Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows "emulator" for Linux next week at the company's Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. From a report: Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail "how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch." The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google's Stadia porting platform team, and promises a "detailed overview of the technology behind Google's solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia." It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux. If the emulator runs live on Stadia instead of just testing environments, this could open the door to a lot more games making their way to Stadia in the future

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: People are review-bombing a hospital in India with one-star reviews after a doctor tweeted a video of himself during a procedure with an unconscious patient. The anesthesiologist, who goes by Dr. Shreeveera on Twitter and his YouTube channel, filmed himself supposedly in an active operating room where he had just anesthetized a patient and was preparing for an invasive procedure to remove a gallbladder. He claimed to be defending himself against people claiming he's not a real doctor, because they disagree with his passion for the "console wars." "Console wars" is shorthand for the decades-long argument between gamers about which platform -- Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo devices, PC gaming, and so on -- is the best.

Shreeveera posted the video to Twitter, writing, "Here I am after inducing anaesthesia, intubating & putting a patient on controlled mechanical ventilation for a Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy case in OR. Slandering my identity, profession coz you Xbots can't Argue FACTS!" according to gaming news outlet Dextero. He added, "SAVING LIVES- My Job. CONSOLE WARS- My Hobby." He was allegedly trying to defend himself from accusations that he wasn't a real doctor. Dextero, which viewed the video before Shreeveera locked his Twitter account, says that he pans around an operating room holding up the phone to record himself, showing the patient on the operating table.

Shreeveera posted an unlisted apology video on YouTube on Monday, saying that he's received a lot of backlash and racist harassment because of his video. He says he regrets posting the video and acknowledges that his obsession with console wars is childish, but also tries defending himself and his hobby. "I'm a human being guys, I make mistakes, please let's move on ahead," he said. "I do not hate anyone on a personal level. If I do not like the console they're playing, I just make points regarding what that console is giving you... this is just a hobby of mine." Judging from his YouTube channel, Shreeveera is clearly a PlayStation fan and an Xbox hater.

According to Deadline, Prime Video is turning PlayStation's mythology-themed game franchise God of War into a live-action TV series. From the report: I hear the series adaptation comes from The Expanse creators/executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and The Wheel of Time executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins as well as Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, which collaborate on all TV series based on PlayStation games. This would mark the latest big deal for a TV series based on a popular video game title in a red-hot streaming marketplace for gaming IP. Peacock just landed another SPT/PlayStation property, Twisted Metal, with a series order and Anthony Mackie starring. HBO has coming up the high-profile PlayStation game-based series The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Netflix has a Resident Evil TV series in the works, while Paramount+ is about to debut Halo.
[...]
The God of War franchise from Sony's Santa Monica Studio spans a total of seven games across four PlayStation consoles. The action game series launched in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, with the first God of War. At the center is ex-Spartan warrior Kratos and his perilous journey to exact revenge on the Ares, the Greek God of War, after killing his loved ones under the deity's influence. After becoming the ruthless God of War himself, Kratos finds himself constantly looking for a chance to change his fate. Following several titles on various PlayStation consoles including the PS3 and the handheld PSP, Santa Monica Studio brought new life to the franchise with the 2018 game on the PlayStation 4. In it, Kratos comes to the Norse wilds where he gets a second chance at fatherhood with his son Atreus. The installment a slew of honors at the 2018 Game Awards, including Game of the Year. An eighth God of War installment, God of War: Ragnorok, is in the works for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and is set to drop this year.

An overview of Tencent's burgeoning games dominance. From a report: In the West, tech giant Tencent is not yet a household name. While its size and acquisitions have made frequent headlines, its presence has remained understated relative to competitors like Amazon and Google, with the name occasionally peppered into conversations as an example of China's burgeoning influence on technology and entertainment around the world. But in China, Tencent is everywhere. It's behind the nation's most popular messaging app, WeChat, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. It's the behemoth that created QQ.com, one of the country's largest web portals and the world's fourth most visited website. And with Tencent Music, it also owns the majority of China's music services, with 841 million active users. It's also China's -- and the world's -- biggest game company. And with a growing presence internationally, we recently decided to take a closer look at how it operates and what it owns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Mykhailo Fedorov, the vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, has publicly called on "all game development companies" to "temporarily block all Russian and Belorussian accounts" in response to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In a tweet from his verified account, Fedorov also called on esports platforms to "temporarily stop the participation of Russian and Belorussian teams and gamers in all international esports events and cancel all international events holding [sic] on the territory of Russia and Belarus."

These moves, Fedorov suggests, "will motivate the citizens of Russia to proactively stop the disgraceful military aggression" by the Russian government. "In 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple rocket launchers... and missiles." In an additional note directed at the Xbox and PlayStation Twitter accounts, Fedorov wrote that "if you support human values, you should [leave] the Russian market!" In a follow-up tweet, Fedorov also asked Riot Games, EA, Ubisoft, Gameloft, and Wargaming to "close your office in Russia" in solidarity with Ukraine. "There's no place for [an] aggressor on the global technological map!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When will Bungie let Destiny 2 come to Valve's Steam Deck handheld gaming PC? It's looking like the answer is never -- because the soon-to-be Sony subsidiary has published a help page that not only says the game's unsupported, but outright threatens to ban prospective Steam Deck players (via Wario64). The help page has a new section titled "Steam Deck and Destiny 2," which reads: "Destiny 2 is not supported for play on the Steam Deck or on any system utilizing Steam Play's Proton unless Windows is installed and running. Players who attempt to launch Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck through SteamOS or Proton will be unable to enter the game and will be returned to their game library after a short time. Players who attempt to bypass Destiny 2 incompatibility will be met with a game ban."

To be fair, Bungie isn't the only one to reject the Steam Deck without necessarily providing a satisfying explanation -- Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney explained to me why Fortnite won't get updated for the Steam Deck last month, even though Epic's own Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) claims game developers can enable it with "just a few clicks." And while both Apex Legends and Elden Ring now fully work on Deck despite using anti-cheat, it's also true that many other top multiplayer games have yet to fully arrive.

Speaking to the BBC on the 30th anniversary of Civilization, American developer Sid Meier says if major companies continue to focus on monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, they risk losing the audience. From the report: "The real challenge and the real opportunity is keeping our focus on gameplay," says American developer Sid Meier. "That is what is unique, special and appealing about games as a form of entertainment. When we forget that, and decide it's monetization or other things that are not gameplay-focused, when we start to forget about making great games and start thinking about games as a vehicle or an opportunity for something else, that's when we stray a little bit further from the path."

The financial model that supports how games companies make their money has changed dramatically in the past decade or so. Now many developers and publishers rely on in-game purchases to help with their bottom line rather than solely on the up-front cost of buying a title to play. [...] Some games companies are also exploring the introduction of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) - a form of digital art that players can buy and own -- into their games. [...] Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetize gaming, they risk losing the audience: "People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetization or whatever -- but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won't work. "In a sense gameplay is cheap... The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn't require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it's perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is."

The global games market is reported to be worth around $175 billion and is forecast to almost double in five years. But Sid Meier says that continued growth isn't guaranteed: "There are lots of other ways that people can spend their leisure time... I think the way the internet works, once a shift starts to happen, then everybody runs to that side of the ship. "I think we need to be sure that our games continue to be high quality and fun to play - there are so many forms of entertainment out there now. We're in a good position... but we need to be sure we realize how critical gameplay is - and how that is the engine that really keeps players happy, engaged and having fun."

Sid says he has no plans to retire just yet, and explains the most gratifying change he's experienced during his more than 30 years in the industry, is the wider public's shift in attitude when it comes to games. People were telling him back in 1991 that he was "wasting his time" working in games - now he smiles, as people say to him: "I wish I could get a job making games."

A year and a half later, Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service has formally launched in the U.S. for Android, iOS, Chrome OS, macOS and Windows. Engadget reports: The core Luna+ service with over 100 games will normally cost $10 per month, with the kid-friendly Family Channel and Ubisoft+ Channels available for a respective $6 and $18 per month. Amazon hopes to reel in newcomers by dropping the monthly fees of Luna+ and the Family channel to $6 and $3 for anyone who signs up during March. Existing users just have to maintain their subscriptions to lock in that pricing.

The official debut comes alongside some new channels. A Prime Gaming channel, as the name implies, gives Amazon Prime members a free, rotating mix of games. The March selection will include titles like Devil May Cry 5 and Flashback. Pay $5 per month for the Retro Channel and you'll get Capcom and SNK classics like Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and Metal Slug 3, while a similar outlay for the Jackbox Games Channel provides access to all eight Jackbox Party Pack titles. Luna's latest update also makes it simpler to stream gameplay from a Fire TV device, Mac or Windows PC on Twitch.

A viral video showing the "Ghost of Kyiv" shooting down a Russian fighter yet was created with Digital Combat Simulator, "a simulation game that was first released in 2008," reports fact-checking website Snopes. From the report: The video was originally posted to YouTube by âoeComrade_Corb.â The original caption identified this clip as a simulation and noted that it was created as an homage to the Ghost of Kyiv. This footage is from DCS, but is nevertheless made out of respect for âoeThe Ghost of Kiev.â If he is real, may God be with him; if he is fake, I pray for more like "him."

When this video was posted to other social media sites, it was miscaptioned as genuine footage of the Ghost of Kyiv. While this video does not feature genuine footage, the general of the Ukrainian armed forces claimed that they had truly downed several Russian aircraft. CNN reported: "The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has claimed five Russian aircraft and a helicopter were shot down early Thursday, as Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The Russian military has denied the claims, state news agency TASS reported on Thursday."
Further reading: 'The Ghost of Kyiv' is the first urban legend of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Reviews of Valve's Steam Deck portable gaming PC are pouring in, but one surprise that has flown under the radar is Aperture Desk Job -- "a new bite-size experience set in the Portal universe that'll be a free download March 1st," reports The Verge. "It's designed to introduce new Steam Deck buyers to the handheld's incredible array of controls, and it involves... toilets and chairs." From the report: [H]ere's how Valve tries to thread the needle between our rampant desire for Valve to remember how to count to three and the potential disappointment that Valve has not yet managed it: "Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work -- your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life's got other plans, and they all involve chairs. Designed as a free playable short for Valve's new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld's controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds. Not Portal 3! Lower your expectations: This is not a sequel to Portal. Now get ready to raise them slightly, because it is in the expanded universe of those games."

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has given employees a frank appraisal of why he believes the company could be better off ending its 30-year relationship with FIFA. From a report: In his most revealing comments yet on the status of licence negotiations with the footballing body, Wilson told staff in an internal company meeting in November that the FIFA license had been "an impediment" to EA's ambitions for the game series. In comments provided anonymously to VGC, Wilson claimed that FIFA had precluded EA from expanding its games into modes beyond traditional 11v11, or "broader digital ecosystems," and suggested that the only value EA got from the licence in a non-World Cup year was "four letters on the front of the box." EA and FIFA were engaged in a surprising series of back-and-forth statements last year, which started when the video games publisher decided to make public that it was considering ending its relationship with the footballing body.

India's teen chess grandmaster Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 16, just become the youngest person to defeat Magnus Carlsen (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), 31, since he became world champion in 2013. The New York Times reports: While his defeat of Carlsen, who has been struggling from the aftereffects of a Covid-19 infection, does not affect the International Chess Federation world title, it nevertheless stunned the chess world and elated people in India. [...] Praggnanandhaa orchestrated his defeat over Carlsen in 39 moves. It was all the more remarkable because he was playing with the black pieces, moving second, with the disadvantages that entails, particularly in elite chess. "He controlled the game, it felt, from start to finish, which is what Magnus does to people," said Levy Rozman, an international master who recaps tournaments and discusses strategy on his YouTube channel, GothamChess, which has more than 1.4 million subscribers.

Carlsen, who was also a top player as a teenager, opened with the Queen's Gambit, moving his queen's pawn to d4. Praggnanandhaa declined the gambit. (Replay the game at Chess24.) In the early and middle stages of the game, Rozman said, Carlsen played a precise game, successfully gaining a pawn, and then another, putting him at an advantage, but Praggnanandhaa compensated by keeping the pieces he still had on the board active and swarming Carlsen's king. "He used what was remaining on the board to launch a devastating counterattack," Rozman said.

The game turned definitively at the 32nd move, when Carlsen made a move with his knight that was later viewed as an error. The decision prompted David Howell, a British grandmaster and a commentator on the chess streaming platform Chess24, to ask, "Is this clever, or is this madness?" The answer was soon clear. Praggnanandhaa quickened his pace and Carlsen appeared visibly frustrated. Seven moves and about 10 minutes later, it was over. After Praggnanandhaa's win, Kaja Snare, a commentator for Chess24, asked him how he would celebrate. "I think it's about just going to bed, because I don't think I will have dinner at 2:30 in the morning," Praggnanandhaa said.

Bethesda on Tuesday announced that it will retire its Bethesda.net Launcher later this year and migrate fans' game libraries and wallets to Steam. As Polygon notes, the launcher has since 2016 "served as a place for players to purchase and launch games made by the publisher." From the report: Players' Bethesda.net accounts will remain active; some games may still require you to log in for save files, in-game cosmetics, or access to a mod library. While the process to transfer Bethesda games to Steam begins in early April, the launcher itself will no longer launch games in May. (Players will retain access to these games and can migrate them at any time; they simply won't be playable through the launcher.) Saves, cosmetics, in-game currencies, and progress in Fallout 76's seasonal model will be able to transfer over to Steam as well, with one exception: saves in Wolfenstein: Youngblood which are "currently unable to transfer."

Bethesda's news post includes a more thorough FAQ, including a specific one for Fallout 76. As for the publisher's other large, live service game, the post states that "The Elder Scrolls Online is unaffected by this change."

Activision Blizzard will delay a Call of Duty game that had been planned for next year, the first time the franchise will be without an annual mainline release in nearly two decades, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plan. From the report: The company is pushing off the release after a recent entry in the series failed to meet expectations, leading some executives to believe that they're introducing new versions too rapidly, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to discuss the deliberations. The decision was not related to Activision's agreement to sell itself to Microsoft for $69 billion, the people said. Activision is working on other projects to fill the gap next year. A Call of Duty game set to come out this fall will receive a steady stream of additional content, and there will be a new, free-to-play online title next year, said the people. Treyarch, the Activision-owned studio working on the now-delayed game, will also help with the free-to-play title, the people said.

Elon Musk said that Tesla is working to make Steam's library of video games work on its onboard vehicle computer. Electrek reports: As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle and they recently started building a similar team in Austin. The automaker has been building a video game platform called Tesla Arcade inside its vehicles, and it has been working with video game studios to port games to it. Right now, it is mainly to create some added value to its ownership experience, but Tesla might have bigger plans for gaming inside its vehicles. In preparation for that, the automaker has been releasing more video games in its Tesla Arcade and it has indicated that it might turn it into a business.

Now Musk announced on Twitter today that Tesla is working to make Steam's library of games work directly on Tesla's software instead of porting specific games: "We're working through the general case of making Steam games work on a Tesla vs specific titles. Former is obviously where we should be long-term." In the Twitter thread, Musk reiterated his goal to make Cyberpunk, a demanding game graphic-wise, work on the upcoming Cybertruck.

HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus are expected to be among the first companies to release gaming Chromebooks. From a report: A code change in the Chromium Gerrit suggests the vendors are working on Chrome OS devices that will support Steam. In January 2020, Google said it would bring Steam to Chromebooks, and the plan may be starting to take shape. 9to5Google spotted a code change on Saturday showing a list of what appears to be Chromebook models that will support Steam:

Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1H)
Acer Chromebook 515
Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)
Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)
Asus Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)
HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook
Unknown Chromebook from Lenovo.

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.