Netflix is looking to hire an executive to oversee its expansion into videogames, The Information reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters: The company has approached veteran game industry executives in recent weeks, the report said. The move comes at a time when the video-streaming pioneer is stepping up efforts to grow beyond its traditional business as competition heats up and subscriber growth slows. The gaming industry has been a big pandemic winner thanks to a surge in demand from customers staying at home during the crisis.

Do gamers need a dedicated browser? Opera sure thinks so. Two years after launching Opera GX, a browser aimed at gamers, on desktop, the company has started to beta test Opera GX on iOS and Android. From a report: So what sets it apart from regular browsers? For starters, Opera GX features a control panel that lets you set limits on CPU, RAM and network bandwidth. Mobile users can also utilize the fast action button to quickly access functions like search and to open and close tabs. Exporting elements from the world of gaming, the button also uses vibrations and haptic feedback. You can also sync the mobile browser with the desktop version by scanning a QR code. Doing this will allow you to transfer across files of up to 10MB, links, YouTube videos, photos and various ephemera. The company says it expects Opera GX for iOS and Android to leave beta in a few weeks.

A newspaper in Austin, Texas shares the story behind a cult-classic videogame, the 1985 Macintosh shareware game "Cap'n Magneto."

It was the work of Al Evans, who'd "decided to live life to the fullest after suffering severe burn injuries in 1963" at the age of 17. Beneath the surface, "Cap'n Magneto" is a product of its creator's own quest to overcome adversity after a terrible car crash — an amalgamation of hard-earned lessons on the value of relationships, being an active participant in shaping the world and knowing how to move on... "Whether I was going to survive at all was very iffy," Evans said. "The chance of me living to the age of 28 or 30 was below 30% or something like that." Regardless of how much time he had left, Evans said he refused to let his injuries hold him back from living his life to the fullest. He would live his life with honesty, he decided, and do his best to always communicate with others truthfully. "I wasn't going to spend the next two years of my life dorking around different hospitals. So I said what's the alternative?" Evans said...

To float his many hobbies and interests, however, Evans knew he had to make money. In addition to doing work as a graphic designer and a translator, he picked up computer programming, which opened his eyes to a digital frontier that allowed for the creation of new worlds with the stroke of a keyboard. When he realized the technical capabilities of the Macintosh — the first personal computer that had a graphics-driven user interface and a built-in mouse function — Evans said he set out to build a world that could marry storytelling and graphics. With the help of his wife Cea, Evans created his one and only computer game: "Cap'n Magneto."

"I really wanted to write a good game, and I definitely think it was that," Evans said...

Australia-based gaming historian, author and journalist Richard Moss says, "What really marked it as different, though, was that the alien speech, once ungarbled by a tricorder item that players had to find, would be spoken aloud through the Mac's built-in speech synthesizer and written on-screen in comic-style speech bubbles," Moss said. "And unlike most role playing games of the time, every character you'd meet in the game could be friendly and helpful or cold and dismissive or aggressive and hostile — depending on a mix of random chance and player choice...."

With "Cap'n Magneto," Evans said he wanted to make sure that players could befriend the non-playable alien characters that the hero encounters. Though the game is beatable without their help, it is significantly easier with the help of allies. A reality in which everyone was an enemy, to Evans, was simply dishonest.

"That doesn't reflect the game of life, you know? Some people, well, most people actually, are probably pretty friendly," he said.
35 years after its release, Evans — now 75 years old — received a message on Facebook informing him that the game was still being played — but no one could finish it because the built-in "nagware" required payments that couldn't be completed.

That problem has finally been fixed, and long-time Slashdot reader shanen now shares the web site where the full game can finally be downloaded.

The iconic spacefaring adventure "Mass Effect" is back today with "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition," a single, remastered version of all three games. From a report: There is no series like "Mass Effect" -- even when it comes to BioWare's other choice-driven RPGs like "Dragon Age." "Mass Effect" is a big ol' space adventure first and foremost, but it's also about loyalty, love, and tough calls. "Mass Effect" follows Commander Shepard -- a hero players can customize for looks and gender -- across three games as they wage war against a galactic threat known as the Reapers. Key choices carry through all three games, whether it's who survives, or who you ally yourself with.

"Mass Effect" (2007) is a classic sci-fi thriller, where Shepard races to stop a turncoat operative hungry for power.
"Mass Effect 2" (2010) is a miscreant adventure centered on building a ragtag squad, culminating in a final "suicide" mission where everyone's survival is on the line.
"Mass Effect 3" (2012) brings the trilogy to a close through a more somber, war-focused story about loss and consequence.

Researchers at Intel Labs have applied machine learning techniques to GTA 5 to make it look incredibly realistic. Gizmodo reports: [I]nstead of training a neural network on famous masterpieces, the researchers at Intel Labs relied on the Cityscapes Dataset, a collection of images of a German city's urban center captured by a car's built-in camera, for training. When a different artistic style is applied to footage using machine learning techniques, the results are often temporally unstable, which means that frame by frame there are weird artifacts jumping around, appearing and reappearing, that diminish how real the results look. With this new approach, the rendered effects exhibit none of those telltale artifacts, because in addition to processing the footage rendered by Grand Theft Auto V's game engine, the neural network also uses other rendered data the game's engine has access to, like the depth of objects in a scene, and information about how the lighting is being processed and rendered.

That's a gross simplification -- you can read a more in-depth explanation of the research here -- but the results are remarkably photorealistic. The surface of the road is smoothed out, highlights on vehicles look more pronounced, and the surrounding hills in several clips look more lush and alive with vegetation. What's even more impressive is that the researchers think, with the right hardware and further optimization, the gameplay footage could be enhanced by their convolutional network at "interactive rates" -- another way to say in real-time -- when baked into a video game's rendering engine.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and president of Valve, has hinted that the company could bring Steam games to consoles during a recent question and answer session. TechRadar reports: The session took place at Sancta Maria College in Auckland, New Zealand, and a student's question and Newell's answer were recorded and uploaded to Reddit by user Odysseic (via VGC). When asked "will Steam be porting any games to console, or will it just stay on PC?", Newell somewhat hesitantly replies "You will get a better idea of that by the end of this year," adding, "and it won't be the answer you expect. You'll say, "Ah-ha! Now I get what he was talking about.'" Newell's comments are, of course, pretty vague and have caused a great deal of speculation. The most common interpretation of his words is that Valve could be planning to bring its own games, currently available on Steam, to consoles in the future. Valve games have previously been ported to consoles so this is perfectly possible.

Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe to encourage pay transparency in their industry. Axios reports: The hashtag started circulating last year, but has returned periodically as developers fight for better working conditions. Salary sharing is a way to equalize the field. By removing the secrecy, as well as the stigma, around discussing pay, workers have more power to advocate for themselves when negotiating salaries and raises. In 2020, Blizzard employees shared their salaries anonymously via a spreadsheet to compare compensation. The pay gap between people at the top, and workers on the ground is measurable in hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even when those CEOs take pay cuts.

What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."

A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."

A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."

Sony Group warned a group of analysts the PlayStation 5 will remain in short supply through 2022, suggesting the company will be constrained in its ability to boost sales targets for its latest games console. From a report: While reporting financial results in late April, the Japanese conglomerate said it had sold 7.8 million units of the console through March 31, and it is aiming to sell at least 14.8 million units in the current fiscal year. That would keep it on pace to match the trajectory of the popular PlayStation 4, which has sold in excess of 115.9 million units to date. In a briefing after those results, Sony told analysts it is challenging to keep up with strong demand. The PS5 has been difficult to find in stock since its release in November, in part because of shortages in components such as semiconductors, and the company hasn't given an official estimate for when it expects supply to normalize. "I don't think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn't be able to catch up with demand," Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said at the briefing, according to several people who attended and asked not to be named as it wasn't public.

Nintendo's worst-selling home console, the Wii U, continues to be the source for some of its biggest hits on the record-setting Nintendo Switch. From a report: With the Switch, Nintendo is putting on a clinic about how to turn prior failure into fortune as it repurposes games from the disastrous Wii U and tries selling them again on its newer hit device. The latest example of this salvaged success is the Switch's "Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury," which sold 5.6 million copies in its first seven weeks of release this year, according to new Nintendo financial data. Compare that seven week total to the just over seven-year total of 5.9 million copies sold of 2013's "Super Mario 3D World" for Wii U. The newer Switch game is basically the old game with a fun bonus adventure. The Wii U was a disaster even by Nintendo's usual cycles of occasional struggle and phenomenal fortunes. The 2012 successor to the popular Wii (remember swinging that controller?) bombed, with just 13.6 million units sold lifetime. Its big innovation: a home console with a controller that contained a screen, allowing players to keep playing their games using that screen when others needed the TV. But people didn't care and it was discontinued by early 2017.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The director of Witcher 3, the most successful video game by Polish publisher CD Projekt SA, resigned after he was accused of bullying colleagues, sending its shares to their steepest decline since March. CD Projekt conducted a months-long investigation into the allegations against Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, according to an email to staff reviewed by Bloomberg. In the message, Tomaszkiewicz wrote that a commission had investigated the allegations and found him not guilty. "Nonetheless, a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me," he wrote. He apologized to staff "for all the bad blood I have caused."

Tomaszkiewicz's work on Witcher 3 inspired the creation of a popular Netflix series, both based on novels by the author Andrzej Sapkowski, and at one point turned CD Projekt into Poland's most valuable company. [...] Tomaszkiewicz was expected to play a significant role in the company's next game in the Witcher series. When reached for comment, Tomaszkiewicz confirmed his departure and said he was "sad, a bit disappointed and resigned." A representative for CD Projekt declined to comment. In the email to employees, Tomaszkiewicz said the decision was agreed upon with the company's board. "I am going to continue working on myself," he wrote. "Changing behavior is a long and arduous process, but I'm not giving up, and I hope to change."

Fans of Fortnite aren't happy that Apple pulled the game app off the iPhone last year -- and some aren't shy about appealing to the federal judge who has the power to make things right. From a report: "Can we please have Fortnite mobile back?" a voice was heard saying Tuesday as a clerk was testing dial-in access for the public to monitor Epic Games' trial against Apple in federal court in Oakland, California. Yesterday, as the three-week trial opened, there were enough hecklers who'd figured out how to unmute themselves -- against the court's rules -- that the phone system was briefly shut down, prompting some online commentators to refer to the situation as a hijacking. Further reading: The Apple vs. Epic Games trial airs private emails.

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Discord will connect the communication service to PlayStation Network early next year, now that Sony has taken an ownership stake in Discord's latest round of capital-raising. Polygon reports: SIE president and CEO Jim Ryan didn't list specifics for how PlayStation and Discord will work together. "Our goal is to bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year," Ryan said, "allowing friends, groups, and communities to hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together." Sony's investment in Discord was made "to bring these experiences to life for our players," he said. Ryan said both companies are already at work on Discord/PSN integration. "Empowering players to create communities and enjoy shared gaming experiences is at the heart of what we do," Ryan said.

It's no secret that Sony held back PS4 cross-platform play for years, but new confidential documents and emails reveal just how much Sony was against letting people play the same games with their friends on other platforms. From a report: Sony initially blocked cross-platform play for both Rocket League and Minecraft, despite Nintendo and Microsoft both enabling players to play across Xbox and Switch. The issue really blew up when Sony blocked Fortnite crossplay in 2018, and players were angry. It now appears that Sony may have been holding out to offset potential revenue losses. In the months leading up to Sony's decision to block Fortnite crossplay in 2018, Epic Games had pleaded with Sony to enable crossplay, emails in the Epic Games v. Apple case reveal. "I can't think of a scenario where Epic doesn't get what we want -- that possibility went out the door when Fortnite became the biggest game on PlayStation," said Joe Kreiner, Epic's vice president of business development.

Kreiner proposed, "We announce crossplay in conjunction with Sony. Epic goes out of its way to make Sony look like heroes." Epic even offered to brand its E3 presence with PlayStation or add unique characters, exclusive to PS Plus subscribers, to sweeten the deal. "Let's make this a huge win for us all. Epic's not changing it's mind on the issue, so let's just agree on it now," said Kreiner. Sony didn't agree. Gio Corsi, Sony's senior director of developer relations at the time, dismissed the idea of crossplay, noting that "cross-platform play is not a slam dunk no matter the size of the title" -- a clear reference to Epic's flex about Fortnite's dominance on PlayStation. "As you know, many companies are exploring this idea and not a single one can explain how cross-console play improves the PlayStation business," said Corsi. But as of August 2019, it appears that Sony may have found a worthy argument: a way to potentially siphon off money from its competitors in exchange for access to PlayStation players.

Vice reports: The AI-powered story generator AI Dungeon has come under fire from fans recently for changes to how the development team moderates content. Notably, the player base is worried that the AI Dungeon developers will be reading their porn stories in the game. Separately, a hacker recently revealed vulnerabilities in the game that show that roughly half of the game's content is porn.

AI Dungeon is a text based adventure game where, instead of playing through a scenario entirely designed by someone else, the responses to the prompts you type are generated by an AI... This week, AI Dungeon players noticed that more of their stories were being flagged by the content moderation system, and flagged more frequently. Latitude, the developers of AI Dungeon, released a blog post explaining that it had implemented a new algorithm for content moderation specifically to look for content that involves "sexual content involving minors... We did not communicate this test to the Community in advance, which created an environment where users and other members of our larger community, including platform moderators, were caught off guard... Latitude reviews content flagged by the model for the purposes of improving the model, to enforce our policies, and to comply with law."

Latitude later clarified in its Discord at what point a human moderator would read private stories on AI Dungeon. It said that if a story appears to be incorrectly flagged, human moderators would stop reading the inputs, but that if a story appeared to be correctly flagged then they "may look at the user's other stories for signs that the user may be using AI Dungeon for prohibited purposes." Latitude CEO Nick Walton told Motherboard that human moderators only look at stories in the "very few cases" that they violate the terms of service...

All of this has been compounded by the fact that a security researcher named AetherDevSecOpsjust published a lengthy report on security issues with AI Dungeon on GitHub, which included one that allowed them to look at all the user input data stored in AI Dungeon. About a solid third of stories on AI Dungeon are sexually explicit, and about half are marked as NSFW, AetherDevSecOpsjust estimated.

Microsoft is shaking up the world of PC gaming today with a big cut to the amount of revenue it takes from games on Windows. From a report: The software giant is reducing its cut from 30 percent to just 12 percent from August 1st, in a clear bid to compete with Steam and entice developers and studios to bring more PC games to its Microsoft Store. "Game developers are at the heart of bringing great games to our players, and we want them to find success on our platforms," says Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios at Microsoft. "A clear, no-strings-attached revenue share means developers can bring more games to more players and find greater commercial success from doing so."

These changes will only affect PC games and not Xbox console games in Microsoft's store. While Microsoft hasn't explained why it's not reducing the 30 percent it takes on Xbox game sales, it's likely because the console business model is entirely different to PC. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo subsidize hardware to make consoles more affordable, and offer marketing deals in return for a 30 percent cut on software sales. Microsoft's new reduction on the PC side is significant, and it matches the same revenue split that Epic Games offers PC game developers while also putting more pressure on Valve to reduce its Steam store cut. Valve still takes a 30 percent cut on sales in its Steam store, which is reduced to 25 percent when sales hit $10 million, and then 20 percent for every sale after $50 million.

Epic Games is holding back Fortnite from being available on Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service, according to a new deposition made public as part of the Epic case against Apple. From a report: The Fortnite developer views Microsoft's xCloud service as competition to its PC offerings, and the company is deliberately not offering Fortnite on xCloud as a result. Joe Kreiner, Epic's vice president of business development, was questioned over why Fortnite isn't available on xCloud, and confirmed it was a deliberate choice. "We viewed Microsoft's efforts with xCloud to be competitive with our PC offerings," says Kreiner in the deposition. The court document makes it appear like Kreiner may go on to explain why, but the next part of the questioning has been redacted.

More game developers have had projects delayed than in past years due to COVID-19, according to a recent state of the industry survey from Game Developer Conference organizers. From a report: Delays are an inevitable part of development, but there's been a noticeable jump since pandemic's arrival. According to GDC's findings, 44 percent of the over 3,000 respondents polled said their games have been subject to delays. Compare that to last year's responses at 33 percent. The impact of working from home ranges from lost collaboration opportunities, to the added pressures of childcare.

An anonymous reader writes: Some weeks ago, in a shady move, Humble Bundle silently removed the ability for customers to define the breakdown of their payments to charity -- a key aspect of Humble Bundle since its inception. Since that time, they refused to explain to customers why their sliders weren't appearing, and investigation by some users, who reenabled the sliders client-side, showed they were also being ignored server-side even if reenabled, such that for a $14 donation only a pathetic $0.72 was going to be split in half between two charities.

Humble Bundle has now finally admitted what everyone feared -- that they're formally and significantly reducing the amount of the purchase value that can go to charity, from a default value of 5% to a maximum of 15%. Given it was previously possible to contribute as much as 100% to charity, this is a significant reduction in the amount that Humble Bundle will allow to go to charity going forward, changing it from a humble effort to do good, to a cynical for-profit cash grab off the backs of the reputation of the charities whose names they use.

Sony looks set to roll out movie and television content into PlayStation Plus subscriptions, according to images briefly uploaded to its website on Wednesday. From a report: A logo for 'PlayStation Plus Video Pass' was published on Sony's official website today, along with its description on its Polish website (now removed). From the report: "A new benefit available for a limited time on PlayStation Plus... PS Plus Video Pass is a trial service active 22.04.21 - 22.04.22. The subscription benefit is available to PS Plus users in Poland." It's not clear if the listing is describing a global or local service, but weâ(TM)ve requested clarification from Sony Interactive Entertainment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A trio of researchers from Monash University and Deakin University has found that teaching children to play chess can reduce their aversion to risk. In their paper published in Journal of Development Economics, Asad Islam, Wang-Sheng Lee and Aaron Nicholas describe studying the impact of learning chess on 400 children in the U.K. The researchers found that most of the children experienced a decrease in risk aversion in a variety of game playing scenarios. They also noticed that playing chess also led to better math scores for some of the students and improvements in logic or rational thinking.

The researchers note that the game of chess is very well suited to building confidence in risk taking when there is reason to believe it might improve an outcome. In contrast, students also learned to avoid taking risks haphazardly, finding that such risks rarely lead to a positive outcome. They [...] line between good and poor risk-taking is especially evident in chess, which means that the more a person plays, the sharper their skills become. The researchers also found that the skills learned during chess playing appeared to be long lasting -- most of the children retained their decrease in risk aversion a full year after the end of their participation in the study. The researchers [...] did not find any evidence of changes in other cognitive skills, such as improvements in grades other than math or general creativity.