telling Axios that attrition is up but that the company has hired 2,600 workers since April," the report adds.

"A spokesperson noted that questions in a recent companywide survey, about whether employees are happy at the company and would 'recommend Ubisoft as a great place to work,' returned a score of 74, which they said was in line with the industry average."

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted. From a report: Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it's sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren't just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine. Minecraft builder "Sammyuri" spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn't the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM. Minecraft processors use the physics engine of the game to recreate the structure of real processors on a macro scale, with materials including redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, levers, and other simple machines. For a little perspective, each "block" inside the game is one virtual meter on each side, so recreating this build in the real world would make it approximately the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.