Workers at Sega of America have voted to unionize. Engadget reports: In a union representation election with the National Labor Relations Board, the workers voted 91-26 in favor of their unit, which is called the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega (AEGIS-CWA). Nineteen ballots were challenged, while three were void. As a result, the group has now officially organized with the Communication Workers of America.

The unit comprises more than 200 workers in various departments across the company, including the brand marketing, games as a service, localization, marketing services, product development, sales and quality assurance teams. While it's hardly the first games union in North America, the workers say it's "the largest multi-department union of organized workers in the entire gaming industry." However, ZeniMax Workers United/CWA includes around 300 quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Studios.

AEGIS-CWA plans to push for improved base pay and benefits, more staff to "eliminate overwork patterns" and more balanced workloads. The workers are also seeking remote work options, clearly defined responsibilities for each role and more.

The Video Game History Foundation: The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak. 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better -- they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you'd have to go all the way there to watch it. It sounds crazy, but that's the reality we live in with video games, a $180 billion industry, while the games and their history disappear.

For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: seek out and maintain vintage collectible games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or... piracy. None of those options are desirable, which means that most video games are inaccessible to all but the most diehard and dedicated fans. That's pretty grim! This is where libraries and archives should come in. Anyone should be able to easily explore, research and play classic video games, in the same way that they can read classic novels, listen to classic albums, and watch classic movies. But outdated copyright laws are preventing institutions like ours from doing our jobs.

Long-time Slashdot reader Andreas(R) has an announcement: Freeciv 3D in the browser is now ready to be played by everyone on FCIV.NET! This is a version of the classic strategy game Freeciv.

The game is open source with an AGPL license, and has been in development since 2016. Freeciv 3D has the same goal as Lichess and other open source web games: creating an accessible platform for Freeciv players of all levels.

Freeciv 3D for the web has been in development for many years, and now we think the game is ready!
It's 2023, and the game now has a window where you can pose questions to ChatGPT.

In 2004, Civilization IV's lead designer answered questions from Slashdot readers.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something else: A 47MB, 272-page PDF full of confidential emails, notes, and other documents from inside a company with a rich history, a strong new competitor, and deep questions about what to do next.

The document offers glimpses, windows, and sometimes pure numbers that explain how Sega went from a company that broke Nintendo's near-monopoly in the early 1990s to giving up on consoles entirely after the Dreamcast. Enthusiasts and historians can see the costs, margins, and sales of every Sega system sold in America by 1997 in detailed business plan spreadsheets. Sega's Wikipedia page will likely be overhauled with the information contained in inter-departmental emails, like the one where CEO Tom Kalinske assures staff (and perhaps himself) that "we are killing Sony" in Japan in March 1996.

"Wish I could get our staff, sales people, retailers, analysts, media, etc. to see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually," Kalinske wrote. By September 1996, this would not be the case, and Kalinske would tender his resignation. Not all of the compilation is quite so direct or relevant. There are E3 floor plans, nitpicks about marketing campaigns, and the occasional incongruity. There is a Post-It note stuck to the front of the "Brand Strategy" folder -- "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97" -- that I will be thinking about for days.

At Nintendo's 83rd annual shareholders meeting last week, president and CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said the company is hoping for a smooth transition from the Switch to its unannounced next game console, pointing to Nintendo Accounts as being key to the generational hand-off. From a report: Nintendo has pointed to its accounts as being integral to future business in the past, as in the Nintendo Account segment of a special report it released at the end of 2021.

In response to an investor asking if the company has any specific measures in place to make the leap to a Switch successor, Furukawa pointed to the difficulty of switching customers from one console to the next, saying in the past, the company had to rebuild a relationship with its customers each time. Furukawa noted that the more than 290 million Nintendo Accounts are cross-platform and can be used with console games as well as mobile apps. To close out his answer, he said that while moving onto the company's yet-unannounced next-generation console, Nintendo would do its best to make the transition smooth for customers.

Microsoft thinks we're getting a PS5 Slim model later this year that might be priced at $399.99. From a report: The software giant is currently waiting a ruling in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing and as part of the case Microsoft has filed documents which reveal it thinks a PS5 Slim is on the way "later this year." Here's exactly what Microsoft says: "PlayStation likewise sells a less expensive Digital Edition for $399.99, and is expected to release a PlayStation 5 Slim later this year at the same reduced price point."

Apple said it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a judge's order in the antitrust case filed by Epic Games, the creator of "Fortnite." The order, issued by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, largely upheld a previous ruling that prohibits Apple from restricting developers from including links to alternative payment options in their apps, potentially reducing Apple's sales commissions. Reuters reports: Apple said in a court filing (PDF) it will ask the justices to take up its appeal of a ruling on Friday by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that kept in place most of the order issued in 2021 by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. [...] Apple's attorneys in Monday's filing said the 9th Circuit reached too far in issuing a nationwide injunction against Apple alleging that it violated a California state unfair competition law. Apple said its petition in the Supreme Court that it will raise "far-reaching and important" questions about the power of judges to issue broad injunctions.

The June Steam Survey results show that AMD CPUs have gained significant popularity among Linux gamers, with a market share of 67% -- a remarkable 7% increase from the previous month. Phoronix reports: In part that's due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD SoC but it's been a trend building for some time of AMD's increasing Ryzen CPU popularity among Linux users to their open-source driver work and continuing to build more good will with the community.

In comparison, last June the AMD CPU Linux gaming marketshare came in at 45% while Intel was at 54%. Or at the start of 2023, AMD CPUs were at a 55% marketshare among Linux gamers. Or if going back six years, AMD CPU use among Linux gamers was a mere 18% during the early Ryzen days. It's also the direct opposite on the Windows side. When looking at the Steam Survey results for June limited to Windows, there Intel has a 68% marketshare to AMD at 32%.

Beyond the Steam Deck, it's looking like AMD's efforts around open-source drivers, AMD expanding their Linux client (Ryzen) development efforts over the past two years, promises around OpenSIL, and other efforts commonly covered on Phoronix are paying off for AMD in wooing over their Linux gaming customer base.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Valve has issued a rare statement after claims it was rejecting games with AI-generated assets from its Steam games store. The notoriously close-lipped developer of the Half-Life series and de facto gatekeeper of PC gaming distribution said its policy was evolving and not a stand against AI. Steam has a review and approval process much like any app platform, and its rules on content aren't always clear until developers test them with edge cases. So it was with one indie dev who posted in a subreddit for like-minded game developers using AI, saying Valve "is no longer willing to publish games with AI generated content."

The game they had submitted had "a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated," and Valve appeared to take issue with this. "As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game," their first warning letter stated. Then, a week later: "we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. Again, while we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."

Considering most AI tools can't really claim to have legal rights to all their training data (and even if they do, it may still not be an ethical use of that data), this policy as stated basically amounts to a blanket ban on AI-generated assets in games. [...] If the creators can't realistically claim copyright over their own work, Valve has deemed the risk of publishing that work too high. As such, Valve responded to Eurogamer to say that, basically, their policy is more "what's legally required" than any particular stance on AI. "We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies," Valve said. "Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

Source code for the original Far Cry, released back in 2004, has popped up online. From a report: Entitled "Far Cry 1.34 Complete", the game's code was uploaded to the internet archive site Archive.org at the end of June, as highlighted by well-known modder Vinicius Medeiros It's unclear if the code includes any subsequent patches -- although the .34 part of the 1.34 title certainly suggests so -- and some commenters who've presumably downloaded and run the code believe the code is "not complete, but close."

VentureBeat is enjoying "secrets that spilled out" in the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard antitrust hearings. "Whether the Federal Trade Commission wins its antitrust case or not, its attempt to stop Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has revealed a trove of new data for everyone." The FTC has argued in a federal court that the merger would harm competition in the game industry and be bad for consumers, as Microsoft could pull Activision Blizzard's games like Call of Duty away from the Sony PlayStation, despite Microsoft's stated intention of not doing so for at least 10 years. In this case, the FTC might not have had an obvious winning hand, as the industry has an odd situation. Microsoft has the highest value ($104 billion in cash alone, versus $13.4 billion for Sony) at $2.49 trillion as a company compared to $115 billion for Sony, and yet it is in third place behind Sony and Nintendo.

Hence, there's some significance to Microsoft's Xbox first-party head, Matt Booty, sending an ill-advised email in 2019 saying Microsoft "has the ability to spend Sony out of business." That was long before the deal was announced 17 months ago, but it could be used as a sign of intent. Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy. While competing fiercely is fine, using monopoly power to drive a rival out of business so you can raise prices later is a no-no...

Did the FTC prove its case? I can't say just yet. Microsoft makes a decent point in saying all the regulators of the world except the U.S. and the United Kingdom have approved the deal. But I hope to have more reasons to binge on popcorn.
In January Ars Technica noted Microsoft's contract set July 18th as the deadline for closing the deal — or else paying a $3 billion "breakup fee". The Verge spotted that some of Sony's documents were poorly redacted. While looking at the lines that were crossed out with black pens, they could see that The Last of Us Part 2 cost the company $220 million to make, with 200 people working on it, while Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make, with 300 working on it for over five years. Both games made considerably more money... In the unSharpied documents, Sony also revealed that a million Call of Duty players spent 100% of their time playing Call of Duty in 2021. It also said that Call of Duty generated $800 million for PlayStation in 2021 alone in the U.S. and perhaps $1.5 billion globally. It also looks like Sony's exclusive marketing deal with Activision for Call of Duty will expire in late 2023. Sony went on to say half of PS5 owners also have a Nintendo Switch.

Microsoft also failed to redact some of its acquisition targets. Those were later marked up, but not before Axios noted that the list included Thunderful, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Playrix, Zynga, Bungie, Square Enix, Warner Bros., Sega, IO Interactive and Scopely... Among the secrets revealed among the companies Microsoft acquired: Microsoft bought Ninja Theory, maker of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for $117 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ole_timer for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Pokemon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees. During last year's layoffs, Niantic canceled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Store, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World; the company will also cancel production on a game based on the Marvel franchise. "In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively," CEO John Hanke wrote in an email to employees, cross-posted to the company blog.

This has been a common refrain among the hundreds of tech companies that have conducted layoffs over the last year -- companies claimed they overhired during the pandemic and now need to right-size their teams. In Niantic's case, Hanke said that revenue has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and new projects have not delivered as much revenue as they would have hoped. One such new project is Peridot, a Tamagotchi-like mobile game. Niantic's first attempt at original IP since Ingress, Peridot launched in May. But according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Peridot has only made $1.4 million in gross in-app purchase revenue thus far. [...] Pokemon GO is Niantic's cash cow, pulling in more than $1 billion in in-app purchases each year since 2020. But players have also been feeling slighted by Niantic's in-app purchase system. [...]

Though games like Peridot have not yet proved financially sustainable, Niantic has an entire business arm separate from its own games. Niantic's Lightship AR developer kit makes it possible for any developer who knows how to use Unity to make AR games. Developers also have access to Niantic's impressive visual positioning system (VPS), which lets users interact with local landmarks in their real-world surroundings. Hanke even mentioned in his note to employees that the company wants to ramp up its focus on building for mixed-reality devices and AR glasses. So, if Niantic can't seem to make a successful follow-up to Pokemon GO, maybe its developer tools can keep the company on the right track.

Valve has reportedly started banning Steam games featuring AI-created art assets, unless developers can prove they have rights to the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create them. From a report: In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build. In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights.

"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game."

Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove all content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it. The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected. "We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights," Valve said. "At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games. From a report: It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie -- but when you scan them in, it's easy to see some of the redactions. Oops. The court has scrambled to remove the document, but the damage is done; reporters and Sony's competition have already downloaded all the documents while they were in the public domain. Among other things, the document shows that Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees, and The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million with around 200 employees.

It's not just how much games cost to make that's been revealed here, either. Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. My colleague Sean Hollister has analyzed the document, and it appears to show: "In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise."

Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money on acquiring game content in 2019 to set the company up to battle Sony in subscriptions. From a report: The revelation comes in an email thread that's part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go spend Sony out of business," said Booty in a December 2019 email, referencing spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to avoid competitors getting ahead in content at a later date.

"It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point," said Booty, referencing competitors like Google, Amazon, and Sony. Booty described content as a moat and that only Sony could really compete with Xbox Game Pass: "In games, Google is 3 to 4 years away from being able to have a studio up and running. Amazon has shown no ability to execute on game content. Content is the one moat that we have, in terms of a catalog that runs on current devices and capability to create new. Sony is really the only other player who could compete with Game Pass and we have a 2 year and 10 million subs lead."

Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.

Blizzard's Battle.net online service was the target of an apparent DDoS attack, "since at least the early hours of Sunday morning," reports Engadget, "making it difficult, if not impossible, to play Diablo IV, World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles." It was just 20 minutes ago that they tweeted that the DDOS attacks "have ended."

Engadget notes Blizzard's customer support account had tweeted at 10:24AM EST, "We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDoS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games." When players launched Battle.net on PC, a notification warned "We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players..."

On Reddit, some players reported they hadn't been able to play Blizzard's latest game for at least 10 to 12 hours.

Engadget predicts, "At the very least, you can bet this incident will likely renew calls for Blizzard to add an offline mode to Diablo IV."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sony's PlayStation chief, Jim Ryan, believed that Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard wasn't about locking games as Xbox exclusives, according to a newly unsealed email. Microsoft counsel revealed the exchange between Ryan and Chris Deering, former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, discussing the announcement of the deal last year. "It is not an exclusivity play at all," said Ryan. "They're thinking bigger than that and they have the cash to make moves like this. I've spent a fair amount of time with both Phil [Spencer] Bobby [Kotick] over the past day and I'm pretty sure we will continue to see Call of Duty on PlayStation for many years to come."

The surprise revelation runs counter to Sony's arguments against Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal and its filings with regulators. Sony has maintained it fears Microsoft could make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox or even sabotage the PlayStation versions of the game. Ryan went on to say, "We have some good stuff cooking," referring to Sony's Bungie acquisition which Sony announced just days after the email exchange. "I'm not complacent, and I'd rather this hadn't happened, but we'll be OK, we'll be more than OK." Microsoft initially offered Call of Duty on PlayStation for three years after the current agreement between Activision and Sony ends. Ryan called that offer "inadequate on many levels." Microsoft eventually offered Sony a 10-year deal for Call of Duty on PlayStation, but the company has refused to sign this so far.

According to a report (PDF) from the Los Angeles City Tourism Commission, E3 has been canceled in LA in 2024 and 2025. The Verge reports: Apparently, the city does not expect E3 to return in 2024 or 2025. This news seems at odds with the messaging from E3's organizers, ReedPop and the ESA. Earlier this year, the ESA -- the trade organization that runs E3 -- announced it was partnering with ReedPop, the entertainment company that runs large fan conventions like New York Comic-Con and Penny Arcade Expo, to run E3 2023. After the covid-19 pandemic shuttered in-person events between 2020 and 2022, 2023 was meant to mark the in-person return of the video game industry's biggest event of the year.

However, E3 2023 was canceled, with ReedPop global vice president of gaming Kyle Marsden-Kish stating the reason why was out of consideration that publishers wouldn't have game demos or reels available in time. But if E3 2024 and 2025 are also canceled, it suggests there is something else preventing E3's return or that its organizers are considering moving it out of Los Angeles. [...] The press release announcing E3 2023's cancellation hinted that ESA and ReedPop would work on future E3 events. In an email to The Verge, the ESA wrote, "ESA is currently having conversations about E3 2024 (and beyond), and no final decisions about the event have been made at this time."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The courtroom showdown between the FTC and Microsoft over the tech company's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard kicked off this morning. First announced in early 2022, the pending transaction has been scrutinized by various global regulatory bodies. Xbox has frantically worked to appease their concerns. While addressing its potentially dominant position, Microsoft lamented its third-place position and admitted defeat in the ongoing "console wars."

Part of Microsoft's current legal strategy is demonstrating the domineering lead PlayStation and Nintendo have established in the gaming industry. Xbox entered the market in 2001, and according to Microsoft's own documentation, their consoles have been outperformed by Nintendo and Sony by a "significant margin." Despite hard-fought success in the Xbox 360 generation and notable financial gain in recent quarters, Xbox claims it's never stopped "losing the console wars." As it stands, Xbox is confidently one of "big three" players in the console market, alongside PlayStation and Nintendo. However, Microsoft states its market share is trailing notably behind the most prominent competition.