Latest News - Page 2596

Well, this came out of nowhere - Chinese gaming giant Tencent has just secured the remaining equity in Riot Games - the creators of League of Legends. Riot Games very quietly made the announcement earlier today.

Riot Games said in an update: "Our majority investor, Tencent, recently purchased the remaining equity of Riot Games. This allows us to move away from a Riot equity program towards a cash based incentive program that allows Rioters to share in Riot's success". Riot continued: "Riot's approach to compensation has always been about aligning the incentives of the company with Rioters, and also about ensuring that we compensate our talented team of professionals well".

Back in 2011, Tencent secured a majority stake in Riot Games, buying out their other investors for a rumored $400 million deal. Tencent has been a long-time investor in the League of Legends developer, investing in Riot back in 2009, and then signing a Chinese distribution deal for League of Legends back in November 2008. Riot Games added: "We're excited about the flexibility of this new approach to comp and believe it'll help us continue to ensure Riot remains a great place to work".

Sony touts that its console-powered PlayStation VR headset sports "cutting edge" 1080p OLED displays that will prove to be a tremendous advantage over competitors like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Japanese console gaming giant Sony is extremely confident that its PlayStation VR headset will make its mark on the new frontier of virtual reality. In the past, Sony execs have called the PSVR the "ultimate weapon for developers", but the headset's real power lies in its display. The PlayStation VR is housed with a 1080p OLED True HD display that runs at 120Hz, which is similar on the surface to the Oculus Rift's display panel. The PSVR has a secret weapon, however: a true R, G and B for every True HD pixel, which makes for extremely crisp visuals.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, the Director of Sony's Magic Labs Dr. Richard Marks detailed the PSVR's display. "The display we chose is 120Hz True HD OLED and each pixel of True HD has R, G, and B subpixels, so if you count the number of subpixels, our True HD has more resolution, more subpixels, than higher resolution than what you can see on a smartphone. We are adopting the really cutting edge display technology for PS VR and integrating it really, really tightly with PS4. That's how we are ensuring the great experience coming from PS VR from day one and as time goes by, the PS4 hardware doesn't change, but because the console allows game developers to really go deep to extract more performance out of."

In a short span of several hours yesterday, beloved Metal Gear Solid developer freed himself from Konami's cruel yoke, proceeded to go indie with a resurrected Kojima Productions dev team, and found a new publisher under Sony Computer Entertainment.

To the elation of millions of fans worldwide, Sony excitedly broke the official news in a press release and video announcement combo, where Sony's own president Andrew House welcomed Kojima in a bit of footage that left us feeling warm and fuzzy. Thanks to the Metal Gear Solid series, Kojima and Sony go together like peas in a pod, and it's only natural the two work together in the future.

"I will be taking on a new challenge by establishing my own independent studio, and I am thrilled to be able to embark on this journey with PlayStation, who I have continued to work with all these past years,"said the MGS creator. "I cannot wait to deliver, with PlayStation, a game that will become a compelling franchise."

New details reveal that Hideo Kojima's new PlayStation 4 game will only be timed-exclusive to the Sony platform, and will indeed make its way to PC.

Hideo Kojima has been pretty busy lately. After freeing himself from Konami's shackles due to an expired contract, the famed Metal Gear Solid creator resurrected Kojima Productions and signed a pretty substantial deal with Sony. Up until now the details of the new partnership have been slim, but a new development unveils that Sony won't have full platform exclusivity to Kojima's new game. Thus the aggravating timed-exclusivity marketing ploy rears its head, meaning Kojima's new game (whatever it may be) will not only release first on PlayStation 4, but be solely available on the platform for a period of time.

The new information comes from a Q&A session on a Medium post written by a Sony exec. Oddly enough, The timed exclusivity news broke across multiple publications, prompting Sony to delete the post, which says volumes about the deal itself. Sadly we have no way of officially corroborating the information as the post has been deleted, but according to past coverage, Hideo Kojima's new game will eventually be released on the PC after the exclusive timer runs out. There was no mention of an Xbox One release.

Google Head of Product Marketing Jeremiah Dillon recently sent out an e-mail to his co-workers in an effort to improve the use of everyone's time in the office. It's a pretty inspired way of thinking about our collective workday, and as such has garnered quite a strong response from employees at Google and beyond. Some even created a concise video version. You can see that below, as well as the full email.

Adidas has partnered with its environmental group Parley for the Oceans to design a 3D-printed shoe created in part with garbage found in the ocean.

As of now, it's in the concept stage and comprises an upper made with plastic sourced from the ocean, and a 3D-printed midsole made with recycled polyester and gillnets (specialized nets used to catch fish and sometimes left in the ocean).

"World leaders forging an agreement is wonderful, but we shouldn't need to be told to do the right thing," says Eric Liedtke, adidas Group Executive Board member responsible for Global Brands. "The industry can't afford to wait for directions any longer. Together with the network of Parley for the Oceans, we have started taking action and creating new sustainable materials and innovations for athletes. The 3D-printed ocean plastic shoe midsole stands for how we can set new industry standards if we start questioning the reason of what we create. We want to bring everyone from the industry to the table and create sustainable solutions for big global problems."

If you're currently rocking a non-K Intel Skylake processor and are interested in doing a little overclocking of your own, ASRock might just be the next motherboard manufacturer for you.

Providing what ASRock has named in its recently issued press release as "a nice Christmas present for the overclocking community named SKY OC," this new SKY OC technology means that you're able to update your BIOS through the official ASRock website and play around with overclocking values on various Intel Z170 chipset processors, including Intel i7, i5, i3 and Pentium chips.

This update has been tested in-house on an Intel Core i5-6400 processor, with MSI engineers being able to push a 60% frequency boost out of the chip, sitting on an ASRock Z170 Pro4 motherboard. As with most great news, there are also some minor negatives, explained by this Taiwanese manufacturer as coming in two forms. Firstly, the Intel onboard graphics will be disabled when SKY OC is running, meaning you'll have to run a video card, in addition to the CPU Turbo Ratio and C-State becoming disabled when using this new technology.

We've all seen bots spamming phishing links on company social media promotions, trying to make use of the companies social networking promotion budget in order to lure in clicks from unsuspecting victims. Taclking the Instagram side of things is a company called Proofpoint, offering a cybersecurity service that aims to limit the exposure these phishing bots receive - named SocialPatrol.

With there being five million monthly active Instagram users in Australia alone and 400,000,000 'Instagrammers' across the globe, Proofpoint's aim is to ensure company promotions stay safe of hackers and retain legitimacy. Quite often when looking at promoted post on social media, customers will switch off when something is covered in "work from home!" or "buy cheap sunglasses here!" statements, sometimes cheapening the brand and possibly resulting in customers turning away.

In a recently issued press release, Global Customer Relations for General Mills Director, Jeff Hagen, spoke positively of this new technology, stating that it has "Helped us control high levels of spam and inappropriate comments on our Instagram accounts," adding "Without the Proofpoint SocialPatrol technology, our only recourse would have been costly expansion of our manual moderation or risk losing followers." While this will likely have little affect on the tech savvy audience TweakTown normally gathers, this technology should be a great invention for the elderly and youngster population alike, further helping protect them from threats online.

If you're in the market for a super-fast, super-huge microSD card, Samsung has just announced its new 128GB PRO Plus microSD card - priced at $199.99. T

The price might seem high, but for $199.99 you're getting a 128GB microSD card that has huge read speeds of 95MB/sec and write speeds of 90MB/sec. This is a huge increase over Samsung's existing 128GB EVO Plus microSD card offerings, which maxed out at read speeds of 80MB/sec and write speeds of only 20MB/sec. This means the new 128GB PRO Plus is 4x faster at writing, which makes a huge difference for fast-snapping cameras.

Samsung says that its new 128GB PRO Plus microSD cards are waterproof (IEC 60529, IPX7), temperature proof, X-ray proof, and magnetic proof.

We all know the strain of using Netflix on anything less than a fiber connection, so you'll be happy to hear that Netflix's design team have been working for quite a while on a new algorithm that will not only increase the quality of its streaming content but reduce the bandwidth required to stream said content.

Netflix has been tweaking its algorithm since 2011 when it hit a road block and realized it had been going about the process entirely wrong. Instead of attempting to encode video specifically for the type of bandwidth a subscriber used, Netflix realized that they should be encoding each individual title to best suit that movie, or TV show's needs. This means that shows like Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse would use less kilobits while streaming, compared to something like Man of Steel. Barbie won't require that much visual fidelity, but the big Hollywood movies do.

The streaming giant has begun re-encoding its entire library with the new algorithm, with Netflix ever so slowly rolling out the newly encoded content to see if subscribers would be able to tell the difference. The next question is why? Why would Netflix go through all of this hassle. Well, considering Netflix streaming chews up a huge 37% of all the Internet traffic in the United States, but with the new algorithm, Netflix could see this drop to only 20%, according to Anne Aaron, Netflix's Video Algorithms Manager.

GameInformer is going VR crazy right now, with a gigantic interview with Sony's President of Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida - yes, the king himself! The interview also includes the Director of PlayStation Magic Lab, Richard Marks.

The first question out of the gate was "Where did PlayStation VR start, and how did it get to where it is now?" to which Yoshida replied with: "The VR project that we used to call Project Morpheus was started as a grassroots project amongst different teams geographically spread across Japan, the U.S., and Europe almost simultaneously. When we released PS Move, many people found that just adding PS Move to head-mounted displays of the time like Sony's Movie Viewer or some other company's viewer creates like a handmade, semi-VR headset, and they started experimenting with it with PS3. All of these people who are using their spare time after work creating the handmade kit and some games to play with as a hobby almost realized that many of us are doing the same thing, and the company was like, "With the PS4, we could make a real virtual-reality system." So this really came from the passion of these people who had waited for the time that virtual reality could be made real".

But it was the big question of "What do you see as the major differentiation between PlayStation VR and the other major headsets?". Yoshida replied: "The difference between the console-based VR systems that we are working on versus PC-based or mobile-based systems that they are working on – the clear difference is that the philosophy we are approaching PS VR is the same as we've always approached PlayStation as a console device, meaning that you don't need any technical knowledge to use it. You've just bought PlayStation in the past and connected it to your TV and enjoyed the game. We want people to just buy PS VR and connect it to a PS4 and enjoy VR experiences. The ease of use, the quality of the experiences – because every single PS4 is the same hardware whether it's a consumer unit or a developer unit the developers are using to test their games in development. So before a developer or publisher releases these titles, they can make sure the experience is great for consumers. They can playtest and we have our certification test the same way as we approach consoles. Developers can fully test their games with the same environment that consumers have. That's a huge benefit that we believe the consumer will notice – not just the ease of use of the hardware and the system, but the expected quality of the games or applications that will become available on PS VR. Because we make the same hardware for a long time, we tend to be able to provide a high-tech device for an affordable price".

Enterprising gamers never fail to amaze me: there'as always someone out there who explores the farthest depths of in-game world's in search of secrets. In this case, one intrepid Fallout 4 adventurer asked himself "what lies beneath Boston's irradiated waters?", and set off on a journey that spanned that entire Commonwealth.

It turns out that Fallout 4 is hiding quite a bit in its nuclear oceans and lakes. Lavon Smith, the Fallout 4 explorer, spent 30 hours charting nearly 100% of the game's hallowed oceans and lakes in search of plunder and treasure, culminating in a absolutely massive Imgur gallery of screenshots. Lavon's YouTube channel is also filled with tons of video footage chronicling his explorations.

Since finding treasure or interesting relics in the Commonwealth's waterways can be hit or miss, Lavon created a handy map that shows the locations of loot and points of interest. Fallout 4's oceans are absolutely riddled with radiation so you'll want to pick up the Aquaboy perk or stock up on Rad-X and equip a Hazmat suit to mitigate the massive RAD intake. Also don't ever equip Power Armor if you plan to go swimming, unless you really want to explore the bottom of the ocean. Power armor sinks like a rock underwater and moves extremely slowly--think Link's Iron Boots x 100--but the flip-side is that you don't have to worry about oxygen.

The first update to Rainbow Six: Siege has been detailed by Ubisoft, something that will include an Ultra HD texture pack for the PC. Not only that, but it does include so much more that we'll detail below:

New Content & Features

General Tweaks & Improvements

Crytek has already announced its first VR game 'Robinson: The Journey' earlier this year at E3 2015, but now the company has announced an Oculus Rift exclusive: 'The Climb'.

The Climb is exactly as it sounds, taking players to parts of the planet where they wouldn't otherwise visit. Thanks to the bundled Xbox 360 controller in the box for the Oculus Rift, you'll be able to use it to grab onto, and hold on for your life, the sides of mountains, huge rocks, and more. The trailer we've embedded above shows off The Climb using Oculus' upcoming Touch controllers, that won't be out until a few months after the Rift drops early next year.

As for the technical side of The Climb, Crytek has confirmed that it's running at 2160 x 2100 and at 90FPS. For a game that has you housed in a VR headset by yourself, you didn't think a company owned by the largest social network in the world would let you play The Climb by yourself, did you? The Climb might be a single-player only title, but you'll have various social factors to play around with, such as scoreboards against your friends. Each climb earns you a score which is based on various factors, such as how long it took you to complete the climb, how difficult the path you took, and more.

Project Reality is a very popular Battlefield 2 mod that launched in 2005 and was maintained all the way through 2015. It featured an even bigger scope and emphasis on teamwork than the much-lauded Battlefield 2 and found great success among the FPS community. The team eventually went legit, forming the studio Offworld Industries and beginning work on Squad, the spiritual successor to Project Reality with equal if not greater ambition, and much more impressive graphics, courtesy of Unreal Engine 4.

After years of hard, steady work, Squad is finally available on Steam Early Access as of today. The game is nowhere near done, but the team has gone with the vertical slice model, so while large scale vehicle combat and other elements are out of the picture for now, the smaller scale infantry combat is pretty rich and from what the community is saying, more than worth picking up at its $40 price tag. The results seem to agree, as, impressively, the game is smack on top of the Steam sales charts as of press time.

The Kojima vs. Konami controversy has been a long and outrageous ride, but it might be nearing its eventual end with the beleaguered Metal Gear Solid creator moving onto greener pastures.

Japanese games publication Nikkei reports that Hideo Kojima has started up a new development studio made up of ex-Kojima Production devs, and is currently negotiating a deal with Sony. The publication says that Kojima tapped Sony to act as publisher of a new game for the PlayStation 4 console. Details on the game and the studio's name aren't available at this time.

Kojima has also officially shed the yoke of Konami, freeing the talented developer up to tackle new experiences and franchises. Nikkei reports that Kojima's contract with Konami officially expired today, and we can only imagine how it feels to shed such a burden. Konami's treatment of Hideo Kojima has been quite ridiculous to say the least, culminating in a year-long debacle that saw Kojima's name scrubbed off of his own game, as well as being denied from accepting an award at TGS 2015. At least now Konami can't lie and say Kojima isn't gone and "just on vacation".

The Core i7-5960X is a beast of a CPU on its own, but when it's clocked up to 5GHz and beyond, it enters a world of its own. But what about 6GHz, you say? Well, that mountain has been conquered by legendary Australian overclocker 'dinos22'.

Dino 'dinos22' Strkljevic smashed the XTU World Record with his GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion motherboard and 16GB of DDR4 with timings of 12-14-15-15, and the assistance of LN2 cooling. Dino now sits at the top of the XTU World Record leaderboards and is currently overclocking his heart away in the Country Cup competition as part of Team AU. Strkljevic is the AU Marketing Manager for GIGABYTE, so this is only going to work in both his personal, and professional favor.

Strkljevic has livestreamed his overclocking adventures before, with the most recent livestream tackling a tutorial on the entire overclocking process - from overclocking DDR4 memory, right up to the CPU overclocking itself.

According to new research reports published by trusted industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's new iPhone 7 will release in September 2016 and won't make any dramatic improvements in Apple's new pressure-sensitive 3D Touchscreen technology.

Although the iPhone 7 is expected to sport beefier specs like 3GB of onboard RAM and a new, upgraded A10 chipset, Kuo states that Apple's upcoming flagship phone won't make any dramatic improvements on the new 3D Touch technology. The iPhone 7's 3D Touch will reportedly use "similar technology and structure" as the existing iPhone 6S and 6S Plus phones, so users shouldn't expect any dramatic changes in that department.

Interestingly enough, a new reports that claims Apple has opened up a secret lab focused on developing new display tech. Although the lab is focused on creating "thinner, lighter, brighter, and more energy-efficient" LCD screens, this could mean that Apple is indeed working on a next-generation 3D touch display. The iPhone 7, however, is rumored to feature an OLED display.

I'm a huge fan of UltraWide monitors, where I sit in front of an LG UltraWide 21:9 monitor every day of the week. Well, the Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas next month, with LG flexing its display muscles ahead of the show.

LG has announced three new 21:9 UltraWide monitors, all rocking the 3440x1440 resolution and boasting Thunderbolt 2 connectivity. The new LG UC98 and UC88 models will feature curved panels, while the UC88 will be a flat, 21:9 UltraWide display. LG also took the time to unveil two new 4K displays, with the UD88 and UD68 series, both sporting USB Type-C connectivity. Also, LG will be rolling out Gram at CES, its 15.6-inch laptop that runs Windows 10 on a Skylake-based Intel processor. LG's Gram weighs just over 2 pounds, and compared to Apple's MacBook Air which weighs just under 2 pounds, LG has something to really show off.

Apple has opened a secret laboratory in Longtan, Taiwan, according to anonymous sources as well as building management and economics ministry records.

You may have immediately imagined an underground facility with the express goal of world domination, but the reality is said to be much more innocent (though still exciting): developing new display technologies for Apple devices. Specifically: liquid-crystal displays that are "thinner, lighter, brighter, and more energy-efficient" than before.

The building houses 50 or more engineers and other workers, as recruited from local display manufacturer AU Optronics Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. (the latter of which is the former building owner). Currently, the building shows no signs of being run by Apple except for an Apple logo and an iMac with Apple's standard visitor registration screen in the lobby and spotted Apple ID badges worn by workers.