Millions of people stopped playing Call of Duty in the first quarter of 2022, as one of gaming's top franchises continued to cool off, according to Activision Blizzard's latest financial results. From a report: Call of Duty is the biggest annual franchise in gaming, so any struggles can have knock-on effects for the rest of the industry. Activision Blizzard said its Activision-branded games -- which nearly entirely consist of Call of Duty -- had 100 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2022. That's down from 107 million in the quarter before. And it's down from 150 million in the first three months of 2021. The drop comes as Microsoft presses forward on a bid to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. In a press release, the company blamed the decline on "lower premium sales" for November's Call of Duty: Vanguard compared to November 2020's Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. It also cited "lower engagement" for free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone and flat performance for its Call of Duty: Mobile title.

"We have worked on Overgrowth for 14 years," begins their new announcement. Development first began in 2008, and the game runs on Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. Overgrowth's page on Wikipedia describes the realistic 3D third-person action game as "set in a pre-industrial world of anthropomorphic fighter rabbits, wolves, dogs, cats and rats."

And now, "Just like they did with some earlier games, Wolfire Games have now open sourced the game code for Overgrowth," reports GamingOnLinux. "[J]ump, kick, throw, and slash your way to victory.... The source code is available on GitHub. You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam."

The Overwatch site adds as a bonus that "we're also permanently reducing the game's price by a third worldwide" (so U.S. prices drop from $29.99 to $19.99).

"Only the code is getting open sourced," the announcement notes, "not the art assets or levels, the reason is that we don't want someone to build and sell Overgrowth as their own." Wolfire CEO Max Danielsson explains in a video that "you'll still have to own the game to play and mod it." "What it does mean, however, is that everyone will have full and free access to all our source code, including the engine, project files, scripts, and shaders.

"We'll be releasing it under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows you to do whatever you want with the code, including relicensing and selling it, with very few obligations. We tried to keep this easy...

"This isn't the next big engine. We don't intend to compete with any other great open source game engines like Godot, which is a great option if you're looking for a general-purpose game engine. But if you're interested in looking at what shipped game code can look like, want to look at specific code, like the procedural animation system, or if you're an Overgrowth modder who wants to make an involved total conversion mod, then this is for you.
"We have wanted to open source Overgrowth for a long time," says the announcement on Wolfire's site, "and we are incredibly grateful to our team and community for making this happen.

"We are excited to see what people do with this code and we look forward to the spirit of Overgrowth living on for another 14 years."

Sony is building a program to let advertisers buy ads in PlayStation games. From a report: It's doing testing with adtech partners to place in-game ads, similar to an initiative by rival Microsoft. The program is expected to launch before the end of the year. Sony is working on a plan to put ads inside PlayStation games, sources said, similar to a move by Microsoft to run ads in Xbox. Three people who are involved in the plans said Sony is doing testing with adtech partners to help game developers create in-game ads through a software developer program. The idea is to encourage developers to keep building free-to-play games, which have soared in the pandemic, by giving them a way to monetize them, they said. PlayStation's current ad inventory is limited to in-menu ads like game publishers promoting their own titles in the console's store, the sources said. PlayStation also serves ads on streaming video to people who stream via their consoles through apps like Hulu .

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn't be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watchers hopeful that Nintendo may be planning official support for some emulated classic portable games through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service in the future. The two leaked emulators -- codenamed Hiroko for Game Boy and Sloop for Game Boy Advance -- first hit the Internet as fully compiled NSP files and encrypted NCA files linked from a 4chan thread posted to the Pokemon board Monday afternoon. Later in that thread, the original poster suggested that these emulators "are official in-house development versions of Game Boy Color/Advance emulators for Nintendo Switch Online, which have not been announced or released."

In short order, dataminers examining the package found a .git folder in the ROM. That folder includes commit logs that reference supposed development work circa August 2020 from a NERD employee and, strangely enough, a developer at Panasonic Vietnam. NERD's history includes work on the software for the NES Classic and SNES Classic, as well as the GameCube emulation technology in last year's Super Mario All-Stars, so the division's supposed involvement wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Footage from the leaked Game Boy Advance emulator also includes a "(c) Nintendo" and "(c) 2019 -- 2020 Nintendo" at various points. While suggestive, none of this is exactly hard evidence of Nintendo's involvement in making these emulators. Some skepticism might be warranted, too, because there is some historical precedent for an emulator developer trying to get more attention by pretending their homebrew product is a "leaked" official Nintendo release.

Some observers also pointed to other reasons to doubt that these leaks were an "official" Nintendo work product. ModernVintageGamer and others noted that the leaked GBA emulator includes an "export state to Flashcart" option designed "to confirm original behavior" on "original hardware," according to the GUI. That option is illustrated with a picture of an EZFlash third-party flash cartridge in the emulator interface, an odd choice given Nintendo's previous litigious attacks on such flashcart makers. A "savedata memory" option in the emulator also references the ability to "inter-operate with flashcarts, other emulators, [and] fan websites..." That's a list that would serve as a decent Johnny Carson "Carnac the Magnificent" setup for "things Nintendo wouldn't want to reference in an official product." A prominent video game historian that Ars consulted with said they were "99.9% sure [the emulators are] real" and that "personally I'm absolutely convinced of its legitimacy."

Sega is developing big-budget reboots of its Dreamcast games Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio as it taps its back catalog in search of global hits like Epic Games's Fortnite, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with its plans. From the report: The two titles would be the first entries in Sega's Super Game initiative, which the company announced a year ago as an effort to develop recurring revenue sources and build online communities around its software portfolio. Fortnite has become the role model for such games: free to play, it's available across platforms, hosts large multiplayer contests and includes extras like vehicles, construction and social events on top of the usual combat, spurring player purchases of in-game items.

The new Crazy Taxi has already been in development for over a year and the Tokyo-based entertainment group aims to release it within two to three years, the people said, asking not to be named as the information is not yet public. It was named alongside Jet Set Radio in Sega's annual report a year ago on a list of intellectual property assets that Sega wanted to recapitalize by bringing them up to date. Both new games are in the early stages of creation and could still be canceled, the people said.

Playdate, the hotly anticipated video game system from Portland tech company Panic, began shipping Monday after a succession of manufacturing setbacks delayed the gadget by more than two years. OregonLive reports: Playdate is a throwback to the handheld video games of the 1980s. Designers eschewed the latest graphics technology in favor of a simple, black-and-white screen and an old-fashioned directional button pad. In a note of whimsey, the $179 Playdate also has a crank on the side. The crank provides various functions across the 24 games that come with purchase. (Games will be released online, two at a time, over the next 12 weeks.)

Panic is a software company, not an electronics manufacturer, and its first foray into computer hardware encountered a string of problems -- exacerbated by the pandemic and the resulting global shortage in computer chips. Most recently, Panic announced last November that many of its first 5,000 Playdates had faulty batteries. The company responded by sending them all back to its manufacturing contractor in Malaysia for replacement with new batteries from a different supplier.

Playdate fielded 20,000 orders in just 20 minutes when the first gadgets went on sale last July. And despite the delays, initial reviews Monday were very enthusiastic [...]. All the reviews noted, though, that Panic is a long way from untangling its production snarls. Only the first orders are going out now -- thousands more Playdates are coming sometime later, though Panic hasn't said just when. There's also good news for DIYers: iFixit's teardown says the gaming system is relatively easy to fix if you ever need to replace its battery or buttons.

"What can scientists learn by teaching two monkeys to play Pac-Man?" asks the South China Morning Post.

"Quite a lot it seems, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences." A team of neuroscientists from the academy said they used the classic video game to look at the way the primates made decisions. The result was the first study of its kind to show that monkeys were capable of formulating strategies to simplify a sophisticated task, they said. "To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving," Yang Tianming, corresponding author of the study, said on Twitter. The results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife last month.

The scientists used artificial intelligence to come up with a statistical model to find out whether the monkey's behaviour could be broken down into a set of strategies.... The monkeys were then trained to use a joystick to manoeuvre Pac-Man around a maze to collect snack pellets and avoid ghosts. The monkeys received fruit juice as a reward instead of earning points. Yang and his colleagues found the monkeys understood the basic elements of the game because they tended to choose the direction with the largest local reward and knew how to react to ghosts in different modes.... More importantly, the researchers found that the monkeys adopted a hierarchical solution for the Pac-Man game by using one dominant strategy and only focusing on a subset of game aspects at a time.

The researchers said the study was significant because it was quantitative and examined complex tasks.... The study said the findings paved the way for further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sophisticated cognitive functions.
Plus, teaching monkeys to play Pac-Man sounds like fun.

Though I wonder how they feel about Donkey Kong....

Microsoft wants to let advertisers place ads inside free-to-play Xbox games. According to Insider, the company "is currently identifying adtech companies who can create the in-game inventory and work with ad agencies to place the ads." From the report: This new program will boost Xbox's limited ad inventory by adding more games that brands can advertise in and by allowing more developers to sell ad space. Those sources said those ads would show up as, for instance, digitally rendered billboards in a car racing game. Insider was unable to learn if Xbox will also offer other types of in-game ad units, like avatar skins or video ads that play in gaming lobbies. Insider was also unable to determine if Microsoft has pitched the Xbox offering to advertisers yet. Insider's sources expect this capability to be live by the third quarter.

The two sources said the tech giant did not seem intent on taking a cut of ad revenue, and that it seemed more interested in building out the Xbox ad network. Ad revenue will be shared by the game developer and the adtech company that places the ad, those sources believe. One of the sources speculated Microsoft isn't currently interested in collecting a cut of ad revenue because it wants to provide more money-making opportunities to developers who make free-to-play games.

Microsoft started talks to build an Xbox in-game ad network around 2018 or 2019, but that process accelerated thanks to the 2020 release of the latest Xbox, and the boom in free-to-play titles, the two sources said. Microsoft is worried inserting ads into Xbox games could irritate people who don't expect to see ads when playing on consoles, so it's moving cautiously and intends to create a "private marketplace," where only select brands can insert ads into games in a way that doesn't disrupt the gameplay experience, the two sources said. They also said Microsoft is concerned about securing its customers' data, so other companies can't use it.

Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham combed through Steam Hardware & Software Survey data "to see how Windows 11 is fairing with enthusiasts." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers -- nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers -- about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements -- many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good.

Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users -- and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users -- were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller.

In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021 -- even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.

Tencent said it will shut down a service that allowed Chinese gamers to access overseas platforms to play unapproved foreign games, in a sign of tightening compliance as Chinese regulators more closely scrutinize the industry. From a report: The country's largest social and gaming firm said late on Wednesday it will on May 31 update its games speed booster mobile and desktop apps to new versions that would only support games operating in China. The new versions will no longer allow users to access foreign games. Tencent first launched the apps in 2018. Such apps, which other companies like NetEase also offer, act as network acceleration tools that help users boost their internet speeds. Unlike most countries, gamers in China are only allowed to play titles approved by the government and are not allowed to play with foreigners on foreign servers.

"Club Penguin Rewritten," a popular remake of Club Penguin enjoyed by thousands of gamers, has been seized by the City of London Police, with three people in connection with the site's shuttering reportedly arrested for allegedly distributing copyrighted material. "Over 140,000 users were members of a Discord server for the game until today, when every message on the Discord disappeared," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In 2007, Disney purchased Club Penguin -- the children's RPG that served as my first introduction to online fandom -- for a whopping $700 million. Even then, as a child with little context about tech industry acquisitions, the purchase seemed foreboding (at least my friends thought so on the Miniclip forums, where I fraudulently claimed to be 13). But eventually, those of us who were dedicated fans of virtual sledding games and dance parties grew out of it, and after once boasting 200 million users, the game was shut down due to lack of interest in 2017. Disney tried to shuttle remaining players to a new mobile game called Club Penguin Island, but it only lasted for a year. But ever since the end of Club Penguin -- when the iceberg finally tipped in a strangely emotional moment -- there have always been remakes out there for nostalgic adults to relive their days of collecting puffles, dancing in the pizza shop and speed-running bans.

Only one message on the Discord remains, posted early this morning by an admin: "CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney," the admin said. "We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation." TechCrunch reached out to the City of London Police and Disney to verify these claims but did not hear back before publication. In 2020, Disney shut down "Club Penguin Online," another copy of the game that acquired over a million new players during the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons developer Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, announced Wednesday it is acquiring D&D Beyond, one of the franchise's most popular officially licensed digital toolsets and online storefronts. Wizards said on its official website it has "no plans to stop supporting D&D Beyond," and all purchases made by consumers will be honored going forward.

D&D Beyond is the creation of Curse, and launched in 2017. The platform is, at its core, a web application and mobile app that provides players and Dungeon Masters (DMs) with the tools they need to play D&D in person or online. Features include a character builder, a character sheet, and a digital dice-rolling function. For DMs, it allows users to purchase official campaign books and other materials digitally for use inside the app. Prices for D&D books are traditionally more or less the same on D&D Beyond as they are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at your local game store. D&D Beyond was purchased by Fandom in 2018 and, according to Hasbro, the relationship has been very lucrative since that time.

"Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for Dungeons & Dragons," Hasbro said. That is undoubtedly true, as financial disclosures show that Wizards -- and its attached digital properties, including Magic: The Gathering Arena -- earned more than $1 billion for the first time in 2021. [...] Wizards' new president, Cynthia Williams, has bigger goals in mind. "The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions," Williams said in a news release. "As part of Wizards, the brand's leadership will soon be able to drive a unified, player-centric vision of the world's greatest role-playing game on all platforms."

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable."

The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own." Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store.

While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library.

Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response....

The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million).

You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth."

Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series. Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally.

As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.

Activision Blizzard will convert all its U.S.-based temporary and contingent quality assurance (QA) positions to full-time jobs, the company announced Thursday. Nearly 1,100 workers will become full-time Activision Blizzard employees, upping pay to at least $20 an hour and allowing QA workers access to bonuses and full benefits. From a report: Activision Publishing chief operating officer and Blizzard Entertainment head Mike Ybarra shared the news with staff Thursday. "Across Activision Blizzard, we are bringing more content to players across our franchises than ever before," an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said in an statement emailed to Polygon. "As a result, we are refining how our teams work together to develop our games and deliver the best possible experiences for our players. We have ambitious plans for the future and our Quality Assurance (QA) team members are a critical part of our development efforts." The conversion of all U.S.-based QA staff to full-time employment increases Activision Publishing's total full-time workforce by 25%.

Ubisoft has promised that more of its games will feature NFTs in the future, despite the overall negativity its Quartz platform has been getting so far. From a report: Billed by Ubisoft as "the first platform for playable and energy-efficient NFTs in AAA games," Quartz was originally revealed in December 2021 and was quickly met with overwhelming backlash by players. Despite this, a statement on the Ubisoft Quartz website tells players that the publisher will continue to add 'Digits' -- its equivalent of NFTs -- to future games. Ghost Recon Breakpoint was the first game to get Digits, and the statement claims that even though it won't be getting any more, there will be more games in the future that support them.

Epic Games has officially launched Unreal Engine 5, its newest set of software tools for making video games. From a report: While Epic may be known to much of the public for its hit game Fortnite, its core business has long been Unreal. Epic's goal is to make Unreal Engine the definitive toolset for building games, virtual worlds and other digital entertainment. The engine is free to download, but Epic then takes a 5% cut of games that generate more than $1 million in revenue. During a kickoff video showcase today, the selling point wasn't just what the engine can do, but who is using it.

Epic workers demonstrated how the engine could be used to make and tweak modern games. Then came the key slide showing dozens of partners, including PlayStation, Xbox and Tencent followed by testimonials from recent Unreal Engine converts CD Projekt RED, which had previously used its own tech to make games in the Witcher and Cyberpunk franchises and ending with the kicker that Crystal Dynamics, another studio that long operated its own in-house engine, would use Unreal on its next Tomb Raider game. More details at Kotaku.

The popular play-to-earn Axie Infinity game had been losing users even before the record cryptocurrency hack disclosed last week restricted the ability of players to move digital money out of the virtual world. From a report: The number of daily active users, or DAUs, has fallen 45% to 1.48 million from a peak in November, according to data compiled by Axie Infinity owner Sky Mavis. The latest tally is for the week ended March 28, or a day before the roughly $600 million hack was discovered. The decrease has been particularly noteworthy since December, when updates to the game were announced, and on March 23, when hackers stole the Ether and USD Coin cryptocurrencies from Axie's Ronin bridge, a sidechain built to facilitate faster and cheaper transactions for the game.

After previously canceling its in-person E3 2022 event, the ESA has now informed its partners that there will be no digital event equivalent this year either - meaning E3 2022 has fully been canceled. IGN reports: The news broke via a tweet from Razer PR lead Will Powers, who said that an email had been sent out announcing the cancellation of a digital E3 event. IGN has independently verified the contents of the email as well. The ESA had initially planned for an in-person E3 event this year after having no event in 2020 due to COVID-19 and a digital one in 2021. "We will devote all our energy and resources to delivering a revitalized physical and digital E3 experience next summer," said the Entertainment Software Association in an official statement to IGN. "Whether enjoyed from the show floor or your favorite devices, the 2023 showcase will bring the community, media, and industry back together in an all-new format and interactive experience."

"We look forward to presenting E3 to fans around the world live from Los Angeles in 2023."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ChessBase: The official broadcast of the final rounds of the FIDE Grand Prix Series, an important part of the World Chess Championship cycle, will feature players' heart rate indicator, according to World Chess, the Series organizer. This is the first time when the players' heart rate is measured and displayed in the broadcast of the World Chess Championship cycle event. It will allow spectators to better understand players' emotions and true feelings (as far as they are reflected in the heart rate) -- a rare insight into the psychology of the elite chess players who are trained and especially good at keeping a poker face. By adding a heart rate indicator, World Chess brings a new dimension into chess broadcasting and opens a new page of the way fans follow chess.

To accurately measure the heart rate without disturbing the players, World Chess is deploying a bespoke AI technology similar to that used by hospitals to track patients' vitals over video. It's the first time such technology is used in sports broadcasting. AI has been trained to read almost invisible changes in reflections of the skin color that change based on a person's heart rate. The official broadcast of the FIDE Grand Prix is available for free on worldchess.com worldchess.com and on World Chess Youtube and Twitch channels. [...] World Chess will continue developing and using the video heart rate reading technology in future events and broadcasting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game. In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, "In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)" to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that "we didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. "The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time," they wrote.

While players outside of Russia should still be able to purchase Loop Hero on Steam, Valve said earlier this month that banking issues prevented it from sending payments to developers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (ironically enough). Valve recently told PC Gamer that developers in these countries will have to provide "intermediary banking information" in a foreign country to receive the payments they're due. "It's a very frustrating situation, and we hope to find the resolution soon," Valve wrote in a note to affected developers. Russia is reportedly considering legalizing software piracy to combat the sanctions imposed on the country for its invasion of Ukraine.

Sony is set to launch a new video game subscription service this summer, seeking to drive sales of its PlayStation consoles and compete with a similar offering from Microsoft. CNBC: The company said Tuesday it will bundle its existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services into one single subscription service called PlayStation Plus. The new PlayStation Plus will be available in June and comes in three tiers:

1. The basic package, PS Plus Essential, replaces the original PS Plus, which offers players two free games each month and access to online multiplayer. It costs $10 a month or $60 for an annual subscription.
2. A step above Essential is PS Plus Extra, which comes with all the same perks as Essential but includes a selection of 400 downloadable PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles. It's priced at $15 monthly or $100 a year.
3. The most expensive package is PS Plus Premium. This one includes 340 more games than Extra, and lets players stream a selection of PS, PS2, PSP, PS3, PS4 and PS5 games over the internet. PS Plus Premium costs $18 a month or $120 each year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, players have complained that ballooning game download sizes are clogging up hard drives and Internet bandwidth. In a recent interview with streamer TeeP, Call of Duty: Warzone Live Operations Lead Josh Bridge admitted that the game's massive file size is also impacting the team's ability to release new maps. Asked about the possibility of adding the original Verdansk map to cycle alongside the game's current Caldera map, Bridge said, "We want that. We all want that," before addressing the "technical problem" that makes it difficult: "The install and re-install sizes are fucking insane, right? If we pulled out Caldera and say we're gonna drop in Verdansk, this could be essentially re-downloading, like, the size of Warzone," he said. "And every time we've done that, we lose players," Bridge continued. "Because you're kind of like, 'I don't want to re-download that,' [so you] uninstall. I think you can't fit anything else but Warzone on a base PS4."

Bridge is exaggerating, but only a little. Activision says you need a whopping 175GB of hard drive space on PC for a Warzone install. On Xbox, the base download is listed at nearly 92GB, similar to the size on PlayStation systems. Adding Modern Warfare onto the Warzone package increases the total size to about 250GB on PC and 150GB on consoles. About a year ago, Activision announced that the "larger than usual" Warzone "Season 2 Reloaded" patch would reduce the game's "overall footprint" on hard drives by 10-15GB (and 30-35GB when combined with Modern Warfare, depending on the platform). The "data optimization and streamlining" in that update would also ensure that "future patch sizes for Modern Warfare and Warzone [would] be smaller" than the 57GB update being offered at that point.

The results over the ensuing year have been mixed. A February Season 2 patch required only about 11GB of file downloads, for instance, while a December 7 update that introduced new maps required a 41-45 GB download on consoles. [...] In any case, Bridge was remarkably frank about Warzone's file size issues and said that "looking to the future, we're putting a lot more effort into how we sort that out on a technical level so that we can have that [map] rotation. We've been really looking at it, so we'll have more to talk about that, but that is ultimately a goal to ensure that there's a freshness and a variety of experiences."

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play -- but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn't colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. "The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV," Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, "games are about systems; they're about the mechanics," Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can "teach" people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. "The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems," Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you'll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you're unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox's Second World War simulator, and you'll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: "General Frost." The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works -- what The Atlantic's Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric."

Paradox's titles don't take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe's rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of "institutions," such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.

"Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing... but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That's uncharted territory," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81.

Neowin reports: The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming... Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn't sound very interesting, but it's a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite?
That's a 24 x 21 pixels object. ("It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel," explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again.

Here's the repository for the "Tiny Pong" code. It's written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound().

And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.

bbsguru writes: Sony/PlayStation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Turismo 7 more dependent on microtransactions. Gamers say the well-reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn't improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. [To make matters worse, Gran Turismo 7 owners weren't even able to play single player because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game went down.] After several tentative responses, Sony is [finally] paying out, "gifting players with a million in-game credits and outlining the near-term updates for Gran Turismo 7 that will address the problems," writes Eurogamer's Martin Robinson. "We want to thank you for your continued patience and valuable feedback as we grow and evolve GT7 to make it as enjoyable and rewarding for as many players as possible," wrote series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in a blog post. "We always want to keep communication lines open with our community so that we can work together to build the best racing experience possible."

Sony is preparing to introduce a new video game subscription service for the PlayStation as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The service, which has been in development under the codename Spartacus, is Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, a sort of Netflix for video games that has amassed more than 25 million subscribers. Sony's will debut with a splashy lineup of hit games from recent years, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private. Sony's new service will combine two of its current offerings, PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus. Customers will be able to choose from multiple tiers offering catalogs of modern games and classics from older PlayStation eras.

According to Techdirt's Timothy Geigner, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation was recently rendered unplayable because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game crumbled during a maintenance window. From the report: "The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning," reports Ars Technica. "Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that 'due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'"

"Inconvenience" in this case means not being able to play the game the customer purchased. Like, basically at all. Why the single player content in a console game of all things should require an online check-in is completely beyond me. Console piracy is a thing, but certainly not much of a thing. There is zero chance that this DRM is worth the headache Sony now has on its hands. A headache that lasted for more than a full calendar day, by the way. And a headache that Sony's competitors picked up on to use in messaging to the public on social media.

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise": When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years....

On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.)

By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible."

Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too."

Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'"

Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible.
The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max."

The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").

Microsoft has released a beta version of Microsoft Edge for Valve's Steam Deck that includes full support for Xbox Cloud Gaming. The Verge reports: "We worked closely with Valve and the Xbox Cloud Gaming team to bring support for Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft Edge Beta for the Steam Deck," says Missy Quarry, a community manager for Microsoft Edge. "We're particularly excited about this ourselves as we feel it can open new opportunities in the Linux gaming community."

While a number of Xbox Game Studios titles are able to run natively on the Steam Deck, Xbox Game Pass isn't available on Steam, so subscribers will have to stream titles from Microsoft's service instead. The Linux version of Microsoft Edge now includes support for the Steam Deck controls and is available from the Discover Software Center part of SteamOS. Microsoft also has detailed instructions for creating a link to Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck to make it easier to access in the future.

The New York Times, which acquired Wordle in January, is putting an end to unofficial takes of the game. The latest casualty is Wordle Archive, a website that let users play through hundreds of previous daily five-letter Wordle puzzles. According to Ars Technica, the site "has been taken down at the request of Wordle owner The New York Times." From the report: The archival site, which offered a backward-looking play feature that's not available in the NYT's official version of Wordle, had been up since early January. But it was taken down last week and replaced with a message saying, "Sadly, the New York Times has requested that the Wordle Archive be taken down." A Twitter search shows dozens of daily Wordle Archive players who were willing to share their results on social media up through March 7. "The usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them," a New York Times representative said in response to an Ars Technica comment request. "We don't plan to comment beyond that."

The Wordle Archive is still fully playable in its own archived form (as of March 5) at the Internet Archive, appropriately enough. Other sites that allow you to play archived Wordle puzzles are not hard to find, as are sites that let you play unlimited Wordle puzzles beyond the usual one-a-day limit. But some of those sites may be under threat, if the Times' treatment of Wordle Archive is any indication.

Rockstar's anarchic masterpiece has been freshened up for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X nine years after it was originally released. From a report: And so the boys are back in town. Michael, Trevor and Franklin, the sociopathic trio that lit up the gaming scene nine years ago, have been made over for the 2020s with this crisp new reworking of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The game's violent narrative of shifting loyalties and doomed machismo felt wild and edgy back in 2013, so how does it fare in the modern era? The good news is, the overhauled visuals definitely give the game new zest and freshness. You can play in either 4K at 30 frames-per-second or in a performance mode that lowers the resolution but bumps up the frame rate to 60, giving wonderful fluidity to car chases, swooping helicopter rides and mass shootouts. The DualSense controller features on PlayStation 5 are very good too: improved driving feedback via the analogue triggers makes the game's cumbersome handling a little easier to, well, handle. It's been quite a joy to rediscover this alternate-reality California; to see the sun drop behind the downtown skyscrapers, or to hit Senora as dawn splashes orange-yellow light across the burning desert.

What the vast upshift in resolution can't hide is the fact that GTA V is a game originally designed for consoles that are now two generations out of date. The character models and facial details look positively archaic compared with, say, Horizon Forbidden West, and the building architecture too seems almost quaint in its stylised blockiness. Compare it with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 and you can see just how far Rockstar has come in its building of intricate next-gen worlds. In many ways, however, the design of the world itself has not been been bettered in the decade since it arrived. The size of San Andreas, the sheer variety of landscapes and the diversity of actions and activities is still incredible -- Cyberpunk 2077 may look better, but it doesn't let you play golf or tennis, or go on day trips on a bike, or set up incredibly complex car or helicopter stunts. Los Santos is a vast playground, a gangster Fortnite -- a factor underlined by the massive community that still gathers in GTA Online (which is where we find this new version's only totally new content -- Hao's Special Works, which lets you unlock faster cars and new tasks).

At the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit where its Stadia B2B cloud gaming platform was unveiled, Google announced the long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks. 9to5Google reports: Google specifically said that the "Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try." That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month. As we noted at the time: "At a minimum, your Chromebook needs to have an (11th gen) Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and a minimum of 7 GB of RAM. This eliminates almost all Chromebooks but those in the upper-mid range and high end."

Google today said "you can check that out on the Chromebook community forum." The post in question is now live, but without any actual availability timeline beyond "coming soon." However, we did learn that the "early, alpha-quality version of Steam" will first come to the Chrome OS Dev channel for a "small set" of devices.

Meanwhile, Google also said Chrome OS is getting a new "games overlay" on "select" Android titles to make them "playable with user-driven keyboard and mouse configurations on Chromebooks without developer changes." It will launch later this year in a public beta. Further reading: The part of the keynote where this announcement was made can be viewed here.

Google's Domain Name Registrar is Out of Beta After Seven Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Google had plenty of news about Stadia, the consumer-facing aspect of its cloud gaming products, at its Google for Games Developer Summit. On the flip side of that is the white-label platform Google's been working on: a way for other companies to license the game streaming tech that powers Stadia. Previously, that B2B offering was believed to be known as Google Stream. Google has now confirmed more details about the offering, including its name.

It's now called Immersive Stream for Games (which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue as smoothly as Google Stream). The Stadia team built it with the help of the folks at Google Cloud. The company says the service will allow companies to run their own game trials, let users play full games, offer subscription bundles or have full storefronts. In other words, publishers might be able to run their own versions of Stadia with their own libraries of games, branding and custom user interface.

We've seen a version of Immersive Stream for Games in action. Last year, Google teamed up with AT&T to offer people a way to play Batman: Arkham Knight for free via the cloud. Thousands of folks took advantage of the offer. AT&T plans to offer its customers access to another game soon with the help of Immersive Stream for Games. While that version of Batman: Arkham Knight was only available on desktop and laptop web browsers, the next game will run on mobile devices too. If all goes well, it could be a decent way for AT&T to show off what its 5G network can do. Immersive Stream for Games will include other features Google revealed for Stadia today, including a way to offer free trials of full games and a project aimed at making it easier to port games so they run on Stadia tech, as well as analytics. Developers and publishers can send Google an inquiry for more details.

Microsoft has finally released its DirectStorage API to game developers. This means one of the most promising features of the Xbox Series X is coming to the PC. From a report: DirectStorage promises to bring faster loading times thanks to optimized NVMe SSD accesses. Previously, a game could only perform one in/out access at a time. This didn't present any issues in the days of hard drives, but now that most gaming PC's have SSDs that can transfer gigabytes per second with hundreds of thousands of in out operations per second (IOPS) it's clear that a better method was needed. Enter DirectStorage. DirectStorage lets an NVMe SSD to reach its full performance potential by allowing multiple I/O operations concurrently. It allows assets to be transferred directly to the GPU, leading to better efficiency.

On the VRChat platform, there's a fake law-enforcement agency called The Loli Police Department, reports Input magazine.

Though it began as a joke, after four years its Discord channel now has 11,000 members, and "The tightly run community allows members to experience a fantasy version of police life and prides itself on being a source of chaotic good in the strange world of virtual reality." Members move through the ranks — from cadet on up — based on their activity level, which is tracked via the group's Discord. Everything is carefully orchestrated to mimic IRL police.... Karet, a 29-year-old game developer and LPD captain from Texas, says that the hard work of volunteers allows users to roleplay police activities in a realistic environment. "We have some of our own worlds — like the hospital for our medical division, where we can pretend someone is getting treatment, or the jail where we put criminals," says Karet, who designed the LPD station and jail.

One of Karet's favorite things to do is mess with users at random. "Lots of people in VRChat like to sit in front of mirrors," he says. "I will go up to the mirror and do a 'mirror inspection.' Then I say it's an illegal mirror and start looking for someone to blame and arrest. They just don't know how to handle that," he laughs. There are other ways to get people into trouble, too. "I can pull out a bag of weed and make it look like it came out of someone's pocket," Karet says. "They always say it's not theirs."

Being a VRChat police officer comes with its share of challenges. Members are aware that their form of roleplay — which frames spot checks and fake drug busts as harmless fun — doesn't sit well with some members of the community....

Despite the power dynamics at play, LPD members are not moderators of the VR world and ultimately can't make much in the way of real change. "One of our new officers came to me upset because they stepped in when they saw harassment, but then they got the brunt of the attack from the harasser," says Karet. "I commended him, but it's not what we do. We're just trying to have fun. So usually when we encounter something like that, we just leave the world." Thankfully, Karet says, the LPD can help their community somewhat. "We encourage LPD officers to help out new users. It's easy to spot them, so we often go and give them a hand, show them how things work," he says. The LPD used to run events for this purpose, but they were recently brought to a halt. "The events are on hiatus because it became a bit cult-y. Everyone was trying to recruit people into the LPD."

Gaming giant Ubisoft has confirmed a cybersecurity incident that led to the mass-reset of company passwords, but has declined to say what the incident actually was. From a report: In a brief statement, Ubisoft said: "Last week, Ubisoft experienced a cyber security incident that caused temporary disruption to some of our games, systems, and services. Our IT teams are working with leading external experts to investigate the issue. As a precautionary measure we initiated a company-wide password reset. Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident," the statement said. The France-headquartered video game company is best known for its Assassin's Creed and Far Cry brands. According to the company's latest earnings report from October, Ubisoft had 117 million active players.

A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse.

"Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by ArsTecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.

Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows "emulator" for Linux next week at the company's Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. From a report: Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail "how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch." The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google's Stadia porting platform team, and promises a "detailed overview of the technology behind Google's solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia." It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux. If the emulator runs live on Stadia instead of just testing environments, this could open the door to a lot more games making their way to Stadia in the future

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: People are review-bombing a hospital in India with one-star reviews after a doctor tweeted a video of himself during a procedure with an unconscious patient. The anesthesiologist, who goes by Dr. Shreeveera on Twitter and his YouTube channel, filmed himself supposedly in an active operating room where he had just anesthetized a patient and was preparing for an invasive procedure to remove a gallbladder. He claimed to be defending himself against people claiming he's not a real doctor, because they disagree with his passion for the "console wars." "Console wars" is shorthand for the decades-long argument between gamers about which platform -- Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo devices, PC gaming, and so on -- is the best.

Shreeveera posted the video to Twitter, writing, "Here I am after inducing anaesthesia, intubating & putting a patient on controlled mechanical ventilation for a Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy case in OR. Slandering my identity, profession coz you Xbots can't Argue FACTS!" according to gaming news outlet Dextero. He added, "SAVING LIVES- My Job. CONSOLE WARS- My Hobby." He was allegedly trying to defend himself from accusations that he wasn't a real doctor. Dextero, which viewed the video before Shreeveera locked his Twitter account, says that he pans around an operating room holding up the phone to record himself, showing the patient on the operating table.

Shreeveera posted an unlisted apology video on YouTube on Monday, saying that he's received a lot of backlash and racist harassment because of his video. He says he regrets posting the video and acknowledges that his obsession with console wars is childish, but also tries defending himself and his hobby. "I'm a human being guys, I make mistakes, please let's move on ahead," he said. "I do not hate anyone on a personal level. If I do not like the console they're playing, I just make points regarding what that console is giving you... this is just a hobby of mine." Judging from his YouTube channel, Shreeveera is clearly a PlayStation fan and an Xbox hater.

According to Deadline, Prime Video is turning PlayStation's mythology-themed game franchise God of War into a live-action TV series. From the report: I hear the series adaptation comes from The Expanse creators/executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and The Wheel of Time executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins as well as Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, which collaborate on all TV series based on PlayStation games. This would mark the latest big deal for a TV series based on a popular video game title in a red-hot streaming marketplace for gaming IP. Peacock just landed another SPT/PlayStation property, Twisted Metal, with a series order and Anthony Mackie starring. HBO has coming up the high-profile PlayStation game-based series The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Netflix has a Resident Evil TV series in the works, while Paramount+ is about to debut Halo.
[...]
The God of War franchise from Sony's Santa Monica Studio spans a total of seven games across four PlayStation consoles. The action game series launched in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, with the first God of War. At the center is ex-Spartan warrior Kratos and his perilous journey to exact revenge on the Ares, the Greek God of War, after killing his loved ones under the deity's influence. After becoming the ruthless God of War himself, Kratos finds himself constantly looking for a chance to change his fate. Following several titles on various PlayStation consoles including the PS3 and the handheld PSP, Santa Monica Studio brought new life to the franchise with the 2018 game on the PlayStation 4. In it, Kratos comes to the Norse wilds where he gets a second chance at fatherhood with his son Atreus. The installment a slew of honors at the 2018 Game Awards, including Game of the Year. An eighth God of War installment, God of War: Ragnorok, is in the works for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and is set to drop this year.

An overview of Tencent's burgeoning games dominance. From a report: In the West, tech giant Tencent is not yet a household name. While its size and acquisitions have made frequent headlines, its presence has remained understated relative to competitors like Amazon and Google, with the name occasionally peppered into conversations as an example of China's burgeoning influence on technology and entertainment around the world. But in China, Tencent is everywhere. It's behind the nation's most popular messaging app, WeChat, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. It's the behemoth that created QQ.com, one of the country's largest web portals and the world's fourth most visited website. And with Tencent Music, it also owns the majority of China's music services, with 841 million active users. It's also China's -- and the world's -- biggest game company. And with a growing presence internationally, we recently decided to take a closer look at how it operates and what it owns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Mykhailo Fedorov, the vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, has publicly called on "all game development companies" to "temporarily block all Russian and Belorussian accounts" in response to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In a tweet from his verified account, Fedorov also called on esports platforms to "temporarily stop the participation of Russian and Belorussian teams and gamers in all international esports events and cancel all international events holding [sic] on the territory of Russia and Belarus."

These moves, Fedorov suggests, "will motivate the citizens of Russia to proactively stop the disgraceful military aggression" by the Russian government. "In 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple rocket launchers... and missiles." In an additional note directed at the Xbox and PlayStation Twitter accounts, Fedorov wrote that "if you support human values, you should [leave] the Russian market!" In a follow-up tweet, Fedorov also asked Riot Games, EA, Ubisoft, Gameloft, and Wargaming to "close your office in Russia" in solidarity with Ukraine. "There's no place for [an] aggressor on the global technological map!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When will Bungie let Destiny 2 come to Valve's Steam Deck handheld gaming PC? It's looking like the answer is never -- because the soon-to-be Sony subsidiary has published a help page that not only says the game's unsupported, but outright threatens to ban prospective Steam Deck players (via Wario64). The help page has a new section titled "Steam Deck and Destiny 2," which reads: "Destiny 2 is not supported for play on the Steam Deck or on any system utilizing Steam Play's Proton unless Windows is installed and running. Players who attempt to launch Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck through SteamOS or Proton will be unable to enter the game and will be returned to their game library after a short time. Players who attempt to bypass Destiny 2 incompatibility will be met with a game ban."

To be fair, Bungie isn't the only one to reject the Steam Deck without necessarily providing a satisfying explanation -- Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney explained to me why Fortnite won't get updated for the Steam Deck last month, even though Epic's own Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) claims game developers can enable it with "just a few clicks." And while both Apex Legends and Elden Ring now fully work on Deck despite using anti-cheat, it's also true that many other top multiplayer games have yet to fully arrive.

Speaking to the BBC on the 30th anniversary of Civilization, American developer Sid Meier says if major companies continue to focus on monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, they risk losing the audience. From the report: "The real challenge and the real opportunity is keeping our focus on gameplay," says American developer Sid Meier. "That is what is unique, special and appealing about games as a form of entertainment. When we forget that, and decide it's monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, when we start to forget about making great games and start thinking about games as a vehicle or an opportunity for something else, that's when we stray a little bit further from the path."

The financial model that supports how games companies make their money has changed dramatically in the past decade or so. Now many developers and publishers rely on in-game purchases to help with their bottom line rather than solely on the up-front cost of buying a title to play. [...] Some games companies are also exploring the introduction of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) - a form of digital art that players can buy and own -- into their games. [...] Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetize gaming, they risk losing the audience: "People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetization or whatever -- but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won't work. "In a sense gameplay is cheap... The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn't require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it's perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is."

The global games market is reported to be worth around $175 billion and is forecast to almost double in five years. But Sid Meier says that continued growth isn't guaranteed: "There are lots of other ways that people can spend their leisure time... I think the way the internet works, once a shift starts to happen, then everybody runs to that side of the ship. "I think we need to be sure that our games continue to be high quality and fun to play - there are so many forms of entertainment out there now. We're in a good position... but we need to be sure we realize how critical gameplay is - and how that is the engine that really keeps players happy, engaged and having fun."

Sid says he has no plans to retire just yet, and explains the most gratifying change he's experienced during his more than 30 years in the industry, is the wider public's shift in attitude when it comes to games. People were telling him back in 1991 that he was "wasting his time" working in games - now he smiles, as people say to him: "I wish I could get a job making games."

A year and a half later, Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service has formally launched in the U.S. for Android, iOS, Chrome OS, macOS and Windows. Engadget reports: The core Luna+ service with over 100 games will normally cost $10 per month, with the kid-friendly Family Channel and Ubisoft+ Channels available for a respective $6 and $18 per month. Amazon hopes to reel in newcomers by dropping the monthly fees of Luna+ and the Family channel to $6 and $3 for anyone who signs up during March. Existing users just have to maintain their subscriptions to lock in that pricing.

The official debut comes alongside some new channels. A Prime Gaming channel, as the name implies, gives Amazon Prime members a free, rotating mix of games. The March selection will include titles like Devil May Cry 5 and Flashback. Pay $5 per month for the Retro Channel and you'll get Capcom and SNK classics like Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and Metal Slug 3, while a similar outlay for the Jackbox Games Channel provides access to all eight Jackbox Party Pack titles. Luna's latest update also makes it simpler to stream gameplay from a Fire TV device, Mac or Windows PC on Twitch.

A viral video showing the "Ghost of Kyiv" shooting down a Russian fighter yet was created with Digital Combat Simulator, "a simulation game that was first released in 2008," reports fact-checking website Snopes. From the report: The video was originally posted to YouTube by âoeComrade_Corb.â The original caption identified this clip as a simulation and noted that it was created as an homage to the Ghost of Kyiv. This footage is from DCS, but is nevertheless made out of respect for âoeThe Ghost of Kiev.â If he is real, may God be with him; if he is fake, I pray for more like "him."

When this video was posted to other social media sites, it was miscaptioned as genuine footage of the Ghost of Kyiv. While this video does not feature genuine footage, the general of the Ukrainian armed forces claimed that they had truly downed several Russian aircraft. CNN reported: "The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has claimed five Russian aircraft and a helicopter were shot down early Thursday, as Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The Russian military has denied the claims, state news agency TASS reported on Thursday."
Further reading: 'The Ghost of Kyiv' is the first urban legend of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Reviews of Valve's Steam Deck portable gaming PC are pouring in, but one surprise that has flown under the radar is Aperture Desk Job -- "a new bite-size experience set in the Portal universe that'll be a free download March 1st," reports The Verge. "It's designed to introduce new Steam Deck buyers to the handheld's incredible array of controls, and it involves... toilets and chairs." From the report: [H]ere's how Valve tries to thread the needle between our rampant desire for Valve to remember how to count to three and the potential disappointment that Valve has not yet managed it: "Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work -- your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life's got other plans, and they all involve chairs. Designed as a free playable short for Valve's new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld's controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds. Not Portal 3! Lower your expectations: This is not a sequel to Portal. Now get ready to raise them slightly, because it is in the expanded universe of those games."