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1924. Private Investigator Pierce is sent to look into the tragic death of the Hawkins family. Plunge into a world of creeping madness and cosmic horror. Cryptic clues, shadowy figures, and pure terror bar your way as you fight to retain your sanity and solve an otherworldly mystery.

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This week at Bungie, we restored the Thorn in your side.

If you can remember your first revive in Old Russia, other memories of Thorn may plague your nightmares from time to time. This week, those same nightmares returned in full force. If you’re a Guardian who’s new around these parts, get ready to feel the sting.

A villain’s weapon returns tomorrow.

Will you dare wield Thorn, the legendary Weapon of Sorrow? pic.twitter.com/jvhqaKNxus
— Destiny The Game (@DestinyTheGame) March 11, 2019

Thorn T-Shirt/Replica: 

Gambit Prime Jersey: 

Thorn wasn’t the only thing happening in Destiny 2 this week. Guardians also faced a difficult question on Tuesday…

Picking Sides

Do you side with the Vanguard or the Drifter? Depending on your choice, you’ll receive a set of rewards specific to your allegiance. Through the Allegiance quest, each side will offer unique lore. Each week you’ll receive a small package as gratitude for your pledge. Throughout Season of the Drifter, depending on your pledge, one of these packages will be found at Ikora or Drifter upon each weekly reset:

Vanguard Weekly Package:

Drifter Weekly Package:

There’s no bias here, I swear!

Prove Your Worth

Last week, Reckoning tiers 1 and 2 went live, bringing players to the plane of the Nine. Tomorrow, tier 3 will become available, opening the chase to fully unlock your Gambit Prime perks. This activity will have a Power level requirement of 680. Players will need to fully upgrade their synthesizer to enter. Modifiers are also active in this playlist, so be ready to mix your arsenal up for the challenge.

Matchmaking will continue to be available if you’re looking to take on the challenge without a pre-made fireteam. Things may be a little trickier without strategy or communication, so prepare for some white-knuckles as you race the clock to eliminate the darkness. We’ll be watching, as will the Nine.

Speaking of the Nine, Invitations of the Nine also begins tomorrow.

To begin, you’ll need to track down Xûr. In addition to his Exotic inventory, he’ll also offer a quest item for you to complete each week, for up to nine weeks. Each week you engage, you’ll be invited to learn more about the Nine and unlock lore pages to dive deeper into their story.

Polish and Prime

With Season of the Drifter little more than a week old, we’re tracking down some bugs to squash and quality-of-life to address. We’ll be deploying hotfixes and updates, along with some back-end server changes to help keep things fresh. Here’s a quick list of changes specific to Gambit, Gambit Prime, and Reckoning that are currently in-flight.

Gambit Matchmaking [Revised 2:20 PM 3/14/19]

With the release of this very blog article, Gambit received some updates to matchmaking. Gambit is a team based activity and as such, players who are in a pre-made fireteam have a communication advantage. To offset that advantage, we’ve raised the internal skill rating of pre-made fireteams to pull in higher skill enemies to fight against. With this change, even as a solo player, you’ll still have a chance. Plus, your other matched fireteam mates should be higher skilled as well.

Solo players of low skill should expect to match other solo players more frequently. Higher skill teams will also match teams more frequently.

Gambit Prime Synths

Shortly after the release of Gambit Prime, players began filling their inventory with Prime Armor Synths. Tentatively planned for Hotfix 2.2.0.2, players will be able exchange a stack of 5 Synths for 100 Glimmer with the Drifter. The intention of this isn’t to give players a means of acquiring large amounts of Glimmer, but strictly to help address inventory issues.

Reckoning Modifiers

In early playtests at the studio, Prism proved to be more challenging than intended in higher Tiers of Reckoning and we planned to remove it in the first patch proactively. When we launched last week, we collected some fairly positive feedback with Prism and wanted to react quickly and remedy that change. Since Glass seemed more problematic, we wanted to take action there too. Tentatively planned for Hotfix 2.2.0.2, we will be replacing Glass with Prism. Tier 3 goes live tomorrow,  so we’ll continue to monitor feedback and make adjustments as needed.

As with all things in development, any of these forecast changes could be altered or delayed. For the most current information on our plans and progress, stay tuned for patch notes.

Persistent Upkeep

Week in and week out, Player Support is at the ready to lend a helping hand when issues arise in Destiny 2. This week, they have some vital information for those preparing to pick a side in the Allegiance quest. No, they’re not telling you to pledge to the Vanguard (even though you totally should), but making sure your experience is smooth and issue free.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.2.0.1

In last week’s Player Support Report, we highlighted an issue where some players’ weekly bounties for Ada-1 and Petra Venj did not refresh at the weekly reset, instead refreshing the following Sunday. With the conclusion of this week’s maintenance, we expect this issue to be resolved.

In addition to this change, we’d like to also highlight the resolution of the following issues:

Poetry in Motion

You ever wonder what the Cabal watch for entertainment? Maybe they tune in to Crucible matches to watch Guardians beat each other’s faces in. Or maybe they jump on bungie.net to watch some funny videos on the Creations page.

Movie of the Week: What’d you expect?

More ding ding ding pic.twitter.com/Z33bGzNuae
— Solar Flair (@SolarFlairYT) March 10, 2019

Honorable Mention: I’ve got a fever…

Hey@A_dmg04 pic.twitter.com/wXvxqWYZ9G
— Dredgen But Good Guy FALLOUT (@falloutplays) March 13, 2019

Honorable Mention: Ok seriously, how many of these are there?

More #Destiny2 #Drifter #Ding fun #GambitPrime pic.twitter.com/puHWREnmLY

— Dan (qazimod) (@qazimod) March 12, 2019

Honorable Mention: Shouldn’t have taken that recent update…

This week is home to villainous weaponry, reckonings, and invitations to the unknown. We’re excited to watch as you dive through the content, and we still have more to come throughout Season of the Drifter. Gambit Prime Private Matches, Arc week, and the Revelry are on the approach. Until then, we have a few more Bungie Bounties to challenge you with and more maps coming into rotation in Gambit Prime.

March 20, 10 AM PDT: PS4 Bungie Bounty

April 3, 10 AM PDT: PC Bungie Bounty

Until then, you can find me building out my Sentry set. Somebody has to keep the Blockers clear and take down those pesky invaders…

Cheers,

dmg04

There are plenty of smaller titles that cropped up over the 25 minutes of today’s Nindies presentation. Here’s our roundup of some of the smaller titles and their trailers.

Overland

Finji delivers a new game from Adam Saltsman, the creator of Canabalt. In this turn-based survival game, players take care of a group of travelers on a post-apocalyptic road trip across the United States. Fight off scary creatures, rescue stranded survivors and scavenge for supplies like fuel, first aid kits and weapons. There are consequences for every action. The game launches on Nintendo Switch this fall.

Neo Cab

Fellow Traveller and Chance Agency offer an emotional survival game about staying human in a world disrupted by automation. Lina, the last human driver on the neon-drenched streets of Los Ojos, California, interacts with a diverse cast of characters with individual story arcs. Players must balance their income, sustain a positive rating and manage their emotions, as fulfilling Lina’s job as a rideshare driver is the only way they might reunite with her best friend Savy, who’s mysteriously gone missing. The game launches on Nintendo Switch this summer.

Katana Zero

Devolver Digital and askiisoft have created a stylish neo-noir action-platformer featuring breakneck action and instant-death combat. Players take on the role of an assassin, the Dragon, to slash, dash and manipulate time to unravel their past in a beautifully brutal acrobatic display. Players can overcome the opposition however the situation requires, as each level is uniquely designed for countless methods of completion. Deflect gunfire back at foes, dodge oncoming attacks and manipulate enemies and environments with traps and explosives. Leave no survivors. The game launches on Nintendo Switch on April 18, and is available for pre-purchase starting today.

Creature In The Well

Flight School Studio challenges players to this top-down, pinball-inspired hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. Players venture deep into a desert mountain haunted by a desperate Creature to restore power to an ancient facility by charging energy orbs and having them bounce around and ricochet to reactivate dormant machinery. They will uncover and upgrade powerful gear to help them save the city of Mirage from a deadly sandstorm. The game launches on Nintendo Switch this summer.

Bloodroots

Paper Cult delivers ultraviolence in a twisted Western revenge tale with a deranged cast of characters. Betrayed and left for dead, Mr. Wolf is hell-bent on finding his attacker and exacting revenge. Players can choreograph spectacular, bloody combos by making use of everything around them, from hatchets and ladders to … carrots? The game launches on Nintendo Switch this summer.

Pine

Kongregate and Twirlbound offer a stirring open-world adventure with beautiful biomes to explore, puzzles to solve and secrets to discover. Players take on the role of Hue, a brave young adult who belongs to the last remaining tribe of humans on the island of Albamare. The island’s factions trade and fight with each other over food and territory, while Hue learns about ways to influence the ecology in search for a new home for the humans. The game launches on Nintendo Switch in August.

Super Crate Box

Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box is coming to bring back the glory of the golden arcade age, when all that really mattered was getting on that high score list. The Nintendo Switch version will include exclusive two-player co-operative and competitive multiplayer for even more arcade mayhem. Prepare for an arcade delight with tight controls, refreshing game mechanics, cracking retro art and a terribly hip chiptune soundtrack when Super Crate Box launches in April.

Nuclear Throne

Vlambeer’s post-apocalyptic roguelike-like top-down shooter challenges players to fight their way through the wastelands with powerful weaponry, collecting radiation to mutate some new limbs and abilities. The game offers 12 playable characters, seven playable main worlds, 30 ways to mutate characters and more than 120 weapons. The game launches on Nintendo Switch – today!

Swimsanity!

Decoy Games takes a deep dive with this multiplayer underwater shooter with action-packed co-op and versus game modes, all supported by online and local play. The game comes with an ocean of content, with more than 150 challenges across eight game modes. Players can toggle between classic dual-stick controls and motion aiming, whether they’re playing locally or online*. The game launches on Nintendo Switch this summer.

And here are a couple without trailers – check out the entire presentation below for footage:

Vlambeer Arcade with ULTRABUGS

Vlambeer Arcade is a collection of bite-sized games with a growing catalog that starts with ULTRABUGS, a fast-paced, high-score-centric game in which players pilot a ship to fight endless space bugs. The only problem is that those bugs then split up into more space bugs when they’re defeated. By beating boss monsters, players will unlock enemy DNA that they can use to customize their ship. Vlambeer Arcade with ULTRABUGS is coming to Nintendo Switch later this year.

Darkwood

Acid Wizard Studio and Crunching Koalas set their survivor horror game in East-Central Europe, in a forest possessed by unknown evil forces that corrupt all the inhabitants of the woods: people, animals and even the plants. Players can get new powers by extracting a strange essence from mutated fauna and flora and injecting it into their bloodstream. The game builds an atmospheric, psychological feeling of tension without the usual horror tricks of jump scares and creaking doors. The game launches on Nintendo Switch in May.

So, what from that little lot takes your fancy? Let us know in the usual place.

A recent Global Market Insights report projects the single board computer market will grow from $600 million in 2018 to $1 billion by 2025. Yet, you don’t need to read a market research report to realize the SBC market is booming. Driven by the trends toward IoT and AI-enabled edge computing, new boards keep rolling off the assembly lines, many of them tailored for highly specific applications.

Much of the action has been in Linux-compatible boards, including the insanely popular Raspberry Pi. The number of different vendors and models has exploded thanks in part to the rise of community-backed, open-spec SBCs.

Here we examine 10 of the most intriguing, Linux-driven SBCs among the many products announced in the last four weeks that bookended the recent Embedded World show in Nuremberg. (There was also some interesting Linux software news at the show.) Two of the SBCs—the Intel Whiskey Lake based UP Xtreme and Nvidia Jetson Nano driven Jetson Nano Dev Kit—were announced only this week.

Our mostly open source list also includes a few commercial boards. Processors range from the modest, Cortex-A7 driven STM32MP1 to the high-powered Whiskey Lake and Snapdragon 845. Mid-range models include Google’s i.MX8M powered Coral Dev Board and a similarly AI-enhanced, TI AM5729 based BeagleBone AI. Deep learning acceleration chips—and standard RPi 40-pin or 96Boards expansion connectors—are common themes among most of these boards.

The SBCs are listed in reverse chronological order according to their announcement dates. The links in the product names go to recent LinuxGizmos reports, which link to vendor product pages.

UP Xtreme—The latest in Aaeon’s line of community-backed SBCs taps Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake-U CPUs, which maintain a modest 15W TDP while boosting performance with up to quad-core, dual threaded configurations. Depending on when it ships, this Linux-ready model will likely be the most powerful community-backed SBC around — and possibly the most expensive.

The SBC supports up to 16GB DDR4 and 128GB eMMC and offers 4K displays via HDMI, DisplayPort, and eDP. Other features include SATA, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, and 40-pin “HAT” and 100-pin GPIO add-on board connectors. You also get mini-PCIe and dual M.2 slots that support wireless modems and more SATA options. The slots also support Aaeon’s new AI Core X modules, which offer Intel’s latest Movidius Myriad X VPUs for 1TOPS neural processing acceleration.

Jetson Nano Dev Kit—Nvidia just announced a low-end Jetson Nano compute module that’s sort of like a smaller (70 x 45mm) version of the old Jetson TX1. It offers the same 4x Cortex-A57 cores but has an even lower-end 128-core Maxwell GPU. The module has half the RAM and flash (4GB/16GB) of the TX1 and TX2, and no WiFi/Bluetooth radios. Like the hexa-core Jetson TX2, however, it supports 4K video and the GPU offers similar CUDA-X deep learning libraries.

Although Nvidia has backed all its Linux-driven Jetson modules with development kits, the Jetson Nano Dev Kit is its first community-backed, maker-oriented kit. It does not appear to offer open specifications, but it costs only $99 and there’s a forum and other community resources. Many of the specs match or surpass the Raspberry Pi 3B+, including the addition of a 40-pin GPIO. Highlights include an M.2 slot, GbE with Power-over-Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 and eDP links, and 4x USB 3.0 ports.

Coral Dev Board—Google’s very first Linux maker board arrived earlier this month featuring an NXP i.MX8M and Google’s Edge TPU AI chip—a stripped-down version of Google’s TPU Unit is designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML models. The $150, Raspberry Pi-like Coral Dev Board was joined by a similarly Edge TPU-enabled Coral USB Accelerator USB stick. These will be followed by an Edge TPU based Coral PCIe Accelerator and a Coral SOM compute module. All these devices are backed with schematics, community resources, and other open-spec resources.

The Coral Dev Board combines the Edge TPU chip with NXP’s quad-core, 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 i.MX8M with a 3D Vivante GPU/VPU and a Cortex-M4 MCU. The SBC is even more like the Raspberry Pi 3B+ than Nvidia’s Dev Kit, mimicking the size and much of the layout and I/O, including the 40-pin GPIO connector. Highlights include 4K-ready GbE, HDMI 2.0a, 4-lane MIPI-DSI and CSI, and USB 3.0 host and Type-C ports.

SBC-C43—Seco’s commercial, industrial temperature SBC-C43 board is the first SBC based on NXP’s high-end, up to hexa-core i.MX8. The 3.5-inch SBC supports the i.MX8 QuadMax with 2x Cortex-A72 cores and 4x Cortex-A53 cores, the QuadPlus with a single Cortex-A72 and 4x -A53, and the Quad with no -A72 cores and 4x -A53. There are also 2x Cortex-M4F real-time cores and 2x Vivante GPU/VPU cores. Yocto Project, Wind River Linux, and Android are available.

The feature-rich SBC-C43 supports up to 8GB DDR4 and 32GB eMMC, both soldered for greater reliability. Highlights include dual GbE, HDMI 2.0a in and out ports, WiFi/Bluetooth, and a variety of industrial interfaces. Dual M.2 slots support SATA, wireless, and more.

Nitrogen8M_Mini—This Boundary Devices cousin to the earlier, i.MX8M based Nitrogen8M is available for $135, with shipments due this Spring. The open-spec Nitrogen8M_Mini is the first SBC to feature NXP’s new i.MX8M Mini SoC. The Mini uses a more advanced 14LPC FinFET process than the i.MX8M, resulting in lower power consumption and higher clock rates for both the 4x Cortex-A53 (1.5GHz to 2GHz) and Cortex-M4 (400MHz) cores. The drawback is that you’re limited to HD video resolution.

Supported with Linux and Android, the Nitrogen8M_Mini ships with 2GB to 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and 8GB to 128GB eMMC. MIPI-DSI and -CSI interfaces support optional touchscreens and cameras, respectively. A GbE port is standard and PoE and WiFi/BT are optional. Other features include 3x USB ports, one or two PCIe slots, and optional -40 to 85°C support. A Nitrogen8M_Mini SOM module with similar specs is also in the works.

Pine H64 Model B—Pine64’s latest hacker board was teased in late January as part of an ambitious roll-out of open source products, including a laptop, tablet, and phone. The Raspberry Pi semi-clone, which recently went on sale for $39 (2GB) or $49 (3GB), showcases the high-end, but low-cost Allwinner H64. The quad -A53 SoC is notable for its 4K video with HDR support.

The Pine H64 Model B offers up to 128GB eMMC storage, WiFi/BT, and a GbE port. I/O includes 2x USB 2.0 and single USB 3.0 and HDMI 2.0a ports plus SPDIF audio and an RPi-like 40-pin connector. Images include Android 7.0 and an “in progress” Armbian Debian Stretch.

AI-ML Board—Arrow unveiled this i.MX8X based SBC early this month along with a similarly 96Boards CE Extended format, i.MX8M based Thor96 SBC. While there are plenty of i.MX8M boards these days, we’re more intrigued with the lowest-end i.MX8X member of the i.MX8 family. The AI-ML Board is the first SBC we’ve seen to feature the low-power i.MX8X, which offers up to 4x 64-bit, 1.2GHz Cortex-A35 cores, a 4-shader, 4K-ready Vivante GPU/VPU, a Cortex-M4F chip, and a Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP.

The open-spec, Yocto Linux driven AI-ML Board is targeted at low-power, camera-equipped applications such as drones. The board has 2GB LPDDR4, Ethernet, WiFi/BT, and a pair each of MIPI-DSI and USB 3.0 ports. Cameras are controlled via the 96Boards 60-pin, high-power GPIO connector, which is joined by the usual 40-pin low-power link. The launch is expected June 1.

BeagleBone AI—The long-awaited successor to the Cortex-A8 AM3358 based BeagleBone family of boards advances to TIs dual-core Cortex-A15 AM5729, with similar PowerVR GPU and MCU-like PRU cores. The real story, however, is the AI firepower enabled by the SoC’s dual TI C66x DSPs and four embedded-vision-engine (EVE) neural processing cores. BeagleBoard.org claims that calculations for computer-vision models using EVE run at 8x times the performance per watt compared to the similar, but EVE-less, AM5728. The EVE and DSP chips are supported through a TIDL machine learning OpenCL API and pre-installed tools.

Due to go on sale in April for about $100, the Linux-powered BeagleBone AI is based closely on the BeagleBone Black and offers backward header, mechanical, and software compatibility. It doubles the RAM to 1GB and quadruples the eMMC storage to 16GB. You now get GbE and high-speed WiFi, as well as a USB Type-C port.

Robotics RB3 Platform (DragonBoard 845c)—Qualcomm and Thundercomm are initially launching their 96Boards CE form factor, Snapdragon 845-based upgrade to the Snapdragon 820-based DragonBoard 820c SBC as part of a Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform. Yet, 96Boards.org has already posted a DragonBoard 845c product page, and we imagine the board will be available in the coming months without all the robotics bells and whistles. A compute module version is also said to be in the works.

The 10nm, octa-core, “Kryo” based Snapdragon 845 is one of the most powerful Arm SoCs around. It features an advanced Adreno 630 GPU with “eXtended Reality” (XR) VR technology and a Hexagon 685 DSP with a third-gen Neural Processing Engine (NPE) for AI applications. On the RB3 kit, the board’s expansion connectors are pre-stocked with Qualcomm cellular and robotics camera mezzanines. The $449 and up kit also includes standard 4K video and tracking cameras, and there are optional Time-of-Flight (ToF) and stereo SLM camera depth cameras. The SBC runs Linux with ROS (Robot Operating System).

Avenger96—Like Arrow’s AI-ML Board, the Avenger96 is a 96Boards CE Extended SBC aimed at low-power IoT applications. Yet, the SBC features an even more power-efficient (and slower) SoC: ST’s recently announced STM32MP153. The Avenger96 runs Linux on the high-end STM32MP157 model, which has dual, 650MHz Cortex-A7 cores, a Cortex-M4, and a Vivante 3D GPU.

This sandwich-style board features an Avenger96 module with the STM32MP157 SoC, 1GB of DDR3L, 2MB SPI flash, and a power management IC. It’s unclear if the 8GB eMMC and WiFi-ac/Bluetooth 4.2 module are on the module or carrier board. The Avenger96 SBC is further equipped with GbE, HDMI, micro-USB OTG, and dual USB 2.0 host ports. There’s also a microSD slot and the usual 40- and 60-pin GPIO connectors. The board is expected to go on sale in April.

During the latest Nindies Showcase it was revealed that Blaster Master Zero 2 – the sequel to the much-liked original – will land on the Switch eShop today for just $9.99.

The first game was a Switch launch title, but it seems that this follow-up is both bigger and better, with the protagonist Jason blasting off into space with his buggy chum. With exciting new weapons and boss battles, this looks like a winner.

Check out the trailer above and let us know if you plan to pick this up today with a comment below. We’ll be reviewing it in the not-too-distant future!

Veteran developer Double Fine today announced an all-new game coming to Switch this summer. RAD is a 3D action game set in the Fallow, a wasteland of a world that has been ravaged by not one, but two apocalypses.

Players will have to battle all sorts of creatures and work to heal the cracked and barren land you can see the the trailer and the screenshots below. It appears that your teenage protagonist doesn’t react very well to the toxic radioactivity he encounters, with various mutations that will help, and we assume hinder, your progress.

From the official blurb:

The fate of the world depends on the player, a sweet bat, and whatever new abilities they gain as the world around them ravages their body, twisting and mutating them into something far less than human, but far more powerful.

The old favourite term ‘roguelike’ got rolled out again for this one, but Double Fine’s trademark humour (glimpsed in the trailer reveal as studio head Tim Schafer put in a cameo appearance) should help stop this particular apocalypse from getting stodgy – we’ll find out more this summer.

Are you a fan of Double Fine’s games? Let us know if this catches your eye in the comments below.

The Game Developers Conference is here again and I’m hecka stoked to join the ID@Xbox team in our annual trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. GDC is an amazing time to highlight new games, catch-up with other developers and friends in the industry and listen to their feedback to continue driving innovation forward for Xbox.

2018 was a fantastic year for developers in the ID@Xbox program and we can’t be more excited to share what we have planned for 2019 with our fans in the coming days and months. Nearly 400 titles were released through the program last year, helping us reach a milestone of over 1,000 titles launched via ID@Xbox. We sent out developer kits to nearly 500 new studios in 2018, which means that over 3,000 studios across 67 countries now have Xbox One developer kits. With over 1,600 games in active development, we’re excited to see the variety of new experiences that teams are bringing to fans. Finally, games coming through the program have generated more than $1.2 billion in revenue since the program’s inception.

Xbox Game Pass has been and continues to be a great way for independent developers to get their games discovered while also enabling members to find their next favorite game. To date, we’ve worked with over 125 developers who have brought their games to Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Game Pass has also helped give independent developers more exposure with audiences that they wouldn’t have normally been able to reach. For example, of all the Xbox Game Pass members who played “Human: Fall Flat,” more than 40% had never played a puzzle game on Xbox before.

Looking ahead, 2019 will be another great year with a stellar lineup of games slated to release through the ID@Xbox program. Folks can once again try out a number of these titles at the Microsoft Booth in the Moscone Center or at our Developer Showcase Event for press. Among these games, titles from acclaimed creators like Night School Studios, Blue Manchu Games and Zen Studios will launch Afterparty, Void Bastards and Operencia: The Stolen Sun day-and-date into Xbox Game Pass, bringing their games to millions of members upon release. We’re also excited to see games like The Artful Escape, Sable and Tunic from our friends at Beethoven & Dinosaur, Shedworks and Dicey respectively continue their development path through the program.

While Xbox Game Pass has created amazing opportunities for developers to have their games discovered by an established player base, Xbox Live continues to be an amazing social tool for players and developers alike. Whether it’s Gamerscore, achievements, cloud saves, multiplayer, leaderboards or just seeing if your friends are online (and what they’re playing), Xbox Live makes playing games better for fans, and implementation of key social features easier for devs.

We’re super excited this week to start talking to developers about how they can use Xbox Live on platforms other than Xbox and Windows 10 PCs, starting with iOS and Android! This has been a big request from players and developers over the years and while we’ve done a lot of work to implement Xbox Live in some of our Xbox Game Studios games on other platforms (such as Microsoft Solitaire and Wordament), and as part of the foundational technology for the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft, we’re excited to open up this functionality to more developers soon via easy-to-use SDKs! You can learn a lot more in Kareem Choudhry’s blog posts. If you’re a developer interested in implementing Xbox Live in your iOS and Android titles, please reach out to us at www.xbox.com/id and we’d be happy to help get you started!

As with most new technologies, we love to work with partners to help us explore new innovations we’re bringing to developers. That brings us to Cuphead! Our friends at StudioMDHR already have experience with Xbox Live beyond the console – Cuphead is available on Windows 10 with Xbox Live as well. We’ve had some good conversations with them about Xbox Live and the gaming community, especially after we saw what Mojang had done with Minecraft and the Bedrock Edition.

Growing out of these recent discussions, we are partnering with StudioMDHR to investigate bringing Xbox Live features beyond Xbox and PC to Nintendo Switch. Yes, this means that fans will now have the opportunity to experience StudioMDHR’s award-winning debut game on Nintendo Switch with Xbox Live! We’ll be working with StudioMDHR to implement Xbox Live features into Cuphead on the Nintendo Switch in the coming months. Given the early stage of our work with StudioMDHR, the Xbox Live features will appear in a post-launch update to Cuphead on Nintendo Switch. We’d like to thank Studio MDHR and Nintendo for their help in this investigation!

To both players and developers – thanks again for playing and supporting the amazing work showcased through ID@Xbox! We can’t wait for what’s to come this week at GDC!