Twitch opens up its money-making tools to tens of thousands of non-Partnered channels

 On the heels of yesterday’s news about expanded subscription options for partners, video streaming site Twitch today announced another way for its creator community to generate revenue, with the launch of an Affiliate program. Explains the company, the new program will allow non-partnered video creators to gain access to a variety of tools that will allow them to make money from… Read More

Streamers flock to YouTube Live, but the money (and crowd) is still at Twitch

 YouTube Live is making impressive strides in catching up to incumbent Twitch, but it has a long way to go yet. On the bright side, it doesn’t look like they’ll run out of road: streaming looks to be a fairly sustainable business. Read More

Game over, man! The NES Classic is discontinued planet-wide

 Well, it was fun while it lasted. The NES Classic Edition (it went by several names, but you know what I mean) was the must-have item of the holidays and pretty much ever since, owing to short supply of the compact retro gaming console. And Nintendo just confirmed that it was indeed ending production of the device in Europe, the last region they were still officially available. Read More

StarCraft is now free, nearly 20 years after its release

 Have you always wanted to check out that StarCraft game you’d heard so much about, but somehow managed to go nearly 20 years without buying a copy? Good news! Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Read More

Everything Facebook launched at both days of F8 and why

 Typing with telepathy? Hearing through your skin? An augmented reality developer platform? These are just a few of the launches and demos Facebook showed off at the social network’s big F8 conference. Here’s an updated breakdown of each major announcement from both days of F8 and why they’re important to you and Facebook. Read More

Microsoft will reveal Project Scorpio Xbox console details at E3 on June 11

 Microsoft just sent out invites to members of the media for its big reveal of Xbox Project Scorpio, the upgraded console that will be the “first true 4K console for gamers” according to the company. We’ve long expected E3’s press event to be the big consumer debut for Scorpio, but Microsoft spelled out that it will indeed be the star of the show in a blog post on… Read More

PlayStation Vue adds ESL’s esportsTV to its internet TV lineup

 PlayStation’s streaming TV service Vue is getting content that could be very near and dear to many users’ hearts: ESL’s esportsTV. LA-based ESL counts itself the world’s largest esports company worldwide, and it esportsTV channel will broadcast 24/7 esports content via a linear channel for the first time ever in the U.S. The launch is coming soon, and will arrive in… Read More

Leaked Star Wars: Battlefront II trailer is visually stunning

 If you’re a fan of the Star Wars (many people are) then you may also be a fan of this trailer for Star Wars: Battlefront II, which just popped up a bit early on Vimeo. The trailer is amazing, showing action-packed sequences rendered using the in-game engine, which seems to be able to deliver top-notch visuals of the variety normally reserved for cutscenes. Perhaps you played Star Wars… Read More

Nintendo reveals Joy-Con battery grips and new color, standalone Switch dock

 Nintendo will offer a special battery grip accessory for its Joy-Con controller accessory, which will be offered in sets of two and add more life to the already considerable 20-hour runtime of the Joy-Cons using their built-in power. Nintendo is also going to add a new color option for Joy-Cons, a Neon Yellow that will make sure everyone knows you’re using a Switch and can’t… Read More

Farewell, NES Classic Edition

 Nintendo had a bonafide – and apparent surprise – hit on its hands with the NES Classic Edition. But like all good things, its time is done. This afternoon, the company confirmed with TechCrunch that, “Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year.” It’s not… Read More

Unreal’s ‘photorealistic character sample’ is like a Rob Lowe from the uncanny valley

 Making the character models you see in games is a very involved process, and as a few recent titles have shown, the faces especially are hard as hell to do right. The folks behind Epic’s Unreal Engine, which powers more than a few of those games, have kindly offered a ‘photorealistic character sample’ — a Rob Lowe-looking dude who looks almost real enough to touch. Almost. Read More

Google’s AlphaGo AI to take on world’s top Go player in May

 After Google-owned DeepMind’s virtual Go champion AlphaGo took on and defeated one of the top-ranked human players in the world, it looks like Google wants to build some bridges, explore the AI-human interaction dynamic – and see if AlphaGo can take on the very best human Go player in the entire world. Google is partnering with the China Go Association and the Chinese Government… Read More

Minecraft is getting a Marketplace where creators can monetize their creations

 Minecraft is getting an update this spring that will add a number of new features, but the most dramatic might be the Minecraft Marketplace, a storefront where users can buy and sell in-game creations for real money. The Marketplace will offer maps, texture packs, skins, min-games and more, all curated by the Minecraft team. The launch catalog will feature selections from a handful of… Read More

Of course a venture capitalist was no match for CMU’s updated poker-playing AI

 Libratus, Carnegie Mellon’s poker-playing AI, is damn good. It easily routed four of the world’s best poker players back in January over 120,000 hands of No-Limit Texas Hold-um. So it comes as no surprise that a team of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and engineers playing against Lengpudashi, Libratus’ bigger, badder brother, would face a similar fate. Read More

The Xbox One Scorpio is a six-teraflop gaming beast

 Microsoft couldn’t wait until E3 in June to unveil the Scorpio, so the company shared some details with Digital Foundry and we now know all of Project Scorpio’s tech specs. As expected, it’s going to be by far the most powerful gaming console out there. The console GPU will be able to process six trillion floating point operations per second, or six teraflops for short. Read More

Disney just launched the new mobile-only version of Club Penguin

 Club Penguin Island, the mobile-only replacement for the original Club Penguin (which shut down last night) has launched. Started in 2005, Club Penguin was one of the first successful virtual worlds for children and, as they grew up, teens and adults. At its peak the platform had 200M users, and a few months ago was still seeing upwards of 5M visitors to the Club Penguin website each month.… Read More

Stealthy gaming company Wonder is ready to tease its new mystery hardware

 Wonder, the incredibly stealthy new gaming company, has quietly created a signup page for information and perks related to its plans for global domination of the gaming market from its Los Angeles headquarters. The company is calling its new campaign the “Alpha Program”, and folks that are interested can get updates on Wonder’s product, provide feedback, and get perks and… Read More

A look back on the golden age of Atari gaming

 This excerpt is from Jamie Lendino’s Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation, an amazing book that details with an obsessive’s eye the rise and fall of Atari 8-bit computers. In this chapter, he looks through a few of his favorite Atari games and brings the memories flooding back of long weekends spent twirling joysticks in the rising dawn of computer gaming. Read More

NASA is using a mixed reality space station to train astronauts

 NASA has always embraced emerging technology for visualization, even if that tech was seemingly developed for frivolous entertainment. We recently covered its holographic Mars exhibit, and the many 3D resources that NASA makes available to developers and educators. Now, the US space agency has partnered with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space… Read More

PlayStation 4 Pro’s Media Player gets 4K MP4 video support

 The PlayStation 4 Pro just got an update that makes it an even better companion for a 4K TV set. An update to the native PlayStation Media Player app will enable 4K video playback, for files in mp4 format saved on either a USB drive or kept in a home server the PS4 Pro hardware con communicate with. Not that if you’ve got a drive attached to your PS4 Pro that’s formatted to act as… Read More

Twitch to start selling video games this week

 Video game streaming site Twitch will soon begin selling PC games and other in-game content on its site, the company says. We understand the games may arrive as soon as tomorrow or later this week, though the exact timing is still in flux. Already one of the top destinations for live streaming and fan engagement, it’s not surprising that Twitch would take the final step… Read More

Xbox One gets Beam streaming, a new guide and more starting today

 Xbox One is getting an update starting today, echoing some of the major changes coming to Windows in its forthcoming Creators Update. The big new additions include streaming via Microsoft’s own Twitch competitor Beam, as well as a brand new Xbox user experience made up of a new design for Guide, improvements to Home and more. The new features are designed around encouraging gamers to… Read More

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival will include a video game festival, too

 New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival is getting a sister event — this year, it will include the kickoff of the very first Tribeca Games Festival. The event is being launched in partnership with gaming publication Kill Screen and will take place on April 28 and 29 (during the film festival). Read More

Super Mario Run hits Android, rolls out version two on iOS

 Super Mario Run hit Android a day early. Originally expected today, March 23, per Nintendo’s earlier announcement, the game arrived on the Google Play Store yesterday instead, along with an update on iOS. The iOS exclusive ran for three months, and brought the app over 78 million downloads, the gaming company said during its earnings in January. Of those players, more than five… Read More

Super Mario Run’s Android release date is March 23

 Super Mario Run is officially making its way to Android, as Nintendo promised what seems like so long ago. The company has now revealed an exact date for Mario’s Android debut: March 23. That’s this Thursday, in case you’re bad at math or don’t have a calendar handy. Read More

Mass Effect: Andromeda offers plenty of gameplay depth despite some faults

 Mass Effect is a video game series that attracts ardent fans and invokes emotional reactions from those fans via its storytelling decisions. The franchise builds on the legacy BioWare built with its stewardship of the Star Wars universe with the Knights of the Old Republic, but offers truly unique science-fiction storytelling in expansive action RPG games. Read More

Japanese Kendama game gets a digital upgrade and a Kickstarter campaign

 Like all good games, Kendama is easy-ish to learn and frustrating as all ever-loving £%&*@£^% to master. What’s a poor entrepreneur to do when a game hasn’t changed for 400 years? Rename it Dendama, add a boat-load of electronics, invent a slew of multiplayer games and launch a Kickstarter campaign, of course. Read More

Watch Zelda’s directors go deep on creating the masterpiece that is Breath of the Wild

 The newest Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, is — and I say this without any attempt at being hyperbolic — an instant masterpiece. I won’t go so far as to call it the best game of all time — but if such a title can exist objectively, this one is certainly in the ring. It’s rare to see something like this thrust into the world and have it so quickly and widely… Read More

With PlayStation Now, you’ll soon be able to play PS4 games on your PC

 Sony just announced that PlayStation 4 games are coming soon to the PlayStation Now cloud gaming service. It means that gamers will be able to pay a subscription fee and stream PS4 games to their PlayStation 4 or PC. Read More

Roblox nabs $92 million to power its massive social gaming platform for kids

 Roblox has spent the greater part of the millennium creating a cool place for kids to play a diverse collection of games inside a single cross-platform world for its huge audience of tens of millions of monthly active youngsters. The company announced Tuesday that it has closed a massive $92 million funding round led by Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures. Read More

Nintendo releases three-part video series about that insanely good Zelda game

 Nintendo shared on its YouTube channel three behind-the-scenes videos about Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Many thought the Nintendo Switch had a pretty thin launch lineup with Zelda: Breath of the Wild as the only big production. But anybody around you who owns a Switch will tell you that it’s an amazing game. Read More

Interactive fiction and the origins of the conversational interface

 It’s 2017, and conversational interfaces (people talking with machines the same way they talk to other people) are everywhere. Siri has become a household name. Taco Bell lets you order tacos over Slack. It feels like we may spend more time talking to computers than to one another in just a few short years. How did we get to this point? Read More

Use Nintendo Switch controllers with the NES Classic with this adapter

 Nintendo Switch controllers are flexible, if flawed — the latest hardware they work with is the NES Classic, via 8bitdo’s $17 Retro Receiver, and a new firmware update available now for that little dongle. The wireless accessory already lets you connect a range of Bluetooth controllers to your NES Classic, including 8bitdo’s own NES30 controller replica, and PlayStation 4, Wii… Read More

Mixed reality arcades are the next big market opportunity — but not for VCs

 Mixed reality arcades can be a huge boon for VR adoption, and I’m confident there will be profitable ventures created in these immersive arcade experiences. But the path to profitability will be a long one. Because VCs typically shy away from capex-intensive industries, I don’t see VCs as the right backers to see these exciting experiences to market. Read More

The Xbox Game Pass is a $9.99 Spotify-like game subscription

 Having free games with Xbox Live Gold was one thing, but Microsoft wants to go one step further. The company is launching a new service called the Xbox Game Pass. It’s a library of more than 100 games that you can download and play for a monthly subscription of $9.99. The feature isn’t live yet, but the company already announced some names so that the company can start beta… Read More

Gaming company Kabam’s roller coaster ride to a $700 million exit

 We talked with Kevin Chou, co-founder and CEO of the gaming company Kabam, about his own both stressful and euphoric experience in running a gaming startup for roughly a decade before selling most of its assets in December to South Korea’s Netmarble Games for a reported $700 million. Read More

Southeast Asia’s Playlab invests $1M in Brazilian gaming startup Cupcake Entertainment

 Thailand-based casual game studio Playlab has turned investor after it invested $1 million into Cupcake Entertainment, a Brazil-based game maker. Read More

The importance of streaming to e-sports

 There are three key ingredients for a game or pastime to become a sport: playing, competing and viewing. The ability to play and compete are necessary steps in the transformation from game to sport. However, broadcasting and viewing are the crucial components to enable widespread adoption and popularity. Just as with offline sports, e-sports require these elements. Read More

The new Pokémon just went live in Pokémon GO and the servers are melting again

 The good news: the 80+ new Pokémon that were supposed to hit Pokémon GO “later this week”? They just went live. I caught a Chikorita! The bad news: If you were a player in the early days, things might look pretty familiar right now… in that you might just be looking at an error screen. The server seems to be having a hard time at the moment, with players reporting issues… Read More

Xbox Project Scorpio will finally get some face time at Microsoft’s E3 Event

 This year’s E3 promises to be a big show – if only thanks to the fact that the gaming convention’s organizers are opening it up to the masses. As expected, Microsoft is going to add considerable fuel to that fire as well, making the mysterious Xbox Project Scorpio a centerpiece to its own big event. Carve out some time on Sunday, June 11th, because that’s when the… Read More

The next big gold rush

 As we look to the next evolution of our digital ecosystem, it seems certain that virtual goods will play a much larger role. From vanquishing new breeds of digital monsters to defining a modern asset class, virtual goods will enable new experiences and redefine traditional ones. Indeed, this new gold rush will create opportunities for the enterprising prospector and shovel-seller alike. Read More

Game developers show political solidarity with Humble Freedom Bundle

 The Humble Bundle is a reliable source of good deals on games, usually organized around some theme or another. This week’s bundle, however, is not only one of the best gaming deals of all time, but all proceeds are going to support charities that work with immigrants and refugees. Read More