An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an epidemic that has been affecting indie game developers for years. When a game launches, strange emails start coming in. Sometimes they claim to be reviewers for websites that don't exist. Other times, they pretend to work for major outlets, using misleading email addresses to con developers out of their games. The scams have grown increasingly elaborate over the years, and for small-time developers who don't have a ton of experience dealing with press, it can be tough to sort out which requests are legitimate. (The problem appears to be more common in the indie scene -- one PR rep working in big-budget games told me they don't receive any scam requests like this.)

Emily Morganti, who handles PR for adventure games like Thimbleweed Park and West of Loathing, said in an email that these key scammers have become a regular feature of her job, like yanking weeds out of a garden. "I have the benefit of working for a lot of different indie devs, so I notice patterns that a developer who's only putting out their one game wouldn't see," she said. [...] Last fall, someone who went by the name Dmitry Tseptsov sent several emails to Morganti to ask for codes, explaining that he operated a coffee shop in Ukraine where he'd give out video games as prizes for trivia. "Even 1 key will help me a lot, for which I will be grateful," he wrote. "The cafe opened quite recently, but has a demand, and many people go to us. I mean, for my part, I promise to advertise your game." The coffee shop did exist, but Tseptsov had nothing to do with it, and as one developer discovered, the story was full of holes.

During a pre-Gamescom 2018 livestream from Cologne, Germany, Nvidia on Monday unveiled new GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti high-end graphics cards. These new 20-series cards will succeed Nvidia's current top-of-the-line GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. While the company usually waits to launch the more powerful Ti version of a GPU, this time around, it's releasing the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at once. Polygon adds: They won't come cheap. The Nvidia-manufactured Founders Edition versions will cost $599 for the RTX 2070, $799 for the RTX 2080 and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti. The latter two cards are expected to ship "on or around" Sept. 20, while there is no estimated release date for the RTX 2070. Pre-orders are currently available for the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced different "starting at" prices during the keynote presentation. Huang's presentation said the RTX 2070 will start at $499, the RTX 2080 at $699 and the RTX 2080 Ti at $999. Asked for clarification, an Nvidia representative told Polygon that these amounts reflect retail prices for third-party manufacturers' cards.

The RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti will be the first consumer-level graphics cards based on Nvidia's next-generation Turing architecture, which the company announced earlier this month at the SIGGRAPH computing conference. At that time, Nvidia also revealed its first Turing-based products: three GPUs in the company's Quadro line, which is geared toward professional applications. All three of the new RTX cards will feature built-in support for real-time ray tracing, a rendering and lighting technique for photorealistic graphics that gaming companies are starting to introduce this year

An anonymous reader shares a report: The gaming site IGN is working to remove all of the posts written by former editor Filip Miucin, who was fired two weeks ago for plagiarism, after internet sleuths found that dozens of his articles and videos copied or rephrased from other websites without attribution. "We've seen enough now, both from the thread and our own searches, that we're taking down pretty much everything he did," IGN reviews editor Dan Stapleton wrote on Twitter last night, referring to a thread on the gaming forum ResetEra cataloging the allegations. For days, people had pointed out more similarities between Miucin's work and various other articles and message board posts.

The plan, IGN editors said, is to scrutinize all of the work Miucin has published since the site hired him last October, then figure out what can be restored. IGN's editors also said they hope to re-review the games he reviewed, including ports of Doom and Skyrim on Switch, both which have been replaced by the same message: "This article has been removed due to concerns over similarities to work by other authors. The author of this article is no longer employed by IGN." In the recent days, Miucin has been accused of copying a Bayonetta 2 review from Polygon, copying from a video that took word-for-word from a NeoGAF post, and a number of videos in which Miucin read excerpts from Wikipedia about topics like Super Mario Odyssey and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero as if he had written them. The list even includes an Octopath Traveler article that copied from one of his own IGN colleague's reviews, much to that writer's dismay. Even his Linkedin resume is copied from a job template website, Kotaku reported.

Motherboard's Matthew Gault provides another possibility for how OpenAI's bots managed to beat professional human players in two consecutive games of Data 2. Gault argues that "it was only possible thanks to significant guardrails and an inhuman advantage" -- not necessarily because the AI was more clever than the humans. From the report: The OpenAI Five bots consisted of algorithms known as neural networks, which loosely mimic the brain and "learn" to complete tasks after a process of training and feedback. The research company put its Dota 2-playing AI through 180 days worth of virtual training to prepare it for the match, and it showed. However, the bots had to play within some highly specific limitations. Dota 2 is a complicated game with more than 100 heroes. Some of them use quirky and game-changing abilities. For this exhibition, the hero pool was limited to just 18. That's an incredible handicap because so much of Dota 2 involves a team picking the proper group composition and reacting to what its opponents pick. Reducing the number of champions from more than 100 to 18 made things much simpler for the AI.

The OpenAI Five bots also played Dota 2 by reading the game's information directly from its application programming interface (API), which allows other programs to easily interface with Dota 2. This gives the AI instant knowledge about the game, whereas human players have to visually interpret a screen. If a human was able to do this in a competitive match against other humans, we'd probably call it cheating. Even with this AI advantage, Walsh and his team beat the bots in the third game, when the match organizers turned hero selection over to the crowd, which gave the AI a weak hero composition. Walsh thinks he and his team could eventually beat the AI in a fair right, even given the limited hero pool and other restrictions.

A federal judge has awarded Take-Two Interactive Software, the maker of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, a preliminary injunction to stop a Georgia man from selling programs that it said helps players cheat at the best-selling video game. From a report: Take-Two had accused David Zipperer of selling computer programs called Menyoo and Absolute that let users of the "Grand Theft Auto V" multiplayer feature Grand Theft Auto Online cheat by altering the game for their own benefit, or "griefing" other players by altering their game play without permission. U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan said Take-Two was likely to show that Zipperer infringed its "Grand Theft Auto V" copyright, and that his programs would cause irreparable harm to its sales and reputation by discouraging users from buying its video games.

Two anonymous readers share a report: When the ground-services employee who stole a turboprop airliner last week declined air-traffic controllers' piloting advice, saying he had played videogames, it was no surprise to some devotees of intricate home flight-simulation programs [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available.]. Such software can mimic many phases of aircraft operations, including takeoffs, as well as how to respond to heavy weather and emergencies, pilots and software makers say. The simulators are also more affordable than pursuing a pilot's license and can help satisfy a lifelong obsession with flying.

Last year, two million units of vehicle-simulation games for PCs and consoles were sold world-wide, the most common being flight simulators, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Home programs have evolved over more than three decades. They can represent all types of aircraft, from wartime bombers to modern-day passenger airliners. A setup can cost a few dozen dollars for a videogame to thousands for software with intricate renderings of cockpits and real-world environments. A new conference called FlightSimExpo held in Las Vegas in June drew around 1,100 people, its organizers said. FlightSimCon held its sixth annual gathering in Dallas in June, according to its website. Many hobbyists say they don't think of simulators in the same vein as traditional videogames, because they aren't trying to rack up points or compete. They simply focus on flying.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers have uncovered and tested a screen-splitting "VR Mode" that has been buried in the Switch's system-level firmware for over a year. The discovery suggests that Nintendo at least toyed with the idea that the tablet system could serve as a stereoscopic display for a virtual reality headset. Switch hackers first discovered and documented references to a "VrMode" in the Switch OS' Applet Manager services back in December when analyzing the June 2017 release of version 3.0.0 of the system's firmware. But the community doesn't seem to have done much testing of the internal functions "IsVrModeEnabled" and "SetVrModeEnabled" at the time. That changed shortly after Switch modder OatmealDome publicly noted one of the VR functions earlier this month, rhetorically asking, "has anyone actually tried calling it?" Fellow hacker random0666 responded with a short Twitter video (and an even shorter followup) showing the results of an extremely simple homebrew testing app that activates the system's VrMode functions.

As you can see in those video links, using those functions to enable the Switch's VR mode splits the screen vertically into two identical half-sized images, in much the way other VR displays split an LCD screen to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. System-level UI elements appear on both sides of the screen when the mode is enabled, and the French text shown in the test can be roughly translated to "Please move the console away from your face and click the close button." The location of the functions in the Switch firmware suggest they're part of Nintendo's own Switch code and not generic functions included in other Nvidia Tegra-based hardware.

According to Nikkei, Japan's Fair Trade Commission is looking into whether Apple improperly pressured Yahoo Japan to shut down a game streaming platform that competed with the iOS App Store. "Yahoo Japan's Game Plus service allowed people to stream full games made for other platforms and to play HTML5 games on mobile phones, which would have allowed iPhone owners to get games without going through the App Store," reports The Verge. From the report: Nikkei reports that Yahoo Japan slashed the program's budget last fall, just months after it launched, and told partners that it was due to pressure from Apple. It's said to have begun filing complaints with Japan's FTC around the same time. Developers essentially have no good alternative to the App Store on iOS. Their only other option is the web, which is a wonderful place for websites, but the web is rarely as fast or flashy as a native app. There are a great number of features that only native apps can take advantage of, which requires going through the App Store and giving Apple a 30 percent cut of most sales. Yahoo Japan's service was meant, in part, to be an alternative to that, offering better terms to developers, according to Nikkei, and fewer restrictions around how games were updated and sold. Final Fantasy creator Square Enix had even signed on and produced an exclusive game for the platform, which has since been pulled.

"Valve appears to be working on a set of 'compatibility tools,' called Steam Play, that would allow at least some Windows-based titles to run on Linux-based SteamOS systems," writes Kyle Orland from Ars Technica. From the report: Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems." Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."

Mark Wilson quotes a report from BetaNews: The arrival of Fortnite on Android has not only been eagerly awaited, but also steeped in controversy. In addition to making the game a Samsung exclusive (for a few days, anyway), Epic Games decided to bypass Google Play and host APK downloads on its own servers. But this isn't going to stop people looking for Fortnite in the Play Store. Google is well aware of this, and that there is the potential for fake, scam apps to appear, tricking users into downloading something malicious. As such, the company is taking action, and is showing a warning to anyone who searches for Fortnite in Google Play. Conduct a search for Fortnite in Google's app store and you'll be greeted by a message that reads "Fortnite Battle Royale by Epic Games, Inc is not available on Google Play." Searchers are also advised that Fortnite rival PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is available to download.

theshowmecanuck writes: Bethesda just pulled a cease and desist on an Amazon Marketplace sale of one of their games. This, despite the fact that the resale of used games is legal in the USA. Bethesda is saying that because it isn't being offered with a warranty, it is not protected through the First Sale Doctrine. UPDATE: The game in question was sealed and unopened, technically not "used," but being sold secondhand. In a letter sent to the seller by Bethesda's legal firm, they made the argument that the sale was not "by an authorized reseller," and was therefore "unlawful." Bethesda also took issue with the seller's use of the word "new" in selling the unwrapped game, claiming that this constituted "false advertising."

Bethesda offered the following statement: "Bethesda does not and will not block the sale of pre-owned games. The issue in this case is that the seller offered a pre-owned game as 'new' on the Amazon Marketplace. We do not allow non-authorized resellers to represent what they sell as 'new' because we can't verify that the game hasn't been opened and repackaged. This is how we help protect buyers from fraud and ensure our customers always receive authentic new product, with all enclosed materials and warranty intact. In this case, if the game had been listed as 'Pre-Owned,' this would not have been an issue."

"The damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic." From a report: In July, Nintendo sued two popular ROM sites, LoveROMS and LoveRetro.co, for what it called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." Both sites have since shut down. On Wednesday, another big, 18-year-old ROM site, EmuParadise, said it would no longer be able to allow people to download old games due to "potentially disastrous consequences." Nintendo owns the intellectual property for its games, and when people pirate them instead of buying a Nintendo Super NES Classic Edition or a downloading a copy from one of its digital storefronts, it can argue it's losing money. According to Nintendo's official site, ROMs and video game emulation also represent "the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers," and "have the potential to significantly damage" tens of thousands of jobs. Even when a Nintendo game isn't for sale, it's still the company's intellectual property, and it can enforce its copyright if it wants.

But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic. Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs. Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to. And perhaps most importantly, denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.

Following Nintendo's recent lawsuits against ROM sites LoveROMs and LoveRetro, a major ROM repository called EmuParadise announced it will preemptively cease providing downloadable versions of copyrighted classic games. While no lawsuits have been filed yet, the site's founder, MasJ, writes in an announcement post: "It's not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years. We run EmuParadise for the love of retro games and for you to be able to revisit those good times. Unfortunately, it's not possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble." Ars Technica reports: EmuParadise will continue to operate as a repository for legal downloads of classic console emulators, as well as a database of information on thousands of classic games. "But you won't be able to get your games from here for now," as MasJ writes. Since founding EmuParadise in 2000, MasJ says EmuParadise has faced threatening letters, server shutdowns, and numerous DMCA takedown requests for individual games. Through it all, he says he was encouraged by "thousands of emails from people telling us how happy they've been to rediscover and even share their childhood with the next generations in their families."

NEC, a Japanese IT and networking company, announced plans to provide a large-scale facial recognition system for the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. "The system will be used to identify over 300,000 people at the games, including athletes, volunteers, media, and other staff," reports The Verge. From the report: NEC's system is built around an AI engine called NeoFace, which is part of the company's overarching Bio-IDiom line of biometric authentication technology. The Tokyo 2020 implementation will involve linking photo data with an IC card to be carried by accredited people. NEC says that it has the world's leading face recognition tech based on benchmark tests from the US's National Institute of Standards and Technology. NEC demonstrated the technology in Tokyo today, showing how athletes and other staff wouldn't be able to enter venues if they were holding someone else's IC card. The company even brought out a six-foot-eight former Olympic volleyball player to demonstrate that the system would work with people of all heights, though he certainly had to stoop a bit. It worked smoothly with multiple people moving through it quickly; the screen displayed the IC card holder's photo almost immediately after.

On August 5th, OpenAI's bots defeated four former professional Dota 2 players in two of the three matches played. "There were a few conditions to make the game manageable for the AI, such as a narrower pool of 18 Dota heroes to choose from (instead of the full 100+) and item delivery couriers that are invincible," reports The Verge. "But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement [the] win was." From the report: The OpenAI Five triumphed in convincing fashion in the first game, not allowing the human players to even destroy one of their defensive towers. The humans recovered a little in game two, conquering one tower, but they still got demolished. And finally, in a game three played purely for pride, the humans managed to squeeze out a win. What stands out when you watch the matches is the apparent intelligence of the AI's decisions and the inhuman absence of any indecision. The typical Dota 2 game, even on the professional tier, involves quite a bit of equivocation about whether to engage in a fight, try and shift it to a more favorable battleground, or run away from it completely. The OpenAI team just doesn't need the processing time that humans require, which made its play appear unnatural -- but only in the speed and crispness of the decision-making, not in the content of those decisions.

Fortnite developer Epic Games will not be distributing its massively popular game on Android because the Play Store takes a 30 percent cut of the revenue. Instead, the company plans to distribute the software to players via the official Fornite website, "where Android users can download a Fortnite Installer program to install the game on compatible devices," reports The Verge. From the report: For Fortnite on iOS, Epic decided to distribute the game on the App Store, most likely because it had no other method of getting iPhone users to easily download the software. (Apple, unlike Google, does not allow iOS users to download apps that are not first approved by its internal review processes and distributed through its proprietary marketplace.) With Google and its more open platform, Epic can get away with distributing the app itself. CEO Tim Sweeney says the primary motivation here is twofold. Epic wants to maintain its direct relationship with consumers. (The company currently distributes Fortnite on PC through its own Epic Games Launcher, instead of using Valve's popular Steam platform.)

The second reason is financial: Epic does not want to pay Google's 30 percent cut, especially considering the entire game is funded through in-app purchases. "The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers' 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games," Sweeney says. "There's a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers." But on mobile platforms that are open, like Android, "30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service," he says. Sweeney adds that Epic is "intimately familiar with these costs" from its direct distribution of Fortnite on Mac and PC. There's no word as to when the Android version of Fortnite will be available, but rumors suggest it will be tied to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch on August 9th.

After returning to stores in June after a brief stint of sales back in 2016, the NES Classic is topping U.S. sales charts. Market research firm NPD reports that the NES Classic was June's highest unit-selling hardware platform in the U.S., beating the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. "The NES Classic managed to outsell these consoles despite only being on sale for a few days in late June," reports The Verge. From the report: While the NES Classic is priced at $59 compared to more expensive current-generation consoles, it's clearly still in demand 35 years after the original Nintendo Entertainment System debuted in 1983. The NES Classic comes loaded with 30 games including classics like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Pac-Man. While you can't insert vintage NES cartridges into it, the console supports game saves and connects to TVs via a HDMI cable. Nintendo hasn't revealed whether it now plans to introduce more miniature retro consoles.

In the next software update for its vehicles, Tesla will include several playable Atari games as new Easter eggs. CEO Elon Musk said the update would be released in "about four weeks" and should include games like Pole Position, Tempest, and Missile Command. The Verge reports: Pole Position's controls will apparently be linked to the Tesla's actual steering wheel -- while the vehicle is stopped, Musk made clear. It goes without saying, but no one should be messing around with any of these when they're behind the wheel of a moving car. A much bigger deal for Tesla owners is that, according to Musk, software version 9.0 will begin to enable "full self-driving features" in eligible vehicles. The new update might be discussed further during Tesla's earnings call later today.

Valve decided to remove a game from Steam after it was found to be turning players' computers into cryptocurrency miners. An anonymous reader shares the report from Polygon: The game is called Abstractism, which was said to not only infiltrate players' computers with mining software, but also dupe them through falsified items on the Steam Marketplace. But not long after these accusations started circulating, it has been taken off Steam. When Abstractism was up on the store, it was marketed as a "relaxing" platformer with a simple design. But YouTuber SidAlpha noticed that something was afoot, when someone on the Team Fortress 2 forums posted about how the game was tied into an item scam.

Players also noticed that the game used massive amounts of CPU and GPU, which Abstractism's developers claimed was because of the game's "high graphics settings," something quite uncharacteristic for a simple platformer. High CPU and GPU usage is another tell-tale sign that a computer is being used to mine cryptocurrency. Just hours after SidAlpha's video and the associated forum posts began to spread, Valve removed Abstractism from Steam, and the developer has been banned from Steam. All previously purchased Abstractism items have been tagged with "This item can no longer be bought or sold on the Community Market."

The New Zealand government spent at least $150,000 to create a video game that shows people how to run their own business. It reportedly took 14 months and eight designers to create. NZ Herald reports: The Tycoon Game series, which consists of Restaurant Tycoon and Tech Tycoon, challenges players to use what the World Economic Forum has deemed as 10 essential skills vital for the future of employment. The educational game will teach players business skills including emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility, as well as critical thinking and creativity -- skills the Forum has this year bumped up the prescribed list. Players can level-up and earn badges for certain achievements, determined by how they manage scenarios in the game, including paying supplier invoices and wages. Do you think a video game is an effective way to teach business? If so, do you have any other games you'd recommend? A couple that come to mind include Capitalism Plus and Hot Dog Stand: Top Dog.