Latest News - Page 2595

After 10 years with 2K International, Neil Ralley has stepped down from his position as General Manager. Replacing Ralley is Murray Pannell, who up until now served as PlayStation UK's Marketing Director, and previously he served Senior Marketing roles with Ubisoft, Xbox and EA.

2K President Christoph Hartmann said in a statement: "During his tenure, Neil helped grow our market share and distribution across Europe and beyond, led our international teams in reaching our 10-year milestone as a label, and helped us achieve our recent historic financial results. We are very grateful for his role in the successful launches of our many franchises and the overall growth of our label. Neil has graciously offered to stay on through the end of our fiscal year on March 31st, and to assist with the onboarding of our new VP of Publishing, Murray Pannell.

He continued: "Murray joined on December 17th and comes to us from Sony PlayStation, where he served as marketing director for UK and Ireland. Murray is a proven leader with a wealth of experience at major publishers like Ubisoft and EA, as well as further first party experience at Microsoft Xbox. We are sad to see Neil go, but we are pleased to formally welcome Murray into our management team in time for what we believe will be another stellar year for 2K in 2016".

Technical Illusions, the AR startup that launched its CastAR augmented reality headset onto Kickstarter in October 2013, has promised to refund the original Kickstarter backers - but with a twist, they will also provide them with a free consumer CastAR system when it launches.

During an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Technical Illusions' CEO David Henzel-Wallace said: "We're giving every backer who was expecting CastAR hardware a free consumer CastAR system at release and will be fully reimbursing their Kickstarter backings. We will start reimbursement via Paypal at the start of the new year with the last batch going out on February 29". He continued: "We're offering reimbursements to backers who pledged at the hardware tiers - "The Magic Wand" and above. The exception is the Early and Almost as Early CastAR backers, since those backers have already received their Early CastAR prototypes. That said, we'll happily exchange any Early CastAR prototypes for a discount code good for one free consumer CastAR at product launch, if any Early/Almost as Early backers would rather wait for the consumer CastAR and content. A standard Kickstarter Survey will go to all backers this week to collect the necessary info".

GamesIndustry.biz asked the big question, "why do such a generous thing when you could just keep the cash?" Henkel-Wallace replied: "Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's right. We have several reasons why we felt it was best to draw the Kickstarter to a close, and why that should involve reimbursing the backers. First, backers ordered various combinations of hardware (e.g. some just glasses, some glasses plus a magic wand controller, etc). It's hard for developers to write fun games if they don't know what the user will have. This way we can level out the configuration (e.g. our consumer product will have the wand!). Second, our Kickstarter rewards were developer-oriented, but we later learned that most of our backers had really expected a consumer product complete with content. Rather than tell people that they would simply have to write their own games, we decided it's better to take the time to give backers what they expected".

Psyonix, the developer behind the huge hit that is Rocket League, has announced that it has pulled in close to $50 million in revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Rocket League was made over a two-year period, costing $2 million, according to Psyonix founder and CEO Dave Hagewood. Hagewood was able to balance its books by doing contract work for games like Mass Effect 3, but struck gold with the release of Rocket League. Psyonix has kept fans and critics more than happy with a continuous stream of free and paid DLC, with new maps, cars, and modes unveiled at a decent rate. Hagewood told the WSJ: "It didn't really sink in until they told me they had to get Steven Spielberg's approval".

Rocket League only hit the PS4 recently, but Psyonix has announced plans to bring the game to the Xbox One in February 2016.

After pulling the game from the market because it was so bad, Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Studios seem to be more confident with Batman: Arkham Knight in its new post-patch state. A new patch has been released, weighing in at 538MB. Batman: Arkham Knight was so bad, we named it the worst gaming fail of 2015 in our new 'Top 5 Gaming Fails of 2015' article.

According to the changelog, we can expect the new December 17 patch to restore the heavier rain during the opening section of the game, fix the missing rain effects on a few remaining player character skins, miscellaneous gameplay fixes and stability improvements as well as minor performance improvements. The new patch for Batman: Arkham Knight will be auto downloaded through Steam, with the full changelog available below:

AMD is getting quicker with its driver releases, announcing the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 drivers, a new set of drivers which fixes the Crossfire issues gamers were experiencing in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. Not only that, but the texture corruption problems in Just Cause 3 have been fixed, as well as the snow flickers in Star Wars Battlefront. You can grab the new AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 drivers here.

Here's a full list of what's fixed, and what's new:

Resolved Issues:

Ubisoft surprised us with the 'Silent Night' live action trailer to The Division, but Mafia fans will enjoy this 12-minute developer-narrated video of Mafia 3, courtesy of IGN.

Haden Blackman, the Studio Head and Creative Director of Hangar 13, the developer behind Mafia 3, explained: "The Mafia franchise is known for its immersive sense of time and place, and for presenting compelling stories about life within organized crime. In Mafia III, we are introducing players to an unexpected new anti-hero and an iconic city to explore, all within a hard-boiled drama set during one of the most turbulent years in American history".

Mafia 3 will be released onto the Xbox One, PS4 and PC in 2016.

Netflix has updated its app on Windows 10 devices, dramatically improving the user experience in the process.

Powered by a "new implementation on the Universal Windows Platform", it features vertical scrolling through categories, an improved details page with optimizations based on the size of your display as well more accessible suggested movies, and support for touch on an integrated display and gestures when using a trackpad.

Currently, the update is only available for desktops, laptops and tablets on Windows 10, but phones will have it soon.

Today Taiwanese PC hardware maker BioStar has launched its new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC video card aimed at gamers on a budget.

BioStar's new GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC GPU is based on NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture and sports 2GB GDDR5 VRAM on a 128-bit bus. The card's main selling point is its new OC revision: the GPU's 640 CUDA cores are factory overclocked to 1127Mhz and can be further pushed to 1178Mhz speeds to boost frame rates and performance for DirectX 11 gaming. As far as a cooling solution, BioStar's GTX 750 Ti OC revision features the company's GAMING FPS dual-fan setup that's optimized to mitigate heat during overclocking or normal use.

The card can hit a max resolution of 4096 X 2160 via digital output, but doesn't come equipped with a Display Port outlet, instead featuring Dual-DVI ports and a single mini-HDMI. BioStar's GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC can perform alongside other NVIDIA GPU's in SLI, and is specifically designed to complement BioStar-branded motherboards.

As China's smog and pollution stretch like a shadow of death and disease over the overseas country, Canadian entrepreneurs have found a way to profit from the gloom.

In a business tactic that would make Spaceball's Presdient Skroob smile in delight, Canadian startup Vitality Air is selling "hand bottled" cans of air to China's smog-choked citizens. China's pollution problem has become so dire that Beijing recently issued a red alert, forcing residents to stay indoors away from the toxic air. Naturally the demand for fresh, clean air--Perriair, anyone?--has surged, and business is booming from the Canadian air-hawkers. "We shipped a sample of 500 bottles to China...they sold out within a week-and-a-half," said Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam said. "People were buying 10 bottles at a time. It's been crazy, crazy."

The bottled air consists of "crisp mountain air Banff National Park in Canada" and ships in 7.7 liter spray bottles that promise up to 150 breaths of fresh air. The bottles, which promise "100% Rocky Mountain air", are affixed to a facemask and administered in a similar fashion as hospital oxygen masks. The Vitality Fresh air cans cost $32CAD with $9 flat shipping across the globe, translating to about 192 Yuan per bottle.

Squad is the first big, publicly available game using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4. Consequently, it's brought to light a major issue within the engine: poor performance on AMD CPUs, seemingly related to an audio component of the engine. The issue has been reported by many players since even before the Early Access launch this week, but now that it's on Steam, the vocalness has intensified.

Squad developer Offworld Industries has stated, "there's very little [we] can do about this besides wait for Epic to fix it and release the fix in an engine patch." With that, we asked Epic if it was aware of the issue and if it had plans to fix it. Senior marketing manager Dana Cowley responded, "First I've heard of this. Thanks to your email I'm getting in touch with the Squad team now to investigate, and see how we might be able to help. We think Squad is awesome, and want to make sure they are set up for success." In a follow-up email, she stated, "Our guys are on top of it."

Microsoft has just released a new list of 16 Xbox 360 games that are now playable on the Xbox One, including yesteryear hits like Halo: Reach, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Portal: Still Alive.

As promised, the Redmond gaming giant has delivered a new batch of backward compatible Xbox 360 games in time for the holiday season. The new offering is much smaller than the original 100 backward compatible Xbox 360 games, but Xbox fans will be delighted to see less Kinect-based titles taking up precious room for great games. Sadly there are a bunch of Xbox LIVE Arcade games, so we can't celebrate too much...however the games themselves aren't so bad. Check out the list below for the full breakdown, and remember all of these games are now playable on the Xbox One.

Remember that all backward compatible Xbox 360 games played on the Xbox One can utilize nifty benefits like game streaming to Windows 10 PC's, cross-platform multiplayer with gamers on Xbox One or Xbox 360, and screenshot and video capture.

Australia's big banks are backing the launch of Android Pay in the land down under, with ANZ, Westpacm St George, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia, Bendigo Bank, Cuscal, ING Direct, and Macquarie Bank signing up their full support for 2016, ZDNet reported.

As announced in a Google blog post, this new service is set to be released in Australia "in the first half of 2016," with Android Pay gaining access to girft card storage, loyalty card intergration and select special offers.

Available for phones running Android 4.4 or later, customers will now gain the ability to pay for purchases in brick-and-mortar stores by using their increasingly-hand smartphone, working thanks to NFC. The service will require users to unlock their phone (due to safety concerns) and simply hold it near any contactless payment device, in what Google hopes will be a method to remove the need of plastic credit card payments in the future.

In a recent report posted by Proofprint, a company that has launched Instagram's first spam bot cruncher, Bible applications have topped the list in hidden malicious data, offering the worst ranking of any category in the completed research, posting 3.7 percent (26 out of 5,600) with malicious code located within.

Including some of the most popular Bible applications, this research found out that user data is being sent to 16 different servers across three countries, tracking things such as user location, private contacts and even making calls on behalf of the user. If this list wasn't long enough already, the report further claims of unauthorized text message access and cross-app interaction when a rooted phone is being used. Applications based around the Quran also put users at risk, Proofpoint claims, with the research concluding that ten of the most-downloaded applications are putting users at risk, sending information to 31 servers, reading text messages and sending messages on the user's behalf without authorization.

Addressing these concerns, Proofpoint Vice President of Threat Operations, Kevin Epstein, stated, "When it comes to malicious apps, apparently nothing is sacred. The surprising prevalence of riskware in religious texts' apps provides further evidence that mobile users -- and their employers -- need to be far more security-conscious." Paying homage to the fact that users should be constantly aware of their personal security, Epstein added, "The findings are also a valuable reminder of the importance of a mobile app security strategy for organizations. To protect employees and users from unscrupulous scammers and cybercriminals."

Thanks to new technology that was announced recently in a press release, users are now able to convert their 15.6-inch standard-screen laptops into interactive touch devices. This new technology is called AirBar and it has been developed by a company named Neodone Inc, a Swedish company specialising in Optical Interactive Sensing Technology.

Connecting to a consumer laptop through a single USB port, this sensor beams an invisible light in order to pick up touchscreen presses and gestures. This completely plug and play product is being released firstly for 15.6-inch laptops and comes priced at only $49.

More information on this product can be found on the official website or by watching the video above. Functioning with both Windows and Chrome operating systems, the AirBar will be shown off to the public during CES 2016 in January, taking place in Las Vegas.

It looks like Google will be making a self-driving unit within its Alphabet company, according to "a person briefed on the company's strategy", reports Bloomberg.

Google's autonomous vehicles have clocked up over 1 million miles (or 1.6 million kilometers) on public roads throughout San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. These cities are where Alphabet (or Google, or whatever) will roll out their autonomous vehicles first, with an Uber-like service. The person that Bloomberg talked with asked not to be identified as "the plans are private". The new autonomous vehicles would be deployed in confined areas at first, such as "campuses, military bases or corporate office parks", according to Bloomberg's source.

One of Google's main goals with autonomous vehicles is to reduce traffic accidents, which claim around 33,000 lives every year in the United States alone. Back in September, Google and Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin said that self-driving cars would first reach humanity as a form of service, saying that countless people could try the technology, and that having "the vehicle come back to us every day" meant that Google could update the machines at a much higher rate than consumer-owned autonomous cars.

Facebook has just announced Transportation on Messenger, which sees the integration of ride-sharing services like Uber into its gigantic communications app.

Uber is the first partner to sign up to Transportation on Messenger, where you can order a ride within the Messenger app. From there, you'll receive your receipts and status updates as conversations, with Uber testing it out right now in specific parts of the US, but other areas and countries will be included very soon. Both Facebook and Uber will benefit from this, as Facebook gets more users - and as Engadget reports, "and importantly, their payment info - returning to Messenger.

Uber on the other hand, gets its ride-sharing hands into the massive Messenger platform, which has over 1 billion users.

Netflix used its marketing prowess at the perfect time, teasing the fourth season of its hit show House of Cards during the GOP presidential debate on Tuesday night.

The announcement was made from the office of President Underwood, the fictional president portrayed by Kevin Spacey. Underwood told voters through a new political ad that his journey in the White House was only just beginning. A new website was also launched for the president's potential campaign, where Underwood says he's had just about enough of "political gridlock and stagnation". A statement on the website says: "Let's plow through the stubborn and smallminded and send Washington a message loud and clear".

House of Cards' fourth season will debut on March 4, 2016 for your binge-watching needs - myself included.

I still remember playing the absolute crap out of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter when it was released on the Nintendo 64 back in the 90s, but it was when it hit the PC that I was excited - as I could drive up the resolution far higher than the N64 could crank out at the time.

Well, Night Dive Studios - who has been in the headlines quite a few times now, namely with System Shock 3 under development - is behind Turok: Dinosaur Hunter remaster. Turok Remastered will include improved textures, effects, and much more. The draw distance has been greatly improved, as Turok was infamous for its use of fog to hide the horrible draw distances back in the day. This isn't a problem anymore, thanks to the greatly improved graphical horsepower of today's hardware.

Turok Remastered drops on December 17 through GOG.com, Steam, and Humble Bumble.

SAPPHIRE Is preparing a new Radeon R9 Fury Nitro card, something that will be a slight step up on its R9 Fury Tri-X. SAPPHIRE's new R9 Fury Nitro will feature a custom PCB, and so much more.

The Fiji PRO GPU will reportedly be clocked at 1050MHz, with the card being a little longer than the current R9 Fury Tri-X model - the Nitro measuring in at 307 x 125 x 45mm, while the Tri-X model measured in at 300 x 110 x 400mm. SAPPHIRE will allowing the R9 Fury Nitro to expand a little wider too, moving to a 2.5-slot card, versus a 2.2-slot card from the Tri-X model. SAPPHIRE's new Radeon R9 Fury Nitro will still use 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, but the custom PCB can be seen as significantly larger than the Tri-X model - so expect some higher power draw on the Nitro.

This means we can hope for some decent overclocking on the SAPPHIRE R9 Fury Nitro, and if SAPPHIRE has been provided approval by AMD for overclocking the Fiji GPU, that means other AIB partners can't be too far behind. The R9 Fury Nitro will still rock the same 3584 stream processors, 4GB of HBM1 on a 4096-bit memory bus providing 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors will require 275W of power. The R9 Fury Nitro will include 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI and 1 X DVI-D (compared to the Tri-X which had the same display output configuration, minus DVI). As for pricing, that's TBD for now.

Are you one of the many PS4 gamers who deleted Hideo Kojima's terrifying P.T. demo, and wailed in agony when Konami pulled it from the PlayStation Store? Despair no longer, my friend, for there is a way to get the Del Toro and Kojima classic back onto your console, but it's a bit risky.

The method, which was discovered by a Gamexeon user Cara Jitu, essentially involves tricking the PlayStation Network with a proxy server and a special bit of PC software called Squid. Essentially the software masks your PS4's connection, letting users access account data that was previously deleted or removed.

Be advised that this method is described as a "grey area", and isn't 100% guaranteed as safe, so be sure to try it at your own risk. Multiple users have reported this method does indeed work, and no one has said anything about bricked consoles or PlayStation Network bans. P.T. was removed off the PlayStation Network at the behest of Konami, which in turn kicked off the inflammatory Kojima vs. Konami controversy. Sadly the method only works for PS4 users in the United States and Europe.