Valve has announced the "early beta" release of Steam Link Anywhere, which will enable streamed gaming to any compatible device, and Steam Networking Sockets APIs, granting developers access to the technology and infrastructure that underlies CS:GO and Dota 2. PC Gamer reports: Steam Link Anywhere is an extension of Steam Link that will enable users to connect to their PCs and play games from anywhere (thus the name), rather than being limited to a local network. It's compatible with both the Steam Link hardware and app, and will be rolled out automatically (and freely) to everyone who owns the hardware with beta firmware installed, the Android app beta, or the Raspberry Pi app. You'll also need to be enrolled in the Steam client beta, and have the latest version installed. Assuming you've got all that covered, you'll see an "Other Computer" option on the screen when searching for computers to connect to via Steam Link. Select that, follow the instructions, and you'll be set. Valve didn't provide specific network requirements but said you'll need "a high upload speed from your computer and strong network connection to your Steam Link device" in order to use it.

Steam Networking Sockets APIs isn't as flashy (and that "flash" is definitely relative) but is aimed squarely at developers, and could be even more significant to Steam's fortunes given the pressure it's facing from the Epic Games Store: It enables developers to run their game traffic through Valve's own private gaming network, providing players "faster and more secure connections." It's free for developers, and "a large portion" of the API is now open source, which could be a pretty big draw for devs look to incorporate online play with a minimum of fuss. If that's your bag, you can get more detailed information at steamcommunity.com, and Valve will be talking about the new feature in-depth at a Game Developer's Conference panel next Thursday, March 21.

Microsoft is now letting Xbox One owners stream their PC games to the console and use a controller to play them. From a report: A newly updated app, Wireless Display app, from Microsoft enables the support so you can play Steam games or other titles directly on an Xbox One. You can use a regular Xbox controller to control the remote PC, enabling game play or even the ability to use an Xbox for presentations. Microsoft's Wireless Display app uses Miracast to create a connection between a PC and the Xbox One, and you can cast to the Xbox using the winkey + P combination. There are different latency modes for gaming and watching videos from a remote PC, and the app is ideal if you want to project a stream or video onto the Xbox. You won't be able to stream protected content like Netflix, though.

nj_peeps shares an excerpt from a report via Wired: [Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says the company is working on a new game.] Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game's virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There's a Midtown Bar, a Downtown Movie Theatre, Brooklyn Coffeeshop, Uptown Park, and so on. As in Candyland, you move your game piece forward by drawing cards. But in Crowley's version, the cards are the habits and locations of real people whose data has been turned into literal pawns in the game. Foursquare knows where their phones are in real time, because it powers many widely used apps, from Twitter and Uber to TripAdvisor and AccuWeather. These people aren't playing Crowley's game, but their real-world movements animate it: If one of them goes into a bar in midtown, for example, the person playing the game would get a Midtown Bar card.

Ask someone about Foursquare and they'll probably think of the once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins and giving recommendations. But the Foursquare of today is a location-data giant. During an interview with NBC in November, the company's CEO, Jeff Glueck, said that only Facebook and Google rival Foursquare in terms of location-data precision. You might think you don't use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare's technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it's in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few.

Microsoft has announced a form of DirectX 12 that will support Windows 7. "Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft; and indeed it's not slated to be a general-purpose solution like DX12 on Win10," reports AnandTech. "Instead, Microsoft has stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well. As a consumer it's great to see them supporting their product ten years after it launched, but with the entire OS being put out to pasture in nine months, it seems like an odd time to be dedicating resources to bringing it new features." From the report: For some background, Microsoft's latest DirectX API was created to remove some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing for developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. There's many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.

Today's announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they'd have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. It's just bizarre.

When The Division 2 launches on March 15th, PlayStation 4 owners will also need to download a day one update -- that's 90 gigabytes. Eurogamer reports: That's according to a new official support page (as spotted by Game Informer) in which Ubisoft warns PS4 players who've opted to purchase The Division 2's physical edition that they should expect an 88-92 gigabyte download on launch day.... Ubisoft also notes that the the final HDD install size on PS4 will be between 88-92GB, for both the digital and disc versions. In other words, it sounds like physical owners are essentially being asked to download the entire game from scratch when release day comes.
The site jokes that when the game launches, PlayStation 4 owners "will have plenty of time to, say, read a book or learn a language or transcend entirely to another plane, while you wait for your download to complete."

Version 6.50 of the PlayStation 4's firmware now allows you to remotely play your PS4 games from an iPhone or iPad. "To access it, you'll need to download the Remote Play app for your iOS device, and then pair it with your console," reports The Verge. "Compatible games can then be played over Wi-Fi using the on-screen buttons." From the report: Announced back in 2013, Remote Play originally let you stream games from a PS4 console to the handheld PlayStation Vita, but later in 2016, Sony released Remote Play apps for both Windows and Mac. Although Sony has yet to announce a broader Android version of the service, the existence of an Android version of the app that's exclusive to Sony Xperia phones suggests there aren't any technical barriers. Bringing the functionality to iOS is a huge expansion for Remote Play, although it's a shame that you're not officially able to pair a DualShock 4 controller with the app via Bluetooth for a more authentic experience (although some users have reported being able to get the controller working via a sneaky workaround). If you're prepared to use a non-Sony controller, then you'll be happy to know that MacStories is reporting that other MFi gamepads (such as the SteelSeries Nimbus) work just fine with the iOS app. Other limitations with the functionality are that you'll need an iPhone 7 or 6th-generation iPad or later to use it, and it's also only available over Wi-Fi. You can't use Remote Play from another location over a mobile network.

PS4 version 6.50 also adds the ability for you to remap the X and O buttons on the controller.

MojoKid writes: Gaming enthusiasts and pro-gamers have believed for a long time that playing on high refresh rates displays with high frame rates offers a competitive edge in fast-action games like PUBG, Fortnite and Apex Legends. The premise is, the faster the display can update the action for you, every millisecond saved will count when it comes to tracking targets and reaction times. This sounds logical but there's never been specific data tabulated to back this theory up and prove it. NVIDIA, however, just took it upon themselves with the use of their GeForce Experience tool, to compile anonymous data on gamers by hours played per week, panel refresh rate and graphics card type. Though obviously this data speaks to only NVIDIA GPU users, the numbers do speak for themselves.

The more powerful the GPU with a higher frame rate, along with higher panel refresh rate, generally speaking, the higher the kill-to-death ratio (K/D) for the gamers that were profiled. In fact, it really didn't matter hour many hours per week were played. Casual gamers and heavy-duty daily players alike could see anywhere from about a 50 to 150 percent increase in K/D ratio for significantly better overall player performance. It should be underscored that it really doesn't matter what GPU is at play; gamers with AMD graphics cards that can push high frame rates at 1080p or similar can see similar K/D gains. However, the new performance sweet spot seems to be as close to 144Hz/144FPS as your system can push, the better off you'll be and the higher the frame rate and refresh rate the better as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki took a Wednesday opportunity to review one game maker's financial reports: CyberAgent Inc, maker of smartphone games like the Nintendo-published Dragalia Lost. This report, published at the end of January, made vague allusions to a single smartphone game dragging the company down. Quoting from the company's own English-language press release: "At the time of the original earnings forecast announcement on October 25, we looked a new game title made a good start [sic]. However, its performance is being slower than we expected as of today." That resulted in a whopping 20-percent drop in revenue expectations in the company's gaming sector, from 50 billion yen to 40 billion. Mochizuki pressed the company to confirm which game that was, and CyberAgent confirmed the game in question was indeed Nintendo's Dragalia Lost.

The company clarified things even further to the WSJ, alleging that Nintendo responded to players' complaints about Dragalia's loot box economy by asking the developer to "adjust the game" to reduce how much a player might spend in the game to progress normally. "Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game," a CyberAgent representative told the WSJ. "If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more." When asked by the WSJ, Nintendo's Japanese arm replied with a statement that apparently confirms CyberAgent's allegation. "We discuss various things, not just limited to payments, to deliver high-quality fun to consumers," the Nintendo rep told the WSJ. The report says the reason why Nintendo's revenue goals for its entire smartphone-gaming sector are considered modest compared to other large Japanese publishers may be "because its smartphone games are positioned less to make oodles of cash and more to raise awareness of Nintendo's IP (which Nintendo will soon leverage with theme park attractions and a feature-length film)."

Jessica Roy, writing for LA Times: Thirty years ago, Maxis released "SimCity" for Mac and Amiga. It was succeeded by "SimCity 2000" in 1993, "SimCity 3000" in 1999, "SimCity 4" in 2003, a version for the Nintendo DS in 2007, "SimCity: BuildIt" in 2013 and an app launched in 2014. Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding -- and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living.

For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, "SimCity" was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.

Microsoft's next iteration of the Xbox One may not have a disc at all, and it might be coming sooner than you think. From a report: That's at least according to rumors from Windows Central, which says a disc-less Xbox One S "All-Digital Edition" will be offered for preorders in April. The new device, said to be code-named Maverick, will offer a "disc-to-digital" program, letting fans turn in physical game discs and convert them to digital downloads, Windows Central added.

One benefit of this new Xbox, Windows Central said, would be that it could push the price of an Xbox down. The Xbox One S starts at $299 and is typically bundled with a game. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. The move could mark a turning point for the video game industry, which has sold video games on discs and cartridges for decades. Some people still prefer to buy physical copies of their games, in part to share them with friends or trade them in at retailers like GameStop.

"The attention economy is dying, and it's not pretty," argues the Verge, adding "there is only so much time in the day to pay attention to things, and we as a society have reached the limit..."

"The base assumption that the whole edifice is built on is becoming unstable, because what happens when society's attention is entirely monopolized? A recent report put out by the media and technology research firm Midia underscores that point: "[E]ngagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritising between them." The trend, they write, has persisted for a while, and only now promises a revenue slowdown -- as told through disappointing quarterly results from a few of the major games publishers. "Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought." As Midia researcher Karol Severin says, "competition within the attention economy is now more intense than ever before."

The problem is attention doesn't scale. There is only so much time in the day to be advertised to; ads themselves are becoming less effective, because they're now everywhere. When was the last time you consumed something that wasn't trying to sell you something, or harvest your personal data to sell you things better?
The article also argues that a "substantial portion" of the attention economy has been captured by the videogame Fortnite. "Last month, Netflix mentioned in its 2018 earnings report that 'we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO'...

"That Netflix is even acknowledging Fortnite as a competitor is important, because it means that digital media companies are beginning to concede that growth isn't infinite, and are shifting their ambitions in response."

This week the Washington Post shared the story of 20-year-old Sam Haberern, who was playing Call of Duty on his Xbox when the other players "started asking him whether he had ever testified in court or murdered anyone." "They said they were from Maryland and that they were going to come and kill me," he said. By then it was 3 a.m., and Haberern decided to quit. One of the gamers in the party then sent him a message via Xbox Live. It contained his home address. Next his house phone rang, then his mother's cellphone. A message appeared on his TV screen from one of the party members -- it was asking why he didn't answer... Haberern contacted Microsoft, which makes Xbox, via its website and reported what happened. Unsatisfied with that process, he then typed a Reddit post, which would go viral, asking what recourse was available to him. The varied and ultimately unsatisfying answers centered on a common theme: There was no good solution.

Toxic behavior in competitive activities is not a new development, nor is it exclusive to video gaming, as social media users can attest. But its persistence amid a rapidly rising medium -- both in terms of users and revenue -- spotlights the question of why undesirable or, in some cases, criminal interactions have been so difficult for the video-game industry or law enforcement to eliminate. Now, with technological advances in online multiplayer games and video gaming's increased prevalence worldwide, a growing percentage of the population is becoming unwittingly exposed to a slew of abusive acts that are only becoming more visible. While game publishers, console makers, online voice-chat applications and even the FBI are aware of these issues and working to confront them, complications stemming from modern technology and gaming practices, freedom of speech concerns, and a lack of chargeable offenses on the legal side make toxic elements a challenge to extinguish.... Ambiguities within the U.S. legal system have played a role in constraining the efforts of law enforcement during the era of online gaming.
After the death threats, Haberern didn't contact the police, but questioned whether Microsoft was creating a safe environment for kids.

The next day, he was back to playing videogames. "But I definitely don't accept invites from people."

An anonymous reader shares a column: Everything about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is big. The latest open-world western, released in October by Rockstar Games, constantly reminds you of this. It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map. It has 200 species of animals, including grizzly bears, alligators, and a surprising number of birds. It takes about 45.5 hours to play through the main quest, and 150-plus hours to reach 100 percent completion. There are more than 50 weapons to choose from, such as a double-barreled shotgun and a rusty hatchet. It's big, big, big.

[...] On top of all the bigness, "Red Dead Redemption 2" is also incredibly dull. I've been playing it off and on since it was released, and I'm still waiting for it to get fun. I'm not alone in thinking so -- Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit called it "quite boring" and Mashable said it's a "monumental disappointment." There are a glut of Reddit posts from people complaining about how slow the game feels, usually with a tone of extreme self-consciousness. Unless you're a real a**hole, it's not exactly fun to stray from popular consensus. Perhaps the general hesitancy to criticize the game is due to the fact that it's not technically bad. Its graphics and scale really are impressive. It is designed to please.

And yet "RDR2" seems to exemplify a certain kind of hollowness that's now standard among Triple-A titles. It's very big, with only tedium inside. Call it a Real World Game. The main problem with "RDR2" is that it's comprised almost entirely of tedious, mandatory chores. It always feels like it's stalling for time, trying to juke the number of hours it takes to complete it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Bright: Ever since the first Xbox was released, an obvious question has been hanging in the air: Microsoft already owns one of the premier gaming platforms, the PC, and both the original Xbox and the current Xbox One are more or less PCs anyway, so when is Microsoft going to bring the two together and let us play Xbox games on Windows? With the new Windows 10 builds, it looks like the company is taking some big steps in that direction. Microsoft has put big chunks of the Xbox infrastructure into Windows 10. This starts right from the moment you download the game: it's coming from the Xbox distribution servers, not the usual ones for Store apps. The game package itself uses a format called .xvc, which is used for Xbox One games, and there are PowerShell commands to work with these .xvc files and install .xvc games. Microsoft Gaming Services includes portions of this Xbox infrastructure; it includes a couple of drivers ("Microsoft Gaming Filesystem Driver" and "Microsoft Gaming Install Filter Driver"), along with a number of libraries that provide Xbox APIs.

The last few Windows 10 preview builds have included some vague instructions from Microsoft to install a special edition of a game, State of Decay, and report any problems with the process. There are no problems with playing the game but, rather, problems with installing and launching it. The instructions didn't give any indication as to why or what to look for. Naturally, people have been taking a closer look to see what's special about State of Decay and figure out why Microsoft is having Windows Insiders test it. Nazmus Khandaker, Rafael Rivera, and the pseudonymous WalkingCat have been poking around both the special edition of State of Decay and a helper application called Microsoft Gaming Services that insider machines are running. Brad Sams wrote up his findings. [...] The State of Decay package does nonetheless contain PC-oriented elements. In particular, it tries to install and update the DirectX runtime during its setup. We the users don't seem to be at the stage of simply running Xbox games unmodified on our PCs, or at least, not yet. But it looks as if the groundwork is being laid. The strange preview of a 2020 Windows release looks like it contains even more of this infrastructure, with signs of a layer to support Xbox's Direct3D variant on PC. "Microsoft could go the whole hog and simply make a Windows 10 PC with a suitable hardware spec into an Xbox that can play any Xbox game," writes Bright, adding: "it might just be there as a simple option for developers to enable if they choose."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A festival designed to recreate Fortnite on the outskirts of Norwich has, somewhat predictably, not lived up to expectations. Event organisers flogged 2500 tickets to kids and parents. Entry cost upwards of $15 and unlimited access wristbands a further $26. In return, families got what amounted to a few fairground attractions. Photos from the event show a climbing wall for three people, archery for four people, and four go-karts. An attraction dubbed a "cave experience" was a lorry trailer with tarpaulin over it. An indoors area where you could play actual Fortnite was probably the best thing there -- although it cost money to access and you had to queue to do so. So much for free-to-play. And all of that was if you could actually get into the event to start with. Hundreds of people were left queuing for hours due to staff shortages.

Google has sent out invites to this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) press event, where the company is expected to unveil a new game streaming product. ExtremeTech reports: There have been rumors about a Google game stream product or service for several years. Initially, leaks pointed to a hardware platform called Yeti that would stream games to a connected display. In late 2018, Google rolled out a game streaming test called Project Stream. To publicize the demo, it worked with Ubisoft to give everyone free access to the new Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Google wrapped up Project Stream in early 2019, offering players a free copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey as thanks. Of course, you'd need a real gaming PC to run that version.

Google's GDC event will take place on March 19th at 10 AM Pacific. All we know for sure is that Google is there to talk about a gaming project. It just seems extremely likely that it will be a new phase for Project Stream. It might remain browser-only, but Google does have a giant network of TV's out there with Chromecast streaming dongles plugged in. If it could leverage those to stream games, it could instantly have as many eyeballs as Sony or Microsoft.

Some analysis from research firm MIDiA: Earlier this month Electronic Arts (EA) reported disappointing quarterly results, now Activision has laid off nearly 800 staff, mostly in marketing and sales. As MIDiA has reported multiple times before, engagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritizing between them.

This downward trend in engagement has persisted for a while now, and the latest quarterly results from some major games publishers confirm that a revenue slowdown will ultimately follow consumer behaviour. Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought. Publishers will be quick to blame declining engagement and revenues on Fortnite. While the title indeed intensified the manifestation of the peak attention economy dynamics among gamers, the coming slowdown is part of a much bigger challenge -- how to capture attention in an increasingly attention-scarce landscape.

Top publishers are facing several headwinds at the same time. Fortnite is only one of them, and arguably one of the less harmful ones to the long-term outlook of the games industry: Fortnite's model utilises the attention economy dynamics: It's a high-grade gaming experience and it's free to play, which means there is little barrier for consumers to allocate attention to, compare to its paid counterparts. While it has undoubtedly cannibalised some revenue and engagement from other major publishers, Fortnite engagement still contributes to the bottom line of the global games industry.
More gamers engage with games videos and events than Fortnite: Not only is engagement declining across mobile, PC and console gaming, at the same time, video is winning the race against gaming in capturing attention on multipurpose devices such as PC.

The Razer Game Store will close on February 28 at 1am PST, the company announced in a blog post. This comes less than a year after its launch last April. From a report: The shutdown is part of "the company's realignment plans," according to Razer. "It has been a privilege for us to recommend and deliver great digital game deals to you. We have been extremely fortunate to have you as part of our awesome community," the post reads. "Thank you for the support and making all this possible. We will be investing in other ways to deliver great content and introduce game promotions through Razer Gold, our virtual credits system."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gamasutra: In the wake of Activision Blizzard's massive layoff wave, a move that was announced in the same call as the company's record quarter, the union federation AFL-CIO has published an open letter to game developers urging members of the industry to organize. The AFL-CIO itself is the largest labor organization in the United States and counts 55 individual unions (and more than 12.5 million workers) among its affiliates. The letter, readable in full on Kotaku, calls out many of the issues that have prompted conversations about unionization in just recent years like excessive crunch, toxic work conditions, inadequate pay, and job instability. The industry, points out AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler, boasted sales 3.6 times greater than those of the film industry in 2018, yet much of that financial success isn't felt by the developers working on the games that generate those billions. "Executives are always quick to brag about your work. It's the talk of every industry corner office and boardroom. They pay tribute to the games that capture our imaginations and seem to defy economic gravity. They talk up the latest innovations in virtual reality and celebrate record-smashing releases, as your creations reach unparalleled new heights," says Shuler.

"My question is this: what have you gotten in return? They get rich. They get notoriety. They get to be crowned visionaries and regarded as pioneers. What do you get? Outrageous hours and inadequate paychecks. Stressful, toxic work conditions that push you to your physical and mental limits. The fear that asking for better means risking your dream job. [...] Change will happen when you gain leverage by joining together in a strong union. And, it will happen when you use your collective voice to bargain for a fair share of the wealth you create every day. No matter where you work, bosses will only offer fair treatment when you stand together and demand it."

The U.S. Copyright Office is skeptical about Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor Alfonso Ribeiro's ownership claim over the signature "Carlton Dance," which became famous after a 1991 episode of the Will Smith series. From a report: In correspondence last month that was surfaced on Wednesday in California federal court, Saskia Florence, a supervisory registration specialist in the Office's Performing Arts Division, told Ribeiro's attorney that registration must be refused because his claimed "choreographic work" was a "simple dance routine."

[...] Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the game NBA 2K, is now seizing upon the refusal in support of the argument that movements for the "Carlton Dance" are not protectable. Ribeiro is suing Take-Two as well as the publisher of Fortnite over special features that allow game players to have their avatars perform the dance. In a dismissal brief, Kirkland & Ellis attorney Dale Cendali makes some of the same arguments she did earlier in the week in an attempt to reject a similar lawsuit over Fortnite from the rapper 2 Milly. But there are particular contentions specifically directed at Ribeiro's claim.