Latest News - Page 1664

The effects of coronavirus are having larger and larger impacts on business, with tech giants Amazon and Google now pushing new restrictions on employee travel over coronavirus, or COVID-19.

Amazon has requested that its 798,000 employees stop all non-essential travel immediately, which includes both domestic and international travel. This move from Amazon comes after the company restricted travel to China in February with its employees, but now the restrictions apply globally, and domestically.

Moving over to everything giant Google, which has increased its employee travel restrictions to include Japan and South Korea -- a list that already banned travel to China, Iran, and two Italian regions: Lombardy and Veneto. A Google spokesperson said: "We can confirm that one employee from our Zurich office has been diagnosed with the coronavirus. They were in the Zurich office for a limited time, before they had any symptoms. We have taken -- and will continue to take - all necessary precautionary measures, following the advice of public health officials, as we prioritize everyone's health and safety".

The Doom Slayer might be a crazed, demon-slaughtering psychopath, but he's still a big kid with a very nerdy side.

Doom Eternal's hub world, the Fortress of Doom, humanizes the rampant killing machine we know and love. Turns out that murderous buff action hero is a huge nerd. Doom Slayer has his own room with personal trinkets, collections, and artifacts, including an old gaming PC that hearkens back to Doom's glory days in the 90s where dial-up and 3.5-inch floppy discs ruled the platform.

"He's a nerd. He's like one of us, only he's 300 pounds, really swole, and he can slaughter demons. He's also a gamer and he's really into the history of games," Doom Eternal creative director Hugo Martin said in a recent PAX East stream.

LG Display has stopped production at one of its smartphone display factories in Gumi, South Korea -- after a bank worker near the facility itself was tested positive for coronavirus, or COVID-19.

The company is aiming at resuming production at its factory on March 3, but the company hasn't said how much this stop in production will hurt its output of smartphone displays. LG will have its own phones impacted by the temporary production halt, but LG doesn't just make displays for its own smartphones.

LG makes panels for some of Apple's current iPhones, so we might expect some ripples in iPhone supply because of it. Although, it's only a few days so we shouldn't expect too much from this, but it's yet another production issue that coronavirus, or COVID-19 is placing on the technology industry.

With coronavirus or COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, 'stay-at-home' companies like Netflix are benefiting the most according to industry analysts.

BMO Capital Market analyst Dan Salmon wrote in a research note on Friday that Netflix "is an obvious beneficiary if consumers stay home due to coronavirus (COVID-19 virus) concerns, and this has been reflected in considerable stock price outperformance this week". Netflix shares were up 0.8% this week, after the worst sell-off on Wall Street in close to 9 years.

It's not just Netflix that is an "obvious beneficiary" of the coronavirus keeping people safer at home, but more internet-connected customers and services are benefiting. These include Facebook, Amazon, and others -- but throw in Microsoft, Sony, and every game developer and streaming service out there -- hell, including NVIDIA's just-launched GeForce NOW service into the mix.

Akira fans will remember the iconic and trend setting 1988 Japanese animated movie predicting that Tokyo would win the right to have the 2020 Olympics hosted in their country... but it gets freakier.

In a scene from the movie, there is a sign that encourages citizens to throw their support behind the 2020 Olympics to make it a success. But underneath the sign in the movie Akira, someone sprayed "Just cancel it!" underneath -- with the sign above noting "147 Days Until The Games".

Well, the Friday just gone (yesterday) was 147 days until the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics -- which kicks off in July 24, 2020. Right now, 'Just Cancel It!' is trending on Japanese Twitter, putting Akira back into the spotlight with the recent news that the coronavirus outbreak might force the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to be canceled.

It feels like it was only a few days ago that Mobile World Congress (MWC) was canceled over coronavirus, and now another trade show has fallen victim to the disease: the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

The official GDC 2020 organizers have officially postponed the event, explaining that: "After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world, we've made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March".

The organizers continued: "Having spent the past year preparing for the show with our advisory boards, speakers, exhibitors, and event partners, we're genuinely upset and disappointed not to be able to host you at this time. We want to thank all our customers and partners for their support, open discussions and encouragement. As everyone has been reminding us, great things happen when the community comes together and connects at GDC. For this reason, we fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer. We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks".

Shadow Warrior 2 developer Flying Wild Hog has come out swinging in regards to teasing next-gen consoles, with a couple of new AAA games in development after they were acquired by Supernova Capital.

During an interview with Flying Wild Hog CEO Michal Szustak and Wccftech, it was unearthed that Szustak says getting to 60FPS on next-gen consoles is going to be "much easier". He's also, like me, an old school gamer and 60FPS gaming is important to him -- personally, I won't game at anything less than 60FPS minimum with the only exception in the last 20+ years being The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch.

During the interview, Szustak said: "So for us, since we do action games, we are super happy because it will be much easier to deliver 60 frames per second, obviously. I'm an old school gamer so 60FPS is important for me. So yeah, I'm super excited about it. In terms of difficulties with making the games, I think the new generation will be much more accessible".

Just as we're all enjoying the weekend, rumors of NVIDIA's next generation Ampere GPU have surfaced -- this time, teasing some basic specifications, purported performance, and more.

We know that NVIDIA's next-gen GPU architecture after Turing will be Ampere, and then Hopper -- with Ampere finding a new home on the 7nm node and offering some truly kick ass performance improvements as well as power efficiency. Pascal and Turing were already quite power efficient GPUs, but Ampere really amps things up... pun intended.

This is where Twitter user '_roggame' comes in, where he has discovered some Geekbench results for "two unknown NVIDIA GPUs". The first of which packs 7552 CUDA (so Ampere) cores, 118 compute units (CUs), GPU clock speeds of 1.11GHz and 24GB of memory. We could be looking at GDDR6 or HBM2/2e, that is not confirmed. The next one has 6912 CUDA cores, 180 compute units, and a GPU clock of 1.01GHz while it packs much more memory at 48GB.

Blizzard confirms some interesting new features coming to Diablo 4 on PC, including full controller support and total controller remapping/custom keybinding.

Diablo 4 is being developed for consoles and PC simultaneously, and Blizzard is going through great lengths to make the two versions as uniform as possible. This is actually the first time a Diablo game is getting made for two platforms at once--that could be both a good and bad thing.

It's only natural that the two platforms will share a lot of features in common, like being able to use a controller on both PC and consoles. There's also parity in aesthetic and UI design decisions. The inclusion of cross-platform controller support is affecting menu presentation, which is arguably one of the game's most important feature. For example, Diablo 4's skill menu is being designed so that it's controller-friendly, and a lot of the game's development decisions will center around compromising.

Borderlands 3's second major campaign DLC is called Guns, Love, and Tentacles, and it's a pretty strange adventure into the heart of Lovecraftian mythos.

Gearbox just announced Borderlands 3's new DLC at PAX East that centers around a Lovecraftian love story with a ton of abyssal horrors to slay. The DLC has the Vault Hunters traveling to a bizarre new planet to attend a wedding. Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs are getting married, but the reception is anything but ordinary. The planet is overrun by spectral terrors and weird occultists who want to summon a titanic sunken god.

So naturally your job is to annihilate all the baddies, which include witch-like occultists who cast spells, big flying devil birds, huge tyrannical musclebound ogres, and a whole manner of creepy-crawlies, insects, and other assorted monstrosities ripped right out of a Lovecraft story.

Reports say Microsoft's video streaming platform Mixer is having some issues internally, namely with keeping employee morale high.

Mixer is now under new leadership and employees may not be too happy with their bosses' new ethos, sources tell OnMSFT. Shilpa Yadla, who now heads the Mixer platform, has one rule: don't give up and stay positive through struggle. It sounds like good advice. But the way Yadla frames her speech in a recent clipped closed-door presentation makes it sound less like a guideline and more like a harsh decree.

In the video, Yadla repeatedly mentions how employees have a choice to either think positively, or to just "doom" everything. It's a strange thing to say to a group of people you're now leading...unless maybe there was a morale problem and you're trying to solve it by brute-forcing positive thinking and intent.

Sony may release two PS5 consoles in 2020: A more powerful, but more expensive PlayStation Pro, and a lower-end and cheaper base PlayStation 5 SKU.

Verified NeoGAF user VFXVeteran reinforces previous rumors of a dual-console PS5 launch. According to the user, who cites unnamed industry sources, the PS5 Pro is expected to match or exceed the Xbox Series X's 12 TFLOPs of GPU power, whereas the PS5 model is expected to hit about 9 TFLOPs.

No other specs were detailed for the base PS5, but if it's real, expect the console to use the same 7nm AMD SoC as the PS5 Pro, just dialed down quite a bit. The base PS5 should also have the same super-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD

Capcom will release a playable Resident Evil 3 demo next month to give us a taste of its new horror creation.

The upcoming Resident Evil 3 remake is shaping up to be the ultimate terror-fest, and thankfully gamers will be able to try it out sometime in March. Capcom confirmed a demo is coming but we don't know when exactly it'll launch, or if it'll be exclusive to one platform (likely not).

The game is a remake/re-imagining of the old-school 90s PlayStation classic, complete with amazingly revamped visuals, new streamlined mechanics, and a brand new anxiety-inducing Nemesis. The RE Engine looks better than ever and RE3make is a big step up from last year's RE2 Remake. Capcom has gone through great lengths to preserve the overall look and feel of the original, but upgraded the shooter mechanics, animations, and everything else.

Microsoft continues hyping its beastly next-gen Xbox Series X console and promises games will look, play, and feel better than ever before.

The Xbox Series X is shaping up to be the ultimate games console. Powered by a next-gen 12 TFLOP Navi GPU, an 8-core Zen 2, and a custom SSD, the system will allow 8K gaming, 4K 60FPS, and even up to 120FPS gaming--all with buttery-smooth variable refresh rates. Developers will use tons of new technologies like ray tracing, variable rate shading, and other software tricks to make games run incredibly well at all perf specs and resolutions. That's the theory at least. We haven't actually seen any games in action yet.

Now according to Xbox exec Jason Ronald, the Xbox Series X's in-game performance is unprecedented. The next-gen Xbox uses "bleeding-edge" tech from AMD to open a new dimension of high-FPS, high-resolution console gaming. It's basically a new era for the console market.

Microsoft's Project xCloud game streaming service will crush Stadia and other competitors for one simple reason: It won't make you re-buy games.

Project xCloud just keeps getting better and better. Not only will the service let you stream Xbox One console games you already own to other devices like mobile phones and laptops, but it'll do the same with PC games.

Sources tell Thurrot.com's Brad Sams that Project xCloud will let you stream PC titles over the cloud service, basically like GeForce Now. This is tremendously powerful and creates a unified link to your cross-platform Xbox games library and allows access wherever you go. There's probably some limitations here, and we don't know if Steam games will be included or if it's exclusive to Windows 10 games bought on the Microsoft Store.

Doom Eternal goes beyond even the craziest frame rate ambitions and can hit up to 1000 FPS of bloody, demon-slaying carnage.

The new id Tech 7 engine is absolutely mind-blowing and can run Doom games 300% faster than id Tech 6. The studio says Doom Eternal maxes out at 1000 frames-per-second thanks to the new engine optimizations--but only if you have the hardware might to throw at the game.

And that's only the theoretical limit; id is careful to say the game is future-proofed so that next-gen PC hardware can push the bar even higher.

UPDATE: GDC 2020 has been postponed, as per an official announcement:

This year's annual Game Developers Conference is likely to be cancelled as the biggest names in the industry skip the show.

Konami could be resurrecting Silent Hills from the dead and letting Hideo Kojima run the macabre show.

Kojima Productions might've just teased something Silent Hill-related on Twitter. Fans have scrutinized the Tweet and found some ties to Konami's stagnant franchise, and admittedly there's some reaching going on. The Tweet shows Kojima Productions' head of communications Aki Saito and says "sorry I've been so silent" (as in Silent Hills, of course) and the pencil has Pyramid stamped on it. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe it's a hint that Silent Hills is coming back. There's even mention of a reveal coming next week.

Konami might be firing up the Silent Hill franchise again and Kojima could help lead the charge. Recent reports say Konami is working on two new Silent Hill projects, but nothing has been confirmed. Konami has been noticably absent in the AAA space, but promised in September 2019 that it's not giving up on new sequels.

The Xbox Series X could upgrade and enhance games from legacy generations including the Xbox 360 and even original Xbox era.

Microsoft has high aspirations for the Xbox Series X's extensive backward compatibility. The next-gen Xbox will play four generations' worth of Xbox games. If it's playable on Xbox One, it's playable on the Xbox SX, the company says. And the new console will play all of these games even better thanks to an on-console boost mode that natively upscales resolution, frame rate, and performance of older games. But Microsoft could take this even further and bring higher-end upgrades like ray tracing to older-gen games (look at Quake II RTX, for example).

In a recent Major Nelson podcast, Xbox exec Jason Ronald says the backward compatibility team wants to push the bar higher than ever before and enhance games beyond their current state.

Two pieces of seemingly new artwork have been spotted on Rockstar Games' mainsite, prompting lots of speculation on new games like Grand Theft Auto 6 and Bully 2. But it's probably not what you think.

Rockstar's website shows two interesting images that have fans buzzing. The art can be seen in the background when clicking ondrop-down menu on the upper left hand side of the site, and randomly rotates across three separate pieces--two of which fans are trying to somehow tie to rumored games like GTA 6, Bully 2, or even Agent, the cancelled stealth game for PS3.

The visuals in question are quite captivating and thought provoking. One shows a futuristic 1980's-style gynoid robot from renown artist Hajime Sorayama, who did the cover art for Aerosmith's Just Press Play album. The robot is hugging the Rockstar logo and there's a bottle of champagne from 1998, the year the studio was founded.