Scientific American reports: To hurtle around a corner along the fastest "racing line" without losing control, race car drivers must brake, steer and accelerate in precisely timed sequences. The process depends on the limits of friction, and they are governed by known physical laws — which means self-driving cars can learn to complete a lap at the fastest possible speed (as some have already done). But this becomes a much knottier problem when the automated driver has to share space with other cars. Now scientists have unraveled the challenge virtually by training an artificial intelligence program to outpace human competitors at the ultrarealistic racing game Gran Turismo Sport. The findings could point self-driving car researchers toward new ways to make this technology function in the real world.

Artificial intelligence has already conquered human players within certain video games, such as Starcraft II and Dota 2. But Gran Turismo differs from other games in significant ways, says Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and co-author of the new study, which was published this week in Nature. "In most games, the environment defines the rules and protects the users from each other," he explains. "But in racing, the cars are very close to each other, and there's a very refined sense of etiquette that has to be learned and deployed by the [AI] agents. In order to win, they have to be respectful of their opponents, but they also have to preserve their own driving lines and make sure that they don't just give way."

To teach their program the ropes, the Sony AI researchers used a technique called deep reinforcement learning. They rewarded the AI for certain behaviors, such as staying on the track, remaining in control of the vehicle and respecting racing etiquette. Then they set the program loose to try different ways of racing that would enable it to achieve those goals. The Sony AI team trained multiple different versions of its AI, dubbed Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy), each specialized in driving one particular type of car on one particular track. Then the researchers pitted the program against human Gran Turismo champions. In the first test, conducted last July, humans achieved the highest overall team score. On the second run in October 2021, the AI broke through. It beat its human foes both individually and as a team, achieving the fastest lap times....

"The lines the AI was using were so tricky, I could probably do them once. But it was so, so difficult — I would never attempt it in a race," says Emily Jones, who was a world finalist at the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2020 and later raced against GT Sophy.... "Racing, like a lot of sports, is all about getting as close to the perfect lap as possible, but you can never actually get there," Jones says. "With Sophy, it was crazy to see something that was the perfect lap. There was no way to go any faster."
The article notes that Sony AI is now working with Gran Turismo's developer (the Sony Interactive Entertainment subsidiary Polyphony Digital) to potentially incorporate a version of their AI into a future update of the game. "To do this, the researchers would need to tweak the AI's performance so it can be a challenging opponent but not invincible..."

Liliputing reports: When Valve's Steam Deck begins shipping to customers later this month, the handheld gaming PC will be running a Linux-based operating system called Steam OS. And that could give gaming on Linux a bit of a boost.

While Valve's game client has been able to run on Linux for years, as of last month just over 1% of Steam users were running Linux (and fewer than 3% were using macOS, with Windows holding a 96% share). It'll be interesting to see if that starts to change once the Steam Deck hits the streets. And if it does, maybe we'll see more game makers add support for Linux... but one of the most popular games around isn't going to add Linux support anytime soon: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company has no plans to port Fortnite to Linux.

He says it's because Epic doesn't "have confidence that we'd be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones," but it's an interesting take since Epic has already ported its anti-cheat software to support Mac and Linux devices including the Steam Deck.

A U.S. district judge "sentenced a Nintendo Switch hacker to 40 months in federal prison," reports the Independent: Gary Bowser, 52, is one of the leaders of the "Team Xecuter" hacker criminal enterprise, a notorious video game piracy gang, authorities said. The gang sold software to hack and download stolen games to various consoles. Besides the Nintendo Switch console, Team Xecuter also targeted the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic and Microsoft's Xbox.

Bowser, a Canadian citizen, was the public face of the group and handled Team Xecuter's public relations and operated its websites. He was arrested in October 2020 in the Dominican Republic and extradited to the US to stand trial in New Jersey. He pleaded guilty in October 2021 to two criminal counts — conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, and trafficking in circumvention devices. As part of his plea deal, Bowser agreed to pay $4.5m in restitution to Nintendo.

Federal agents said that he caused a loss of about $65m (about £48m) to gaming companies.
"The hacking group was initially adamant that its hardware and software modifications that circumvented copyright protections were intended for homebrew application development, not to enable users to steal software..." notes Hot Hardware.

"Following the guilty plea, Bowser settled a civil lawsuit with Nintendo to the tune of $10 million, on top of the $4.5 million in restitution he already owed."

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army released America's Army, a video game meant as a recruitment tool. "The free-to-play tactical shooter was wildly successful, reaching 20 million players," reports Fast Company. "But come May 5, the servers will be shut down -- and America's Army will surrender to the forces of time." From the report: To date, no industry has embraced games as warmly as the military, though. America's Army, for example, started with an initial budget of $7 million of your tax dollars at play -- and quickly grew from there. Recognizing that players know a quality title when they see one (and ignore and ridicule poor-quality efforts), it assembled a team of proven developers and bought a license for the Unreal Engine, which was (and remains) one of the premier game engines on the market. America's Army was only supposed to be a seven-year project, but its success encouraged the Defense Department to stay with the game, with the Pentagon spending more than $3 million a year to evolve and promote it -- a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $8 billion recruiting budget.

How well did it work? A 2008 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30% of all Americans ages 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." The end of America's Army is hardly the end of the military's use of games as recruiting tools. The Army has its own Twitch channel (with more than 23,000 followers) and has an e-sports team that competes at tournaments -- with recruiters in tow.

Isolation rooms, fears of positive Covid-19 tests and the absence of cheering crowds are squeezing all the joy from the Beijing Games. From a report: On the day Team USA flag bearer Elana Meyers Taylor was supposed to march her country into the Olympic Stadium, she was in a Chinese isolation hotel. She had tested positive for Covid-19 and watched the Opening Ceremony on TV in a room she wasn't allowed to leave. Ms. Meyers Taylor was one of the lucky ones. She has since recovered and is scheduled to compete as one of the medal favorites in two bobsled events. In the gloom of the Beijing Winter Olympics, luck is a relative term. The Games are supposed to be an ebullient, global sporting bonanza, but they have never felt so downbeat. Rather than "Faster, Higher, Stronger -- Together," the Olympic motto, the Beijing Games so far have been sadder and quieter.

Olympians compete in nearly empty arenas without friends or family. Some wear N95 masks, in practice and even in competition, to limit the risk of infection. The rest live with the daily fear of testing positive, being sent to isolation and watching years of training slip away. Natalia Maliszewska, a short-track speedskater from Poland, was awoken at 3 a.m. one night this week, before she was set to compete, and transported to isolation before learning that authorities had made a mistake. It later turned out that she had tested positive and was returned to isolation. "To me, this is a big joke," Ms. Maliszewska said. "I hope whoever is managing this has a lot of fun. My heart and my mind can't take this anymore." The usual stresses, strains and tolls of competing at the Games have been amplified by a pandemic that has shrunk the event to fit into a suffocating bubble. American figure skater Vincent Zhou felt a sense of desperation from inside his isolation hotel room this week after he tested positive for Covid-19. With his chance to compete now over -- he skated in the team event but missed his individual event -- he was awaiting the two negative PCR tests that would return his freedom.

Japanese tech giant Sony revealed this week that it has trained the toughest-ever opponent for the race-car simulator Gran Turismo -- a champion that can beat top-class e-sports drivers at their own games. From a report: Forged on the battlegrounds of over 1,000 PlayStation 4 consoles, the AI racer-bot has grown smart enough to identify optimal course routes and can execute skilled tactical maneuvers to pass or block competitors, even in vehicular scrum. It does so with ruthless effectiveness -- while still respecting the human etiquette of the game, Sony claims. The company published research on its brainchild -- dubbed Gran Turismo Sophy -- in Nature journal this week. The development process paired "state-of-the-art, model-free, deep reinforcement learning algorithms with mixed-scenario training to learn an integrated control policy that combines exceptional speed with impressive tactics," it said. "In addition, we construct a reward function that enables the agent to be competitive while adhering to racing's important, but under-specified, sportsmanship rules."

In a media-broadcast demonstration, Sophy bested four of the world's top Gran Turismo drivers in head-to-head contests, proving the tech's superiority to mere mortals. But Sophy's aspiration was never to crush humanity's spirits or to leave it feeling defeated. On the contrary, it was meant to spark fresh excitement in e-sports, especially among elite players who felt they had no challenge left to answer. "I feel frustrated, that never happened before battling with an AI," Tomoaki Yamanaka, one of the four racers, said after the loss. "I drove like I would drive against a human. That's a really amazing thing."

Ubisoft's ongoing NFT odyssey continues to bewilder and demoralize not just longtime fans but also its own developers. The company recently held another workshop aimed specifically at addressing the concerns of skeptical employees, yet also started giving out special NFTs to some members of the Ghost Recon team to "celebrate" the series' 20th anniversary. From a report: One developer likened it to the staff saying "We hate this crypto stuff," and Ubisoft responding with, "OK, come get some." Last week, VP of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab, Nicolas Pouard, claimed in an interview that players' overwhelmingly negative reaction to the company's NFT rollout was because "they don't get it." His remark was roundly derided on social media, but also by some within the company, according to posts from Ubisoft's internal communications platform viewed by Kotaku. In addition to disagreeing with Pouard's position, they expressed frustration over the company's continued botched messaging around the controversial tech.

"They don't get it" was also the tone of a recent internal Q&A with the Quartz team aimed at addressing skeptical employees, sources familiar with the event told Kotaku. (Quartz is the name of Ubisoft's recently introduced proprietary crypto platform.) Instead, it bolstered some developers' concerns about security vulnerabilities in the Quartz technology and its lack of interesting design possibilities. Pouard and other blockchain proponents have pitched scenarios in which cosmetic items can follow players between games. That's not something current Quartz NFTs are set up to do, however, and according to sources, Pouard admitted internally that the "interoperability" question remains unanswered. In the meantime, the core use-case for Quartz NFTs remains in-game hats.

A Russian court has sentenced three Siberian teenagers for terrorism Thursday for activities including plotting to blow up a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building in the popular online game Minecraft. From a report: Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko and Bogdan Andreyev from Kansk, a town in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, were arrested in June 2020 for hanging up political leaflets on the local FSB office that included slogans such as "the FSB is the main terrorist" and support for Azat Miftakhov, an anarchist who was sentenced to six years in prison. All three suspects were 14 at the time of their arrest. The Eastern Military Court in Krasnoyarsk found Uvarov, Mikhailenko and Andreyev guilty of "undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities" on Thursday. Uvarov was sentenced to five years in a penal colony, while Mikhailenko and Andreyev were handed three and four-year suspended sentences.

Microsoft executives are warming up regulators to their proposed acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard in Washington by pledging a future that includes an open, "universal" app store. From a report: On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a set of "Open App Store Principles" the company says will apply to the Microsoft Store on Windows and the next generation of its marketplaces for games. [...] Seven of those principles center around security, privacy, quality, safety, accountability, fairness and transparency, and the company says it is committing to those principles starting today. The four remaining principles would change how developers use app stores by not requiring developers to use Microsoft's payment system, not giving its app store more favorable terms, not disadvantaging developers who use a different payment system and not preventing developers from communicating directly with customers.

Players generate a wealth of revealing psychological data -- and some companies are soaking it up. From a report: While there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveilling their players in-game (although, as a recent article suggests, large publishers and developers like Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state they capture user data in their license agreements), a new industry of firms selling middleware "data analytics" tools, often used by game developers, has sprung up. These data analytics tools promise to make users more amenable to continued consumption through the use of data analysis at scale.

Such analytics, once available only to the largest video game studios -- which could hire data scientists to capture, clean, and analyze the data, and software engineers to develop in-house analytics tools -- are now commonplace across the entire industry, pitched as "accessible" tools that provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace by companies like Unity, GameAnalytics, or Amazon Web Services. (Although, as a recent study shows, the extent to which these tools are truly "accessible" is questionable, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.) As demand for data-driven insight has grown, so have the range of different services -- dozens of tools in the past several years alone, providing game developers with different forms of insight. One tool -- essentially Uber for playtesting -- allows companies to outsource quality assurance testing, and provides data-driven insight into the results. Another supposedly uses AI to understand player value and maximize retention (and spending, with a focus on high-spenders).

Developers might use data from these middleware companies to further refine their game (players might be getting overly frustrated and dying at a particular point, indicating the game might be too difficult) or their monetization strategies (prompting in-app purchases -- such as extra lives -- at such a point of difficulty). But our data is not just valuable to video game companies in fine-tuning design. Increasingly, video game companies exploit this data to capitalize user attention through targeted advertisements. As a 2019 eMarketer report suggests, the value of video games as a medium for advertising is not just in access to large-scale audience data (such as the Unity ad network's claim to billions of users), but through ad formats such as playable and rewarded advertisements -- that is, access to audiences more likely to pay attention to an ad.

Nintendo's latest financial report to investors, issued as an overview of its fiscal year's third quarter, came with a momentous announcement for the veteran video game and console producer: Switch has joined the 100 million-worldwide-sales club. From a report: What's more, Switch's current tally of 103.5 million means the device has leapfrogged over both the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Wii in terms of sales. The count makes the Switch Nintendo's highest-selling home console of all time. While Sony's PS4 and PS2 console families continue to hold higher sales counts, neither got to the 100 million mark as quickly as Switch, which only needed 57 months to do so (March 2017 to December 2021). The only console family to get to the 100 million-global-sales mark faster is Nintendo's own portable DS platform, which needed only 51 months. The DS, which came out in 2004, launched at a lower $149 price point and went lower from there, while Switch has never sold for less than $199. In a statement to investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa affirmed that the Switch console, as it nears its fifth anniversary, is "in the middle of its lifecycle." Furukawa said nearly the exact same thing a few months earlier when Switch crossed the 90 million-sales mark.

Rockstar Games recently acknowledged the "unprecedented longevity" of Grand Theft Auto V (and its online component Grand Theft Auto Online) — and confirmed their working on the next new game for the series.

But Forbes argues "The success of GTA Online itself may end up fundamentally changing the way Rockstar makes this series going forward..." The success of Grand Theft Auto 5 has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for Rockstar, making zillions from the success of GTA Online, and for those deeply invested in that world which has continually gotten new expansions and additions. But a curse for those waiting for GTA 6, as Rockstar is now about to release GTA 5 across three different generations, cementing its massive lead as the best-selling game in history, endlessly delaying a true sequel. Now, however, Rockstar has finally stated the obvious, they are working on the next GTA game, which we're all calling GTA 6, but Rockstar stops short of saying number that outright....

I don't know if we can say for sure if this is going to be GTA 6 specifically, either the name or the concept.... I can imagine a "new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series" being a massive game that is perhaps online from the start, including for its base campaign. And not to use the "m" word, but there are less compelling metaverses than what GTA Online has become, and Rockstar may want to lean into that even further to try to get ahead of competition trying to make their own virtual worlds. As such, I could see a future that blends a traditional numbered GTA sequel and GTA Online, and who knows what that would be called ("GTA World?" "GTA Infinite?"). Just saying, it may not be "GTA 6," exactly.

Google is trying to salvage its failing Stadia game service with a new focus on striking deals with Peloton, Bungie, and others under the brand "Google Stream." Business Insider reports: When Google announced last year that it was shutting down its internal gaming studios, it was seen as a blow to the company's big bet on video games. Google, whose Stadia cloud service was barely more than a year old, said it would instead focus on publishing games from existing developers on the platform and explore other ways to bring Stadia's technology to partners. Since then, the company has shifted the focus of its Stadia division largely to securing white-label deals with partners that include Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, according to people familiar with the plans.

Google is trying to salvage the underlying technology, which is capable of broadcasting high-definition games over the cloud with low latency, shopping the technology to partners under a new name: Google Stream. (Stadia was known in development as "Project Stream.") The Stadia consumer platform, meanwhile, has been deprioritized within Google, insiders said, with a reduced interest in negotiating blockbuster third-party titles. The focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream, people involved in those conversations said. The changes demonstrate a strategic shift in how Google, which has invested heavily in cloud services, sees its gaming ambitions.

Google has continued to prop up the Stadia consumer platform with a steady stream of titles. After Google closed Stadia's internal game studios, known as Stadia Games & Entertainment, insiders said the directive was to build out what was internally dubbed a "content flywheel" -- a steady flow of independent titles and content from existing publishing deals that would be much more affordable than securing AAA blockbusters, two former employees familiar with the conversations said. "The key thing was that they would not be spending the millions on the big titles," one said. "And exclusives would be out of the question." Executives and employees for the Stadia product have also shifted roles. Phil Harrison, the former PlayStation executive Google tapped to run its gaming operations, now reports to the company's head of subscriptions. Patrick Seybold, a Google spokesperson, told Insider in a statement: "We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that. The first manifestation has been our partnership with AT&T who is offering Batman: Arkham Knight available to their customers for free. While we won't be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro."

"Steam Deck Verified list is ramping up!" writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, sharing a breakdown of some notable stats via a Neowin article: As of this writing, there are 136 Steam Deck Verified titles, which will alone give Steam Deck the largest launch library of any console, ever. In fact, at this time yesterday the Steam Deck Verified list was at 99 titles. This means there has been over a 30% jump in verified titles overnight. Let's look at the breakdown.

Of the 136 verified titles, 64 of them were developed with Unity. That could be an indication of how popular the engine is, but in all of Steam there are 26,142 titles that use it, out of 110,014. That's less than a quarter of all titles. But what about publishers? Square Enix tops this list and the top developers list, but not by a lot. Of the verified games, nine are published by Square, while five are published and developed by them. Among those titles is the awesome Power Wash simulator, which has a whopping 95.26% user rating. Neowin also notes that 48 of the verified titles "have been released since 2021" and over a third "have been released within the last 14 months."

The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures." The newspaper says it'll remain "free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay." From the report: Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created the game as a gift for his partner. It was released to the public in October, and it exploded in popularity in a matter of months. Ninety people played the game on Nov. 1, Mr. Wardle said. Nearly two months later, 300,000 people played it. To play the game, people are required to guess a predetermined five-letter word in six tries. The yellow and green squares indicate that the Wordle player has guessed a correct letter, or a combined correct letter and placement. The buzz around the game can be attributed to the spoiler-free scoring grid that allows players to share their Wordle wins across social media, group chats and more. The game's creator, Josh Wardle, announced the sale in a tweet, writing: "If you've followed along with the story of Wordle, you'll know that NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me."

He adds: "I've long admired the NYT's approach to their games and the respect with which they treat their players. Their values are aligned with mine on these matters and I'm thrilled that they will be stewards of the game moving forward."

Sony Group is purchasing Bungie, the U.S. video game developer behind the popular Destiny franchise, for $3.6 billion to bolster its stable of game-making studios. From a report: The deal announced on Monday is the third significant video-game acquisition announced this month, following Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion two weeks ago and Take Two Interactive snagging mobile game leader Zynga on Jan. 10. Buying Bungie will give Sony one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with the massive Call of Duty series, which Sony's main rival now owns through Activision.

IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders.

It's about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens... The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. "The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked," he explained. "The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone."

Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — "which roughly adds up to one game per earthling."
But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. One hobbyist used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that's just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters).

Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, "Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz," reports the projects site Hackster.io, "which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet."

Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to "explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level," according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also "allow us to reimagine the game as we know it...."

"For example, the 'castling' move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?"

AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different "variants" of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variations tested:

- Castling is no longer allowed
- Castling is only allowed after the 10th move
- Pawns can only move one square
- Stalemates are a win for the attacking side (rather than a draw)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn (and can also be captured en passant if they do)
- Pawns have the option of moving two squares -- but only when they're in the second or third row of squares. (After which they can be captured en passant )
- Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square).
- Pawns can also move sideways by one square.
- It's possible to capture your own pieces.


"The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess."

AlphaZero's ability to continually improve its understanding of the game, and reach superhuman playing strength in classical chess and Go, lends itself to the question of assessing chess variants and potential variants of other board games in the future. Provided only with the implementation of the rules, it is possible to effectively simulate decades of human experience in a day, opening a window into top-level play of each variant. In doing so, computer chess completes the circle, from the early days of pitting man vs. machine to a collaborative present of man with machine, where AI can empower players to explore what chess is and what it could become....

The combination of human curiosity and a powerful reinforcement learning system allowed us to reimagine what chess would have looked like if history had taken a slightly different course. When the statistical properties of top-level AlphaZero games are compared to classical chess, a number of more decisive variants appear, without impacting the diversity of plausible options available to a player....

Taken together, the statistical properties and aesthetics provide evidence that some variants would lead to games that are at least as engaging as classical chess. "Chess's role in artificial intelligence research is far from over..." their article concludes, arguing that AI "can provide the evidence to take reimagining to reality."

There may still be cabinets in rows with flashing lights and electronic sounds — but Polygon reports a historic change in the world of videogame arcades: Even though arcades all over the world have been in a steady decline over the past 20 years, owing to the ubiquity of console and PC gaming, they've kept a fairly major place in Japan's gaming culture. However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, even Japan's arcades started to falter. In late 2020 Sega sold 85% of its shares in the company's arcades, which are run by the Sega Entertainment division, to Genda. Now, as new variants of COVID-19 crop up and the arcade business continues to struggle, Sega has sold the remaining shares to Genda as well, according to Eurogamer and Tojodojo.

Sega's arcades will be renamed GiGO throughout Japan, according to a tweet from Genda chief executive Takashi Kataoka.
"It's worth noting that although Sega's Entertainment business ran its arcade locations, the company manufactured and sold arcade machines themselves separately and will likely continue to do so," reports Video Games Chronicle.

And "While it is sad to see an era of Sega's history come to an end, this doesn't mean Sega will stop making actual arcade games," notes the Metro, which points out that Sega "has continued to supply arcades with new games right up to the present day."

But Syfy Wire notes the news comes "after a remarkable 56 years maintaining a coin-operated gaming presence from its native Japan." In memory Eurogamer shared it editor-in-chief's posts about visiting Tokyo's iconic arcade and anime district Akihabara.

It's official: Valve's Steam Deck gaming portable will go on sale starting February 25th. The Verge reports: According to the company's blog, customers who have reservations will get an email on that day and have three days to place an order. Valve also says that it'll release new batches on a weekly basis, so if you've got a reservation, March will be the time to keep an eye on your email.

Here's some more info from Valve's announcement: "We will start sending invites shortly after 10:00 am on February 25th, PST. Order emails are sent in the same order that reservations were made. You can only order the Steam Deck model that you originally reserved. Your reservation deposit will be applied to the final price of Steam Deck, and shipping costs are included." Valve says that the orders placed on the 25th will start shipping out on the 28th.