gaming

playstation-has-blocked-hardware-cheating-device-cronus-zen,-others-may-follow

PlayStation has blocked hardware cheating device Cronus Zen, others may follow

anticheat, Call of Duty, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, cheating, cronus, cronus zen, gaming, microsoft, PlayStation 5, Sony, xbox / /

What’s a little anti-recoil between friends? —

No more using a mouse and keyboard on PS5, or using aiming mods, for now.

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Enlarge / Who doesn’t want less recoil? Unless, that is, you’re someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 “emulation” device.

Cronus

The Cronus Zen describes itself as a hardware tool for “universal controller compatibility,” letting you plug in a third-party controller, an Xbox controller into a PlayStation, or even your keyboard and mouse into a console. But you can also use its scripting engine to “amplify your game” and set up “GamePacks” to do things like reduce recoil animations in games like Call of Duty. And that is where Cronus seems to have gotten into trouble.

As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5’s system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting. The update is “NOT mandatory,” Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing. Still, there is “currently no timetable on a fix … it could be 24 (hours), 24 days, 24 months, we won’t know until we’ve dug into it.” There is, for now, a “Remote Play Workaround” for those already too far updated.

Ars attempted to reach Cronus for comment and reached out to Sony as well and will update this post with any new information.

The Cronus Zen, which costs $100 or more and is available on Amazon and at GameStop, among other outlets, does claim to offer accessibility and third-party compatibility options for players. But what has caught gamers’ attention, and Sony’s, is the wealth of GamePacks available for various games. Some single-player games, like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077, are represented, but it’s the offerings for Call of Duty, Battlefield, Destiny 2, and other online multiplayer games that likely drew Sony’s ire.

Just a peek at the Apex Legends GamePack page suggests Zen mods “inspired by” the game, with options for “Aim Assist,” “Anti-Recoil Strength,” and “Fire Mods,” the latter of which can make you “harder to hit” and ping teammates when you are firing. Call of Duty: WarZone 3 mods include “Silent Aim. Insanely strong and not visible Aim Assist MOD!” The Zen was also capable of powering other cheat tools with emulated input, like AI-assisted aim assist.

Console manufacturers, already having more locked-down software than PCs, have taken up the cause of eliminating cheating at the hardware level. Microsoft issued a system-level ban on “unauthorized” accessories connecting to Xboxes in October. That had the unintended effect of cooling enthusiasm among fighting game enthusiasts and accessibility advocates. It did not, however, seem to block the Cronus, so long as you attached a compliant controller to it.

Individual game-makers have also attempted to block devices like the Cronus. Activision’s anti-cheat Ricochet tool called out “third-party hardware devices” that “act as a passthrough for controllers” in a blog post about its April 2023 updates. The same went for Ubisoft and Bungie, none of which called out the Cronus Zen in particular, but were signaling efforts to block it and similar devices, like the XIM and ReaSnow S1. Fortnite was ahead of the game, calling out the Cronus Zen and Cronus Max in late 2022.

None of these companies have offered a patch to the behavior of people who want to spend more than $100 and risk lifetime bans to earn undeserved points worth no tradable value.

Listing image by Cronus

PlayStation has blocked hardware cheating device Cronus Zen, others may follow Read More »

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Modder re-creates Game Boy Advance games using the audio from crash sounds

Game boy Advance, gaming, gba, hardware hacking, Nintendo, Pokémon, pokemon emerald, Reverse-engineering, ROMs, sound files / /

To truly catch them all —

Create a bootable, working Pokémon game by recording it crash multiple times.

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Game Boy Advance, modded, on display

Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham’s modded and restored Game Boy Advance could, with enough time, sing out all the data loaded into a cartridge.

Andrew Cunningham

Sometimes, a great song can come from great pain. The Game Boy Advance (GBA), its software having crashed nearly two hours ago, will, for example, play a tune based on the game inside it. And if you listen closely enough—using specialty hardware and code—you can tell exactly what game it was singing about. And then theoretically play that same game.

This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to “sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokémon games.” It’s “hardly a ready-to-use solution,” the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats. So while there are certainly easier ways to get GBA data from a cartridge, none make you feel quite so much like an audio datamancer.

TheZZAZZGlitch’s demonstration of re-creating Game Boy Advance ROM data using the sounds from a crashing system.

After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark. Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence. Otherwise, it’s 8-bit data at 13,100 Hz, and at times, it sounds absolutely deranged.

“2 days of bugfixing later,” the modder had a Python script ready that could read the audio from a clean recording of the GBA’s crash dump. Did it work? Not without more troubleshooting. One issue with audio-casting ROM data is that there are large sections of 0-byte data in the ROM, which are hard to parse as mute sounds. After running another script that realigned sections based on their location in the original ROM, the modder’s ROM was 99.76 percent accurate but “still didn’t boot tho.” TheZZAZZGlitch later disclaimed that, yes, this is technically using known ROM data to surface unknown data, or “cheating,” but there are assumptions and guesses one could make if you were truly doing this blind.

The next fix was to refine the sound recording. By recording three times and merging them with a “majority vote” algorithm, their accuracy notched up to 99.979 percent. That output ROM booted—but with glitched text and a title screen crash. After seven different recordings are meshed and filtered for blank spaces, they achieve 100 percent parity. That’s about the halfway point of the video; you should watch the rest to learn how it works on physical hardware, how it works with a different game (an ARM code mystery in a replica cartridge), and how to get the best recordings, including the use of a “cursed adapter” that mixes down to one channel the ugly way.

Modder re-creates Game Boy Advance games using the audio from crash sounds Read More »

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a new first-person Nazi-whipping journey

bethesda, Bethesda Game Studios, gaming, Indiana Jones, MachineGames, nazis / /

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle —

Modern action/FPS is set inside Indy’s classic post-Ark, pre-Crusade era.

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Indiana Jones in front of an alcove in a ruin.

Enlarge / CGI Harrison Ford just can’t believe he’s getting roped into another globe-trotting adventure.

Bethesda/Machine Games

Almost two years ago to this day, Bethesda told everyone its Machine Games subsidiary was working on a new Indiana Jones game, one with “an original story.” Now we can see what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is going to look like, with a gameplay trailer showing up during Microsoft’s Developer Direct event, and when it’s arriving: “2024.” You can now wishlist it on Steam and the Xbox store; it’s exclusive to those platforms.

Gameplay reveal trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

While the game has Harrison Ford’s likeness, it’s not Ford voicing your character. Troy Baker, the original voice of Joel in The Last of Us, picks up the role of the archaeologist.

From the trailer, Great Circle looks a lot like the modern Wolfenstein games that Machine Games made—and that’s a good thing. The New Order and The New Colossus excelled at making you feel more like a human action hero than a shooting tank. They’ve got a knack for first-person platforming, stunts, and cinematic moments that are nowhere near as painful as in many shooters. They excel at balancing immersing you as a player and letting your character have a personality.

That, plus the developer’s interest in mystical-tinged WWII-era tales and art deco-influenced visuals, made them a natural fit for the project. It’s hard to think of Indiana Jones in the first person, but then it’s hard to think of any other team that could pull it off.

  • That cavalier charm! None but the most heinous of artifact-stealers can resist.

    Bethesda/Machine Games

  • These sites we’ve visited? They form a circle around the globe. A great circle, you might call it.

  • This is when I knew the Wolfenstein devs were involved.

    Bethesda/Machine Games

  • You will absolutely be able to whip, throw a hammer at, punch, shoot, shove, and otherwise bludgeon some Nazis.

    Bethesda/Machine Games

Machine Games has also shown a notable dedication to letting the player knock out, stab, and kill Nazis. The trailer shows Indy dispatching foes with whips, fists, and trickery but also straight-up plugging them with a revolver and two-handed machine gun. There will be other ways of dealing with foes and situations, according to Entertainment Weekly’s interview with Machine Games’ lead designer, Jerk Gustafsson.

The plot involves the theft of a relic from Indy’s teaching gig by a supersized villain, Locus. Digging into the mysterious theft, Indy makes marker-drawn stops on his paper map in the Vatican, the Himalayas, Egypt, and Thailand. There’s a journalist love interest, a villain with the decisive name Emmerich Voss, and, of course, there’s Marcus Brody.

Great Circle is the latest from Lucasfilm’s new game strategy under its Disney ownership. The firm has given out its IP licenses to lots of notable firms to make new games: Respawn with its Jedi-based series, Ubisoft’s yet-unreleased Outlaws, and a Knights of the Old Republic remake that is either dead or alive, but definitely struggling a bit.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a new first-person Nazi-whipping journey Read More »

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Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools

AI, Artificial Intelligence, game development, gaming, generative ai, tools / /

Do androids dream of Tetris? —

But 84% of devs are at least somewhat concerned about ethical use of those tools.

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The future of game development?

Enlarge / The future of game development?

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use.

The Game Developers Conference’s 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill.

Forty-nine percent of the survey’s developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do.

A majority of game developers said their workplace was at least interested in using generative AI tools.

Enlarge / A majority of game developers said their workplace was at least interested in using generative AI tools.

The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in “narrative/writing.”

Among the 38 percent of respondents who said their company didn’t use AI tools, 15 percent said their company was “interested” in pursuing them, while 23 percent said they had “no interest.” In a separate question, 12 percent of respondents said their company didn’t allow the use of AI tools at all, a number that went up to 21 percent for respondents working at the largest “AAA developers.” An additional 7 percent said the use of some specific AI tools was not allowed, while 30 percent said AI tool use was “optional” at their company.

Worries abound

The wide embrace of AI tools hasn’t seemed to lessen worries about their use among developers, though. A full 42 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about the ethics of using generative AI in game development, with an additional 42 percent being “somewhat concerned.” Only 12 percent said they were “not concerned at all” about those usage ethics.

Developer policies on AI use varied greatly, with a plurality saying their company had no official policy.

Enlarge / Developer policies on AI use varied greatly, with a plurality saying their company had no official policy.

Overall, respondents offered a split opinion on whether the use of AI tools would be overall positive (21 percent) or negative (18 percent) for the industry. Most respondents seemed split, with 57 percent saying the impact would be “mixed.”

Developers cited coding assistance, content creation efficiency, and the automation of repetitive tasks as the primary uses for AI tools, according to the report.

“I’d like to see AI tools that help with the current workflows and empower individual artists with their own work,” one anonymous respondent wrote. “What I don’t want to see is a conglomerate of artists being enveloped in an AI that just does 99% of the work a creative is supposed to do.”

Elsewhere in the report, the survey found that only 17 percent of developers were at least somewhat interested in using blockchain technology in their upcoming projects, down significantly from 27 percent in 2022. An overwhelming 77 percent of respondents said they had no interest in blockchain technology, similar to recent years.

The survey also found that 57 percent of respondents thought that workers in the game industry should unionize, up from 53 percent last year. Despite this, only 23 percent said they were either in a union or had discussed unionization at their workplace.

Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools Read More »

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Harmonix is ending Rock Band DLC releases after 16 years, ~2,800 songs

DLC, downloads, epic, epic games, gaming, Harmonix, Rock, rock band, song / /

Don’t look back in anger —

Previously purchased songs will still be playable via Rock Band 4.

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After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/RockBand4_NoHUD_03-640×360.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p>After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>Here at Ars Technica, we remember covering <em>Rock Band</em>‘s weekly DLC song releases <a href=way back in 2007, when such regular content drops were still a new concept for a rhythm game. Now, Harmonix has announced the last of the series’ roughly 2,800 downloadable releases will finally come on January 25, marking the end of a nearly 16-year era in music gaming history.

Previously purchased DLC songs will still be playable in Rock Band 4, Harmonix’s Daniel Sussman writes in an announcement post. Rock Band 4 live services, including online play, will also continue as normal, after online game modes for earlier Rock Band games were finally shut down in late 2022.

“Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment,” Sussman writes. “Over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That’s wild.”

A long-lasting content commitment

You’d be forgiven for not realizing that Harmonix has kept up its regular releases of downloadable playable Rock Band songs to this day. While we were big fans of 2015’s Rock Band 4, the Xbox One and PS4 release generally failed to reignite the ’00s mania for plastic instruments that made both Guitar Hero and Rock Band into billion-dollar franchises during their heyday.

Yet, Harmonix has still been quietly releasing one to three new downloadable Rock Band 4 tracks to faithful fans every single week since the game’s release over eight years ago. Before that, Harmonix had kept a similar weekly release schedule for earlier Rock Band titles going back to 2007, broken up only by a 21-month gap starting in April 2013.

Those regular releases were key to maintaining interest and longevity in the Rock Band titles beyond the dozens of songs on the game discs. For a couple of bucks per song, players could customize their in-game soundtracks with thousands of tracks spanning hundreds of indie and mainstream acts across all sorts of genres. And even after all that time, the last year of newly released DLC has still included some absolute bangers from major groups like Steely Dan, Linkin Park, and Foo Fighters.

Rock Band 2 at that game’s 2008 launch party at LA’s Orpheum Theatre.” height=”481″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/GettyImages-81960955-640×481.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A couple of folks absolutely getting down to Rock Band 2 at that game’s 2008 launch party at LA’s Orpheum Theatre.

Getty Images

Harmonix also deserves credit for making its DLC cross-compatible across multiple different games and systems. That copy of The Police’s Roxanne that you bought to play on your Xbox 360 in 2007 could still be re-downloaded and played on Rock Band 4 via your Xbox Series X to this day (Switch and PlayStation 5 owners are less lucky, however). And for songs that were trapped on earlier game discs, Harmonix also went out of its way to offer song export options that let you transfer that content forward to newer Rock Band titles (with the notable exception of The Beatles: Rock Band, whose songs remain trapped on that version of the standalone game).

Compare that to the Guitar Hero franchise, which also relaunched in 2015 as the online-focused Guitar Hero Live. When Activision shut down the game’s “Guitar Hero TV” service in 2018, 92 percent of the new game’s playable songs became instantly inaccessible, leaving only 42 “on-disc” songs to play.

What’s next?

While official support for Rock Band DLC is finally ending, the community behind Clone Hero just recently hit an official Version 1.0 release for their PC-based rhythm game that’s compatible with many guitars, drums, keyboards, gamepads, and adapters used in Rock Band and other console rhythm games (microphones excluded). While that game doesn’t come with anything like Rock Band‘s list of officially licensed song content, it’s not hard to find a bevy of downloadable, fan-made custom Clone Hero tracks with a little bit of searching.

Rock Band DLC, but we do get… this.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ff-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / We might not get any more Rock Band DLC, but we do get… this.

Epic Games

Shortly after its acquisition by Epic in 2021, Harmonix has been working on “Fortnite Festival,” the incredibly Rock Band-esque mini-game embedded in Epic’s Fortnite “metaverse.” Sussman writes that a “rotating selection” of free-to-play songs will continue to cycle through that game mode, and that support for Rock Band 4 instruments will be coming to Fortnite in the future as well (peripheral-maker PDP looks like it will be getting in on the Fortnite guitar act as well).

As for the last few weeks of Rock Band DLC offerings, Sussman writes that Harmonix is planning “some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment.” Here’s hoping we finally get an official Rock Band version of November Rain as part of that closeout; as Guns N’ Roses memorably said, “Nothing lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change.”

Harmonix is ending Rock Band DLC releases after 16 years, ~2,800 songs Read More »

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That’s never happened before: Games Done Quick video stars speedrunning dog

games done quick, gaming, speedrun / /

Personal Best Boy —

The Shiba Inu was trained to use a custom controller in a game meant for a robot.

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Peanut Butter the dog speedruns Gyromite at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024.

The twice-a-year video game speedrunning and fundraising live event Games Done Quick has been a source of amazement and joy for years, but we’re still saying “that’s never happened before” even now, more than a decade after the first event.

Case in point: Awesome Games Done Quick 2024, which is streaming live 24 hours a day this week on Twitch, saw the very first speedrun performed by a dog.

A Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter (shortened to PB, also a speedrunner term for “personal best” finish time) completed a 30-minute speedrun of the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game Gyromite.

Gyromite was originally bundled with the nostalgic but failed ROB (Robotic Operating Buddy) accessory for the NES. It’s a platformer of sorts, but not a conventional fast-paced one. Rather, it’s a comparatively slow-moving game where you make inputs to raise and lower pipes to allow a character to pass through the level safely.

In the speedrun, PB took over for the robot in a category called B Game. PB didn’t set a world record or a personal best (most GDQ runners don’t at the event), as there were a couple minor mistakes, but he still finished the game under its estimate by dutifully sitting, pressing buttons, and holding down those buttons at the right moments at owner JSR_’s prompts. JSR_ also prompted PB to periodically bark “hello” to the stream’s tens of thousands of viewers. PB received numerous treats throughout the run, including bits of cheese and ham.

The final time was 26 minutes and 24 seconds, compared to PB’s personal best of 25 minutes, 29 seconds. The human record is 24 minutes and 39 seconds, by a runner named Octopuscal. PB’s PB is currently the world record among dogs, but of course, he’s the only runner in that particular category.

Speedrunner JSR_ adopted PB during the height of the pandemic and has spent a portion of every day training him to press and hold large buttons on a custom controller for treats in order to play the game. “This took years of training,” he said. “I wanted to train him to do something special, when I realized as a puppy that he was much smarter than most other dogs I’ve seen. Since I’m a speedrunner (and PB was literally named after, you know, getting a ‘PB’ in a speedrun) it only made sense to me.”

You can see the full video of the run above. Awesome Games Done Quick is an annual event benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. A sister event called Summer Games Done Quick benefits Doctors Without Borders later in the year. You can watch and donate on the event website.

That’s never happened before: Games Done Quick video stars speedrunning dog Read More »

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Why I hope the Atari 400 Mini will bring respect to Atari’s most underrated platform

atari, Atari 2600, Atari 400, Atari 8-bit, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 800, atari vcs, commodore 64, gaming, HDMI, mini consoles, MULE, retrotech, Tech / /

Have you played Atari today? —

Can USB, HDMI, and built-in games raise awareness for a platform overshadowed by the C64?

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Retro Games' THE400 Mini console.

Enlarge / Retro Games’ THE400 Mini console.

Retro Games / Benj Edwards

Last week, UK-based Retro Games, Ltd. announced a mini console version of the Atari 400 home computer, first released in 1979. It’s called “THE400 Mini,” and it includes HDMI video output, 25 built-in games, a USB version of Atari’s famous joystick, and it retails for $120. But this release means something more to me personally because my first computer was an Atari 400—and as any other Atari 8-bit computer fan can tell you, the platform often doesn’t get the respect it should. This will be the first time Atari’s 8-bit computer line has received a major retro-remake release.

My Atari 400 story goes a little something like this. Around the time I was born in 1981, my dad bought my older brother (then 5 years old) an Atari 400 so he could play games and learn to program. My brother almost immediately found its flat membrane keyboard frustrating and the Atari 410 cassette drive too slow, so my dad ordered an Atari 800 and an Atari 810 disk drive instead. This began our family’s golden age of Atari 800 gaming, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I’ve often said if a modern game designer wants to learn how to make games, just dive into the Atari 400/800 game library. There are some priceless gems there you can’t find anywhere else, plus others that play best on the platform. OK, I’ll name a few: The Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, M.U.L.E., Wizard of Wor, Salmon Run, Star Raiders, The Halley Project, and so much more.

A photo of Benj Edwards' family Atari 800 and Atari 400 in his brother's room, Christmas 1985.

Enlarge / A photo of Benj Edwards’ family Atari 800 and Atari 400 in his brother’s room, Christmas 1985.

Even with the new 800, it seems that my dad must have kept the original Atari 400, because by the time I grew up more and wanted “my own computer” in the late 1980s, he gave me the Atari 400. The 800 was still my brother’s baby and typically remained in his bedroom. When I wasn’t playing more complex games like M.U.L.E. and Archon on the 800 with my brother, I hooked up the 400 to a small black-and-white TV set in my room and mostly played Galaxian, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong on a cartridge. Not long after, I got an Apple II Plus and learned BASIC on that, but the Atari 400 always got pride of place in my growing computer collection.

A snippet from a 1988 to-do list written by Benj Edwards' dad that says

Enlarge / A snippet from a 1988 to-do list written by Benj Edwards’ dad that says “Get TV/monitor for Benj’s Atari 400 computer,” completed 4/14/88.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the new Atari 400 Mini. I haven’t used it myself yet, so all we have to go on is the information provided by the company—and the company’s reputation. Retro Games has previously released full-sized remakes of the Commodore VIC-20 and the Commodore 64, and mini consoles of the Amiga 500 and the Commodore 64. In 2020, Engadget gave the company’s “THE64 Mini” mixed reviews, praising its looks but complaining about its joystick and poor game selection. We’ll admit preconceived bias and hope the 400 Mini fares much better. Even if the joystick ends up a dud, Retro Games says you can provide your own USB stick or controller.

I also hope THE400 does well because Atari 8-bit fans have a tough time with group identity in the span of retro tech history. Few Americans aside from Atari 400/800 owners have heard of the platform (though the platform did very well in Eastern Europe). The Atari 8-bit series didn’t sell nearly as well as competitors like the Commodore 64 in the US (although Sean Lennon had an Atari 400 as a kid—cool trivia).

And even though the Atari 400/800 series provided the template for Commodore to imitate with the VIC-20 and C64, Commodore undercut Atari in price with cheaper parts, which contributed to Atari’s crash in 1983 and drove Texas Instruments out of the home computer business. More recently, the Commodore 64 has had several retro re-releases since the Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV in 2004. The Atari 400/800 platform has had none until now.

Why I hope the Atari 400 Mini will bring respect to Atari’s most underrated platform Read More »

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Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

App Store, Apple, Apple v Epic, epic, fortnite, gaming, Google, Policy, Supreme Court, Tech / /

Epic v. Apple —

Most of Epic’s arguments are moot now, but one point will change the App Store.

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Fortnite characters looking across the many islands and vast realm of the game.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.

Epic Games

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.

Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.

Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options Read More »

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Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial

billy mitchell, defamation, Donkey Kong, gaming, lawsuit, twin galaxies / /
Two men give a presentation in what appears to be a hotel room.

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell (left) and Twin Galaxies owner Jace Hall (center) attend an event at the Arcade Expo 2015 in Banning, California.

The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and “International Scoreboard” Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Courthouse News reports that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies have reached a confidential settlement in the case months before an oft-delayed trial was finally set to start.

The settlement comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell’s witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had “debased myself before this Court” and “allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement” by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.

But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell’s side to task for “what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence.” The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended “to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court,” he wrote.

Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.” height=”1024″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mitchellpaper.jpg” width=”683″></img><figcaption> <p>Billy Mitchell reviews a document in front of a <em>Donkey Kong</em> machine decked out for an annual “Kong Off” high score competition.</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>In <a href=a filing last month, Tashroudian asked the court to sanction Mitchell for numerous alleged lies and fabrications during the evidence-discovery process. Those alleged lies encompass subjects including an alleged $33,000 payment associated with the sale of Twin Galaxies; the technical cabinet testing of Carlos Pineiro; the setup of a recording device for one of Mitchell’s high-score performances; a supposed “Player of the Century” plaque Mitchell says he had received from Namco; and a technical analysis that showed, according to Tashroudian, “that the videotaped recordings of his score in questions could not have come from original unmodified Donkey Kong hardware.”

Tashroudian asked the court to impose sanctions on Mitchell—up to and including dismissing the case—for these and other “deliberate and egregious [examples of] discovery abuse throughout the course of this litigation by lying at deposition and by engaging in the spoliation of evidence with the intent to defraud the Court.” A hearing on both Mitchell and Tashroudian’s alleged actions was scheduled for later this week; Tashroudian could still face referral to the State Bar for his misconduct.

“Plaintiff wants nothing more than for me to be kicked off of this case,” Tashroudian continued in his apology statement. “I know this will not stop. I am now [Mitchell’s] and his counsel’s target. The facts support [Twin Galaxies’] defense and now [Mitchell] realizes that. He also realizes that he has dug himself into a hole by lying in discovery. I do not say that lightly.”

Mitchell, Tashroudian, and representatives for Twin Galaxies were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial Read More »

those-games-turns-crappy-mobile-game-ads-into-actually-good-puzzles

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

gaming, mobile game ads, puzzle games / /

Can YOU reach the treasure? —

It’s pin-pulling, color-pouring, fake-but-real fun, and you only pay once.

–

Pin-pulling puzzle with a stick figure, boulder, and treasure.

Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge?

D3Publisher

You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?

The stage select music gets to be a bit much, but nobody will sue you if you play with the sound off.

That’s exactly what Those Games are. Their full title is Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam. The package is $10 on all platforms.

Some people will find that price a bargain, given the chance to prove how much better they’d be at these kinds of puzzles than the psychological dark patterns that taunt them. Some people might wait for a sale, given that you are, in fact, getting some very free-to-play-esque puzzles. But having spent more time than I expected tackling them, I can vouch that once you get past the first few patronizing levels and adjust to some slightly muddy controls in a couple of titles, each set of games starts giving you real, thoughtfully constructed challenges.

Three of the games in Those Games were instantly familiar to me, a person who owns a smartphone and reads things on it. Surprisingly, I had never seen the last two in the list here:

  • Pin Pull, removing barriers between you, monsters, traps, and treasure in the right order
  • Number Tower, sending your number-ranked fighter to tackle numbered monsters, potions, power-ups, and rebuffs in the right order
  • Color Lab, combining similar colors from vials in the right order
  • Parking Lot, moving cars facing different directions out of a lot with a circular drive, in the right order
  • Cash Run, clicking on an auto-walking man to have him pile up money to avoid obstacles, finishing with enough to not be “poor” and disappoint his spouse

  • I got a few levels past this Pin Pull stage, but not through all 50. Troll clubs goblin, goblins run toward stick guy, so when do you release rock?

    DCPublisher

  • As with most of the games, the inherent “how hard could it be?” starts coming back on you as the complications multiply.

    DCPublisher

  • You can’t pour a full, single-color vial, and that makes the later levels of Color Lab an actual challenge.

    DCPublisher

  • Parking Lot is fun, but only if you stop caring about timing and star ratings, given the quirky controls.

    DCPublisher

  • Cash Run is perhaps the only game in the set you could suggest has a deeper meaning, vis-a-vis capitalism. It’s also harder to grasp than the others.

    DCPublisher

Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles Read More »

valve-request-takes-down-portal-64-due-to-concerns-over-nintendo-involvement

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement

demake, gaming, Homebrew, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, portal, portal 64, valve / /

Doing what they can because they must —

It’s not the use of Portal, it’s the use of an N64 SDK that’s the issue.

–

Window open inside Portal 64

Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment.

Valve/James Lambert

Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo’s classic platforms, done outside Nintendo’s blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo’s wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.

That’s why, one week after announcing that his years-long “demake” of Valve’s classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its “First Slice” ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There’s no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, “communication with Valve” that “because the project depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down.”

Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.

It’s far from the first time Valve has taken preemptive action to avoid Nintendo’s involvement. In mid-2023, a Wii/GameCube emulator, Dolphin, halted its planned release on Valve’s Steam platform after Nintendo contacted Valve and requested the emulator not be released. In that case, the Dolphin emulator’s weakness to potential action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions was its use of a proprietary cryptographic key from the Wii. Rather than argue about keys, BIOS files, and other matters in court, Dolphin gave up on Steam, while keeping the project alive elsewhere.

Valve has seemingly been silent on Portal 64 until now. Playing the game required access to a Steam-purchased copy of Portal, with one of that game’s data files then patched by Lambert’s software to work inside Nintendo 64 emulators. Lambert wasn’t charging for his project, although he did have a Patreon to further his work on it. Lambert told PC Gamer that he thought “Valve didn’t want to be tied up in a project involving Nintendo IP,” and he didn’t blame them.

The “Nintendo’s proprietary libraries” at issue inside Lambert’s project appear to be Libultra, the official SDK provided to those developing Nintendo 64 games on Silicon Graphics machines (and later other platforms). There exists an open source N64 SDK, libdragon, but Lambert told PC Gamer that he wouldn’t move over to that without assurance that it would appease Valve—and, by proxy, Nintendo. Lambert has many more N64-related and adjacent projects to work on, judging from his YouTube channel.

Nintendo has been remarkably successful over the years at keeping games and tributes it didn’t make from remaining in place: cover art for emulated Switch games, explanations of emulator installation, fan games, Game & Watch hacks, and even Mario-themed Minecraft videos. The company has created a general atmosphere of legal fear around anything touching its properties. That extends, apparently, even to large, well-resourced companies with far more tolerance for fan hacking.

Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement Read More »

why-more-pc-gaming-handhelds-should-ditch-windows-for-steamos

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS

ayaneo, gaming, steam machines, steamos, valve / /
Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.

Enlarge / Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.

Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago, we’ve seen plenty of would-be competitors that have tried to mimic the Deck’s portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing one of the Steam Deck’s best features: integration with the increasingly robust, Linux-based SteamOS 3.

That’s finally set to change with the just-announced Ayaneo Next Lite, the first non-Valve portable hardware set to come with SteamOS pre-installed. We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve’s gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.

A bespoke, portable gaming OS

Ayaneo’s announcement highlights a few vague-ish features of the Next Lite, including a 7-inch 800p screen, a 47 Wh battery, and drift-resistant hall-effect joysticks. But even though the announcement doesn’t include a specific asking price, Ayaneo promises that the device “integrates outstanding cost-effectiveness” and will be “the all-new cost-effective choice with flagship experiences.”

That ad copy highlights one of the main advantages a SteamOS-based gaming portable brings over one sporting Windows: cost. Sure, OEMs are likely paying much less than the $139 consumer asking price for a copy of Windows 11. Still, even a $70-per-unit bulk license would represent a good 10 percent of the ASUS ROG Ally’s $700 asking price (and an even bigger chunk of the price difference between the Ally and the Steam Deck). In an increasingly competitive portable PC gaming market, being able to cut out that significant cost over Windows-based alternatives could be a big deal.

Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.

Enlarge / Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.

Then there’s the interface. Modern Windows is designed with a desktop/laptop or tablet form factor in mind. That UI definitely leaves something to be desired when forced into a 7- or 8-inch touchscreen that lacks a keyboard and mouse. Our review of the ROG Ally highlights just how annoying it can be to have to fiddle with Windows settings on a touchscreen running “an awkwardly scaled” version of the OS. And while Microsoft has experimented with a handheld-friendly version of Windows meant for portable gaming devices, nothing public has yet come of the effort.

SteamOS 3, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up with portable gaming on Steam Deck in mind. That comes through in many little ways, like a built-in “suspend” mode, tons of battery-optimization features, and menus that are designed for a small screen and joystick navigation.

And let’s not forget the way that most Steam games are pre-configured and optimized to “just work” on the OS after you download them, eliminating the kind of settings tweaking that’s often needed when running Windows on a gaming portable. As Ars’ Kevin Purdy summed it up in his ROG Ally review, “I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally’s combination of Windows 11 and Asus’ own Armoury Crate software.”

Who needs Windows?

The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.” height=”480″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/rogally-640×480.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A mess of launchers and OS cruft crowd the screen when launching The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.

Kevin Purdy

Yes, a Windows installation means a gaming portable is compatible with almost every PC game ever made, including many that still don’t run on SteamOS for one reason or another. But SteamOS’s robust Proton compatibility layer means an ever-expanding list of thousands of games are certified as at least “Playable” on SteamOS, including most of Steam’s most popular titles. That’s a huge change from the desktop-focused “Steam Machines” era of the mid-’10s, when early versions of SteamOS could only run the relative handful of games that developers bothered to explicitly port to Linux.

While Proton does come with at least some performance overhead, a variety of Steam Deck benchmarks show games running under SteamOS tend to perform comparably (or sometimes better) than those running under Windows on the handheld. That’s also a huge change from the Steam Machines era, when Ars’ testing showed that many SteamOS games ran significantly worse than their Windows counterparts on the same desktop hardware.

Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS Read More »