Crytek is closing studios and slow-paying employees again
Crytek, the developer behind the technically impressive CryEngine toolset, and most recently Robinson: The Journey, is laying off employees and closing studios. Workers’ paychecks have reportedly been extremely slow to arrive as well. No, you aren’t imagining things — the company faced similar circumstances a few years ago. But the bloodletting appears much worse this time out: All of the company’s studios will be shuttered but two.
Specifically, Crytek’s offices in Budapest; Istanbul; Seoul; Sofia, Bulgaria and Shanghai will be closed. Studios in Frankfurt and Kiev will remain open.
In a press release, co-founder Avni Yerli said “these changes are part of the essential steps we are taking to ensure Crytek is a healthy and sustainable business moving forward that can continue to attract and nurture our industry’s top talent.” Until it comes time to pay them, apparently.
Kotaku reports that employees at the company’s main studio in Frankfurt haven’t received paychecks in three months, and that offices in Budapest and Sofia have gone without pay as well. The publication’s sources said that payments have been late all year long and that management has been incommunicative about the reasons why, or when payment will happen.
Employees were paid wages for October as of last week, according to Eurogamer, while November pay will supposedly arrive this week. The money may have come from Russian internet company Mail.ru, which is rumored to buy Crytek’s free-to-play shooter Warface and its unannounced sequel come January, the publication said.
When facing a similar situation in 2014, Crytek old off its UK studio to Metro: Last Light publisher Deep Silver, along with the rights to Homefront: The Revolution. That game was shoved onto market this past May, following additional delays post-purchase. It has a rating of 48 (out of 100) on Metacritic, and a 3.8 user score.
Via: Eurogamer
Source: Crytek
‘Dawn of Titans’ shrinks an epic strategy game onto your phone
This year alone, 1.4 billion smartphones will be sold, giving more people have access to gaming devices than ever before. But with more than 1,000 new apps flooding the App Store every day, it’s increasingly difficult for new titles to make an impact. Every so often, a game like Pokémon Go comes along, proving that if you have the right “hook,” you can find a massive audience.
NaturalMotion believes technology is its hook. The British gaming studio started life creating animation engines, with its software used for everything from The Lord of the Rings movies to Grand Theft Auto V. It then packed that tech into mobile games like Clumsy Ninja that, thanks to their visual edge, quickly topped the App Store. That success led to the studio being bought for $527 million by casual-gaming giant Zynga. It’s been nearly three years since the acquisition, though, and the pressure is on for NaturalMotion to deliver a fresh hit.
The studio is hoping that pushing the processing power of modern smartphones is enough to get players downloading again. Moving away from the simple titles that built them an empire, NaturalMotion’s latest title, Dawn of Titans, is the developer’s first foray into action-strategy gaming.
For a mobile game, Dawn of Titans offers an unusual sense of scale. Upon opening the app, you find yourself looking over an intricately detailed floating kingdom, fully rendered 3D castles and buildings sitting before you as tiny villagers wander around them in real time. It’s a level of detail you’d expect to see in a console game, not on an app’s home screen.
Although not quite as detailed, the battles themselves are also pretty spectacular. With the studio clearly taking cues from Creative Assembly’s Total War series, Dawn of Titans sees you leading thousands of soldiers into battle against either real-life or AI-controlled foes. Combat is simple: Skirmishes last around a minute, and you command each type of unit to attack with the flick of a finger. Most of the real strategizing takes place long before any swords clash. Offline missions and online fights reward you with in-game currency, and between matches you train your units and equip your most prized warriors.
NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil explains that simplicity is the key to success. “Those epic battles that you see in the likes of The Lord of the Rings, they don’t exist on mobile. We felt like we could do that and make them pass the Starbucks test.” Reil pauses, gesturing at the opposing army lying defeated on the screen. “For it to work on mobile, you need to be able to win a battle in the time it takes you to buy a coffee.”
“..Successful games create an environment that you want to spend time in, where you make friends. Then, eventually, some people will want to pay.”
Sensibly, this time NaturalMotion is choosing to avoid heavy-handed micro transactions. “[Dawn of Titans] doesn’t nickel-and-dime you because when we tried that in the past, players just dropped out of the game,” he explains. “In this new generation of free-to-play, I think all the successful games create an environment that you want to spend time in, where you make friends. Then, eventually, some people will want to pay.”
As enjoyable as Dawn of Titans is, it needs to do more than impress gamers like me. Facebook gaming has fallen by the wayside and NaturalMotion’s parent company Zynga’s relevance and profits have declined with it. The Farmville creator has bet big on NaturalMotion, and despite performing well initially, the company’s first game since the acquisition, CSR Racing 2, has since dropped out of the top 50 on the App Store charts. A lot is riding on Dawn of Titans‘ success.
NaturalMotion’s CEO seems less worried. “If we wow people, it spreads word of mouth.” Reil says. “It’s actually a very specific focus that we have with all of our games. Our business model is if we invest more in the product, then we invest less in user acquisition.”
But its competitors reportedly spend almost $1 million a day on star-studded ad campaigns, and NaturalMotion is going to need more than just word of mouth to succeed. Reil argued that Zynga has the resources to compete. “If we want to compete with Clash of Clans — with any of these companies– we can,” he says. I’m not so sure. That may have been true in 2012 when Zynga was valued at $11.5 billion, but now the company is worth just $2.4 billion, less than a quarter of Clash of Clans maker Supercell (which also has the financial clout of Tencent, a $250 billion company, behind it).
Since my discussion with Reil, Dawn of Titans was released on both Android and iOS. As of December 19th, it ranked 64th in the App Store’s “Top Grossing” list and 50th in the corresponding Google Play chart. It’s off to a decent start, for sure, but with Zynga unable to match its rivals’ marketing budgets, Dawn of Titans will have to hook a lot more players if it’s to succeed in this cutthroat market.
Vote for the winners of the first ever Steam Awards
Back in November, Valve asked you to nominate titles for the first ever Steam Awards — now, the gaming titan also wants you to choose its winners. It sounds like the nomination phase was a success, since Valve ended up with four write-in categories instead of one. Since there are eight pre-determined categories, there are now 12 in total, including “Villain Most In Need Of A Hug,” “Just 5 More Minutes” and “I’m Not Crying, There’s Something In My Eye.”
Can you think of games that fit those descriptions perfectly? Good, because Steam will start accepting votes for one category a day starting at 1PM EST on December 22nd. You only have 24 hours to vote for the winner for each one before moving to the next until all eight pre-determined categories are done. Then on December 30th, all four write-in categories will be open for voting for another 24 hours. Valve will announce the winners on New Year’s Eve, and we can finally know which game made the most people cry and which has been keeping the most people glued to their computer screens.
Source: Steam
Now the Xbox One Elite gamepad is even more customizable
Sure, the Xbox One Elite gamepad is tailored to however you want to use it. But if you’d rather have a controller that wasn’t the standard black and grey, you’d have to opt for the hideous Gears of War 4 edition’s stylings. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. Over a year later, Microsoft and Scuf (hardware partner and purveyors of pro-level gamepads) are offering the controllers in a bevy of colors and patterns.
You can’t go full Xbox Design Lab, but there are plenty of cosmetic options to choose from. Want a carbon fiber pattern for the body, blue and purple trim rings around the thumbstick pods, white face buttons and hot pink profile slider button? Have at it. You can get custom-designed thumbsticks, D-pads and lever setups as well.
Speaking of which, if you shelled out $150 for the gamepad before now, those control levers, thumbsticks and D-pads will be available for sale as well. You can even swap out the Elite’s default sidewall grips, too. The controllers themselves start at $149, and the accessory packs range from $30 to $40 and will be available “soon.”
Via: Xbox WIre
Source: Scuf Gaming
‘Thumper’ pulses its way to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets
Thumper, the trippy rhythm game with a pulsing electronic soundtrack (no, the other one) was one of the surprise hits of PlayStation VR’s launch. And now it’s headed elsewhere. That’s right, folks with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets will be able to find the title in their store of choice now. The recently released update on Steam adds “basic support” for Oculus Touch and Vive wands as well. With what I’ve played of the game on PSVR though, I’m not sure how motion control is going to improve the experience — a gamepad is a perfect fit as it is. But hey, Thumper in more places is hard to complain about.
Source: Steam, Oculus Home
‘Until Dawn’ looked way different as a PlayStation 3 game
Until Dawn was my favorite game from last year. It had a rocky development history, though, starting as a first-person PlayStation 3 game that used the Move motion controller pretty extensively. And now, footage from an early prototype has surfaced online, showing off just what the game looked like as a motion-controlled PS3 title.
The shift to a first-person perspective is the most jarring difference, and Sony’s Move wand works both for controlling the in-game flashlight and for completing quick-time events. The doomed teens still convene at a ski lodge in the woods, but the setting doesn’t look nearly as impressive as the final, PlayStation 4, version given the PS3’s comparatively weaker hardware. Character faces have a distinctly mannequin-esque look to them, as well. Another difference? The live-action story sequences peppered about to fill in the narrative. Oh, and Hollywood actors Hayden Panettiere and Rami Malek are nowhere in sight.
The game’s greatest strength was how much it felt like an indie teen-horror flick. And for all the changes from prototype to finished product, it’s interesting hearing that while the lines of dialog and character names switched, the quality of the script and acting were paramount from the beginning. But as much as I’d love a proper sequel, the franchise’s future isn’t clear. Sure, there was the PlayStation VR launch title Rush of Blood, but that was an on-rails shooter. Maybe developer Supermassive Games could tackle suburbia horror next, a la It Follows. That’s assuming Sony would actually market it next time ’round.
Via: VG 24/7
Source: PtoPOnline (YouTube)
The Nintendo Switch could be twice as powerful while docked
Just how powerful is Nintendo’s next game console? We won’t know for sure until January, but if the latest report from Eurogamer pans out, the answer could be kind of complicated. According to specifications provided to developers, the Nintendo Switch performance changes depending on how you use it: in its docked, TV-mode or as a gaming portable.
Specifically, sources familiar with the system have revealed two different graphic processor specifications for the final Nintendo Switch hardware — an undocked portable profile that clocks the NVIDIA Tegra GPU at 307.2MHz and a docked, TV-based profile that more than doubles it to 768MHz. Doing some rough calculations using the Tegra X1 chip the Switch’s silicon is said to be based off of, we can guess the console can push around 400 gigaflops on FP32 while docked. Yes, that’s a lot of numbers, but don’t worry about the math too much. The long and short of it is that the latest numbers show that the Nintendo Switch will definitely outpace the Wii U — but it’s still a few hundred (or thousand) gigaflops shy of its competitors.
That said, nobody really expected the next Nintendo to keep place with the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. Nintendo dropped out of the race to the top years ago, and hasn’t made a move to be the ‘most powerful’ game console in over a decade. That doesn’t seem to be changing with the Nintendo Switch.
Source: Eurogamer
‘Two Dots’ now has a competitive mode where you can bet real money
Two Dots is a unique, beautiful and meditative puzzle game that exudes a level of polish rarely found in mobile games. So it was a bit of a surprise to see its developer, Dots, announce that it was partnering with the recently launched Sparcade to release a competitive version of Two Dots — one in which players can wager real money. Would the fairly chill gameplay of Two Dots make any sense in a competitive environment?
It’s something that the Dots team carefully considered before moving on with the project. “We had a really good hunch that this was going to work, because we had a competition mode in the first Dots game,” says Dots CEO Paul Murphy. While later games added more intricate puzzles and levels to the experience, the original Dots simply asked you to clear as many dots in a minute as you could. Comparing scores with your friends for bragging rights was a big part of the game as well. “People get really competitive with the game; in Dots people would compete for high scores and it would get really intense,” Murphy says.
For those who haven’t tried Sparcade before, it’s a competitive gaming app for iOS that launched earlier this fall with a handful of high-profile games, including Pac-Man, Tetris and Scrabble. Players can participate in a number of different challenges and put either tokens or real money on the line. While that might sound like gambling, Sparcade VP Greg Canessa says that the service falls under “skill-based gaming” laws, which let you put money on the line in competitions where luck doesn’t come into play. It’s the same law that lets you put money down in a bowling league or a golf tournament, for example.
As for how Sparcade keeps things fair, you play a game board, and then you’re matched with someone who plays the exact same board, with no random chance involved. In a game like Tetris, that means the falling blocks come down in the same order for both players. Similarly, in Two Dots, the falling dot patterns will be identical for each player; it’s up to the players to maximize their score by making the best moves they can.
“Every participant gets exactly the same setup, exactly the same boards, exactly the same power-ups,” Canessa says. “It’s what you do with the circumstances versus what I do that makes this a game of skill.” And all of Sparcade’s games measure your skill level after just a few matches so you end up getting matched against players with similar chops. Of course, you can play against friends, but if you’re matching up against random opponents, you should expect a fair fight.
The gameplay itself will be totally familiar to anyone who has tried Two Dots. For starters, Sparcade will offer a few different challenges of varying difficulties. The games are timed, so you’re basically shooting for a high score — but in true Two Dots fashion, you’ll need to clear specific colors or get rid of certain obstacles in the level to progress.
For the most part, Sparcade’s designers worked on the actual levels in consultation with the Dots team. “The two teams collaborated on a best design, then we manage the actual development of the skill version of the game with their regular feedback, input, assets, art and sound effects,” Canessa says. In the quick demo of Two Dots I played on Sparcade, it felt exactly like the original game, just with a new, time-based challenge. The standard version of Two Dots has no time constraints, so you can spend as long as you want figuring out your next move — but on Sparcade, you need to balance making the best move with not burning up the clock.
So while it’s safe to say Two Dots has successfully been ported to Sparcade, that doesn’t really get into the why. Couldn’t Dots build its own competitive version of its game? Well, as a relatively small studio, making this partnership with Sparcade was a much easier way to go. “We don’t have the resources to create another team to build [a competitive game], even though this is a great business,” says Murphy. “We’re focused on our fourth game — that’s the amount of expansion that we can have at our stage. This is an opportunity to do it right now with someone that knows the space really well.” And while you may not know Sparcade, its parent company, GSN, has years of experience in the “skill gaming” business.
And while Dots is looking forward to the extra revenue it’ll get, that wasn’t a primary motivator for this expansion. “We love the incremental revenue, but our real driver was exposing Dots to a new audience,” Murphy says. “This is an opportunity to tap into people that are more competitive but still attracted to our game style.”
That said, it’s also a very good test case to see if there’s real money to be made here. “Free-to-play has worked well for us,” says Murphy. “I’m not slamming it — but I do feel like it’s not the last business model we’ll see in mobile gaming.” Whether Sparcade’s competitive gaming plan will be the next big thing remains to be seen. But even if you’re not into betting money on a game, Two Dots in Sparcade is worth checking out. It turns out a timed version of Two Dots is a good thing, whether you’re putting money on the line or not.
Source: Sparcade
This was the year of VR, until AR stole it
This was supposed to be the year of virtual reality, but barely had 2016 started when Microsoft threw a spanner in the works with the announcement of HoloLens. Rather than taking us to a virtual world, Microsoft’s headset pulls virtual objects into our own. Microsoft calls these objects Holograms, much to the chagrin of hologram enthusiasts, but most people know them as tenets of mixed, or augmented, reality. It’s already being touted as the next next big thing.
Of course, 2016 was full of VR. With spring came the retail launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC’s Valve-endorsed Vive. Both require two things: a lot of cash and a lot of power. The Rift costs $599 while the Vive is $799 (including controllers and tracking accoutrements). But then you need to factor in the price of a PC that can support the high-fidelity, high-speed visuals VR requires. A typical all-in price started from $1,500, putting it out of the range of all but the most ardent of gamers. That price has dropped and will continue to drop as cheaper, better graphics cards are released.
There are no firm figures for how many VR kits have been sold. Steam statistics suggest that just 0.34 percent of its users in November had a headset. Even counting gamers who don’t use Steam, that would likely put the total figure sold across both Vive and Oculus at well under a million. That estimation is in line with VR analytics group SuperData Research, which projected around 450,000 HTC Vive sales and 355,000 Oculus Rift sales for 2016.
Just as Oculus and HTC should’ve been dominating the news cycle, Magic Leap, the secretive Google-backed mixed reality (MR) startup, finally broke cover with a Wired feature. Magic Leap is basically promising to do the same things as HoloLens, but better.
Details are scant, but rather than projecting images onto a portion of a giant helmet (like Microsoft’s headset), Magic Leap will beam light into your eyes, using a system called Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal to give these objects depth and solidity. The company has yet to show off any hardware or software or even suggest a year when its tech will be ready, but it’s nonetheless one of the best-funded startups around. Wired’s Magic Leap feature came in April, within weeks of the Vive and Rift launches. The timing was obvious, and the message was clear: There’s something better around the corner.
In the meantime, an ex-Google startup with a couple dozen employees was preparing to steal everyone’s attention with a mobile game. I’m talking about Niantic, of course, and Pokémon Go, which was undoubtedly the hit game of the summer, if not the year.
Somewhat erroneously referred to as an augmented reality (AR) game, Pokémon Go is better described as a location-based game, like geocaching, with a pervasive layer on top. Definitions aside, there can be no doubt that AR has been a big part of its huge success. When catching Pokémon, players are shown a live feed from their device’s camera with a monster overlaid. Hundreds of thousands of people shared these images on social media, helping spread intrigue about the game.
Before long, packs of Pokémon hunters were roaming New York, London, Paris and other locations around the world, searching for new monsters and using an AR system to help catch them. Unlike Niantic’s last game, Ingress, this wasn’t just geeks and gamers. I can count on one hand the number of Ingress players I know. With Pokémon Go, I can count on one hand the people I know who didn’t play it. My 64-year-old mom played. My 10-year-old son played. It felt like, at one point, almost everyone gave it a shot. By the time Niantic announced an Apple Watch app for Pokémon Go, the game had already been downloaded 500 million times. That’s a ridiculous number.
Of course, crazes rise and fall, and it’s safe to say that Pokémon Go is, if not gone, seemingly on its way out of the public’s imagination. But its impact remains. My colleague Kris Naudus referred to Pokémon Go as AR’s aha moment, and I agree. For a fleeting minute, the game brought a little Pokémon magic into our world. It’s one of the most basic implementations of AR around, but we found it compelling. That should be encouraging for Microsoft, Magic Leap and any other company that’s planning a mixed or augmented reality product.
So where does that leave virtual reality? Well, there are still plenty of headsets out there, and VR is not going away anytime soon. Sony launched the PlayStation VR just a month ago, and it’s expected to equal Vive and Rift sales combined by the year’s end. It’s not that PSVR offers a better experience than its PC-based cousins. It’s just a lot cheaper — $399 to $499, depending on your needs — and has a way bigger reach. Steam stats suggest little over 10 percent of PC gamers have a VR-ready computer. Every PlayStation 4 owner can plug in a PSVR and get started. That gives Sony somewhere between two and four times the potential audience.
And even PSVR’s prospective audience is dwarfed by the potential market for smartphone VR. Google has sold cheap Cardboard viewers for a couple of years, but this year the company announced Daydream, a new initiative to bring a more premium VR experience to mobile users. Daydream View is a $79, comfortable headset sold with a bundled motion controller. At present, only Google’s Pixel and the updated Moto Z are Daydream-certified — a side effect of the high standard of experience that Google is hoping to maintain — but you can bet that many Android phones will support the standard in 2017.
VR, AR, MR and every other “R” need to coexist for a while. For now virtual reality is the easiest to pull off — software and hardware makers have the fewest things to keep track of and complete control of the virtual environment — and also the most developed. It’s fairly easy for a developer to build a VR app or for a manufacturer to make a VR-ready phone. Mixed reality is clearly harder.
Microsoft’s HoloLens is effectively a wearable computer, making thousands of calculations every second just to understand its environment. And its limitations, such as field of view, are way more apparent than those of a VR headset. The virtual objects of HoloLens have to be small enough — or faraway enough — to fit into a small square in the middle of the headset. You simply can’t see the whole illusion. Perhaps Magic Leap already has the answer to that problem, but given how many years it’s been in development — and how little it’s shown so far — it’s likely not a simple thing to figure out.
In 2017, Microsoft’s partners will release a handful of $300 VR headsets for Windows. Rather than competing with existing VR products, these headsets are more like a diet HoloLens. You’ll get the same experience, interface and apps as HoloLens, but your entire environment will be virtual. Think of it like a gateway drug for mixed reality. In one swoop, it’s getting both developers and users ready for MR, without the tribulations of dealing with first-generation, hyper-expensive headsets.
At the same time, Google is currently working on a device that uses cameras and algorithms to display mixed reality inside a virtual reality headset. It’s essentially going to be a combination of VR and Google’s Tango computer vision efforts, with a lot of extra smarts added on top. Again, the project seems almost like a stepping-stone toward a more complete mixed reality experience. The device has yet to be announced, but sources familiar with the matter say it’s of great importance to the company.
The dark horse in all of this is Apple. As is tradition, there’s been a lot of speculation and questions asked about the company’s plans for virtual, augmented and mixed reality. CEO Tim Cook has said that AR is more interesting than VR, as it’s less closed off and more social. The company has already acquired an AR company, and it has experts in the field within its ranks. Its iPhones clearly have the power and sensors to pull off a Daydream-like VR experience immediately, but it’s obviously waiting to offer something more compelling to its users.
There can be no doubt that ‘virtual reality’ headsets like the Vive, Rift and Daydream View are just a stopgap until mixed reality is ready.
There can be no doubt that “virtual reality” headsets like the Vive, Rift and Daydream View are just a stop-gap until mixed reality is ready. That probably sounds like a bold statement, but it’s easy to justify. Mixed reality headsets will, at some point make virtual objects appear solid. HoloLens isn’t there yet, sure, but Magic Leap claims to be, and you can be sure Microsoft is working on it.
Once these headsets are able to display opaque objects and cover our entire field of view, developers and creatives will have total control over what we see. They can decide to mix or augment our surroundings, like we’ve already seen with Magic Leap and HoloLens, or completely scrap that environment and put us in a virtual space, like with a VR headset. It should only take a few taps to send us to an augmented reality, a virtual one and back to our own.
This year showed millions of people how fun it can be to see a digital creation entering their world. And maybe 2017 won’t be the year, but as technology catches up to its aspirations, we might soon be able to see how fun it is to have millions of digital creations do the same.
Check out all of Engadget’s year-in-review coverage right here.
‘Minecraft’ for Apple TV arrives today
A big part of Mincraft’s success is how the game is available on basically every platform you can think of. Today, that list got one longer: Minecraft is now available on the Apple TV. As usual, it’s the Minecraft experience you know and perhaps love, but with a few things missing. Namely, the multiplayer Minecraft Realms and Xbox Live support, though the developers say those features will be added in the “near future.” The $19.99 entry price gets you the game as well as seven DLC packs: the Holiday 2015, Town Folk and City Folk skin packs as well as the Plastic, Natural, Cartoon, and Festive 2016 “mash-ups.”
Minecraft was first announced for Apple TV by Tim Cook at Apple’s October MacBook Pro refresh event, though details on how the game would play were slim. But the game sounds like it’ll be pretty up-to-date, aside from those missing multiplayer features. The Apple TV edition will include the just-announced “Ender update,” which brings a whole bunch of new single-player content to the experience. If you want to check it all out, you can go grab the app on Apple TV now.
Source: Minecraft
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