Latest News - Page 2626

With the underwhelming performance and reviews of Terminator: Genisys, it should come as no surprise that Paramount Pictures has put any future sequels on hold, indefinitely.

Even though the studio pulled in $440 million worldwide on a budget of $155 million, marketing costs have to be put on top of that, and I'm sure Paramount really splashed out on marketing for the new Terminator movie in hopes it would win big at the box office. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Terminator: Genisys is still losing money, even with the $440 million box office haul.

SOMA was released on September 22 for the PlayStation 4 and PC, with Frictional Games announcing that it has sold 92,000 copies in the 10 days since its release.

92,000 might not sound like a lot, but Frictional Games isn't a gigantic studio, with the developer saying: "Our goal for SOMA's sales is 100,000 after a month" and it will meet that very easily. Frictional Games added: "The money that we've got from this will pretty much pay our company expenses for another two years. Sales are still going pretty strongly too, with a total of around 2,000 copies sold per day. This number is bound to drop over time, and it'll be interesting to see just how fast and where it stabilizes".

If we compare the sales of SOMA against Frictional's famous Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA is doing extremely well. In its first week, Amnesia sold 20,000 copies while its sequel, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs sold 120,000 copies. Frictional added: "Our goal for SOMA's sales is 100,000 after a month, and at the current pace it should be able to reach pretty much exactly that with a few units to spare. However, this doesn't mean that we've come close to recouping all our costs. We need to sell almost three times that amount to do that. But given that it took us five years to make the project, there's no immediate stress to do so".

Showtime have some of the best shows on TV right now, with the likes of Homeland, Ray Donovan, and finished shows like the incredible Dexter (if you forgive that abysmal finale). But without a presence in the mobile world these days, you're not going to secure as many customers as your competition.

The company has just announced it is streaming Showtime to your Android device for $11 per month, without the need of a cable subscription. All you'll need is a credit card, a compatible device, and the new Showtime for Android app. Before this, the only way you could enjoy Showtime shows was by adding Showtime to Hulu, at $9 per month.

New users can even get a 30-day free trial when they download the app from the Google Play Store.

Hours after we broke news that AMD might not have the HBM2 game wrapped up, news has broken that AMD will be culling 5% of its global workforce. Around 500 jobs will be lost due to a restructuring process, which is said to streamline AMD's business and reduce costs as the company continues to struggle against Intel, reports Bloomberg.

AMD will record charges of around $42 million due to the restructuring plan, which will outsource some of its IT services and application development. The company will save around $2 million and $7 million in the last two quarters of the year, and a total savings of $58 million in 2016.

While Bloomberg might say this is down to Intel beating the company, AMD is taking an even worse battering from NVIDIA. In the discrete GPU market, NVIDIA controls 82% of the dGPU market share with its GeForce products, leaving AMD with scraps. The new Fiji-based cards powered by the next-generation High Bandwidth Memory seem to be few and far between, with stock not filling shelves, or gamers' PCs.

Pre-orders have just opened up for Fallout 4's $30 season pass, but why should you bother with it when mod support is coming in 2016?

When Fallout 4 releases in November, just about everyone in the known universe is going to put their lives on hold for a post-apolcayptic joyride in an irradiated Boston. Gamers will pour hundreds and hundreds of hours of their time into the game, exploring every nook and cranny whilst building up their respective survivors. Given that Fallout 4 will take over 400 hours to complete, isn't it really too soon to even think about DLC?

We all know how the games industry works. Pre-orders are the bread and butter for devs, and often season passes and DLC are planned out way before the game is actually finished. Now Bethsoft is participating in this, but they're also going to roll out full mod support across all platforms, bringing mods to consoles for the first time. This is huge. Before now console gamers have been locked out of user-created content and were at the mercy of whatever developers decided to throw at them.

In a bid to push Prime subscribers towards its own Fire TV set-top box, Amazon is planning on ceasing all sales of Google's Chromecast and the Apple TV.

The digital retailer says that it will no longer list or sell devices that don't support Prime Video streaming, including all current and last-generation Apple and Google streaming products. The new policy will go into effect starting October 29, whereupon the entire online retailer will be Chromecast and Apple TV-free.

"Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," Amazon said in an official statement to Mashable. "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices."

Microsoft has been working hard since June to make it so inter-language conversations are possible on the Skype desktop program, courtesy of Skype Translator. As of today, it's finally possible, as the company begins its slow rollout to users, which will be complete within a few weeks.

Skype Translator covers both voice and text chat: six languages for the former, and 50 for the latter. Among the more popular: Chinese, English, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and just for good measure, Klingon (which was assisted by the Skype community).

Apparently the results earlier this year were impressive, so they should be even better now.

Amazon continues to evolve, with the launch of its latest service that pays part-time drivers to deliver packages for Amazon. Amazon Flex is an Uber-like delivery service that pays drivers between $18 and $25 per hour to deliver packages using Amazon Prime Now, within the promised one-hour delivery window.

Interested drivers need to be at least 21 years old, have their own vehicle, an Android-powered smartphone, and have to pass a background check. We don't know how many drivers Amazon is after, the delivery distance and package size they'd be handling and other factors that would determine how much a driver is paid per hour.

Part-time drivers can work two-, four-, or eight-hour shifts to supplement their income - or with the eight-hour shifts, it could very well be a full-time job. It's not as flexible as being an Uber driver, but the benefits are there. Amazon Flex drivers can work as much as they want, as Amazon needs delivery drivers seven days a week.

Ubisoft has confirmed that microtransactions are here to stay in the modern Assassin's Creed universe: we've seen them in Black Flag, Unity, and now they're coming to 18th century London in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

The paygate content will be "100% optional" so you can still all of the game's content without paying extra. Syndicate's microtransaction model will be focused on the money vs. time convenience scheme that involves shelling out cash to get the strongest items and possible level up faster. It'll likely be in the same currency tier scheme we see in freemium mobile games and F2P games like Warframe. Ubisoft maintains that Syndicate's microtransactions will be closer to Black Flag than Unity--which is a smart thing to say, considering how Unity is associated with catastrophe.

"Assassin's Creed Syndicate will include paid options to save time and accelerate progress," Ubisoft dev Francois Pelland said in a community Q&A on IGN. "The pay model allows players who do not have time to fully explore our huge game world to still be able to eventually acquire the game's most powerful gear as well as other items. Rest assured, all of AC Syndicate's content is available without paying anything additional and the game has been balanced such that microtransactions are 100% optional."

AMD has released its Catalyst 15.9.1 beta driver, a slight update over the recently released 15.9 beta driver.

The latter improved performance in the Fable: Legends benchmark and The Star Wars: Battlefront beta, but also gave rise to a severe memory leak bug that triggered when resizing windows. That bug is fixed in 15.9.1, so download and install via the source link to your heart's content.

Driver notes are below.

Due to overwhelming pressure from fans, Square Enix has pulled the plug on the "Augment Your Pre-order" scheme for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

The scheme itself was a brand new method to encourage and rack up pre-orders, and was universally condemned by gamers and the gaming press. Essentially players were strongly enticed to pre-order the game (which is a dangerous proposition in today's industry) to earn extra redeemable bonuses, and if enough gamers pre-ordered, the game would release four days early.

"We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback," the publisher wrote in the official announcement.

We've all joked about the future of IoT wearable technology, especially with the audacious idea of "smart jewelry". But Apple is pretty serious about pushing the limits of wearables and now for the first time we have a glimpse of what may very well become the Apple iRing.

The patent for Apple's smart ring tech has just been published, revealing rough abstracts and schematics of the small wearable. According to the patent, the "iRing" is an "external electronic device with a finger-ring-mounted touchscreen that includes a computer processor, wireless transceiver, and a rechargable power source".

The ring's form factor is quite curious. One configuration of the device has a pressure-sensitive display (hinting at layered 3D Touch support) with haptic and tactile feedback on the front, with a slider dial, buttons and a built-in microphone underneath the screen. Other variants don't have a screen at all, Some variants come with an onboard camera for photos and video recording.

NVIDIA has just unveiled GeForce Now, its rebranded game streaming service that was until now, known as Grid. NVIDIA plans to compete against PlayStation Now, but at a much cheaper price point.

GeForce Now will be offering gamers the chance to stream games from their servers at 1080p 60FPS, blasting the titles to their Shield console, Shield Tablet, or Shield Portable. NVIDIA has more than 50 games on their GeForce Now service, with games like Alan Wake, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Grid 2, Dirt 3, Borderlands and multiple Batman titles. If you want to purchase games outright and play them instantly, you can get some hours pumped into titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Saints Row: Gat out of Hell and Resident Evil: Revelations 2.

NVIDIA is launching GeForce Now on October 1 in the United States, EU and Japan for $7.99 per month. The company is including a free three-month trial membership which will allow gamers to try out the service before they dive head first into it.

Google only just unveiled the Nexus 6P a couple of days ago, but we didn't know who made the 5.7-inch QHD panel. Well, Samsung has come out and confirmed it has provided the WQHD panel for the Nexus 6P, on a post on Reddit.

The post reads: "It has a Samsung WQHD AMOLED panel. We have spent a lot of time tuning the white-point and color gamut for these panels - hope you will enjoy the accuracy of the display. Yep, confirmed: Nexus 6P has the latest generation panels from Samsung. One of things we deeply care for is the quality and accuracy of the display through which all of us connect with the stuff we care about. We created a very tight spec (white-point temperature, delta-E variance, color-space accuracy, etc) for the 6P WQHD AMOLED panel, so it was important that we use the most cutting edge panel technology available".

LG has just unveiled its latest smartphone, the V10, which is the company's new premium 'V' line of handsets. The V10 is the first of LG's new 'V' line of smartphones, which loses the plastic feel for premium materials, and that's just scratching the surface.

The V10 looks like the G4 from the outside, but you'd be wrong to think that. We have the same 3000mAh removable battery, Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, and 16-megapixel rear-facing camera that are found in the G4, but we have 4GB of RAM versus the 3GB in the G4. The V10 has a flat 5.7-inch QHD display with an 'always-on' screen at the top that looks like it could be useful.

The smaller screen is found just above the actual 5.7-inch display, which is capable of displaying the weather, time, date, and battery levels when the main display is off. When the main display is on, the second screen can be used for quick-launching apps, accessing your favorite contacts, or displaying notifications.

With the announcement of PlayStation VR not long ago, Sony will soon be starting the big marketing push behind its PS4-powered VR headset. During a recent interview with Eurogamer, President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, had some interesting things to say.

Yoshida said: "The real issue is, we look at things positively in terms of fast sales of PS4. We continue to try to push to reach an even broader audience. Even when PS4 is doing well, you might look at the sales, the fast pace of PS4 sales, we may be just selling to the same people faster, right! That's a sad view of things, but it could be the case".

He added: "We have to continue to work hard to really bring back people who used to play console games before PS2 era, or find new people to provide great experiences, that people who never had their own consoles might find useful for their lives. For that, actually, PlayStation VR has broader applications than the games, and demos we've been doing, the very first demo we provided was The Deep. It has no gameplay at all. Anyone can enjoy it. Of course there's a challenge of pricing and whatnot, but in the future we position PlayStation VR not as a peripheral to VR, but as a virtual reality system that makes use of PS4. We're hoping in the future that people might pick up PlayStation VR and PS4 not only for the games, but for other entertainment usage".

Exclusive: AMD has enjoyed being the first to market with a HBM-powered video card, with the Radeon R9 Nano, R9 Fury and R9 Fury X all powered by High Bandwidth Memory. But it looks like the company might run into troubles sourcing HBM2 in 2016 according to our industry sources.

Our source reached out to us today, saying that they "wouldn't count on [AMD] using HBM2 next year", but wouldn't elaborate further. This is an interesting rumor, because if it were true, it would mean that the use of HBM2 would shift primarily to NVIDIA. NVIDIA's next-gen Pascal architecture is already being tested internally by the company according to the latest rumors, and will rock HBM2. But AMD's next-gen GPU is rumored to rock between 8GB and 16GB of HBM2, is something we don't know too much about yet.

If AMD is in trouble with HBM2 next year, they might be stuck with short end of HBM2 yields. If so, we could see AMD utilizing HBM2 for their highest end GPU, which will most likely be a Fury X successor. Under that, we could see the company possibly using HBM1, but personally, I think HBM1 is something that should be used on mid-range cards for AMD's next-generation product stack.

With the non-stop growth of digital downloads physical media has its days numbered, or not. According to GameStop CEO Paul Raines, "disc-based games will be around forever".

During a chat with Fortune, Raines added: "The market has seen physical music sales down 50 per cent from its peak and physical movie sales down 60 per cent from its peak, but even in a doomsday scenario, disc-based games will be around for a long time. I see a complimentary business where we sell discs plus download like the current console mode".

What about VR headsets? Raines had something to say about that too, adding: "Analysts believe there could be 10 million VR users by the end of 2016, and there are hardware forecasts of $30 billion by 2020. We're going to be the destination for VR". He said that GameStop customers will soon be able to stop by their stores to test out the three main VR headsets: the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive.

Stephen Hawking has no misconceptions about the universe, and reading his answers to interview questions is like wading through a sci-fi novel. In a recent session, the renowned astrophysicist talks about what it'd be like if aliens visited earth, how humanity has to breach the firmament to survive, and computer AI overtaking the world in a not-so-distant future.

In a recent interview, Hawking says that aliens visiting earth would somewhat like the aftermath of Columbus' exploration of the Americas, with interstellar beings completely dominating all life on our home planet. "If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," Hawking told Spanish publication El Pais. "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

This metaphor resonates with truth for me in particular, as I've long thought that the most deadly gift aliens could deliver wouldn't be their technology, it'd be their space flu. These intergalactic viruses and bacteria could completely devastate our population the same way smallpox spread havoc and death in the New World.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is a colossal failure: the game is riddled with glitches, terrible graphics, physical bugs and is just a heaping hot mess of bad game. But who's to blame? Taking a closer look reveals that Activision should have known better.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is one of the most memorable failed games in recent memory, and it only just launched. It's been hailed as broken on all accounts and is utterly embarrassing in every capacity. If anything Tony Hawk 5 should be sold as a $10 game on the Xbox LIVE Arcade--that Activision charges $59.99 for it is quite telling. Even the game's 7.7GB launch day update, which is actually bigger than the total 4.4GB of the game itself, couldn't fix things. Yes, it's worse than Assassin's Creed: Unity. But why? How did this happen?

The game crashed simply because Activision once again handed off a big-name franchise to another amateur developer. The publisher did this with the last-gen ports of Black Ops 3, leading to the game's entire campaign being gutted out on Xbox 360 and PS3. Despite the fact that Robomondo Games was responsible for the critical failure that was Tony Hawk: Shred, the $120 game with a skateboard controller, Activision went ahead and entrusted Tony Hawk 5 to Robomondo. And it completely backfired.