gaming

supreme-court-denies-epic-v.-apple-petitions,-opening-up-ios-payment-options

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

App Store, Apple, Apple v Epic, epic, fortnite, gaming, Google, Policy, Supreme Court, Tech / /

Epic v. Apple —

Most of Epic’s arguments are moot now, but one point will change the App Store.

–

Fortnite characters looking across the many islands and vast realm of the game.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.

Epic Games

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.

Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.

Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options Read More »

twin-galaxies,-billy-mitchell-settle-donkey-kong-score-case-before-trial

Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial

billy mitchell, defamation, Donkey Kong, gaming, lawsuit, twin galaxies / /
Two men give a presentation in what appears to be a hotel room.

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell (left) and Twin Galaxies owner Jace Hall (center) attend an event at the Arcade Expo 2015 in Banning, California.

The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and “International Scoreboard” Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Courthouse News reports that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies have reached a confidential settlement in the case months before an oft-delayed trial was finally set to start.

The settlement comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell’s witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had “debased myself before this Court” and “allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement” by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.

But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell’s side to task for “what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence.” The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended “to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court,” he wrote.

Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.” height=”1024″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mitchellpaper.jpg” width=”683″></img><figcaption> <p>Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>In <a href=a filing last month, Tashroudian asked the court to sanction Mitchell for numerous alleged lies and fabrications during the evidence-discovery process. Those alleged lies encompass subjects including an alleged $33,000 payment associated with the sale of Twin Galaxies; the technical cabinet testing of Carlos Pineiro; the setup of a recording device for one of Mitchell’s high-score performances; a supposed “Player of the Century” plaque Mitchell says he had received from Namco; and a technical analysis that showed, according to Tashroudian, “that the videotaped recordings of his score in questions could not have come from original unmodified Donkey Kong hardware.”

Tashroudian asked the court to impose sanctions on Mitchell—up to and including dismissing the case—for these and other “deliberate and egregious [examples of] discovery abuse throughout the course of this litigation by lying at deposition and by engaging in the spoliation of evidence with the intent to defraud the Court.” A hearing on both Mitchell and Tashroudian’s alleged actions was scheduled for later this week; Tashroudian could still face referral to the State Bar for his misconduct.

“Plaintiff wants nothing more than for me to be kicked off of this case,” Tashroudian continued in his apology statement. “I know this will not stop. I am now [Mitchell’s] and his counsel’s target. The facts support [Twin Galaxies’] defense and now [Mitchell] realizes that. He also realizes that he has dug himself into a hole by lying in discovery. I do not say that lightly.”

Mitchell, Tashroudian, and representatives for Twin Galaxies were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial Read More »

those-games-turns-crappy-mobile-game-ads-into-actually-good-puzzles

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

gaming, mobile game ads, puzzle games / /

Can YOU reach the treasure? —

It’s pin-pulling, color-pouring, fake-but-real fun, and you only pay once.

–

Pin-pulling puzzle with a stick figure, boulder, and treasure.

Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge?

D3Publisher

You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?

The stage select music gets to be a bit much, but nobody will sue you if you play with the sound off.

That’s exactly what Those Games are. Their full title is Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam. The package is $10 on all platforms.

Some people will find that price a bargain, given the chance to prove how much better they’d be at these kinds of puzzles than the psychological dark patterns that taunt them. Some people might wait for a sale, given that you are, in fact, getting some very free-to-play-esque puzzles. But having spent more time than I expected tackling them, I can vouch that once you get past the first few patronizing levels and adjust to some slightly muddy controls in a couple of titles, each set of games starts giving you real, thoughtfully constructed challenges.

Three of the games in Those Games were instantly familiar to me, a person who owns a smartphone and reads things on it. Surprisingly, I had never seen the last two in the list here:

  • Pin Pull, removing barriers between you, monsters, traps, and treasure in the right order
  • Number Tower, sending your number-ranked fighter to tackle numbered monsters, potions, power-ups, and rebuffs in the right order
  • Color Lab, combining similar colors from vials in the right order
  • Parking Lot, moving cars facing different directions out of a lot with a circular drive, in the right order
  • Cash Run, clicking on an auto-walking man to have him pile up money to avoid obstacles, finishing with enough to not be “poor” and disappoint his spouse

  • I got a few levels past this Pin Pull stage, but not through all 50. Troll clubs goblin, goblins run toward stick guy, so when do you release rock?

    DCPublisher

  • As with most of the games, the inherent “how hard could it be?” starts coming back on you as the complications multiply.

    DCPublisher

  • You can’t pour a full, single-color vial, and that makes the later levels of Color Lab an actual challenge.

    DCPublisher

  • Parking Lot is fun, but only if you stop caring about timing and star ratings, given the quirky controls.

    DCPublisher

  • Cash Run is perhaps the only game in the set you could suggest has a deeper meaning, vis-a-vis capitalism. It’s also harder to grasp than the others.

    DCPublisher

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles Read More »

valve-request-takes-down-portal-64-due-to-concerns-over-nintendo-involvement

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement

demake, gaming, Homebrew, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, portal, portal 64, valve / /

Doing what they can because they must —

It’s not the use of Portal, it’s the use of an N64 SDK that’s the issue.

–

Window open inside Portal 64

Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment.

Valve/James Lambert

Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo’s classic platforms, done outside Nintendo’s blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo’s wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.

That’s why, one week after announcing that his years-long “demake” of Valve’s classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its “First Slice” ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There’s no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, “communication with Valve” that “because the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down.”

Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.

It’s far from the first time Valve has taken preemptive action to avoid Nintendo’s involvement. In mid-2023, a Wii/GameCube emulator, Dolphin, halted its planned release on Valve’s Steam platform after Nintendo contacted Valve and requested the emulator not be released. In that case, the Dolphin emulator’s weakness to potential action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions was its use of a proprietary cryptographic key from the Wii. Rather than argue about keys, BIOS files, and other matters in court, Dolphin gave up on Steam, while keeping the project alive elsewhere.

Valve has seemingly been silent on Portal 64 until now. Playing the game required access to a Steam-purchased copy of Portal, with one of that game’s data files then patched by Lambert’s software to work inside Nintendo 64 emulators. Lambert wasn’t charging for his project, although he did have a Patreon to further his work on it. Lambert told PC Gamer that he thought “Valve didn’t want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP,” and he didn’t blame them.

The “Nintendo’s proprietary libraries” at issue inside Lambert’s project appear to be Libultra, the official SDK provided to those developing Nintendo 64 games on Silicon Graphics machines (and later other platforms). There exists an open source N64 SDK, libdragon, but Lambert told PC Gamer that he wouldn’t move over to that without assurance that it would appease Valve—and, by proxy, Nintendo. Lambert has many more N64-related and adjacent projects to work on, judging from his YouTube channel.

Nintendo has been remarkably successful over the years at keeping games and tributes it didn’t make from remaining in place: cover art for emulated Switch games, explanations of emulator installation, fan games, Game & Watch hacks, and even Mario-themed Minecraft videos. The company has created a general atmosphere of legal fear around anything touching its properties. That extends, apparently, even to large, well-resourced companies with far more tolerance for fan hacking.

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement Read More »

why-more-pc-gaming-handhelds-should-ditch-windows-for-steamos

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS

ayaneo, gaming, steam machines, steamos, valve / /
Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.

Enlarge / Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.

Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago, we’ve seen plenty of would-be competitors that have tried to mimic the Deck’s portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing one of the Steam Deck’s best features: integration with the increasingly robust, Linux-based SteamOS 3.

That’s finally set to change with the just-announced Ayaneo Next Lite, the first non-Valve portable hardware set to come with SteamOS pre-installed. We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve’s gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.

A bespoke, portable gaming OS

Ayaneo’s announcement highlights a few vague-ish features of the Next Lite, including a 7-inch 800p screen, a 47 Wh battery, and drift-resistant hall-effect joysticks. But even though the announcement doesn’t include a specific asking price, Ayaneo promises that the device “integrates outstanding cost-effectiveness” and will be “the all-new cost-effective choice with flagship experiences.”

That ad copy highlights one of the main advantages a SteamOS-based gaming portable brings over one sporting Windows: cost. Sure, OEMs are likely paying much less than the $139 consumer asking price for a copy of Windows 11. Still, even a $70-per-unit bulk license would represent a good 10 percent of the ASUS ROG Ally’s $700 asking price (and an even bigger chunk of the price difference between the Ally and the Steam Deck). In an increasingly competitive portable PC gaming market, being able to cut out that significant cost over Windows-based alternatives could be a big deal.

Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.

Enlarge / Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.

Then there’s the interface. Modern Windows is designed with a desktop/laptop or tablet form factor in mind. That UI definitely leaves something to be desired when forced into a 7- or 8-inch touchscreen that lacks a keyboard and mouse. Our review of the ROG Ally highlights just how annoying it can be to have to fiddle with Windows settings on a touchscreen running “an awkwardly scaled” version of the OS. And while Microsoft has experimented with a handheld-friendly version of Windows meant for portable gaming devices, nothing public has yet come of the effort.

SteamOS 3, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up with portable gaming on Steam Deck in mind. That comes through in many little ways, like a built-in “suspend” mode, tons of battery-optimization features, and menus that are designed for a small screen and joystick navigation.

And let’s not forget the way that most Steam games are pre-configured and optimized to “just work” on the OS after you download them, eliminating the kind of settings tweaking that’s often needed when running Windows on a gaming portable. As Ars’ Kevin Purdy summed it up in his ROG Ally review, “I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally’s combination of Windows 11 and Asus’ own Armoury Crate software.”

Who needs Windows?

The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.” height=”480″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/rogally-640×480.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A mess of launchers and OS cruft crowd the screen when launching The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.

Kevin Purdy

Yes, a Windows installation means a gaming portable is compatible with almost every PC game ever made, including many that still don’t run on SteamOS for one reason or another. But SteamOS’s robust Proton compatibility layer means an ever-expanding list of thousands of games are certified as at least “Playable” on SteamOS, including most of Steam’s most popular titles. That’s a huge change from the desktop-focused “Steam Machines” era of the mid-’10s, when early versions of SteamOS could only run the relative handful of games that developers bothered to explicitly port to Linux.

While Proton does come with at least some performance overhead, a variety of Steam Deck benchmarks show games running under SteamOS tend to perform comparably (or sometimes better) than those running under Windows on the handheld. That’s also a huge change from the Steam Machines era, when Ars’ testing showed that many SteamOS games ran significantly worse than their Windows counterparts on the same desktop hardware.

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS Read More »

valve-now-allows-the-“vast-majority”-of-ai-powered-games-on-steam

Valve now allows the “vast majority” of AI-powered games on Steam

AI, gaming, steam, vale / /

Open the flood gates —

New reporting system will enforce “guardrails” for “live-generated” AI content.

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Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's none of them).

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it’s none of them).

Aurich Lawson

Last summer, Valve told Ars Technica that it was worried about potential legal issues surrounding games made with the assistance of AI models trained on copyrighted works and that it was “working through how to integrate [AI] into our already-existing review policies.” Today, the company is rolling out the results of that months-long review, announcing a new set of developer policies that it says “will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use [AI tools].”

Developers that use AI-powered tools “in the development [or] execution of your game” will now be allowed to put their games on Steam so long as they disclose that usage in the standard Content Survey when submitting to Steam. Such AI integration will be separated into categories of “pre-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools during development” (e.g., using DALL-E for in-game images) and “live-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools while the game is running” (e.g., using Nvidia’s AI-powered NPC technology).

Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content. But disclosure will not be sufficient for games that use live-generated AI for “Adult Only Sexual Content,” which Valve says it is “unable to release… right now.”

Put up the guardrails

For pre-generated AI content, Valve warns that developers still have to ensure that their games “will not include illegal or infringing content.” But that promise only extends to the “output of AI-generated content” and doesn’t address the copyright status of content used by the training models themselves. The status of those training models was a primary concern for Valve last summer when the company cited the “legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models,” but such concerns don’t even merit a mention in today’s new policies.

For live-generated content, on the other hand, Valve is requiring developers “to tell us what kind of guardrails you’re putting on your AI to ensure it’s not generating illegal content.” Such guardrails should hopefully prevent situations like that faced by AI Dungeon, which in 2021 drew controversy for using an OpenAI model that could be used to generate sexual content featuring children in the game. Valve says a new “in-game overlay” will allow players to submit reports if they run into that kind of inappropriate AI-generated content in Steam games.

Over the last year or so, many game developers have started to embrace a variety of AI tools in the creation of everything from background art and NPC dialogue to motion capture and voice generation. But some developers have taken a hardline stance against anything that could supplant the role of humans in game making. “We are extremely against the idea that anything creative could or should take [the] place of skilled specialists, to which we mean ourselves,” Digital Extremes Creative Director Rebecca Ford told the CBC last year.

In September, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded to reports of a ChatGPT-powered game being banned from Steam by explicitly welcoming such games on the Epic Games Store. “We don’t ban games for using new technologies,” Sweeney wrote on social media.

Valve now allows the “vast majority” of AI-powered games on Steam Read More »

nvidia’s-g-sync-pulsar-is-anti-blur-monitor-tech-aimed-squarely-at-your-eyeball

Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar is anti-blur monitor tech aimed squarely at your eyeball

g-sync, gaming, gaming monitors, Monitors, NVIDIA, Tech, variable refresh rate, VRR / /

What will they sync of next? —

Branded monitors can sync pixels to backlighting, refresh rate, and GPU frames.

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Motion blur demonstration of G-Sync Pulsar, with

Enlarge / None of this would be necessary if it weren’t for your inferior eyes, which retain the colors of pixels for fractions of a second longer than is optimal for shooting dudes.

Nvidia

Gaming hardware has done a lot in the last decade to push a lot of pixels very quickly across screens. But one piece of hardware has always led to complications: the eyeball. Nvidia is targeting that last part of the visual quality chain with its newest G-Sync offering, Pulsar.

Motion blur, when it’s not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by “the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen,” as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor’s backlight.

You can’t just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing “a novel algorithm” in “synergizing” its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting.

Nvidia also claims that Pulsar can help with the visual discomfort caused by some strobing effects, as the feature “intelligently controls the pulse’s brightness and duration.”

  • The featureless axis labels make my brain hurt, but I believe this chart suggests that G-Sync Pulsar does the work of timing out exactly when to refresh screen pixels at 360 Hz.

    Nvidia

  • The same, but this time at 200 Hz.

    Nvidia

  • And again, this time at 100 Hz. Rapidly changing pixels are weird, huh?

    Nvidia

To accommodate this “radical rethinking of display technology,” a monitor will need Nvidia’s own chips built in. There are none yet, but the Asus ROG Swift PG27 Series G-Sync and its 360 Hz refresh rate is coming “later this year.” No price for that monitor is available yet.

It’s hard to verify how this looks and feels without hands-on time. PC Gamer checked out Pulsar at CES this week and verified that, yes, it’s easier to read the name of the guy you’re going to shoot while you’re strafing left and right at an incredibly high refresh rate. Nvidia also provided a video, captured at 1,000 frames per second, for those curious.

Nvidia’s demonstration of G-Sync Pulsar, using Counter-Strike 2 filmed at 1000 fps, on a 360 Hz monitor, with Pulsar on and off, played back at 1/24 speed.

Pulsar signals Nvidia’s desire to once again create an exclusive G-Sync monitor feature designed to encourage a wraparound Nvidia presence on the modern gaming PC. It’s a move that has sometimes backfired on the firm before. The company relented to market pressures in 2019 and enabled G-Sync in various variable refresh rate monitors powered by VESA’s Display port Adaptive-Sync tech (more commonly known by its use in AMD’s FreeSync monitors). G-Sync monitors were selling for typically hundreds of dollars more than their FreeSync counterparts, and while they technically had some exclusive additional features, the higher price points likely hurt Nvidia’s appeal when a gamer was looking at the full cost of new or upgraded system.

There will not be any such cross-standard compatibility with G-Sync Pulsar, which will only be offered on monitors with a G-Sync Ultimate badge, and then further support Pulsar, specifically. There’s always a chance that another group will develop its own synced-strobe technology that could work across GPUs, but nothing is happening as of yet.

In related frame-rate news, Nvidia also announced this week that its GeForce Now game streaming service will offer G-Sync capabilities to those on Ultimate or Priority memberships and playing on capable screens. Nvidia claims that, paired with its Reflex offering on GeForce Now, the two “make cloud gaming experiences nearly indistinguishable from local ones.” I’ll emphasize here that those are Nvidia’s words, not the author’s.

Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar is anti-blur monitor tech aimed squarely at your eyeball Read More »

unity-lays-off-an-additional-25-percent-of-its-staffers

Unity lays off an additional 25 percent of its staffers

game engine, gaming, layoffs, unity, unity engine / /

Disunity —

1,800 newly announced job cuts come on top of 1,300 layoffs since mid-2022.

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Unity lays off an additional 25 percent of its staffers

Unity

When Unity laid off 265 Weta Digital engineers in November, the company warned that more layoffs would be necessary in the near future as part of a plan to “refocus” on the company’s core game engine business. A large chunk of those changes became real on Monday as the Unity Engine maker told the SEC that “it plans to reduce approximately 1,800 employee roles, or approximately 25% of its current workforce.”

“This decision was not taken lightly, and we extend our deepest gratitude to those affected for their dedication and contributions,” Unity Director of PR Kelly Ekins said in a statement to The Verge. Ekins added that the layoffs will be spread across “all teams,” and a company spokesperson told Reuters that this round of layoffs will be complete by March, with additional internal changes coming thereafter.

The massive staffing cuts come after over 1,300 layoffs already implemented across the company in multiple waves since June 2022 (including those November Weta Digital cuts). Despite that, Unity’s statement to the SEC says these further cuts are necessary “to position [the company] for long-term and profitable growth.”

Hemorrhaging money

The company’s recent financial statements show why such a drastic change is even being considered. Despite annual revenues measured in the billions, Unity has struggled to show a profit in recent years, reporting net losses of $859 million for the 12 months ending in September 2023.

Unity’s stock price, which jumped nearly 4 percent in the immediate wake of the layoff news late Monday, is back down to its lowest level since mid-December as of Tuesday morning. That stock price is currently down nearly 40 percent from its late 2020 IPO and off over 80 percent from its peak in late 2021.

But Unity stock is now up over 40 percent since interim CEO Jim Whitehurst (who was the former CEO of Red Hat) announced a “company reset” in a November shareholder letter. At the time, Whitehurst warned that Unity “will likely include discontinuing certain product offerings, reducing our workforce, and reducing our office footprint” as the company implements plans “to increase our focus on our core; the Unity Editor and Runtime, and Monetization Solutions.”

Recovering from Riccitiello

Of course, Whitehurst was only in a position to make that kind of statement after October’s abrupt resignation of Unity CEO John Riccitiello after nine years heading the company. Riccitiello departed amid the announcement and significant rollback of a developer-enraging plan to charge “per-install” fees on all Unity Engine games. That botched rollout—which has since been scaled back to a capped runtime fee for successful commercial projects—contributed to a sense of widespread joy over Riccitiello’s departure across the game development community.

Riccitiello oversaw Unity through an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions after the company’s IPO, including cloud gaming service Parsec, mobile ad giant Ironsource, and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch, to name just a few. Those ancillary products and services may be in particular danger as Unity plans to “reduc[e] the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability,” as Whitehurst wrote Monday in a company memo obtained by Reuters.

Even with the massively reduced headcount and new focus on the engine business, Unity isn’t expecting its corporate fortunes to turn around any time soon. In his November investor letter, Whitehurst said, “We expect the impact of this [runtime fee] business model change to have minimal benefit in 2024 and ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases.”

Unity lays off an additional 25 percent of its staffers Read More »

they’re-not-cheap,-but-nvidia’s-new-super-gpus-are-a-step-in-the-right-direction

They’re not cheap, but Nvidia’s new Super GPUs are a step in the right direction

gaming, GeForce, GPU, Graphics Card, NVIDIA, Tech / /

supersize me —

RTX 4080, 4070 Ti, and 4070 Super arrive with price cuts and/or spec bumps.

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Nvidia's latest GPUs, apparently dropping out of hyperspace.

Enlarge / Nvidia’s latest GPUs, apparently dropping out of hyperspace.

Nvidia

  • Nvidia’s latest GPUs, apparently dropping out of hyperspace.

    Nvidia

  • The RTX 4080 Super.

    Nvidia

  • Comparing it to the last couple of xx80 GPUs (but not the original 4080).

    Nvidia

  • The 4070 Ti Super.

    Nvidia

  • Comparing to past xx70 Ti generations.

    Nvidia

  • The 4070 Super.

    Nvidia

  • Compared to past xx70 generations.

    Nvidia

If there’s been one consistent criticism of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series graphics cards, it’s been pricing. All of Nvidia’s product tiers have seen their prices creep up over the last few years, but cards like the 4090 raised prices to new heights, while lower-end models like the 4060 and 4060 Ti kept pricing the same but didn’t improve performance much.

Today, Nvidia is sprucing up its 4070 and 4080 tiers with a mid-generation “Super” refresh that at least partially addresses some of these pricing problems. Like older Super GPUs, the 4070 Super, 4070 Ti Super, and 4080 Super use the same architecture and support all the same features as their non-Super versions, but with bumped specs and tweaked prices that might make them more appealing to people who skipped the originals.

The 4070 Super will launch first, on January 17, for $599. The $799 RTX 4070 Ti Super launches on January 24, and the $999 4080 Super follows on January 31.

RTX 4090 RTX 4080 RTX 4080 Super RTX 4070 Ti RTX 4070 Ti Super RTX 4070 RTX 4070 Super
CUDA Cores 16,384 9,728 10,240 7,680 8,448 5,888 7,168
Boost Clock 2,520 MHz 2,505 MHz 2,550 MHz 2,610 MHz 2,610 MHz 2,475 MHz 2,475 MHz
Memory Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit 256-bit 192-bit 256-bit 192-bit 192-bit
Memory Clock 1,313 MHz 1,400 MHz 1,437 MHz 1,313 MHz 1,313 MHz 1,313 MHz 1,313 MHz
Memory size 24GB GDDR6X 16GB GDDR6X 16GB GDDR6X 12GB GDDR6X 16GB GDDR6X 12GB GDDR6X 12GB GDDR6X
TGP 450 W 320 W 320 W 285 W 285 W 200 W 220 W

Of the three cards, the 4080 Super probably brings the least significant spec bump, with a handful of extra CUDA cores and small clock speed increases but the same amount of memory and the same 256-bit memory interface. Its main innovation is its price, which at $999 is $200 lower than the original 4080’s $1,199 launch price. This doesn’t make it a bargain—we’re still talking about a $1,000 graphics card—but the 4080 Super feels like a more proportionate step down from the 4090 and a good competitor to AMD’s flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The 4070 Ti Super stays at the same $799 price as the 4070 Ti (which, if you’ll recall, was nearly launched at $899 as the “RTX 4080 12GB“) but addresses two major gripes with the original by stepping up to a 256-bit memory interface and 16GB of RAM. It also picks up some extra CUDA cores, while staying within the same power envelope as the original 4070 Ti. These changes should help it keep up with modern 4K games, where the smaller pool of memory and narrower memory interface of the original 4070 Ti could sometimes be a drag on performance.

Most of the RTX 40-series lineup. The original 4080 and 4070 Ti are going away, while the original 4070 now slots in at $549. It's not shown here, but Nvidia confirmed that the 16GB 4060 Ti is also sticking around at $449.

Enlarge / Most of the RTX 40-series lineup. The original 4080 and 4070 Ti are going away, while the original 4070 now slots in at $549. It’s not shown here, but Nvidia confirmed that the 16GB 4060 Ti is also sticking around at $449.

Nvidia

Finally, we get to the RTX 4070 Super, which also keeps the 4070’s $599 price tag but sees a substantial uptick in processing hardware, from 5,888 CUDA cores to 7,168 (the power envelope also increases, from 200 W to 220 W). The memory system remains unchanged. The original 4070 was already a decent baseline for entry-level 4K gaming and very good 1440p gaming, and the 4070 Super should make 60 FPS 4K attainable in even more games.

Nvidia says that the original 4070 Ti and 4080 will be phased out. The original 4070 will stick around at a new $549 price, $50 less than before, but not particularly appealing compared to the $599 4070 Super. The 4090, 4060, and the 8GB and 16GB versions of the 4060 Ti all remain available for the same prices as before.

  • The Super cards’ high-level average performance compared to some past generations of GPU, without DLSS 3 frame generation numbers muddying the waters. The 4070 should be a bit faster than an RTX 3090 most of the time.

    Nvidia

  • Some RTX 4080 performance comparisons. Note that the games at the top all have DLSS 3 frame generation enabled for the 4080 Super, while the older cards don’t support it.

    Nvidia

  • The 4070 Ti Super vs the 3070 Ti and 2070 Super.

    Nvidia

  • The 4070 Super versus the 3070 and the 2070.

    Nvidia

Nvidia’s performance comparisons focus mostly on older-generation cards rather than the non-Super versions, and per usual for 40-series GPU announcements, they lean heavily on performance numbers that are inflated by DLSS 3 frame generation. In terms of pure rendering performance, Nvidia says the 4070 Super should outperform an RTX 3090—impressive, given that the original 4070 was closer to an RTX 3080. The RTX 4080 Super is said to be roughly twice as fast as an RTX 3080, and Nvidia says the RTX 4070 Ti Super will be roughly 2.5 times faster than a 3070 Ti.

Though all three of these cards provide substantially more value than their non-Super predecessors at the same prices, the fact remains that prices have still gone up compared to past generations. Nvidia last released a Super refresh during the RTX 20-series back in 2019; the RTX 2080 Super went for $699 and the 2070 Super for $499. But the 4080 Super, 4070 Ti Super, and 4070 Super will give you more for your money than you could get before, which is at least a move in the right direction.

They’re not cheap, but Nvidia’s new Super GPUs are a step in the right direction Read More »

$329-radeon-7600-xt-brings-16gb-of-memory-to-amd’s-latest-midrange-gpu

$329 Radeon 7600 XT brings 16GB of memory to AMD’s latest midrange GPU

AMD, gaming, GPU, Radeon, RDNA 3, rx 7600 xt, Tech / /

more rams —

Updated 7600 XT also bumps up clock speeds and power requirements.

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The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat.

Enlarge / The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat.

AMD

Graphics card buyers seem anxious about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren’t otherwise equipped to play games at super-high resolutions. And while this anxiety tends to be a bit overblown—lots of first- and third-party testing of cards like the GeForce 4060 Ti shows that just a handful of games benefit when all you do is boost GPU memory from 8GB to 16GB—there’s still a market for less-expensive GPUs with big pools of memory, whether you’re playing games that need it or running compute tasks that benefit from it.

That’s the apparent impetus behind AMD’s sole GPU announcement from its slate of CES news today: the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT, a version of last year’s $269 RX 7600 with twice as much memory, slightly higher clock speeds, and higher power use to go with it.

RX 7700 XT RX 7600 RX 7600 XT RX 6600 RX 6600 XT RX 6650 XT RX 6750 XT
Compute units (Stream processors) 54 (3,456) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 28 (1,792) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 40 (2,560)
Boost Clock 2,544 MHz 2,600 MHz 2,760 MHz 2,490 MHz 2,589 MHz 2,635 MHz 2,600 MHz
Memory Bus Width 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 192-bit
Memory Clock 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 1,750 MHz 2,000 MHz 2,190 MHz 2,250 MHz
Memory size 12GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 12GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP) 245 W 165 W 190 W 132 W 160 W 180 W 250 W

The core specifications of the 7600 XT remain the same as the regular 7600: 32 of AMD’s compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA3 GPU architecture and the same memory clock speed attached to the same 128-bit memory bus. But RAM has been boosted from 8GB to 16GB, and the GPU’s clock speeds have been boosted a little, ensuring that the card runs games a little faster than the regular 7600, even in games that don’t care about the extra memory.

Images of AMD’s reference design show a slightly larger card than the regular 7600, with a second 8-pin power connector to provide the extra power (total board power increases from 165 W to 190 W). The only other difference between the cards is DisplayPort 2.1 support—it was optional in the regular RX 7600, but all 7600 XTs will have it. That brings it in line with all the other RX 7000-series GPUs.

  • AMD’s hand-picked benchmarks generally show a mild performance improvement over the RX 7600, though Forza is an outlier.

    AMD

  • The 7600 XT’s performance relative to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 is also a little better than the RX 7600’s, thanks to added RAM and higher clocks. But Nvidia should continue to benefit from superior ray-tracing performance in a lot of games.

    AMD

  • Testing against the 4060 at 1440p. Note that the longest bars are coming from games with FSR 3 frame-generation enabled and that Nvidia’s cards also support DLSS 3.

    AMD

  • The complete RX 7000-series lineup.

    AMD

AMD’s provided performance figures show the 7600 XT outrunning the regular 7600 by between 5 and 10 percent in most titles, with one—Forza Horizon 5 with ray-tracing turned all the way up—showing a more significant jump of around 40 percent at 1080p and 1440p. Whether that kind of performance jump is worth the extra $60 depends on the games you play and how worried you are about the system requirements in future games.

AMD says the RX 7600 XT will be available starting on January 24. Pricing and availability for other RX 7000-series GPUs, including the regular RX 7600, aren’t changing.

$329 Radeon 7600 XT brings 16GB of memory to AMD’s latest midrange GPU Read More »

a-complete-(so-far)-star-citizen-ship-collection-now-costs-$48,000

A complete (so far) Star Citizen ship collection now costs $48,000

cloud imperium, gaming, roberts space industries, star citizen / /

Time for a second mortgage —

Ars analysis finds per-ship costs have come down slightly, in real terms.

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There aren't many online game stores where you can spend $48,000 on a single

Enlarge / There aren’t many online game stores where you can spend $48,000 on a single “Add to Cart.”

At this point, over 11 years after we first wrote about Star Citizen, the still-in-alpha game is interesting less as something that might eventually be “finished” and more as a fascinating tale of feature creep and fundraising success. To that last point, we were suitably boggled at the recent news that Roberts Space Industries is now offering a  $48,000 “Legatus Pack” as a “perfect collection” of “all ships released and concepted through [in-universe year] 2953.”

The collection of 187 ships (and hundreds of accessories like paint colors, skins, armor, and in-game posters) is now roughly two-thirds of the median annual household income in the US (circa 2022). But that price isn’t even available to lookie-loos like you and me; to add the package to an online shopping cart, you must first spend at least $1,000 to become a member of the game’s Chairman’s Club.

What a bargain!

While the newest Legatus Pack launched in late December, the offering isn’t a new concept for developer Roberts Space Industries. The first Legatus Pack launched in May 2018 for a relatively reasonable $27,000. Before that, similar “Completionist” packs of all in-game content released up to that point would run players up to $15,000.

  • Fig. 1: Even accounting for inflation, the cost of a “complete” Star Citizen hangar keeps going up.

    Ars Technica analysis

  • Fig. 2: The number of ships available in Star Citizen‘s completionist Legatus Pack has been going up at a relatively constant clip over the years.

    Ars Technica analysis

  • Fig. 3: Adjusting for inflation, the per-vehicle average for Star Citizen‘s Legatus Pack has come down a bit in recent years.

    Ars Technica analysis

Since the launch of that first Legatus Pack, which included 117 ships, RSI has updated its “complete” offering of in-game content in December of every year since 2019, upping the price and the number of ships included. An Ars analysis of those updates finds that, despite the sticker shock of the $48,000 package, the inflation-adjusted average price-per-ship has actually come down about 12 percent since peaking in late 2019 (the number of extra accessories included in the pack has also gone up from 163 in 2018 to 635 today).

It’s also worth remembering that this collection isn’t necessarily intended for individuals. In 2018, Cloud Imperium’s Eric Kieron Davis told Polygon that the Legatus Pack was something that “[some] players will use to deploy ships, items, etc. across organizations/corporations/guilds” which could have hundreds or thousands of individual players.

“It wasn’t created in a vacuum,” Davis continued. “We were responding to what the community asked for. We have some passionate supporters that are not looking at Star Citizen as your typical game purchase/transaction but rather a dream project they want to see happen.”

A very small sample of the full collection of ships you can get in the Legatus Pack.

Enlarge / A very small sample of the full collection of ships you can get in the Legatus Pack.

Still, the fact that anyone is even considering spending $48,000 on a single bundle of DLC for a game that—we have to stress again—is still in alpha after 11-plus years, is a testament to the devotion that Star Citizen continues to command among the faithful. Despite the drawn-out development, in 2023, RSI set its sixth annual nominal fundraising record of $117 million. That one-year take represents nearly 20 percent of the staggering $658 million the game has raised from players over its lifetime, and includes over $3 million raised in a single day during last year’s Intergalactic Aerospace Expo event.

Despite the game’s continued fundraising success, though, even some Star Citizen fans are balking at the optics of pre-selling tens of thousands of dollars of DLC before the game is even near launch.

“We’ve all put in the time to delude ourselves into thinking that ships are worth, in real world money, their pledge prices. They aren’t,” Reddit user magicmouse wrote in a recent thread. “You can rationalize it by saying that you’re supporting the development of a really cool game but, to outsiders, we look like total clowns for pledging hundreds of dollars for a ship that can be earned in-game in a relatively short period of time. I’m glad the game is financially successful and I’m happy to support it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking these purchases will ever look reasonable to somebody who isn’t mainlining the kool-aid.”

A complete (so far) Star Citizen ship collection now costs $48,000 Read More »

flurry-of-firmware-updates-makes-analogue-pocket-an-even-better-retro-handheld

Flurry of firmware updates makes Analogue Pocket an even better retro handheld

analogue, analogue pocket, Emulation, emulator, fpga, Game Boy, Game boy Advance, gaming, Nintendo, openFPGA, retro console, Retro Gaming, Tech / /

super game boy —

Display filters for FPGA cores, custom Game Boy color palettes, and more.

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An Analogue Pocket running <em>Super Mario World</em> on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IMG_1480-2-800×533.jpeg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.

Andrew Cunningham

We’ve got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket, the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022. This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.

But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.

The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV, adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I’ve seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn’t one of them.

The basic Trinitron filter is available by default for “suitable” cores, which in our testing tends to mean “home consoles that were meant to be connected to a CRT TV.” FPGA cores for portable systems like the Game Boy or Game Boy Advance, which shipped with old but scanline-less LCD screens, don’t have the filter available. Third-party FPGA core developers will need to add support for additional screen filters themselves, something that most developers still haven’t done as of this writing.

  • A zoomed-in photo of the screen with no filters enabled. It’s sharp and crisp, and even zoomed in with a good mirrorless camera it’s difficult to make out individual pixels on the Pocket’s screen.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • The same scene with the Trinitron CRT filter enabled. Subtle scanlines, visible CRT “pixels,” and just the right amount of blurring makes the picture look more period-accurate.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Zoomed out, scanlines off.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Scanlines on, default “integer” scaling used. This is the most accurate aspect ratio, but it leaves a black border of unused pixels around the screen.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Scanlines on, Integer+ mode used. This eliminates the black border and, to my eyes, looks just fine on the Pocket’s screen and makes the effect of the scanline filter easier to see.

    Andrew Cunningham

The Trinitron filter looks good on the Pocket’s screen, but it’s subtle; you may appreciate the scanline effect more and notice its downside less if you’re playing while connected to a TV with the Analogue Dock. And at least on the NES and SNES cores I tested it with, it has the undesirable side effect of shrinking the game picture down on what is already a fairly small screen. This default setting can be tweaked without visibly degrading the image quality, at least not to my eyes; just switch from the default Integer scaling mode in the display settings to Integer+.

The screen filters are probably the most interesting and requested new feature for the Pocket, but both firmware updates have many other smaller fixes and additions. Firmware version 1.2 fixes numerous issues with sleep/wake and save states for various games, allows FPGA cores to use cartridge adapters, and lets FPGA cores know when the Pocket is in a dock; when docked, it also adds support for additional controllers and fixes issues with others. Version 2.0 adds support for custom color palettes for Game Boy games, allows FPGA cores to switch aspect ratios when docked, and fixes a “video issue with some openFPGA cores and resolutions” when docked.

To update the Pocket’s firmware, connect the device’s microSD card to your computer and drop one of the firmware update .bin files into the root directory (make sure you delete any older firmware files first since the Pocket won’t delete old update files once it’s done with them). Next time you boot the console, it should install the firmware update and reboot. As usual, when performing any software or firmware update, it’s best to ensure the console is fully charged or plugged in before you start the process.

Flurry of firmware updates makes Analogue Pocket an even better retro handheld Read More »