Voice actors will picket WB Games on November 3rd
Striking video game voice actors are determined to keep up the pressure on developers. In the wake of a picketing campaign against Electronic Arts last week, the SAG-AFTRA union is calling on actors and supporters to picket WB Games on November 3rd. This action by itself probably won’t get WB and other targeted studios to change their ways, but it stresses that actors aren’t backing down on calls for better pay, particularly for strenuous voice recordings or popular titles.
The game studios themselves aren’t shying away from their own publicity tactics. They recently launched a website insisting that SAG-AFTRA didn’t tell actors about the negotiating terms before it broke off talks and called for a strike. The page also contends that its terms are “so close” to what actors want that actors likely wouldn’t have wanted to strike themselves. We suspect the union would beg to differ, though — it even says the studios’ website is using the SAG-AFTRA name without permission. The odds are that this war of words won’t end until one side or the other is willing to make concessions and break the deadlock.
Via: Polygon
Source: SAG-AFTRA
Twitter will stream its first live awards show on December 1st
Twitter is already a hotbed of discussion during awards shows, and now it’s ready to broadcast one of those shows — if not necessarily the one you expect. The social network has reached a deal to stream The Game Awards when they kick off December 1st at 8:30PM Eastern. You can watch the whole of Geoff Keighley’s hybrid of ceremony and game premieres through either Twitter’s website or its official mobile apps, whether or not you’re logged in. It’s an easy fit when TGA caters to a tech-savvy audience that already offers running commentary on Twitter, but you no longer have to juggle apps or websites to have your say.
The awards show may amount to a test run for Twitter. The company is no longer a stranger to streaming live sports or political events, but live entertainment is relatively uncharted territory. If it can show that there’s a significant audience willing to watch awards broadcasts directly on Twitter, it may stand a better chance of scoring deals for massive galas like the Emmys or Oscars. And that’s important for a company counting on video to turn around its ailing fortunes.
Source: PR Newswire
‘Pokémon Go’ will keep users hooked with daily bonuses
Now that Halloween is over, the folks at Niantic Labs have cooked up a new bonus scheme to keep players coming back for more. The next update to Pokémon Go will make it easier to rack up more XP, items and Stardust if you catch a Pokémon or visit a PokéStop every day.
For starters, your first Pokémon catch of the day will kick in 500 XP and 600 Stardust, but if you go on a seven-day catching streak, you’ll be rewarded with a quadruple bonus of 2,000 XP and 2,400 Stardust. Likewise, if you’ve got a favorite PokéStop that you visit on a daily basis, that’ll start to pay off a little bit more. Trainers will get 500 XP and bonus items on their first PokéStop visit and seven straight days of check-ins will bless your character with 2,000 XP and even more item pickups.
If you’re curious, the bonuses refresh every night at midnight in your local time. So, if you catch a Pokémon at 5 PM on a Tuesday, you’ll be eligible for the next daily bonus at 12 AM on Wednesday morning. This latest update, combined with a more balanced playing field should make it easier for casual Pokémon Go players to get a quick boost while also rewarding the hardcore fans still walking around with their phones out.
Source: Pokémon Go Live
The 12 best tech gifts for sports fanatics
Chances are there’s at least one die-hard sports fan in your life. And look, even if your idea of game-time small talk is “Hey, how about that local sportsball team” you can still get them the perfect gift. Whether they’re big NBA addicts, avid runners or trying to perfect that spiral and become an NFL quarterback, we’ve got you covered. And you don’t even have to betray your tech-geek roots to do it. There’s plenty of ways to get your game on while simultaneously getting your geek on. High-end TVs deliver football in 4K glory while wearables like the TomTom Adventurer let you turn that epic hike into epic reams of data. Check out the gallery bellow to see our 12 techie gift recommendations sports fans and athletes.
Twitch will show you more (but higher-quality) ads
Like it or not, Twitch is about to make it harder to escape ads… but you might not mind it as much as you think. It’s introducing SureStream video technology that has Twitch hosting ads itself, saving it from having to insert promos from third-party sources. This will increase the chances that you see ads during a stream, especially if you use ad blocking software. Sorry, folks, you’ll probably have no choice but to subscribe if you want to guarantee uninterrupted viewing. There will be some upshots if you do have to sit through commercials, though.
As Twitch won’t have to rely on outside ads nearly as often, you should see fewer freezes and other technical problems stemming from the switch to and from third-party providers. Twitch will also have greater control over the quality of the ads you see: you should get more consistent volume levels, higher overall visual quality and quicker removals of “problematic” (read: glitchy) spots. And of course, partnered streamers should get a “more reliable” source of income. If you can’t justify a subscription, you can at least find some comfort in knowing that your favorite streamers could receive more ad money.
SureStream starts rolling out today, and should reach everyone sometime in the “coming months.” Twitch isn’t shy about its underlying goals — this will ideally “attract and retain” advertisers worried that they might not reach you, and help serve more ads overall. However, the streaming giant is clearly betting that the reduced anguish when you do see ads will make up the difference, or at least soften the blow.
Source: Twitch Blog
DOJ sues DirecTV for conspiring against LA Dodgers (updated)
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that it is bringing suit against DirecTV for its role in an alleged collusion scheme involving the broadcast rights to Los Angeles Dodgers games. Specifically, the DOJ asserts that DirecTV and three of its competitors — Cox, Charter and AT&T — shared “agreed to and did exchange non-public information about their companies’ ongoing negotiations” with SportsNet LA, the only channel authorized to show Dodgers games.
The DOJ filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and alleges that the four companies essentially gave each other a heads up as to their individual progress in negotiating with SportsNet LA and whether they’d actually carry the channel should they be successful. Doing so, the DOJ argues, allowed the companies to not only gain unfair bargaining leverage but also minimize their subscriber losses should only one company be successful.
What’s more, the DOJ is saying that the reason that none of these companies have yet to carry SportsNet LA is a direct result of their collusion and in doing so, they’ve prevented a large swath of fans from watching the games over the past three seasons. “As the complaint explains,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sallet of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division stated. “Dodgers fans were denied a fair competitive process when DIRECTV orchestrated a series of information exchanges with direct competitors that ultimately made consumers less likely to be able to watch their hometown team.”
Update: AT&T released the following comment to Engadget: “We respect the DOJ’s important role in protecting consumers, but in this case, which occurred before AT&T’s acquisition of DIRECTV, we see the facts differently. The reason why no other major TV provider chose to carry this content was that no one wanted to force all of their customers to pay the inflated prices that Time Warner Cable was demanding for a channel devoted solely to LA Dodgers baseball. We make our carriage decisions independently, legally and only after thorough negotiations with the content owner. We look forward to presenting these facts in court.”
Source: US Department of Justice
Fove’s eye-tracking VR headset is up for pre-order
Last year, we took a look at Fove, a unique take on virtual reality that tracks your eyes in addition to your head for increased accuracy and realism. This doesn’t just reduce head movement — it also reduces the likelihood of VR sickness and introduces a whole new style of gameplay where you can simply look at certain objects to trigger an action. Back then, Fove was just a Kickstarter project, but now it’s ready for the masses. Units will finally start shipping to Kickstarter backers next month, and it’s also now available for pre-order on Fove’s website. It’ll retail for $599 but those who pre-order between now and November 9th can get it for $549.
Fove gets its name from “foveated rendering,” which is a technique used to render scenes in only the area where the eye can see. This, Fove says, is vastly more efficient than having to render the scene over a large area. It improves performance significantly and reduces strain on the system, according to the company. It also means that unlike other headsets such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, you could use the Fove with lower-end PCs. The Rift’s recently announced Spacewarp technology allows for this as well, but Fove CTO and co-founder Lochlainn Wilson says the company still has the Rift beat when it comes to sharpness and quality. The Fove’s display has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440, while the Rift’s is 2,160 x 1,200.
I had a chance to try on the latest iteration of the Fove headset and it looks a little different from the concept art used in the company’s Kickstarter pitch. Instead of a white plastic enclosure, there are velcro straps holding your head in place. “It was just too hard to make sure it fit on different-sized heads,” Wilson said. The current iteration doesn’t allow for thick-rimmed glasses like mine so I had to take them off, but Wilson says the company hopes to have a more spectacle-friendly version next year.
Like my co-worker Roberto Baldwin described when he tried on an early version of the Fove, you first have to go through a calibration process where your eyes follow a floating green dot for a few minutes. After doing that, I found myself facing an army of tiny triangle-shaped spaceships. Just looking at them was enough to trigger gunfire, though I had to make sure the crosshairs lined up correctly with my targets. Next, I saw a demo where the depth of field changes depending on where I look at an image — focusing on the foreground will blur out the background, for example, while staring at an object in the background will fuzz its surroundings, creating a bokeh effect.
I also played a demo of Project Falcon, an on-the-rails first-person-shooter that was a collaboration between Fove and RewindVR. I used an Xbox controller to blast away enemy robots, using only my eyes to aim. I still occasionally had to turn my head to pinpoint those that were slightly out of view, but otherwise I kept relatively still, letting my gaze wander. Which was a good thing, because once eye-tracking was turned off, I found that moving my head around gave me a bit of motion sickness. Wilson also showed me another game where you’re a bound captive, unable to move your arms. As you confront your interrogative captor, you can look around the room at different items in order to prompt him to take certain actions, like, say assassinating an informant.
But even though Fove is a full-fledged VR headset that works with a variety of Steam VR games, Wilson made it clear that the device is still very much for developers. “We’re coming at VR from a slightly different angle,” he said, adding that he’s not trying to compete with Oculus or HTC. Instead, he really just wants to develop the eye-tracking tech as much as possible.
Yuka Kojima, Fove’s CEO and co-founder, added that while eye-tracking has an obvious use case in games, it could also be used in other applications too, like in avatars for social VR. Indeed, Fove is even working on mouth tracking so that you could interact with your friends’ in VR in a much more realistic way.
“I believe eye-tracking is going to be in every headset by 2018,” Wilson said. “But we can get it to you today.”
Source: Fove
Steam now requires that game makers show real screenshots
Have you ever been duped into buying a game on Steam that looked good in the store preview, but was nowhere near as exciting when you sat down to play? Valve wants to put a stop to that. The company is telling Steamworks users that, once the developer tool’s Discovery Update 2.0 arrives, all games on Steam will have to use in-game screenshots for their store image galleries. As Polygon notes, it’s a simple matter of truth in advertising: Valve wants would-be buyers to know what it’s really like to play, not just stare at concept art. It can be “harder for customers to understand” what they’re getting without actual in-game content, Valve’s Alden Kroll says.
It’s not certain that Valve will always double-check game submissions to make sure they honor the policy when it takes effect in the next few weeks. However, this at least gives the company the power to force changes (or in the worst cases, pull apps) if it sees a game that violates the new rule. If nothing else, Valve is practicing what it preaches. The Dota 2 product page on Steam now focuses on in-game screenshots where it previously centered on illustrations.
This doesn’t guarantee that every sketchy developer will mend its ways, or that Valve will avoid selling games whose massive hype doesn’t quite match reality. It should discourage studios from trying to hide shoddy graphics from customers, though. That, in turn, should reduce the chances that you need to ask for a refund or otherwise suffer through buyer’s remorse.
Source: Polygon
Gameroom is Facebook’s antiquated answer to Steam
Back in August Facebook announced its PC gaming platform as a partnership with the Unity developer toolset. There are a few more details now, and from the sounds of it, Facebook Gameroom is basically Steam from 2009, but for Facebook games — both web and those natively built for the ecosystem. The social network is starting small: games can’t be any larger than 200MB, although it will “consider” hosting games up to 500MB on a case-by-case basis, according to the service. That automatically rules out something like, say, Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition’s 58GB, but smaller fare like Desert Golf’s 1MB size would have plenty of room to spare.
Gameroom has been in beta for a bit — Game of Dice came out last week — but this seems like the platform’s big roll out, with a free client download for Windows 7 and above. In our tests, Words With Friends, Trivia Crack, Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity showed up as available games. And, well, none of them worked when we tried opening them. Those that did, like Scrabble, launched what looks like a web page within the program itself. There’s even a browser compatibility check. First-person shooter Critical Ops, on the other hand, downloaded 100MB worth of files before it would start.
Currently, Gameroom feels like something that’s been gathering dust for awhile. It’s kludgy and there really isn’t anything worth playing on it. But, given that Facebook is adamant about making sure everyone will be jacked into VR, the company needs its own way to sell games to people like your elderly uncle or grandma. Gameroom might seem foreign to you and me, but for a vast swath of the folks playing games on Facebook, it’s the other way around with GOG, Origin and Steam. And those people are who this service is for.
Source: Facebook Developers
Project Tango game ‘Woorld’ is here to make your life silly
This one is for all the Levovo Phab2 Pro owners out there. The Project Tango-powered augmented reality game Woorld is available today via the Google Play Store, just for Phab2 Pro people. Woorld comes from Keita Takahashi, the creator of eccentric classics Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, and it features a familiar brand of adorable, cartoonish characters and objects. However, since this is an AR game, everything is overlaid on the real world through the Phab2 Pro’s screen.
Players are able to map their surroundings and then place things like houses, sprouts, clouds, mushrooms, pyramids, snowmen and cute little box-like characters anywhere around the environment. The objects interact with each other — the sprout grows into a flower after it receives some rain from a cloud, for example.
We got a closer look at Woorld in May and found it to be a creative, sandbox-style experience. Woorld comes from Takahashi and Funomena, an independent game studio founded by Journey developers Robin Hunicke and Martin Middleton.
The Phab2 Pro hit shelves today for $500. It’s the first-ever phone to launch with Google’s Tango depth-sensing technology, and to show off all the fancy AR features, 35 new Tango apps hit the Google Play Store today.
Source: Funomena
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