The X019 celebration will continue live from London on Friday and Saturday with online programming
This week, we’ll be kicking off X019, our global celebration
of all things Xbox, with a special episode of Inside Xbox live from London on Thursday,
November 14, at 12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. GMT. We’re incredibly
excited to be in London this week with our local community and those joining us
online from around the world. We resurrected our X0 event last year because
bringing everyone together to celebrate our shared love of games is very important
for us and, more importantly, our community.
Inside Xbox will be jam-packed with news for all gamers, including 12 games from Xbox Game Studios. Yes, that includes brand new game reveals, plus big news for Xbox Game Pass, Project xCloud and much more. Inside Xbox will welcome representatives to our stage from Rare, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, inXile, Mojang, and Xbox Publishing to name a few. Fans will also get to see what our friends at Respawn Entertainment, Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, and other studios are working on. We can’t spoil the surprises just yet, but we can’t wait to show all our fans what we have in store.
The X019 celebration will continue live from London on
Friday and Saturday with online programming (including panels, Let’s Play
sessions, and much more) that celebrates and expands upon the announcements
from Thursday’s episode of Inside Xbox.
Console Gaming Microtransaction Revenue Has Slowly Declined Throughout 2019
Are players getting fed up of buying skins, emotes, and all the extras in games?
A new report from statistical group SuperData Research suggests that console players are spending less on in-game purchases.
As keen gaming fans will already be aware, additional in-game content has been on the rise in recent times with more purchasable cosmetic items, battle passes, loot boxes and more popping up in our favourite games. There’s a reason for that – the report says that “almost half of total console revenue was generated by in-game spending in 2018” – but 2019’s a different story.
SuperData says that in-game spending revenue has slowly declined over the past year, with trends suggesting that players are now less likely to spend money on such transactions overall and more likely to focus on one or two favourite games, rather than numerous titles.
As an example, Fortnite – while still being one of the most financially successful games in the world every month – has seen in-game spending “mostly declining since the start of 2019”, with combined revenue from PC, console and mobile failing to hit $100 million in September. Speaking about gaming in a general sense, the report suggests that “players are growing more and more wary of monetisation tactics”, and that developers will need to think of new and exciting ways to earn revenue in this way going foward.
“In-game spending as we know it has reached a saturation point. Between loot boxes, battle passes, one-time booster packs and individual cosmetic purchases, there is no shortage of in-game monetization tactics. These strategies, however, are not enticing everyone to purchase additional content. Developers must seek out and identify the best approach for converting players to spenders or earning back player trust that was lost due to poorly implemented microtransaction models.”
Do you tend to spend money on in-game extras, or are you fed up with the practice and wish we could go back to simpler times where all of a game’s content came on the cart? Share your thoughts with us below.
Nintendo Reveals The Top 30 Switch eShop Games Of October 2019 (North America)
Ryan can list the first 151 Pokémon all in order off by heart – a feat he calls his ‘party trick’ despite being such an introvert that he’d never be found anywhere near a party. He’d much rather just have a night in with Mario Kart and a pizza, and we can’t say we blame him.
The celebrated RPG classic comes West for the first time! Experience a brand-new HD remaster of the legendary 1995 RPG masterpiece introducing optimised graphics, a new dungeon to explore, new scenarios and a new game+ function.
Video Game Deep Cuts: Disco Elysium Gives You A Pistol Whip
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless (GDC, Gamasutra co-runner, No More Robots advisor), rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.
This week’s roundup includes pieces on notable recent titles including Disco Elysium & Pistol Whip, as well as articles or videos on the science of addiction, Japanese arcades, cryptography in Mario Maker 2, and lots more besides.
Hope you enjoy the latest roundups – stay tuned for lots more in approximately 7 of your Earth days.
The role of posters in video game worldbuilding(Ewan Wilson / The Face – ARTICLE) “Remedy Entertainment’s new action-adventure game Control is all about confronting a world considerably larger than we first imagined. Central to this idea is the image of the room and the poster. Referencing the 1995 film The Shawshank Redemption – where behind the pin-up on his prison cell wall, Andy Dufresne slowly chisels a hole to the outside world – the poster in Control is a gateway to a more expansive universe.”
Why the Creator of Disco Elysium Hasn’t Read the Reviews, and What’s Next for the IP (Samantha Nelson / The Escapist – ARTICLE) “The members of the small Estonian studio are all high school dropouts who had no prior game development experience before working on Disco Elysium. Kurvitz, who is 35, said they spent most of their youth smoking cigarettes, wandering the gray Eastern European architecture, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.”
Publishers are dictating what esports will be(Michael Cohen / Torte De Lini – ARTICLE) “As more esports titles become largely dictated by their publishers, the fewer opportunities there are for tournament organizers to create events. Tournament organizers not only compete with one another for calendar dates and territorial positioning but they also compete for esports titles.”
When the Fun Stops: The Science of Addiction(Andrew Przybylski / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO) “In this 2019 GDC session, Oxford University’s Andrew Przybylski explains why the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for studies investigating video game addiction, and what developers can do to help promote healthy play.”
The 100 best games of the decade (2010-2019): 10-1(Various / Polygon – ARTICLE) “With this, our top 100 games of the decade list comes to an end. Read on to see what the Polygon team chose for our 10 best. [We published the whole list at the same time, so after you’re done here, you can check out the rest of it: the bottom half and games 50-11.]”
Nintendo boss Bowser on Switch Lite sales, 3DS support, and tiny retro consoles(Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE) “Meanwhile, during Nintendo’s most recent earnings report, the company revealed that 43 percent of Switch Lite owners were buying the device as a second system. That’s an important part of Nintendo’s stated goal of having multiple Switches in family homes, but Bowser also looks at it from a different perspective.”
Horace’s incredible journey(Martin Robinson / Eurogamer – ARTICLE) “Where to start with a game like Horace? Maybe with how it’s one of the year’s finest games, and definitely its most overlooked. A sprawling, cinematic and ever-inventive 2D platformer – and puzzle game, and old-school arcade racer, and pixelart first-person shooter and about half a dozen other things it morphs into over its 20-hour running time – it’s a lyrical flight of fancy that could only ever, really, have been made in the industrial town of Sittingbourne, Kent…”
The Healing Power of Making Video Games Like ‘Minecraft’(Keith Stuart / OneZero – ARTICLE) “The mainstream industry, with its vast teams and gigantic, noisy, and explosive blockbusters, appears a universe away from personal expression. At the same time, the actual process of making a game — the numbing hours of coding, the complex mathematics — seems anathematic to soul searching. But is it?”
Riot’s Runeterra Declares War Against Blizzard’s Hearthstone(Various / Deconstructor Of Fun – ARTICLE) “Purposefully capping monetisation to appeal to a small and vocal minority is either a good idea – or a really bad one. The risk is that millions of Riot’s players will spend more time on Runeterra and less time on League of Legends, resulting in decline of revenues due to poor monetisation of the game. [SIMON’S NOTE: of course, more of a monetization-centric view on this, but intriguing nonetheless.]”
Death Stranding: The Kotaku Video Review (by Tim Rogers)(Kotaku / YouTube – VIDEO) “I reviewed Death Stranding. How do you review a game with 900 trailers? Well, you make a one-hour video with three nested intros, you don’t talk about the gameplay until about twelve minutes in, and you mostly use footage from the game’s 900 trailers throughout. [SIMON’S NOTE: Top quote from the video: ‘”With Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima has finally made a game that is like eating 60 pounds of vegetables at gunpoint.”‘]
Ray tracing is the next generation of graphics. See the difference.(Gene Park / Washington Post – ARTICLE) “In simplest terms, ray tracing is a computer’s graphical simulation of how light works in the real world. Complex algorithms would re-create how a beam of light would act, creating color that bounces and reflects off other objects, creating more realistic shadows and reflections.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Is a Brutal and Disconcerting Portrayal of Combat(Reid McCarter / EGM – ARTICLE) “Where past Call of Duty games have incorporated civilians into their levels only sporadically—the airport massacre of Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian”; the fleeing Lagosians in Advanced Warfare’s highway shootout; the rescued child evacuated from a German warzone in Call of Duty: WWII—the new Modern Warfare is notable for its insistence on showing, with remarkable brutality, how war devastates ordinary people in just about every one of its levels.”
Pistol Whip review: The year’s freshest VR game—and oh-so close to greatness(Sam Machkovech / Ars Technica – ARTICLE) “Pistol Whip… both evokes the simple genius of Beat Saber yet actually delivers on that rare combination of familiar and fresh. Its single-sentence pitch is just as fun: pretend you’re John Wick and get into gun-fu battles against hypercolor hitmen to the rhythm of thudding techno. [SIMON’S NOTE: also see this Tested.com review.]”
‘Mario Maker 2’ Creators Are Using Cryptography to Make Impossible Levels(Patrick Klepek / VICE – ARTICLE) “The underlying mechanics driving Longest Passcode Level are complicated, but the player’s task is not. You enter the stage with a spike helmet, and walk through row after row of blocks. Some blocks, when hit, contribute to the passcode. Most blocks, howvever, do not.”
Playing piano with a sledgehammer: creating Death Stranding’s unidentifiable score(Aron Garst / The Verge – ARTICLE) “Kojima wanted more than the sounds of chains banging against floors and walls sprinkled throughout the score. He wanted unique sounds that felt familiar and real. That led to the trip to Home Depot and the three-day recording session, something Corelitz was brought on to help coordinate and run. While Forssell and Corelitz had an idea of what they wanted, much of the recording session involved experimentation; putting different objects together to see what kind of noise they would make.”
BYG TV Clark Tank: ROI in Indie Games, Steam Top 50, and Disco Elysium!(Brace Yourself Games / YouTube – VIDEO) “Every third Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases.”
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Postmortem: The Making of the Expansion and the Future of the Series(Kat Bailey / Eurogamer – ARTICLE) “Online games don’t have the greatest track record in 2019. Ghost Recon Breakpoint was a bust; Anthem was a disaster, and Fallout 76’s new subscription plan wiped out a year’s worth of accrued goodwill in less than a day. That makes Monster Hunter World: Iceborne a pleasant surprise—an expansion met with almost universal praise.”
How Magic: The Gathering card sets are designed(Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE) “Eldraine is product of a remarkable design machine which somehow spits out a similar set of new cards every three months, so I asked Rosewater how it works. “Later this year, I’ll celebrate my 24th anniversary working here at Wizards on Magic,” he says. “People always ask, ‘Don’t you get bored? How can you do the same thing for 24 years?’ And I’m like, well, every set is almost its own game.””
A Knight In Shining Armor – Swen Vincke Talks The Long Road Of Larian Studios(Daniel Tack / USGamer – ARTICLE) “Swen Vincke wasn’t always on top. From basic beginnings and a scrappy, dark path through the often tumultuous games industry, the founder of Larian Studios has gone from sneaking into trade shows to helming one of the most anticipated RPGs of all time with Baldur’s Gate 3.”
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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
What's New To Netflix This Week: Movies, TV, And Originals
I think it's safe to say that almost everyone is subscribed to a streaming service at this point. And the most popular of them all is none other than Netflix--which has a massive release list for November 2019. This week, there are plenty of TV shows, movies, original programming, and comedy specials headed your way. Check out the full list below.
The biggest release of the week is Season 3 of the docuseries The Toys That Made Us, a show that explores the origins of your favorite toy lines from when you were a kid. This season, the show explores Power Rangers, wrestling toys, My Little Pony, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--which is the best of the season and quite possibly the series. The Toys That Made Us arrives on Friday.
If you're looking for something comedic, there's a new comedy special arriving on Tuesday that may be up your alley. Jeff Garlin: Our Man In Chicago arrives that day, who you may know from HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm or the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs. This is Garlin's 37th year of doing stand-up, and the comedian discusses his life as well as working in TV and more.
Below, you can find everything coming to Netflix this week. For more streaming info, check out everything coming to Hulu and Amazon Prime Video this November.
Two New Pokémon Revealed In Sword And Shield’s ‘Final’ Trailer
A brand new trailer has been released for Pokémon Sword and Shield, revealing two brand new monsters in the process.
You can see all of the action unfold for yourself above; the two new Pokémon can be seen at the 0:23 and 0:48 marks although they only appear for the briefest of moments. At present, no additional information on these two designs – such as their names or typing – has been revealed.
We have some clearer images of them for you below (thanks, Serebii):
This would appear to be the final trailer set to be released for the upcoming games, as indicated by its title on YouTube. We imagine a western release of the trailer could be on its way shortly.
Do you like these new Pokémon designs? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-12-2019, 11:22 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan Does Not Believe That Blitzchung's Ban Was Fair
Blizzard has come under fire lately for their harsh treatment of Hearthstone Grandmaster pro Blitzchung, who was banned from the game and had his winnings taken away for expressing a pro-Hong Kong sentiment during a post-match interview. Although eventually his prize money was reinstated and his ban was reduced to six months, the fallout from the incident was immense: the game's developers spoke out against the way Blitzchung had been treated, sponsor Mitsubishi cut ties with the Hearthstone esports scene, and numerous protests were held, which led to further bans.
Blizzard president J. Allen Brack addressed the decision directly during BlizzCon, but it's clear that many within Blizzard remain unhappy with how things have played out. Now Jeff Kaplan, director of Overwatch, has added his own voice to the discussion. Talking to The Washington Post, Kaplan has said that he would personally like to see Blitzchung's suspension reduced further. "I was relieved when they reduced his suspension...and I think the suspension should be reduced more or eliminated. But that’s just me."
"I’m obviously a huge supporter of free speech," Kaplan said. "It’s something that’s very important to me...it got to me personally. I think the punishment was too harsh and I was greatly relieved when they gave his money back. I think that was extremely important." Kaplan talked about his own experience in Overwatch, where decisions like this typically take "four or five days" to get settled. He said that it was surprising to see a punishment like this get metered out so quickly: "I was actually shocked that such a harsh penalty was levied."
For now, Blitzchung's suspension remains in place. For more on this, watch our interview with Freedom Hong Kong organizer Dayton Young about Blizzard's action here, and why change is important.
For an industry that started 12,000 years ago, there is a lot of unpredictability and imprecision in agriculture. To be predictable and precise, we need to align our actions with insights gathered from data. Last week at Microsoft Ignite, we launched the preview of Azure FarmBeats, a purpose-built, industry-specific solution accelerator built on top of Azure to enable actionable insights from data.
With AgriTechnica 2019 starting today, more than 450,000 attendees from 130 countries are gathering to experience innovations in the global agriculture industry. We wanted to take this opportunity to share more details about Azure FarmBeats.
Azure FarmBeats is a business-to-business offering available in Azure Marketplace. It enables aggregation of agriculture datasets across providers and generation of actionable insights by building artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) models based on fused datasets. So, agribusinesses can focus on their core value-add rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering.
Figure 1: Overview of Azure FarmBeats
With the preview of Azure FarmBeats you can:
Assess farm health using vegetation index and water index based on satellite imagery.
Get recommendations on how many sensors to use and where to place them.
Track farm conditions by visualizing ground data collected by sensors from various vendors.
Scout farms using drone imagery from various vendors.
Get soil moisture maps based on the fusion of satellite and sensor data.
Gain actionable insights by building AI or ML models on top of fused datasets.
Build or augment your digital agriculture solution by providing farm health advisories.
As an example, here is how a farm populated with data appears in Azure FarmBeats:
Figure 2: Boundary, sensor locations, and sensor readings for a farm
For a real-world example of how it works, take a look at our partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In a pilot, USDA is using Azure FarmBeats to collect data from multiple sources, such as sensors, drones, and satellites, and feeding it into cloud-based AI models to get a detailed picture of conditions on the farm.
Azure FarmBeats includes the following components:
Datahub: An API layer thatenables aggregation, normalization, and contextualization of various agriculture datasets across providers. You can leverage the following data providers:
Datahub is designed as an API platform and we are working with many more providers – sensor, satellite, drone, weather, farm equipment – to integrate with FarmBeats, so you have more choice while building your solution.
Accelerator: A sample solution, built on top of Datahub, that jumpstarts your user interface (UI) and model development. This web application leverages APIs to demonstrate visualization of ingested sensor data as charts and visualization of model output as maps. For example, you can use this to quickly create a farm and easily get a vegetation index map or a sensor placement map for that farm.
While this preview is the culmination of years of research work and working closely with more than a dozen agriculture majors, it is just the beginning. It would not have been possible without the early feedback and validation from these organizations, and we take this opportunity to extend our sincere gratitude.
Azure FarmBeats is offered at no additional charge and you pay only for the Azure resources you use. You can get started by installing it from Azure Marketplace in Azure Portal. In addition, you can:
With Azure FarmBeats preview, we are pioneering a cloud platform to empower every person and every organization in agriculture to achieve more, by harnessing the power of IoT, cloud, and AI. We are delighted to have you with us on this global transformational journey and look forward to your feedback on the preview.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-12-2019, 05:18 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Update Will Change The 725 Shotgun Again
Following a recent patch that nerfed the gun, Activision is planning another update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to address one of the military shooter's most controversial weapons. In a tweet, multiplayer co-director Joe Cecot said developer Infinity Ward is planning another change for the 725 shotgun that should address how effective the weapon is at a distance.
Specifically, the update will "massage out" instances where the 725 is seemingly too effective at range, Cecot said. As you can see in the video below, the 725 is still very, very effective at a distance, which many have remarked makes the shotgun far too powerful.
The 725 is a break-action shotgun that carries only two rounds. It's also not a standard shotgun. The weapon has a cylindrical choke that keeps the projectile spread tight. This is what makes the 725 effective at long ranges unlike other, more standard shotguns.
Another tweak is coming which should massage out the rare very long shot. Now if the target is at low health this thing will always reach out. https://t.co/qN3cCNovOP
In another tweet, Cecot said Infinity Ward is being careful to make sure that whatever changes it plans for the 725 do not impact the "soul" of the weapon. He also confirmed that Infinity Ward has no plans to simply remove the 725 from the game. "No," he said.
Modern Warfare's 725 shotgun
The video below shows the 725 killing someone in one shot, from across the map. Cecot said this video shows a "rare" situation where one of the shotgun pellets lands. That being said, Cecot added that there are "changes still to come," presumably for instances like this.
