UnknowingFool writes: In November 2021, Roblox sued YouTuber, Benjamin Simon aka "Ruben Sim" for $1.6M accusing him of griefing: harassment of users, harassment of employees, and disrupting the October 2021 Roblox Developers Conference by posting a false bomb threat. Ruben Sim has settled the suit with actions including: paying $150,000, staying off the platform [for several years], staying away from all Roblox facilities, and taking down all his YouTube videos regarding Roblox [if they make false statements, encourage violence, or glamorize Roblox rule-breaking].

According to a new exclusive analysis of NPD Game Pulse data conducted by Ars Technica, the number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital console games explodes. From the report: In terms of distinct game titles released in the United States, the raw number of new games available on physical media (i.e. discs or cartridges) declined from 321 in 2018 to just 226 in 2021, a nearly 30 percent decline (games released on multiple consoles are counted as a single title in this measure). The number of digital games released each year, on the other hand, remained relatively flat from 2018 through 2020. Then, in 2021, that number exploded to nearly 2,200 digital titles, a 64 percent increase from 2020. All told, the proportion of all new console games available exclusively as digital downloads increased from 75 percent in 2018 to nearly 90 percent in 2021.

These divergent trends suggest that the decline in new physical releases is not simply an artifact of consoles like the Xbox One and PS4 nearing the end of their lifecycles. Instead, as a whole, publishers seem to see a physical release as a less relevant market for an increasing proportion of titles. But the transition away from physical console games is not distributed evenly across all publishers. The largest publishers are much more likely to go through the hassle and expense of a physical release for their marquee titles. Among major publishers, a slight majority (56.4 percent) of distinct titles released in 2021 were available as physical releases. That's still a major decline from 2018, though, when nearly 80 percent of titles from those publishers merited a physical launch. When those large publishers are filtered out, though, physical game releases quickly become a very minor part of the market. Just 8.1 percent of new games from those smaller companies were available on physical media in 2021, down in terms of both proportion and raw numbers from 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's been less than a month since the New York Times bought Wordle, but it's wasting no time in ruining everyone's favorite word game in all the shitty ways you'd expect from a billion-dollar behemoth. And -- you guessed it -- that means your little daily puzzles are being loaded with ad trackers now, too. Most of us assumed that this was going to happen eventually. I mean, the Times dropped a cool seven-figure sum on a game that's still free to play (at least for right now), so those profits would need to be recouped from somewhere. And this week, some code-savvy Worlders stumbled onto where that "somewhere" was: a dozen different trackers shoved into places where there were literally zero before. Taking a look for ourselves, Gizmodo found that some of the trackers were from the New York Times proper, but most were used to send data to third-party players like Google. [...]

Here's just one nightmare scenario out of the bajillion or so that could come out of a system like this: Ad trackers were created to shove t-shirts and mugs onto all of our timelines, but they can also be used for outright surveillance. There are countless cases of cops using the data gleaned from those shitty ads to track protestors, immigrants, and anyone else they'd want completely warrant-free. And two of the companies that officers tap on the regular for this work -- Google and Oracle (via its infamous Bluekai subsidiary) -- are tied up in Wordle's shiny new trackers. Every time you open the page to see the day's puzzle to complain about how hard it is, the page pings details back to those companies -- and the data it shares can be extremely detailed, as Bluekai's own documents (PDF) lay out. At the very least, it's likely sending broad strokes to say you were on the site at a certain time, while your device was at a certain location.

Sure, adtech players can (and will) pull much shadier shit to share more data on the regular. But as a for instance, if a cop wanted to set a geofence warrant around your neighborhood -- tracking which devices are caught in a specific area at a specific time -- they could easily tap into Bluekai's ad data to get those wheres and whens. And now the fact that you Wordle'd at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday becomes one of the reasons that you ended up on some fed's watch list for a crime you didn't commit but will somehow end up jailed for anyway. This absolute nightmare is almost certainly not what's happening on Wordle right now (phew). And again, this scenario applies to most of the sites you likely visit every day, not just Wordle. But the real scary part about all of this -- at least to me -- is that it can.

Nintendo has announced that in March 2023 the online storefronts for 3DS and Wii U systems will be ceasing operations, a move that the BBC reports has attracted a lot of backlash from fans. Kotaku adds: In terms of people playing and enjoying the games they already own, Nintendo says: Even after late March 2023, and for the foreseeable future, it will still be possible to redownload games and DLC, receive software updates and enjoy online play on Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems." All of this is expected stuff. The 3DS is 11 years old this year and the Wii U ten, so digital store closures were always going to happen sooner or later. What's shitty about these closures in particular, though, is that both shopfronts offered users the ability to purchase and then own many of Nintendo's greatest ever titles, something you're now largely unable to do ever since the company switched to a subscription model with Nintendo Switch Online. The announcement post from Nintendo initially had an FAQ question, which read, "Doesn't Nintendo have an obligation to preserve its classic games?" The company deleted that part from the blog post. Kotaku adds: "We currently have no plans to offer classic content in other ways," is an incredibly shitty thing to read, because under zero circumstances is a subscription-based model an acceptable substitution to actually owning a game.

Worldle, the latest spinoff of the viral online word game Wordle, gives players six chances to guess a country outlined in black. CNET reports: As with Wordle, which was recently purchased by The New York Times, Worldle flashes green, gray and yellow squares. The difference is, here the more green squares you see the closer you are geographically to the right nation. Worldle also shows the distance in kilometers your guess was to the actual location. (You can change that measurement to miles in the Settings section, or even hide the country image for more of a challenge.)

joshuark shares a report from Popular Mechanics: A mathematician from Harvard University has (mostly) solved a 150-year-old Queen's gambit of sorts: the delightful n queens puzzle. In newly self-published research (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed), Michael Simkin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, estimated the solution to the thorny math problem, which is based loosely on the rules of chess. The queen is largely understood to be the most powerful piece on the board because she can move in any direction, including diagonals. So how many queens can fit on the chess board without falling into each other's paths? The logic at play here is similar to a sudoku puzzle, dotting queens on the board so that they don't intersect.

Picture a classic chess board, which is an eight-by-eight matrix of squares. The most well-known version of the puzzle matches the board because it involves eight queens -- and there are 92 solutions in this case. But the "n queens problem" doesn't stop there; that's because its nature is asymptotic, meaning its answers approach an undefined value that reaches for the infinite. Up until now, experts have explicitly solved for all the natural numbers (the counting numbers) up to 27 queens in a 27-by-27 board. However, there is no solution for two or three, because there's no possible positioning of queens that satisfies the criteria. But what about numbers above 27?

Consider this: for eight queens, there are just 92 solutions, but for 27 queens, there are over 200 quadrillion solutions. It's easy to see how solving the problem for numbers higher than 27 becomes extremely unwieldy or even impossible without more computing power than we have at the moment. That's where Simkin's work enters the arena. His work approached the topic through a sharp mathematical estimate of the number of solutions as n increases. Ultimately, he arrived at the following formula: (0.143n)n. In other words, there are approximately (0.143n)n ways that you can place the queens so that none are attacking one another on an n-by-n chessboard.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: [T]he North Carolina Dept. of Public Instruction on Monday issued a press release announcing it's going all-in on Microsoft's idea of having kids learn to code by using Minecraft and will be bringing a Minecraft-based CS curriculum to the state's 340K middle schoolers. From the press release:

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction announced today a collaboration with Microsoft and [Dublin-headquartered] Prodigy Learning to bring the award winning 'Coding in Minecraft' credential program to all middle school students across the state over a three-year period. [...] The deployment of the program starts with providing access to up to 8,000 students and 200 educators during year one and exposure for every middle school student by year three. In all, the program has the potential to reach nearly 340,000 students and more than 14,000 educators.

"We are pleased to see that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and Prodigy Learning are building tailored experiences that can inspire students with the possibilities of computer science through Minecraft," said Paige Johnson, vice president of Education Marketing at Microsoft. "North Carolina is harnessing the intrinsic engagement that happens when students play games to teach them the critical skills of computational thinking, coding and computer science. By combining the immersive Minecraft: Education Edition platform with critical curriculum, students will be better prepared for college and career."

"Lost Ark has comfortably passed 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent counts," reports the Verge: The Diablo-like MMO launched Friday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam's most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there's a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO's record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2's of 1,295,114. It's not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it's now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB...
The article notes it's Amazon's second big hit after its game New World "set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago."

GameSpot also spotted a playful clause in the game's terms of service. It specifies that while players must be human (and not AI), that doesn't apply if Earth is taken over by robots, simians, or aliens. "In that event, Amazon said these beings will be allowed to play Lost Ark and other games. 'We welcome our alien, robots, ape, or other overlords, as applicable,' Amazon said."

Engadget reports: With two weeks to go before its February 25th release date, Valve has published CAD files for Steam Deck's exterior shell to GitHub. Making them available under a Creative Commons license, the company noted the release is "good news" for DIY enthusiasts, modders and most notably, accessory manufacturers. All three groups can use the provided technical drawings and schematics to 3D-print custom shells for the handheld.

As Eurogamer notes, Valve's decision here is an interesting one. It suggests the company will allow case makers to freely make aftermarket shells for Steam Deck. In fact, Valve said it was "looking forward to seeing what the community creates!" Contrast that to the approach Sony has taken with the PlayStation 5. When Sony's latest console first shipped and only came in one color, an entire cottage industry of companies sprang up to produce colored plates for the PS5. However, Sony quickly moved to shut down those projects before it went on to announce a set of first-party covers for people to purchase.

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.