"Red Dead Redemption 2" broke records in its first three days on sale, pulling in more than $725 million in worldwide retail sales and achieving the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, developer Rockstar Games announced. Here's a story from Bloomberg Businessweek that goes behind the scenes: In a compensation deal unique to the video-gaming industry, Sam and Dan Houser, the brothers responsible for Grand Theft Auto, will get the bulk of an expected $538 million in royalties Take-Two Interactive Software will pay to all employees for this year, according to an analyst. That's thanks in large part to their latest title, Red Dead Redemption II, due Friday. The British-born brothers and a few key insiders share half the profits of Rockstar Games, the Take-Two subsidiary that makes both titles, according to a lawsuit filed by a former employee. Last year, Take-Two distributed $383 million in what it called internal royalties. More than 2,000 Rockstar employees receive bonuses, a company spokesman said. Take-Two said its compensation programs allow employees to join in the success of software they help develop. The company declined to say how much of it went to the Housers. Gerrick Johnson of BMO Capital Markets estimated the brothers received the bulk.

"As long as Grand Theft Auto is chugging along, no one seems to care," Johnson said. The Housers' haul shows just how far video games have come since the days of Pong and Space Invaders. The industry is expected to bring in $138 billion this year, according to market researcher Newzoo. Red Dead II will sell at least 15 million copies by the end of the year, analysts said, at a retail price starting at $60 for the base package.

At the end of August, Valve announced a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report: When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn't yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that's also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 -- more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.

In a series of rulings, the Library of Congress has carved out a number of exemptions that will help the movement to archive and preserve video games. From a report: In an 85-page ruling [PDF] that covered everything from electronic aircraft controls to farm equipment diagnostic software, the Librarian of Congress carved out fair use exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for video games and software in general. These exemptions will make it easier for archivists to save historic video games and for museums to share that cultural history with the public. "The Acting Register found that the record supported granting an expansion in the relatively discrete circumstances where a preservation institution legally possesses a copy of a video game's server code and the game's local code," the Librarian of Congress said. "In such circumstances, the preservation activities described by proponents are likely to be fair uses."

These rules are definitely good news for single-player games. "The big change for single-player games happened during the last DMCA review process in 2015, when the Copyright Office decided that museums and archives could break the online authentication for single-player titles that were just phoning home to a server for copy protection reasons," Phil Salvador -- a Washington, DC-area librarian and archivist who runs The Obscuritory, a site that focuses on discussing and preserving obscure, old game -- told Motherboard. That 2015 ruling was due to expire this year, but thanks to pressure from activists it was renewed today instead.

According to a recently published paper by Microsoft Research team, the company could be looking to launch physical controllers for mobile devices. From a report: The research paper documents some of the popular solutions to gaming via a touch screen, while hailing the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Portable (PSP) for circumventing touch-based control limitations with full joysticks and buttons. From the paper [PDF]: As smartphones and tablets have become pervasive, so has mobile gaming. Not surprisingly, popular games for these platforms are focused on touchscreen-based interaction. However, many types of game are less well-suited to mobile devices. Despite systems like AdaptControl which can adapt to the 'drift' typically occurring when using virtual on-screen controls, touchbased emulations of traditional gaming controls like Dpads, buttons and joysticks are often unsatisfactory.

Mobile gaming devices like the Sony PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS and Switch are dedicated mobile gaming platforms which overcome these limitations via physical controls. The success of the Switch is testament to the value of mobile gaming with physical controls. A number of cheaper products allow a smartphone to be clipped into or onto a modified handheld gaming controller; these include the ION iCade mobile, the GameCase, the GameVice and products from Moga. However, the fixed form of these accessories means they are bulky and inflexible.

An anonymous reader quotes NBC News: The California man behind a years-long string of hoax 911 calls -- including one that ended in a Kansas man's death -- wants to plead guilty to all charges, court documents revealed. Tyler Rai Barriss, 25, intends to waive his right to trial and admit guilt to a 46-count federal indictment, according to a document he signed on Oct. 18 and was filed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday. Barriss faces up to life behind bars for his dozens of acts of "swatting" -- calling police to falsely report a serious crime, in hopes of drawing a massive response to the home of an unsuspecting target.... According to the court records, Barriss will admit to dozens of "swatting" incidents all over America between 2015 and the end of 2017, The false alarms connected to Barriss happened in Ohio, Nevada, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, MIssouri, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Connecticut and New York.
Barriss performed SWATs if clients sent him $10 over PayPal -- occasionally demanding "upwards of $50," according to a new (possibly pay-walled) article on Wired. A Call of Duty player hired Barriss to SWAT a teammate who'd caused them to lose a $1.50 wager, but his intended target supplied a false address across town which resulted in the fatal police shooting.

Both gamers are now "awaiting trial on lesser charges," reports NBC.

harrymcc writes: The better AI gets at teaching itself to perform tasks in ways beyond the skills of mere humans, the more likely it is that it may unwittingly behave in ways a human would consider unethical. To explore ways to prevent this from happening, IBM researchers taught AI to play Pac-Man without ever gobbling up the ghosts. And it did so without ever explicitly telling the software that this was the goal. Over at Fast Company, I wrote about this project and what IBM learned from conducting it.

The researchers built a piece of software that could balance the AI's ratio of self-devised, aggressive game play to human-influenced ghost avoidance, and tried different settings to see how they affected its overall approach to the game. By doing so, they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them.

China's regulators have ended the issuance of game licenses through a stopgap approval process, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The move would close the last known official path for making money from new titles in the world's biggest gaming market. From the report: Licenses are no longer being granted through a process known as the "green channel," used for testing both domestic and foreign games, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The approval mechanism had been in place since at least August, following the government's decision earlier this year to restructure how it reviews video games for violence, gambling and sensitive topics. The new restrictions in the $38 billion market threaten the fortunes of game companies such as Tencent Holdings and NetEase and add to the uncertainty about the Communist Party's long-term plans for regulating the industry. While it's unclear why Beijing has shut that window, the government has stepped up its oversight of an industry it sees fomenting addiction, myopia and other ills among the country's youth. Some analysts had anticipated that the broader freeze would end by September. They had seen the green channel as a temporary solution to carry the industry until then.

CCP Games, the Icelandic studio known for their long-running MMO Eve: Online (2003), shuttered their VR production studios in a surprise move last year, selling off their Newcastle-based branch behind their multiplayer space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016), and completely shutting down their Atlanta studio behind sports game Sparc (2017). Now, CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson speaks out in an interview with Destructoid about the studio's return to traditional desktop gaming, and his thoughts about the VR landscape. From a report: In short, he thought VR would be bigger by now, and more capable of supporting a healthy multiplayer userbase. EVE: Valkyrie, the company's flagship VR game, was the result of over three years of development before becoming a day-one launch title on Oculus Rift and PSVR, arriving shortly afterwards on HTC Vive via Steam in 2016 -- a seemingly best-case scenario for any multiplayer-only game.

Under CCP direction, EVE: Valkyrie saw a number of updates designed to entice players back, including new ships, maps, and weekly events; CCP even pushed a major update to the game last year that brought support for desktop and console players, a move to help boost sales and revive the ailing VR-only playerbase. Still, the multiplayer game just didn't perform as CCP ultimately expected, and the company officially stepped back from VR shortly thereafter. "We expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period," Petursson tells Destructoid. "You can't build a business on that."

Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game tear. From a report: "The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It's] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players." The veteran stood on stage holding a silver trophy, his first since losing to Harry Hong in 2014, and the unlikely Saelee, tears still in his eyes, hoisted the gold to applause from the crowd at Sunday's Retro Game Expo crowd.

Though Tetris came out on the NES in 1989, the Classic World Championship tournament as it exists today didn't get started until 2010 after the game's competitive scene spent most of the aughts trading strategies, high scores, and footage evidence throughout a scattered network of forums and websites. Now, top players from around the world compete annually at the Expo using the original game and controllers played on old CRTs to see who can get the highest score in individual head-to-head matchups.

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Rockstar Games co-founder and VP Dan Hauser unleashed a storm of controversy when he casually stated in an interview with Vulture that "We were working 100-hour weeks" putting the finishing touches on Red Dead Redemption 2. Reaction was swift with many condemning the ubiquitous practice of crunch time in the video game industry in general and Rockstar's history of imposing harsh demands on its employees in particular... Hauser responded that he was talking about a senior writing team of four people working over a three-week period. This kind of intense short-term engagement was common for the team which had been working together for 12 years. Hauser went on to say that Rockstar doesn't "ask or expect anyone to work anything like this". Employees are given the option of working excessive overtime but doing so is a "choice" not a requirement.

A QA tester at Rockstar's Lincoln studio in the UK has taken to Reddit to answer questions and clarify misconceptions about overtime at Rockstar that have arisen in the wake of Hauser's comments.... He has no knowledge of working conditions at other Rockstar studios. The first thing the poster points out is that he and other QA testers (with the possible exception of salaried staff) are paid for their overtime work. He then writes "The other big thing is that this overtime is NOT optional, it is expected of us. If we are not able to work overtime on a certain day without a good reason, you have to make it up on another day. This usually means that if you want a full weekend off that you will have to work a double weekend to make up for it... We have been in crunch since October 9th 2017 which is before I started working here...."

[A] requirement to opt into weekly overtime shifts and more than a year of required crunch time ranging from 56 to 81.5 hours spent at work each week is a far, far cry from Hauser's claim that overtime is a "choice" offered to Rockstar's employees. The good news is that Rockstar has changed its overtime policies in response to the negative press engendered by Hauser's 100-hours comment [according to the verified Rock Star employed on Reddit]. Beginning next week "all overtime going forward will be entirely optional, so if we want to work the extra hours and earn the extra money (As well as make yourself look better for progression) then we can do, but there is no longer a rule making us do it."
The videogame correspondent for Forbes argues that this "crunch time is the norm" idea in the videogame industry "is unconscionable and untenable. No one, in any line of work, should be expected to sacrifice their family for their job. If people want to devote their life to their job, they should be able to do so but those who would rather work a standard work-week should also be able to do so without suffering adverse job-related consequences." But what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should 'crunch' overtime be optional?

The November issue of Popular Mechanics includes a message from its editors that Elon Musk is "under attack," arguing that while some criticisms have merit, "much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg." But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity? Elon Musk is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem-solver -- the kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championed -- and the problems he's trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, that's for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.
The magazine includes statements from 12 high-profile supporters, including investor Mark Cuban, who writes "When you invest in a company run by an entrepreneur like Elon, you are investing in the mindset and approach that an entrepreneur brings to the table as much as you are valuing the net present value of future cash flows. That is not typical for public companies that are overwhelmingly run by hired CEOs. My advice for Elon is simple: Be yourself. Be true to your mission. Respect your investors. Ignore your critics."

Meanwhile, in a Friday post on Twitter, Musk jokingly claimed that he'd purchased and then deleted the game of Fortnite, posting a doctored Marketwatch article quoting him as saying "I had to save these kids from eternal virginity."

"Had to been done," tweeted Musk, adding "ur welcome".

Steam VR is introducing a new feature called "Motion Smoothing" that will give PCs with low-end hardware the power to deliver VR experiences more smoothly. "It functions like Motion Smoothing for TV and Asynchronous Spacewarp for Oculus devices, which are frame-rate smoothing techniques that generate synthetic frames between two real ones in order to avoid a stuttery experience," notes Engadget. From the report: When Steam VR determines that an experience is lagging or dropping frames, Motion Smoothing automatically kicks in. It drops an app's framerate from 90FPS to 45FPS and generates a synthetic frame for every real one to mimic real 90FPS. If things get especially bad, it can generate two to three frames for every real one instead. Steam explains that the feature "dramatically [lowers] the performance requirements," allowing PCs with lower end hardware to "produce smooth frames." Take note, however, that the feature will not work with the Oculus Rift or with Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can only take advantage of it if you have an HTC Vive or a Vive Pro, and if you're running Windows 10 -- all you need to do is right-click on Steam VR and select beta under Tools in Library.

The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software. From a report: The court order allowed Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to search two properties in Melbourne, Australia, for evidence related to a cheat known as Infamous. The Australian federal court has also frozen the assets of the five, who have not yet filed a defence. The cheat went offline six months ago. It allowed players who paid about $40 to manipulate the gaming environment, generate virtual currency and use a "god mode" feature that makes players invincible.

Hoping to avoid injuries, gamers get physical training; squat jumps, ginger smoothies and yoga. From a report: Esports, the world of professional videogaming, is looking more and more like other sports, with big sponsors, prize money, fan bases -- and player injuries. In response, teams are educating players on ergonomics, hiring personal chefs and sending gamers to the gym [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. Sweden's Ninjas in Pyjamas, one of esports' most accomplished teams, distributes an illustrated fitness guide to players with nearly two dozen recommended "core" exercises like burpees, Superman lifts and squat jumps. It has also instituted a "no pizza" rule before morning matches and mandated teams take pregame walks.

Before matches, hand-warming packets are doled out to its two dozen players. "If you have warm hands, you reduce the risk of injury versus cold hands," says Hicham Chahine, Ninjas' chief executive. The potential for injuries -- most frequently in the wrists, hands and fingers -- is rising due to the popularity of the $900 million esports universe. With new leagues and a proliferation of competitions, for some games, tournaments are popping up nearly every other week. "Everyone is susceptible to injuries in everything that is done to an extreme," says Veli-Matti Karhulahti, of Finland's University of Turku, who along with co-author Tuomas Kari, has published peer-reviewed research on physical activity in esports.

South Korean team KT Rolster hired a nutritionist two years ago who dictates breakfast, lunch and dinner. Brown rice was substituted for white rice. Players craving fast food or instant ramen must now make a special request to do so, says Jeong Je-seung, KT Rolster's coach and a former professional gamer. In his playing days, Mr. Jeong says low salaries meant "if you could eat three times a day as an esports player back then it was enough." Top players can now earn millions of dollars annually in prize money and sponsorships. The 2018 world championship for "Dota 2," a game where teams raid opponents' bases, carried a purse of nearly $25 million.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, Google made a seemingly crowd-pleasing tweak to its Chrome browser and created a crisis for web game developers. Its May release of Chrome 66 muted sites that played sound automatically, saving internet users from the plague of annoying auto-playing videos. But the new system also broke the audio of games and web art designed for the old audio standard -- including hugely popular games like QWOP, clever experiments like the Infinite Jukebox, and even projects officially showcased by Google. After a backlash over the summer, Google kept blocking autoplay for basic video and audio, but it pushed the change for games and web applications to a later version. That browser version, Chrome 70, is on the verge of full release -- but the new, autoplay-blocking Web Audio API isn't part of it yet. Google communications manager Ivy Choi tells The Verge that Chrome will start learning the sites where users commonly play audio, so it can tailor its settings to their preferences. The actual blocking won't start until Chrome 71, which is due in December.

"The first published RPG was Dungeons & Dragons, shortly followed by some other imitative games," Greg Stafford once said. "Chaosium, however, was never content to imitate but published games that were original in style of play, content and design."

Greg Stafford died Thursday at the age of 71. Long-time Slashdot reader argStyopa shares this memorial from Chaosium's Michael O'Brien. As one of the greatest game designers of all time; winner of too many awards to count; and a friend, mentor, guide, and inspiration to generations of gamers, "the Grand Shaman of Gaming" influenced the universe of tabletop gaming beyond measure. Greg founded The Chaosium in 1975... Under his leadership, the company quickly became renowned for its originality and creativity, and was responsible for introducing numerous things to the hobby that are standards today. As John Wick (7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings) memorably said, "The older I get, the more I hear young RPG designers say 'Never been done before!' And then I just point at something Greg Stafford did a few decades ago."

Greg's work in roleplaying games, board games, and fiction have been acclaimed as some of the most engaging and innovative of all time. There will doubtless be many valedictory messages over the coming days from the countless people that Greg inspired and enthused across his many interests and passions -- Glorantha, Oaxaca, King Arthur, shamanism, mythology and more. For now, we leave you with the words of the Myth maker himself, speaking at the 2018 ENnies Awards ceremony, his last public engagement
"When I started Chaosium in 1975... we never imagined, truly, that it would reach the magnitude that it has today," Stafford tells the audience. "It went through a long period of being some strange thing that just random geeks did... I figure when role-playing games get on The X-Files and The Simpsons, we've made it..."

""It's true that it's not us. We're a bunch of obsessive-compulsive, detail-minded game designers, people looking desperately for a job that doesn't make them wear a tie to work, artists who would've never had a market without our industry. We all do a lot of work, but in fact we're just a small handful of people, and truly the phenomenon that we have today is not due to us, but is due to you, the fans and the players. We really appreciate everything that you've done... I want to say thank you to all of you fans."

The forum at Basic Roleplaying Central has started a condolences thread.

The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

Patrick Klepek tells the story of a PlayStation Network user who had their 13-year-old account stolen via what appears to be a social engineering scheme against Sony. Klepek managed to track it down and start negotiating for its release. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: 1,200. That's how much someone is asking for a PlayStation Network account I've been investigating for the past few weeks. "Secure," the person calls it, claiming the account will "never be touched" by the original owner again. "He won't be getting it back," they claim. More than a thousand dollars? That's a little rich for my blood, and so I counteroffer: $700. "Btc?" they respond, accepting my bid. (BTC refers to bitcoin. The majority of transactions like this take place using cryptocurrency; it's generally harder, but not impossible, to trace.) I didn't purchase the account, of course. But I could -- anyone could, if they only knew where to look. This account wasn't on a shady market because someone was clumsy with their digital security. They had a strong password and two-factor authentication. When they were notified about problems with their account, they called Sony and asked for help. Despite all this, despite proving their identity over and over, they lost access to their PSN account, including any trophies earned or any games purchased. It was gone...well, sort of. The original owner no longer had access, but this person -- the individual asking for $1,200 but who quickly and without hesitation dropped to $700 -- did.
[...]
More than likely, Sony itself is a victim of a clever social engineering scheme, in which a user, or series of users, repeatedly spammed their representatives, until it found someone willing to accept the limited information they did have, and calculated the system would eventually lock the account in their favor. Even a "failed" social engineering attempt can be a success, if the person calling comes away with new information about the account. Every company in the world can fall victim to social engineering, as there are no true fail safes. But Sony's setup seems especially ripe for it. Why didn't the system get flagged as "sensitive" sooner? Why can a user flip off two-factor authentication over the phone? How can an account get abandoned, when it's still active? There are ways Sony could have prevented this from happening. In the end, the original account owner was magically handed the account. "Sony promised that they were going to set it up so no reps could make any changes," the account owner said, "but they are still investigating how this happened."

Sony's president has confirmed that the company is working on the next PlayStation, but stopped short of calling it "PlayStation 5." From a report: "At this point, what I can say is it's necessary to have a next-generation hardware," Kenichiro Yoshida told the Financial Times on Monday. He didn't give a sense of the form the next PlayStation might take, but FT sources suggested that it wouldn't be a major departure from the PS4 and that its fundamental architecture would be pretty similar. The report suggests Sony isn't quite ready to jump from consoles to cloud-based gaming, even as direct competitors such as Microsoft and potential ones like Google reveal game streaming services.

Microsoft has unveiled "Project xCloud," its new game streaming service designed to work across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. "Scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey for us," explains Microsoft's cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry in a blog post. "We'll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations." The Verge reports: Microsoft has built custom hardware for its datacenters, as The Verge previously exclusively reported, so that existing and future Xbox games will be compatible with the services. Games will be streamed to devices, and Microsoft has been testing the xCloud service with Xbox wireless controllers connected to consoles, mobile devices, and PCs. Microsoft says its research teams are "creating ways to combat latency" via advanced network techniques combined with video encoding and decoding. This should make game streaming viable on 4G networks, too.