Valve just announced that Counter-Strike 2, made in Source Engine 2, will be released in Summer 2023. From a report: Accompanying the announcement, Valve also released three videos teasing what to expect in the Counter-Strike's massive and transformative update. Leveling up the World shows off the upgraded maps and overhauls, Moving Beyond Tick Rate announces that tick rate will no longer matter (moving and shooting will be "equally responsive"), and Responsive Smokes details the new "dynamic volumetric" nature of smoke grenades.

On March 27th, Nintendo's eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles will be shut down. With many of the titles being original to those consoles and not available anywhere else, it's left archivists and historians scrambling to preserve them before it's too late. However, those preservation plans get complicated given Nintendo's litigious nature on matters of intellectual property. Techdirt's Timothy Geigner writes: Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern: "While it's unfortunate that people won't be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,' the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. 'What we don't understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.'"

Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don't exist for the video game space. [...] So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it: "In an effort to address this -- or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible -- YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries. He's now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks."

As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.

Roblox is launching its first set of generative AI game creation tools: Code Assist and Material Generator. Engadget reports: Although neither tool is anywhere close to generating a playable Roblox experience from a text description, Head of Roblox Studio Stef Corazza told an audience at GDC 2023 that they can "help automate basic coding tasks so you can focus on creative work." For now, that means being able to generate useful code snippets and object textures based on short prompts. Roblox's announcement for the tools offers a few examples, generating realistic textures for a "bright red rock canyon" and "stained glass," or producing several lines of functional code that will that make certain objects change color and self-destruct after a player interacts with them.

Code Assist looks promising, but Roblox is careful to state it's imperfect, and may generate "incorrect" or "misleading" information. "It is still up to you to review, test, and determine if the code suggestion is contextually appropriate." Even so, Roblox's Corazza seems confident that this is the first step towards making every user on the platform a creator, suggesting it may only be a few years before these tools can generate fully playable, interactive 3D scenes from a simple prompt.

Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners. The company also has 16 games currently being developed by its in-house game studios. Netflix launched games in November 2021 and has released 55 titles since then. From a report: The streaming service says it's committed to building out its games portfolio and will be bringing Ustwo's Monument Valley franchise to its platform, starting with Monument Valley 1 and Monument Valley 2, with more to come. In a briefing with reporters, Ustwo CEO Maria Sayans confirmed that the Netflix versions of the games won't be different than the current available versions, and that they will include all paid in-app purchases.

The streaming service also announced that Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace, a rogue-lite game set in the universe some may remember from The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, will be launching in April 18. The game, which is from Ubisoft, features an improved formula, deepened narrative and upgraded frantic action gameplay. The launch is part of Netflix's partnership with Ubisoft, and is the second of three exclusive games from the developer to be released on Netflix. The first exclusive game, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, launched in January.

The open-source, cross-platform Godot Engine has arrived in the Epic Games store. "Starting today, you can choose to use EGS to download the engine and keep it up to date with every release," writes the company in a blog post. From the release: Epic Games is a long-time supporter of Godot, and thanks to their contributions we have been able to improve our rendering pipeline as well as our built-in scripting language, GDScript -- the fruits of that work are now visible in the newly released Godot 4.0!

The Godot build you can download from EGS is the exact same open source release as on other platforms. Being present on more storefronts opens a new convenient avenue for more users to find the engine and begin their game development journey. You can of course still download Godot Engine from other platforms, or clone its source code from the Git repository and build it yourself. And if you do, you are more than welcome to contribute to Godot's development too!

Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time -- and now it's coming to mobile for the first time. From a report: In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form. In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year.

The video reveals that the app was built using Unity -- in part to make for an easy path to releasing and maintaining the app on multiple platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets. It also includes a few minutes of footage of Second Life's detailed character models and environments, with accompanying commentary by Linden Lab developers about bringing as much of the experience to mobile as possible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has signed a 10-year deal to bring its Xbox PC games to little-known Ukraine-based streaming platform Boosteroid. The move is being positioned in part to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. "If the only argument is that Microsoft is going to withhold Call of Duty from other platforms, and we've now entered into contracts that are going to bring this to many more devices and many more platforms, that is a pretty hard case to make to a court," Smith told The Wall Street Journal.

Started in 2017, Boosteroid boasts 4 million streaming customers using servers based in nine European countries and six US states. Those customers pay 7.50 euro per month to stream games from those servers to any smartphone, Windows/Mac/Linux-based PC, or Android TV device. Boosteroid currently links to users' accounts on other PC-based platforms -- including Steam, the Epic Games Store, Blizzard's Battle.net, EA's Origin, the Rockstar Game Launcher, and Wargaming -- and lets them play games from those services without having to install them on a local gaming PC. With this new deal, that access will expand to include games available through Microsoft's Xbox app on the PC.

Emily Willingham writes via Scientific American: In 2016 a computer named AlphaGo made headlines for defeating then world champion Lee Sedol at the ancient, popular strategy game Go. The "superhuman" artificial intelligence, developed by Google DeepMind, lost only one of the five rounds to Sedol, generating comparisons to Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess loss to IBM's Deep Blue. Go, which involves players facing off by moving black and white pieces called stones with the goal of occupying territory on the game board, had been viewed as a more intractable challenge to a machine opponent than chess. Much agonizing about the threat of AI to human ingenuity and livelihood followed AlphaGo's victory, not unlike what's happening right now with ChatGPT and its kin. In a 2016 news conference after the loss, though, a subdued Sedol offered a comment with a kernel of positivity. "Its style was different, and it was such an unusual experience that it took time for me to adjust," he said. "AlphaGo made me realize that I must study Go more."

At the time European Go champion Fan Hui, who'd also lost a private round of five games to AlphaGo months earlier, told Wired that the matches made him see the game "completely differently." This improved his play so much that his world ranking "skyrocketed," according to Wired. Formally tracking the messy process of human decision-making can be tough. But a decades-long record of professional Go player moves gave researchers a way to assess the human strategic response to an AI provocation. A new study now confirms that Fan Hui's improvements after facing the AlphaGo challenge weren't just a singular fluke. In 2017, after that humbling AI win in 2016, human Go players gained access to data detailing the moves made by the AI system and, in a very humanlike way, developed new strategies that led to better-quality decisions in their game play. A confirmation of the changes in human game play appear in findings published on March 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

The team found that before AI beat human Go champions, the level of human decision quality stayed pretty uniform for 66 years. After that fateful 2016-2017 period, decision quality scores began to climb. Humans were making better game play choices -- maybe not enough to consistently beat superhuman AIs but still better. Novelty scores also shot up after 2016-2017 from humans introducing new moves into games earlier during the game play sequence. And in their assessment of the link between novel moves and better-quality decisions, [the researchers] found that before AlphaGo succeeded against human players, humans' novel moves contributed less to good-quality decisions, on average, than nonnovel moves. After these landmark AI wins, the novel moves humans introduced into games contributed more on average than already known moves to better decision quality scores.

Microsoft said it would license Activision Blizzard's "Call of Duty" (CoD) to Sony for 10 years to address concerns raised by Britain over its $69 billion takeover of the games maker, according to a document published by the regulator. From a report: "Microsoft is proposing a package of licensing remedies which (i) guarantee parity between the PlayStation and Xbox platforms in respect of CoD and (ii) ensure wide availability of CoD and other Activision titles on cloud gaming services," Microsoft said in the document published on Wednesday.

An Nvidia GPU driver update has caused some users to see inflated CPU usage after closing 3D games, which persists until a reboot. Nvidia confirmed the problem with driver update 531.18, and will post a hotfix on March 7. PCWorld reports: The company confirmed the problem with the latest driver update, 531.18, which was published on February 28th. An updated list of open issues (including some that didn't make it into the full release notes) was posted to Nvidia's support forum, and spotted by VideoCardz.com. Issue number 4007208 reads, "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container may be observed after exiting a game." Some users are showing CPU usage of up to 10-15 percent in these conditions -- not enough to seriously hamper most gaming desktops, but more than enough to be an annoyance, especially if you use your PC for other intensive tasks. Like opening three Chrome tabs at once.

At the moment there's no easy fix, so the immediate solution if you're affected is to roll back your driver to version 528.49 from February 8th, available for manual download here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Cheaters are an annoying part of almost every online video game. And banning them has become an important routine for game developers and publishers to keep their users happy. The publisher of Escape from Tarkov, a game developed by the Russian company Battlestate Games, has added an unusual twist to the routine: naming and shaming the cheaters. In the last week, Battlestate Games said it banned 6,700 cheaters, and it published all their nicknames on publicly available spreadsheets. "We want honest players to see the nicknames of cheaters to know that justice has been served and the cheater who killed them in a raid has been punished and banned," Battlestate Games' spokesperson Dmitri Ogorodnikov told TechCrunch.

"Meta is cutting prices for two of its virtual reality headsets as it continues trying to boost adoption for the nascent technology on which it has bet its future," reports CNN: The company announced Friday that it is slashing the price of its higher-end Meta Quest Pro headset by some $500, bringing its cost to $999, roughly six months after it was released. Meta is also lowering the price of its Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The price cut for the Quest 2 will go into effect in more than a dozen countries including the United States on Sunday. The Quest Pro price drop will take effect the same day in the United States and Canada and on March 15 in all other countries where it is sold.

"Our goal has always been to create hardware that's affordable for as many people as possible to take advantage of all that VR has to offer," the company said in a blog post.
Yahoo Finance believes Meta is lowering prices "because consumers are, well, just not buying as many as the company expected." The Verge agrees that the Meta Quest Pro was "an absolute boondoggle of a device" — but suggests that's not the whole story.

"if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well." Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president for VR, told staff that Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets thus far. That includes both the Quest and Quest 2.... That seems like a small number, but the Nintendo GameCube only sold 21 million consoles in its entire lifespan, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold approximately 20 million consoles thus far. So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well.
Their conclusion? "Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games.... And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it's kind of ignoring that core gamer audience."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has largely denied Sony's request to quash a Microsoft subpoena requesting that it divulge confidential documents. Microsoft served Sony with the subpoena in January as part of its defence-building process ahead of an FTC lawsuit regarding its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The subpoena included 45 separate requests for Sony documents, including copies of every third-party licensing agreement Sony has, and "all drafts of and communications regarding" SIE president Jim Ryan's declaration to the FTC. Sony attempted to quash or limit the subpoena, arguing that a number of the requests were either irrelevant to the case or too time-consuming and expensive to carry out.

However, in a newly filed order made by the FTC's chief administrative law judge, most of Sony's arguments have been rejected. Most notable among Sony's requests was that an order to produce a copy of "every content licensing agreement [it has] entered into with any third-party publisher between January 1, 2012 and present" be quashed, a request which has been denied. Sony had argued that this information had no apparent value, and that compiling the documents would mean an "unduly burdensome" manual review of over 150,000 contract records to find which ones were relevant. Microsoft's argument, which the FTC has agreed with, was that since much of the Activision Blizzard acquisition case revolves around whether gaining access to its IP could result in Xbox-exclusive titles that could negatively impact competition, it was important to understand the full extent of Sony's own exclusivity deals and "their effect on industry competitiveness." One request the FTC did grant Sony, however, was to limit the date range of documents being requested -- as such, only documents dated from January 1, 2019 to the present date will be required.

The state sponsors titles that cast it in a favorable light and punish indies for depicting a more complex vision of Iranian identity. From a report: Commander of the Resistance: Amerli Battle is a first-person shooter set in Iraq. Launched in 2022, the game pitches players against Islamic State militants laying siege to a town, based on a real-life event that took place in 2014. Its hero -- the commander of the title -- is a real-life figure too: Qasem Soleimani, a major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force under the command of Iran's theocratic leadership. Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, was a powerful figure in the regime -- and a controversial one, declared a terrorist by the US and accused of overseeing human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

The game was produced by Monadian Media, an offshoot of the Basij Cyberspace Organization -- the digital wing of the IRGC's paramilitary group, the Basij's and it is part of an ongoing propaganda effort by the regime to rewrite history and mythologize its leading figures. Facing growing discontent, the Islamic Republic has increasingly invested in producing video games, in the hope that it can use them to influence young people. The games' narratives try to reinforce the religious identity of the nation, to portray domestic opponents -- such as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began last year -- as sectarian extremists, and to rehabilitate figures like Soleimani, a military commander associated with brutal crackdowns. And it has thrust Iran's once-thriving games industry into the midst of a battle over Iranian identity.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week in Barcelona, OnePlus showcased a concept smartphone with liquid cooling technology, dubbed "Active CryoFlux." While the headset may never see the light of day, at least in its current form, it serves to show how serious OnePlus hopes to get about mobile gaming. From a report: A 0.2 square centimeter piezoelectric ceramic micropump moves the coolant up and down a pipeline near the rear of the device and around the massive camera array. The rear of the device is covered in a transparent material, showcasing the process as a kind of light show. It's a cool effect, and one that invariably shares comparisons to Phone (1), released by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei's Nothing last year. "A lot of young people like playing games," said OnePlus President and COO Kinder Liu. "Gaming plays an important role in their digital life, and in the future, we will continuously improve their gaming experience. Currently, we definitely engage with our users about gaming development. We are talking about how to improve the gaming experience, and in the future, we believe we will have more time to talk to them."

Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It's not good enough. Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn't, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves.

Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them -- having searched for the exact title -- under a slew of other guff. Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks -- this esteemed publication included -- for lots of reasons. [...] However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple -- and indeed Google's Play store -- opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what's out there is up to standard. It's a wild west. Happily things may be about to change -- including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google's "effective duopoly" over what we see, do and play on our phones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned in the last few weeks after they were caught red-handed using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post published on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had recently patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit. According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing information used internally by the Dota client that shouldn't be visible during gameplay. After investigating how it worked, the developer then decided to identify and remove the "bad actors" from the active Dota playerbase.

"We released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using," Valve said. "This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits." Valve claims that all 40,000 of the now-banned accounts had accessed this hidden section of data, and that it had "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved." Valve highlighted that the number of accounts banned was especially significant due to how prevalent this particular family of cheating clients is, and that the action taken is just one step in an ongoing campaign to tackle those abusing the popular MOBA game. "While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota," warned Valve.

"Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal to bring "Call of Duty" and other Activision games to Nvidia's gaming platform, if the Xbox maker is allowed to complete its much-contested $69 billion acquisition of Activision," reports Reuters. It comes hot on the heels of a 10-year deal with Nintendo that guarantees Nintendo players will get Activision games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity. Reuters reports: Regulators and competitors like Sony have come out hard against the proposed Microsoft-Activision tie-up, and a Nvidia deal could allay concerns by ensuring more ways for consumers to get games controlled by Microsoft. [...] Microsoft President Brad Smith told a news conference on Tuesday he was now more optimistic of getting the Activision acquisition done after the Nvidia deal and a similar arrangement with Nintendo.

Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's GeForce Now segment, said that titles such that "Call of Duty" will not be available on Nvidia's service unless Microsoft acquires Activision but that other Microsoft-owned titles such as "Minecraft" are covered immediately under the 10-year license agreement. "We were a little concerned about it at the beginning," Eisler said of the Microsoft-Activision deal. "But then we reached out to Microsoft, and they were very open about wanting to enable cloud gaming and work with us on a 10-year license agreement. So over time, they made us more and more comfortable with it."

Eisler said Nvidia is not paying Microsoft for access to the titles, which has been the chip company's practice with other gaming companies such as "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Instead, Nvidia's 25 million customers will need to pay Nvidia for access to its cloud gaming platform and pay Microsoft for its games. Nvidia said it now supports the Xbox maker's bid to purchase Activision, but the deal could still be a hard sell with regulators. Smith said he hoped that rival Sony will consider doing the same type of deal with Nvidia.

Microsoft president Brad Smith announced that the company has signed a 10-year deal to bring Xbox games -- including Call of Duty once it is acquired -- to Nintendo players. From a report: The signed deal means Microsoft is living up to its promise to the Federal Trade Commission that it will make Call of Duty available to other platform companies like Nintendo if its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard is approved. Smith said in a tweet, "This is just part of our commitment to bring Xbox games and Activision titles like Call of Duty to more players on more platforms." The binding agreement means that Nintendo players will get the games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity, so they can experience Call of Duty just as Xbox and PlayStation gamers enjoy Call of Duty.

Microsoft said it is committed to providing long-term equal access to Call of Duty to other gaming platforms. The FTC has sued Microsoft for potential antitrust claims, and Microsoft has not yet been able to strike a similar deal with Sony, which is trying to get regulators to quash the deal. The feature parity claim is interesting because I think it means that Microsoft will bring the game to a new Nintendo console that hasn't been announced yet, as such a machine would be able to run the full Call of Duty game. The Nintendo Switch isn't capable of running the full Call of Duty, I believe.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital, the developers of Gran Turismo, developed a new AI agent that is able to race at a world-class level. At the time, the experiment was described in a paper in Nature, where the researchers showed that this AI was not only capable of driving very fast -- something other AI have done in the past -- but also learned tactics, strategy, and even racing etiquette. At the time, GT Sophy -- the name of the AI -- wasn't quite ready for prime time. For example, it often passed opponents at the earliest opportunity on a straight, allowing itself to be overtaken in the next braking zone.

And unlike human players, GT Sophy would try to overtake players with impending time penalties -- humans would just wait for that penalized car to slow to gain the place. But in the intervening year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital have been working on GT Sophy, and tomorrow (February 21), GT Sophy rolls out to Gran Turismo 7 as part of update 1.29, at least for a limited time. Until the end of March, players can try their skills against Sophy in the GT Sophy Race Together mode in a series of races with increasing difficulty levels. There's also a one-versus-one match where you race Sophy in identical cars, so you can see how much slower you are than the AI.