gaming

discord-starts-down-the-dangerous-road-of-ads-this-week

Discord starts down the dangerous road of ads this week

ads, discord, gaming, Social Media, Tech / /

Sponsored Quests —

Discord’s first real foray into ads seems minimally intrusive.

– Updated

The Discord logo on a funky cyber-background.

Discord

Discord had long been strongly opposed to ads, but starting this week, it’s giving video game makers the ability to advertise to its users. The introduction of so-called Sponsored Quests marks a notable change from the startup’s previous business model, but, at least for now, it seems much less intrusive than the ads shoved into other social media platforms, especially since Discord users can choose not to engage with them.

Discord first announced Sponsored Quests on March 7, with Peter Sellis, Discord’s SVP of product, writing in a blog post that users would start seeing them in the “coming weeks.” Sponsored Quests offer PC gamers in-game rewards for getting friends to watch a stream of them playing through Discord. Discord senior product communications manager Swaleha Carlson confirmed to Ars Technica that Sponsored Quests launch this week.

Discord shared this image in March as an example of the new type of ads.

Enlarge / Discord shared this image in March as an example of the new type of ads.

The goal is for video games to get exposure to more gamers, serving as a form of marketing. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that it viewed a slide from a slideshow Discord shows to game developers regarding the ads that reads: “We’ll get you in front of players. And those players will get you into their friend groups.”

Sellis told WSJ that Discord will target ads depending on users’ age, geographic location data, and gameplay. The ads will live on the bottom-left of the screen, but users can opt out of personalized promotions for Quests that are based on activity or data shared with Discord, Swaleha Carlson, senior product communications manager at Discord, told Ars Technica.

“Users may still see Quests, however, if they navigate to their Gift Inventory and/or through contextual entry points like a user’s friends’ activity. They’ll also have the option to hide an in-app promotion for a specific Quest or game they’re not interested in,” she said.

“Users may still see Quests, however, if they navigate to their Gift Inventory and/or through contextual entry points like a user’s friends’ activity. They’ll also have the option to hide an in-app promotion for a specific Quest or game they’re not interested in. “

Discord already tested the ads in May with Lucasfilm Games and Epic Games. Discord users were able to receive Star Wars-themed gear in Fortnite for getting a friend to watch them play Fortnite on PC for at least 15 minutes.

Jason Citron, Discord co-founder and CEO, told Bloomberg in March that the company hopes that one day “every game will offer Quests on Discord.”

Discord used to be anti-ads

It may be a nuisance for users to have to disable personalized promotion for Sponsored Quests when they never asked for them, but it should bring long-term users at least some comfort that their data purportedly doesn’t have to contribute to the marketing. However, it’s unclear if Discord may one day change this. The fact that the platform is implementing ads at all is somewhat surprising. Discord named its avoidance of advertising as one of its key differentiators from traditional social media platforms as recently as late January.

In March 2021, Citron told WSJ that Discord had eschewed ads until that point because ads would be intrusive, considering Discord’s purpose of instant back-and-forth communication and people’s general distaste for viewing ads and having their data shared with other companies.

“We really believe we can build products that make Discord more fun and that people will pay for them. It keeps our incentives aligned,” Citron told WSJ at the time.

That same year, Citron, in response to a question about why being ad-free is important to Discord, told NPR: “We believe that people’s data is their data and that people should feel comfortable and safe to have conversations and that their data is not going to be used against them in any way that is improper.”

Sponsored Quests differs from other types of ads that would more obviously disrupt Discord users’ experiences, such as pop-up ads or ads viewed alongside chat windows.

A tight-rope to walk

Beyond Sponsored Quests, Discord, which launched in 2015, previously announced that it would start selling sponsored profile effects and avatar decorations in the Discord Shop. In March, Discord’s Sellis said this would arrive in the “coming weeks.” Discord is also trying to hire more than 12 people to work in ad sales, WSJ said Saturday, citing anonymous “people familiar with [Discord’s] plans.”

Discord’s Carlson declined to comment to Ars on whether or not Discord plans to incorporate other types of ads into Discord. She noted that Sponsored Quests “are currently in the pilot phase” and that the company will “continue to iterate based on what we learn.”

In 2021, Discord enjoyed a nearly three-times revenue boost that it attributed to subscription sales for Nitro, which adds features like HD video streaming and up to 500MB uploads. In March, Citron told Bloomberg that Discord has more than 200 million monthly active users and that the company will “probably” go public eventually.

The publication, citing unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter,” also reported that Discord makes over $600 million in annualized revenue. The startup has raised over $1 billion in funding and is reported to have over $700 million in cash. However, the company reportedly isn’t profitable. It also laid off 17 percent of staffers, or 170 workers, in January.

Meanwhile, ads are the top revenue generator for many other social media platforms, such as Reddit, which recently went public.

While Discord’s first real ads endeavor seems like it will have minimal impact on users who aren’t interested in them, it brings the company down a tricky road that it hasn’t previously navigated. A key priority should be ensuring that any form of ads doesn’t disrupt the primary reasons people like using Discord. As it stands, Sponsored Quests might already put off some users.

“I don’t want my friendships to be monetized or productized in any way,” Zack Mohsen, a reported long-time user and computer hardware engineer based in Seattle, told WSJ.

Updated April 1, 2024 at 5: 32 p.m. ET to add information and comment from Discord. 

Discord starts down the dangerous road of ads this week Read More »

largely-cut-off-from-western-games,-russia-looks-into-a-homegrown-game-console

Largely cut off from Western games, Russia looks into a homegrown game console

gaming, russia, video games / /

The new digital iron curtain —

How hard could it be?

–

A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market.

Enlarge / A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market.

It’s been over two years since major players in the international game industry united to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from a beleaguered Ukraine. The relative isolation has apparently forced Vladimir Putin’s government to contemplate the kind of homegrown gaming hardware and software that characterized Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.

PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):

consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users

Oh, is that all?

A massive undertaking

Gaming technology isn’t a completely new area of focus for the Russian government. In 2022, the Ministry of Digital Development reportedly started discussing the possibility of creating a homegrown domestic Russian game engine. But building an entire gaming platform from scratch would be an even bigger undertaking.

To be fair, building your own game console today is a bit easier than it would have been in a different era. Open source platforms like Android can provide a good starting point for a bespoke gaming operating system (it worked for Ouya, kind of), while off-the-shelf, system-on-a-chip solutions can save a lot of the hardware engineering work needed to develop a new console.

But even if those issues get “solved,” the Russian government would still have to build the other scaffolding that supports a robust gaming platform. Crafting features like payment processing, game downloads, online play, moderation, quality control, and more is not a simple undertaking, even for major conglomerates like Microsoft or Valve. And that’s before you get into attracting the developers that would need to create the actual games for this new platform.

Building a bare-bones Steam Deck competitor isn't nearly as hard as building out the platform that supports that hardware.

Enlarge / Building a bare-bones Steam Deck competitor isn’t nearly as hard as building out the platform that supports that hardware.

Valve

Speaking to Russian-language newspaper Kommersant, Anton Fomin, the head of retail projects for mobile phone company Fplus, said, “In Russia, no one has the expertise that would allow them to produce their own PlayStation or Xbox-level console” (according to a machine translation). An unnamed expert source also told Kommersant that creating a full system would take Russia 5 to 10 years and 5 to 10 billion rubles ($54 to $108 million) just to get a gaming platform that would “lag behind already existing foreign solutions in terms of parameters by 10 to 15 years.”

The fact that Russia is even contemplating this kind of move might reflect the wider state of the country’s gaming sector. A 2023 survey found a significant majority of Russian gamers resorting to piracy for their gaming fix as legitimate access to foreign games dwindled. Russian job listing data from last year also suggests that Russia’s domestic game development has withered by up to 40 percent since the start of the Ukraine war.

But this isn’t the first time Russia has been forced to bootstrap its own homegrown gaming industry. In the waning days of the Cold War, Soviet engineers cut off from the Western gaming market created a variety of odd knock-off arcade machines and hundreds of amateur computer games, including many with surprisingly activist themes. If that era of Russian gaming could create something like Tetris, maybe the idea of a new Russian gaming platform isn’t completely ridiculous.

The Russian government has until June 15 to make its recommendations about the feasibility of any domestic game console creation plans.

Largely cut off from Western games, Russia looks into a homegrown game console Read More »

cities:-skylines-2-gets-long-awaited-official-mod-support-and-map-editor

Cities: Skylines 2 gets long-awaited official mod support and map editor

cities: skylines 2, city builders, colossal order, gaming, modding, Paradox Interactive, simulation game / /

Cities: Skylines 2 —

Modding was seen as the most important next step by developer’s leader.

–

View of a rooftop terrace with sun umbrella in Cities: Skylines 2's Beach Properties expansion.

Enlarge / Kudos to the designer of this umbrella-shaded rooftop terrace at Colossal Order, perhaps the only worker who can imagine a place that isn’t overwhelmed by Steam reviewers.

Paradox Interactive

Under the very unassuming name of patch 1.1.0f1, Cities: Skylines 2 is getting something quite big. The sequel now has the modding, map editing, and code modding support that made its predecessor such a sprawling success.

Only time will tell if community energy can help restore some of the momentum that has been dispersed by the fraught launch of Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2). The project of relatively small developer Colossal Order arrived in October 2023 with performance issues and a lack of content compared to its predecessor. Some of that content perception stemmed from the game’s lack of modding support, which had contributed to entire aspects of the original game not yet available in the sequel.

When Ars interviewed Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen in December, she said that modding support was the thing she was most looking forward to arriving. Modding support was intended to be available at launch, but the challenges of building the new game’s technical base, amid many other technical issues, pushed it back, along with console releases.

“[W]e can’t wait to have the support out there, so we can have the modding community ‘fully unleashed,'” Hallikainen said then. “Because I know they are waiting to get to work. They are actually already at it, but this will make it easier. … We just can’t wait to give them the full set of tools.” She noted that character modding, a “technically difficult thing to support,” would arrive further out, and indeed, asset modding is listed as “available later this year.”

The base-level modding support is now available, though in “Beta” and in a different form than fans are used to. Instead of working through Steam Workshop, C:S2 mods will be available through Paradox Mods to support console players. There are, of course, issues at launch, including slowdown with the in-game mod browser. Most non-incensed commenters and reviewers consider the tools themselves to be an upgrade over the prior game’s editing suite.

In addition to making mods, the in-game mod tools should make it easier to load preset “Playsets” of mod combinations. We’ll have to see how long it takes assets like Spaghetti Junction, the most popular mod for the original Cities: Skylines, to arrive in C:S2 so that all may experience the municipal engineering regrets of Birmingham, England.

Along with modding tools, Colossal Order issued some of its first proper DLC for C:S2. Beach Properties, an asset pack, adds both North American and European waterfront zoning and buildings, palm trees, and six signature buildings. There’s also a Deluxe Relax Station that puts 16 new songs and DJ patter on the soundtrack. The recent patch also contains a number of optimizations and bug fixes. Steam reviewers and Paradox forum members are asking why the beach DLC doesn’t contain actual beaches.

Cities: Skylines 2 gets long-awaited official mod support and map editor Read More »

dragon’s-dogma-2-is-gritty,-janky,-goofy,-tough,-and-lots-of-fun

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is gritty, janky, goofy, tough, and lots of fun

capcom, dragon's dogma, dragon's dogma 2, elden ring, Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, FromSoftware, gaming, RPG / /

Review —

This epic RPG reminds us of Skyrim‘s ambitious jank, but with way better combat.

–

Player shooting down a griffon with circling beams of light.

Enlarge / One day I will own griffons in such spectacular fashion. But I’m currently carrying a too-heavy backpack and clipped through a hut wall.

With all due respect to the Capcom team, which poured itself into Dragon’s Dogma 2 and deserves praise, raises, and time off, let me get right to it: I love this game for how dumb it is.

I mean “dumb” in the way most heavy metal lyrics are dumb, but you find yourself rocking out nonetheless. Dumb like when you laugh uncontrollably at the sight of someone getting conked in the head and falling over backward. Dumb as in the silliest bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, just nowhere near as self-aware (unless, due to translation issues, this game actually is self-aware, then I apologize).

Dragon’s Dogma 2 (DD2) reminds me of playing another huge, dumb, enjoyable game: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Not the first time you play through it, though. I’m talking about the second or third run-through (or that 100-plus-hour save in which you refuse to finish the game), and your admiration of this huge, rich world gives way to utter ridiculousness. You one-shot dragons with your broken stealth-archer build, you put buckets on the heads of NPCs to rob them, and you marvel at how the most effective fast travel is horse tilting. You lunge into possibilities, choose chaos, and appreciate all the ways you can do so.

Rogue-ish fighter Peter looks on as The Arisen finds himself done in by his greatest foe yet: the awning on a small village hut, next to a rocky hill.

Rogue-ish fighter Peter looks on as The Arisen finds himself done in by his greatest foe yet: the awning on a small village hut, next to a rocky hill.

DD2 gives me those multifaceted Skyrim thrills and chuckles (and a friend confirmed Morrowind works here, too). One time, I had to reload the game because my character—the “Arisen,” savior of the continent, heralded throughout the land—got stuck between a stone hut and an angled hill behind it. Someday, he will challenge the world-conquering dragon, but today, he can’t turn sideways or climb three feet.

Sorry, what's that about recruit training, Phill? I'm having trouble hearing you over the deadly hand-to-hand combat.

Sorry, what’s that about recruit training, Phill? I’m having trouble hearing you over the deadly hand-to-hand combat.

Another time, a band of nearby goblins launched an attack against my squad and a band of nearby knights. The knights’ leader, midway through a lengthy, high-falutin dialogue dirge, just kept talking. Even when a goblin set one of his soldiers on fire less than two feet to his right, he kept yapping.

DD2 has a huge, rich, and varied world, full of systems that just barely fit together, regularly bashing into one another in ways that delight, annoy, and astound. But there is a solid, if quirky, game at its core that rewards exploration and experimentation. The plot, while overwrought with nobility and rebirth and destinies, is intriguing in its broad strokes but let down by the aforementioned dialogue.

The game has made me say, “This is so ridiculous” and “This is amazing” to myself in roughly equal amounts, and that feels like an achievement.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is gritty, janky, goofy, tough, and lots of fun Read More »

take-a-trip-through-gaming-history-with-this-charming-gdc-display

Take a trip through gaming history with this charming GDC display

Game Developers Conference, gaming, GDC, history / /

Remember when —

Come for the retro Will Wright photo, stay for the game with a pack-in harmonica.

–

  • Only the most dedicated “Carmen” fans—or North Dakotan educators of a certain age—are likely to have this one in their collections.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • These “pretty cool stickers” came from a “Carmen Day” kit the producer Broderbund sent to school to encourage themed edutainment activities that went beyond the screen.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • As a nearby placard laments: “When female human characters were depicted in early video games, they often fell into stereotypical roles”—nature-loving girls or sexualized adults being chief among them.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Despite the lack of diverse female representation in early games, early game ads were often equal-opportunity affairs.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Don’t be fooled by the wide variety of headshots on these boxes—you needed to invest in “Alter Ego: Female Version” to get the full suite of personas.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • We’re struggling to think of any other video games that came packaged with a harmonica.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • A standard Game Boy Camera hooked up to USB-C output via a customized board. VGHF used the setup to trade customized postcards for donations (see some examples in the background).

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • “EXTREME CLOSE-UP IS EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT.”

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Be the coolest beachgoer in all of Zebes with these promotional sunglasses.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • A ’90s photo of the Maxis team, including a downright baby-faced Will Wright (back row, second from left).

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • VGHF’s Phil Salvador told me that this cow was one of the top results when you searched for “’90s mousepad” on eBay.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • The brief heyday of music-based CD-ROM “multimedia” experiences is rightly forgotten by most consumers, and rightly remembered by organizations like VGHF.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Ever wonder what specific pantone swatch to use for that perfect “Joker jacket purple”? Wonder no longer!

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

SAN FRANCISCO—Trade shows like the Game Developers Conference and the (dearly departed) E3 are a great chance to see what’s coming down the pike for the game industry. But they can also be a great place to celebrate gaming’s history, as we’ve shown you with any number of on-site photo galleries in years past.

The history display tucked away in a corner of this year’s Game Developers Conference—the first one arranged by the Video Game History Foundation—was a little different. Rather than simply laying out a parcel of random collectibles, as past history-focused booths have, VGHF took a more curated approach, with mini-exhibits focused on specific topics like women in gaming, oddities of gaming music, and an entire case devoted to a little-known entry in a famous edutainment series.

Then there was the central case, devoted to the idea that all sorts of ephemera—from design docs to photos to pre-release prototypes to newsletters to promotional items—were all an integral part of video game history. The organization is practically begging developers, journalists, and fan hoarders of all stripes not to throw out even items that seem like they have no value. After all, today’s trash might be tomorrow’s important historic relic.

As we wrap up GDC (and get to work assembling what we’ve seen into future coverage), please enjoy this gallery of some of the more interesting historical specimens that the VGHF had at this year’s show.

Listing image by Kyle Orland / VGHF

Take a trip through gaming history with this charming GDC display Read More »

“we’ve-done-our-job”:-baldur’s-gate-3-devs-call-off-dlc-and-step-away-from-d&d

“We’ve done our job”: Baldur’s Gate 3 devs call off DLC and step away from D&D

Baldur's Gate 3, DLC, Dungeons and Dragons, gaming, hasbro, Larian Studios, Wizards of the Coast / /

Baldur’s Gate Closed —

Larian boss says BG3 is “a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

–

Karlach, the tiefling barbarian, infernal heart glowing, axe at her back.

Enlarge / Sometimes your infernal-engine-powered heart just isn’t in it.

Larian Studios/Hasbro

Swen Vincke, director of the colossal entity that is Baldur’s Gate 3, is not leaving the door open to future expansions of that already fully packed game.

At this week’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Vincke made it clear during a talk and in interviews that Larian Studios is not going to make any major new content for Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3)—nor start work on Baldur’s Gate 4, nor make anything, really, inside the framework of Dungeons & Dragons’ Fifth Edition (5e).

Not that Vincke or his team are bitter. Their hearts just aren’t in it. They had actually started work on BG3 downloadable content and gave some thought to Baldur’s Gate 4, Vincke told IGN. “But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong.” On top of that, the team had new ideas that didn’t fit D&D 5e, which “is not an easy system to put into a video game,” Vincke said.

“You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn’t really coming from the heart, and we’re very much a studio from the heart. It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success,” Vincke told IGN.

After returning from winter holidays, Vincke told the Larian team, “We’ve done our job. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let’s pass the torch to another studio to pick up this incredible legacy.” The team, he told IGN, was “elated.”

Onto the next act

Vincke’s enthusiasm for having determined Act 1 of “this thing I’ve been working on,” as he posted on X (formerly Twitter) in early January 2024, has some new context from this new dialogue. Larian, it seems, is working on another RPG, just not one involving a certain port city in a particular tabletop scheme.

At GDC, Vincke said Larian was “a company of big ideas… not a company that’s made to create DLCs or expansions,” according to PC Gamer’s recap. “We tried that actually, a few times. It failed every single time. It’s not our thing. Life is too short. Our ambitions are very large,” Vincke told the crowd.

As you might imagine, Larian Studios is ready to say goodbye to D&D games, but Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro almost certainly are not. As of February, BG3 had made around $90 million for Hasbro. Hasbro’s CEO followed up on that report by noting that BG3 was “just the first of several new video games that will be coming out over the next five to 10 years.”

One of those is likely to be “an innovative hybrid of survival, life simulation, and action RPG,” from the makers of the notably survival/life/RPG-like game Disney Dreamlight Valley. Gameloft Montreal pitches the game as a space where “the rich lore of this legendary franchise meets real-time survival in a unique campaign of resilience, camaraderie, and danger at nearly every turn.

It feels safe to say that you will not be able to romance Beast, Maui, or Mike Wazowski in the next big D&D game. Larian’s time in the Forgotten Realms is over, and the team is likely to have many people waiting to see where they’re going next.

“We’ve done our job”: Baldur’s Gate 3 devs call off DLC and step away from D&D Read More »

switch-emulator-suyu-hit-by-gitlab-dmca,-project-lives-on-through-self-hosting

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting

DMCA, Emulation, emulator, gaming, gitlab, Nintendo, suyu, Switch, takedown / /

They can run… —

Developer says there’s “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved in takedown.

–

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo.

While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab’s public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice “from a representative of the rightsholder.” GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project’s Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:

Suyu is based off of Yuzu code, which violates Section 1201 of the DMCA. Suyu, like yuzu, is primarily designed to circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, namely Suyu unlawfully uses unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo’s authorization. Therefore, the distribution of Suyu also constitutes unlawful trafficking of a circumvention technology.

A Suyu Discord moderator going by the handle Princess Twilight Sparkle shared a message Thursday evening citing the project’s “legal team” in reporting that Suyu will have to use the self-hosted Git repo “in the foreseeable future. Getting our GitLab back most likely needs us to go through a lawsuit, which is going to be very difficult… Thanks for your understanding.”

Troy, listed as a “Core Suyu Developer” in the Discord server, wrote Thursday afternoon that the DMCA request came from an “unknown source” and that there is “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved. “There is also a possibility that the person who sent this DMCA is a copyright troll, like on YouTube, based on the wording of the DMCA reason that was sent to GitLab,” Troy wrote.

Suyu Discord moderator and contributor Sharpie told Ars Technica that “we don’t have any more information than you at this time.”

Earlier this month, Sharpie outlined to Ars many steps the project’s developers were taking to avoid potential legal consequences, including avoiding “any monetization” and taking a hardline stance on any discussion of piracy. Despite those precautions, Sharpie admitted to Ars that “Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of.”

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting Read More »

amd-promises-big-upscaling-improvements-and-a-future-proof-api-in-fsr-3.1

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

AMD, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, dlss, fsr, fsr 3.1, gaming, GPU, intel, NVIDIA, Radeon, Tech / /

upscale upscaling —

API should help more games get future FSR improvements without a game update.

–

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

AMD

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD’s “Fluid Motion Frames,” which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1, which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available “later this year” in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia’s equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

It also means you can use FSR 3.0 frame generation with other upscalers like DLSS, especially useful for 20- and 30-series Nvidia GeForce GPUs that support DLSS upscaling but not DLSS Frame Generation.

“When using FSR 3 Frame Generation with any upscaling quality mode OR with the new ‘Native AA’ mode, it is highly recommended to be always running at a minimum of ~60 FPS before Frame Generation is applied for an optimal high-quality gaming experience and to mitigate any latency introduced by the technology,” wrote AMD’s Alexander Blake-Davies in the post announcing FSR 3.1.

Generally, FSR’s upscaling image quality falls a little short of Nvidia’s DLSS, but FSR 2 closed that gap a bit, and FSR 3.1 goes further. AMD highlights two specific improvements: one for “temporal stability,” which will help reduce the flickering and shimmering effect that FSR sometimes introduces, and one for ghosting reduction, which will reduce unintentional blurring effects for fast-moving objects.

The biggest issue with these new FSR improvements is that they need to be implemented on a game-to-game basis. FSR 3.0 was announced in August 2023, and AMD now trumpets that there are 40 “available and upcoming” games that support the technology, of which just 19 are currently available. There are a lot of big-name AAA titles in the list, but that’s still not many compared to the sum total of all PC games or even the 183 titles that currently support FSR 2.x.

AMD wants to help solve this problem in FSR 3.1 by introducing a stable FSR API for developers, which AMD says “makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.” This may eventually lead to more games getting future FSR improvements for “free,” without the developer’s effort.

AMD didn’t mention any hardware requirements for FSR 3.1, though presumably, the company will still support a reasonably wide range of recent GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. FSR 3.0 is formally supported on Radeon RX 5000, 6000, and 7000 cards, Nvidia’s RTX 20-series and newer, and Intel Arc GPUs. It will also bring FSR 3.x features to games that use the Vulkan API, not just DirectX 12, and the Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK) so it can be used in console titles as well as PC games.

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1 Read More »

playtron’s-wildly-ambitious-gaming-os-aims-to-unite-stores,-lure-“core-casuals”

Playtron’s wildly ambitious gaming OS aims to unite stores, lure “core casuals”

AOSP, asus rog ally, Cyanogen, cyanogen inc., CyanogenMod, gaming, Handheld Gaming, handheld gaming pc, Linux, Portable gaming, steam deck / /

Core Casual Corps —

Headed by former Cyanogen CEO, it’s a Linux OS that might not be fully open.

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Mock-up of a potential Playtron device

Enlarge / This isn’t what the first PlaytronOS-powered device will look like. That could be your Steam Deck, a 5G device from your cell carrier, or maybe your car.

Playtron

The Steam Deck’s OS is purpose-built for handheld gaming, but it’s confined to one device, unless you’re willing to head out to the bleeding edge. Beyond SteamOS, there is Windows, which can let down ambitious Deck-likes, there is the Nintendo Switch, and there are Android-based devices that are a lot like Android phones. This setup has got at least one company saying, in infomercial tones, that there has got to be a better way.

That company is Playtron, a new software startup that aims to fix that setup with a Linux-based gaming OS that’s tied to no particular game store or platform. Playtron has $10 million, coders from open source projects like ChimeraOS and Heroic Games Launcher, and the former CEO of Cyanogen. With that, it aims to have “Playtron-native devices shipping worldwide in 2025,” and to capture the 1 billion “core casual” gamers they see as under-served.

Demo of Playtron running on a Lenovo Legion Go, uploaded by Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster.

What devices will Playtron use to serve them? Some of them might be Steam Decks, as you will “soon be able to install Playtron on your favorite handheld PC,” according to Playtron’s ambitious, somewhat scattershot single-page website. Some might be “Playtron-powered 5G devices coming soon to markets around the world.” Really, though, Playtron aims to provide a gaming platform to any device with a CPU and a screen, be it desktop or mobile, ARM or x86, TV or car.

  • I have looked at this Venn diagram for long stretches and have still not figured out if the target is someone who is deeply into gaming or turned off by having to choose a platform or both or neither.

    Playtron

  • Additional mock-ups of hypothetical Playtron devices from Playtron’s website or possibly just Playtron logos on existing devices.

    Playtron

Sean Hollister at The Verge spoke with Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster. He has also viewed internal planning documents and tried out an alpha of the OS. McMaster told Hollister that handheld-maker Ayaneo plans to ship a Playtron device in 2024, while “numerous OEMs and mobile operators” are looking at 2025. Playtron aims to compete with Windows on price ($10 instead of what McMaster cites as $80 per head), and against Steam with a non-Steam platform that, McMaster claims, will still prevent cheating with a Fedora-Silverblue-based immutable file system. There are also some mentions of AI tools for helping casual gamers or determining launch configurations for games. Also, there are crypto-focused investors and a mention of offering crypto-based game purchases, though Playtron may also not have a store at all.

Another notable thing Playtron has is McMaster, the former head of Cyanogen Inc. That project launched in 2013 with $7 million in venture funding and an ambition to turn the free and open source-minded Android ROM community, CyanogenMod, into a for-profit OS and apps vendor. Google reportedly tried to buy Cyanogen Inc. at some point in 2014 but was turned away, as the company saw itself as growing. By the end of 2016, Cyanogen Inc. was shut down, and the Android ROM community reorganized around LineageOS. Ars’ 2016 “Deathwatch” cited McMaster’s “delusions of grandeur,” noting his claimed desire to “put a bullet in Google’s head” while maintaining an OS that was almost entirely dependent on Google’s open source Android code.

McMaster told The Verge’s Hollister that, from his time at Cyanogen Inc., he “learned that you shouldn’t try to commercialize an open-source project with a significant history because it can lead to culture wars.” There are strong hints that Playtron will not be entirely open source, though it will encourage the Linux coders it has hired to continue contributing to projects like ChimeraOS.

Playtron’s wildly ambitious gaming OS aims to unite stores, lure “core casuals” Read More »

report:-sony-stops-producing-psvr2-amid-“surplus”-of-unsold-units

Report: Sony stops producing PSVR2 amid “surplus” of unsold units

gaming, headset, PlayStation, PlayStation VR, ps5, psvr, Sony, tethered, virtual reality / /

Too many too late? —

Pricy tethered headset falters after the modest success of original PSVR.

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PSVR2 (left) next to the original PSVR.

Enlarge / PSVR2 (left) next to the original PSVR.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

It looks like Sony’s PlayStation VR2 is not living up to the company’s sales expectations just over a year after it first hit the market. Bloomberg reports that the PlayStation-maker has stopped producing new PSVR2 units as it tries to clear out a growing backlog of unsold inventory.

Bloomberg cites “people familiar with [Sony’s] plans” in reporting that PSVR2 sales have “slowed progressively” since its February 2023 launch. Sony has produced “well over 2 million” units of the headset, compared to what tracking firm IDC estimates as just 1.69 million unit shipments to retailers through the end of last year. The discrepancy has caused a “surplus of assembled devices… throughout Sony’s supply chain,” according to Bloomberg’s sources.

IDC estimates a quarterly low of 325,000 PSVR2 units shipped in the usually hot holiday season, compared to a full 1.3 million estimated holiday shipments for Meta’s then-new Quest 3 headset, which combined with other Quest products to account for over 3.7 million estimated sales for the full year.

The last of the tethered headsets?

The reported state of affairs for PSVR2 is a big change from the late 2010s when the original PlayStation VR became one of the bestselling early VR headsets simply by selling to the small, VR-curious slice of PS4 owners. At the time, the original PSVR was one of the cheapest “all-in” entry points for the nascent market of tethered VR headsets, in large part because it didn’t require a connection to an expensive, high-end gaming PC.

In the intervening years, though, the VR headset market has almost completely migrated to untethered headsets, which allow for freer movement and eliminate the need to purchase and stay near external hardware. The $550 PlayStation VR2 is also pricier than the $500 Meta Quest 3 headset, even before you add in the $500 asking price for a needed PS5. Sony’s new headset also isn’t backward compatible with games designed for the original PSVR, forcing potential upgraders to abandon most of their existing VR game libraries for the new platform.

Even before the PSVR2 launched, Sony was reportedly scaling back its ambitions for the headset (though the company denied those reports at the time and said it was “seeing enthusiasm from PlayStation fans”). And since its launch, PSVR2 has suffered from a lack of exclusive titles, featuring a lineup mostly composed of warmed-over ports long available on other headsets. An Inverse report from late last year shared a series of damning complaints from developers who have struggled to get their games to run well on the new hardware.

Put it all together, and PSVR2 seems like a too-little-too-late upgrade that has largely squandered the company’s early lead in the space. We wouldn’t be shocked if this spells the end of the line for Sony’s VR hardware plans and for mass-market tethered headsets in general.

Report: Sony stops producing PSVR2 amid “surplus” of unsold units Read More »

“you-a—holes”:-court-docs-reveal-epic-ceo’s-anger-at-steam’s-30%-fees

“You a—holes”: Court docs reveal Epic CEO’s anger at Steam’s 30% fees

epic games, gaming, Tim Sweeney, valve / /

Not just for show —

Unearthed emails show the fury that helped motivate Epic’s Games Store launch.

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Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long been an outspoken opponent of what he sees as Valve’s unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before the launch of the competing Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the “assholes” at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing “the little guy” with what he saw as inflated fees.

The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire’s price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are “no longer justifiable.” They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later.

“I bet Valve made more profit… than the developer themselves…”

The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017, starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is “anything we [are] doing to annoy you?” That query was likely prompted by Sweeney’s public tweets at the time questioning “why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB.” Later in the same thread, he laments that “the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here’s Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc.”

Expanding on these public thoughts in a private response to Newell, Sweeney allows that there was “a good case” for Steam’s 30 percent platform fee “in the early days.” But he also argues that the fee is too high now that Steam’s sheer scale has driven down operating costs and made it harder for individual games to get as much marketing or user acquisition value from simply being available on the storefront.

Calculating.... calculating... profit maximizing point found!

Enlarge / Calculating…. calculating… profit maximizing point found!

Getty / Aurich Lawson

Sweeney goes on to spitball some numbers showing how Valve’s fees are contributing to the squeeze all but the biggest PC game developers were feeling on their revenues:

If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1,000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter [user acquisition] or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990’s.”

Based on experience with Fortnite and Paragon, Sweeney estimates that the true cost of distribution for PC games that sell for $25 or more in Western markets “is under 7% of gross.” That’s only slightly lower than the 12 percent take Epic would establish for its own Epic Games Store the next year.

“Why not give ALL developers a better deal?”

The second email chain revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple’s total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court.

Years before Epic would bring its own case against Apple, Sweeney was somewhat prescient, noting that “Apple also has the resources to litigate and delay any change [to its total App Store control] for years… What we need right now is enough developer, press, and platform momentum to steer Apple towards fully opening up iOS sooner rather than later.”

To that end, Sweeney attempted to convince Valve that lowering its own platform fees would hurt Apple’s position and thereby contribute to the greater good:

A timely move by Valve to improve Steam economics for all developers would make a great difference in all of this, clearly demonstrating that store competition leads to better rates for all developers. Epic would gladly speak in support of such a move anytime!

In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam. He offered some harsh words for Valve while once again begging the company to serve as a positive example in the developing case against Apple.

Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?

After being forwarded the message by Valve’s Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic “You mad bro?”

GameDiscoverCo provides a good summary of other legal tidbits offered in the (often heavily redacted) documents published in the case file this week. Wolfire is now seeking a class-action designation in the suit with arguments that largely rehash those that we covered when the case was originally filed in 2021 (and revived in 2022). While Epic Games isn’t directly involved in those legal arguments, it seems Sweeney’s long-standing position against Valve’s monopoly might continue to factor into the case anyway.

“You a—holes”: Court docs reveal Epic CEO’s anger at Steam’s 30% fees Read More »

google’s-new-gaming-ai-aims-past-“superhuman-opponent”-and-at-“obedient-partner”

Google’s new gaming AI aims past “superhuman opponent” and at “obedient partner”

AI, deepming, gaming, Google / /
Even hunt-and-fetch quests are better with a little AI help.

Enlarge / Even hunt-and-fetch quests are better with a little AI help.

At this point in the progression of machine-learning AI, we’re accustomed to specially trained agents that can utterly dominate everything from Atari games to complex board games like Go. But what if an AI agent could be trained not just to play a specific game but also to interact with any generic 3D environment? And what if that AI was focused not only on brute-force winning but instead on responding to natural language commands in that gaming environment?

Those are the kinds of questions animating Google’s DeepMind research group in creating SIMA, a “Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent” that “isn’t trained to win, it’s trained to do what it’s told,” as research engineer Tim Harley put it in a presentation attended by Ars Technica. “And not just in one game, but… across a variety of different games all at once.”

Harley stresses that SIMA is still “very much a research project,” and the results achieved in the project’s initial tech report show there’s a long way to go before SIMA starts to approach human-level listening capabilities. Still, Harley said he hopes that SIMA can eventually provide the basis for AI agents that players can instruct and talk to in cooperative gameplay situations—think less “superhuman opponent” and more “believable partner.”

“This work isn’t about achieving high game scores,” as Google puts it in a blog post announcing its research. “Learning to play even one video game is a technical feat for an AI system, but learning to follow instructions in a variety of game settings could unlock more helpful AI agents for any environment.”

Learning how to learn

Google trained SIMA on nine very different open-world games in an attempt to create a generalizable AI agent.

To train SIMA, the DeepMind team focused on three-dimensional games and test environments controlled either from a first-person perspective or an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. The nine games in its test suite, which were provided by Google’s developer partners, all prioritize “open-ended interactions” and eschew “extreme violence” while providing a wide range of different environments and interactions, from “outer space exploration” to “wacky goat mayhem.”

In an effort to make SIMA as generalizable as possible, the agent isn’t given any privileged access to a game’s internal data or control APIs. The system takes nothing but on-screen pixels as its input and provides nothing but keyboard and mouse controls as its output, mimicking “the [model] humans have been using [to play video games] for 50 years,” as the researchers put it. The team also designed the agent to work with games running in real time (i.e., at 30 frames per second) rather than slowing down the simulation for extra processing time like some other interactive machine-learning projects.

Animated samples of SIMA responding to basic commands across very different gaming environments.

While these restrictions increase the difficulty of SIMA’s tasks, they also mean the agent can be integrated into a new game or environment “off the shelf” with minimal setup and without any specific training regarding the “ground truth” of a game world. It also makes it relatively easy to test whether things SIMA has learned from training on previous games can “transfer” over to previously unseen games, which could be a key step to getting at artificial general intelligence.

For training data, SIMA uses video of human gameplay (and associated time-coded inputs) on the provided games, annotated with natural language descriptions of what’s happening in the footage. These clips are focused on “instructions that can be completed in less than approximately 10 seconds” to avoid the complexity that can develop with “the breadth of possible instructions over long timescales,” as the researchers put it in their tech report. Integration with pre-trained models like SPARC and Phenaki also helps the SIMA model avoid having to learn how to interpret language and visual data from scratch.

Google’s new gaming AI aims past “superhuman opponent” and at “obedient partner” Read More »