Gaming - Page 1909

Over the weekend we reported, as many others did, that Microsoft had delayed the launch of its Xbox One console in China, but the company has just announced that this is wrong. Microsoft has said that it is launching the Xbox One in China on September 29, just six days from now.

General Manager of Xbox China, Enwei Xie, said in an official release: "After receiving government approval for the first wave of games, we will launch with the first 10 games now and continue our work to bring more blockbuster games and a broad offering of entertainment and app experiences to the platform in the weeks and months to come. With extraordinary effort and seamless cooperation across parties, we are incredibly excited to deliver Xbox One to fans in China and we welcome them to the Xbox family".

Which ten games will be on offer for the Chinese launch of the Xbox One? We will see Forza Motorsport 5, Kinect Sports Rivals, Powerstar Golf, Zoo Tycoon, Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, Dance Central Spotlight, Neverwinter Online, Rayman Legends Trials Fusion, and Naughty Kitties from Chinese developer Coconut Island released on September 29. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said: "This milestone is significant for both our partnership with China and our global expansion plan. Every new market launch is unique and we're grateful to our fans for their patience and enthusiasm throughout the process".

Steam gamers will enjoy the new Steam Discovery Update that Valve is pushing out right now, which adds "functionality and features designed to optimize the Steam shopping experience as the number of new titles on Steam increases".

Valve has softly announced that there are now over 100 million active Steam accounts, with an additional 1300 new titles being added to Steam in the last nine months alone. Valve, with the Steam Discovery Update, is offering a smarter Home page, which will be "offering recommendations based on past purchases, recent playtime, and recommendations by friends".

Valve has also improved Steam Search, with a new feature called Curators, which allows anyone to become a Curator, recommending games and allowing people to follow them, and their recommendation on titles. Alden Kroll of Valve said: "We have made great efforts to increase the number of titles we can publish on Steam, which means more choices for customers. This update introduces multiple features and functionality to help customers explore Steam's growing catalog and find the games they are most interested in playing".

Rockstar Games had a support article on their website, which has since been ripped away, teasing some new features for the new version of Grand Theft Auto V coming to the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. One of these features was something never-before-seen, a first-person mode for both on foot and vehicles.

The full list included: "a brand new first person mode for vehicles" something that "shows off the interior of the vehicle, including working speedometers, tachometers, dash lights and more". This is a big, big change, as GTA V has countless vehicles that the developer would need to re-work the internals of. Better yet, Rockstar teased that there would be "a brand new first person mode while on foot" which changes the game, completely. A first-person mode on foot would propel Grand Theft Auto V to completely new heights, especially with the precision offered on a mouse for the PC.

The news was confirmed just today, with the RockstarGTAV account on Twitter teasing "First person #GTA V #PS4 #XBOXONE #PC". Other new features for the upcoming re-release include "a wealth of new easter eggs and random events for Story Mode", possible animals roaming Los Santos, player transfers from the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases of GTA V offering free new weapons and a free garage in GTA Online, and a "newly overhauled character selection screen".

Video games are a big part of most of our lives, but most forget its origins. Generations of gamers will grow up thinking that consoles started it all, with the likes of Xbox and PlayStation, but the seeds were planted before some of these gamers' parents were even born. Now, in Frisco, Texas, we can expect a new videogame history museum to be opened, known as The National Videogame Museum.

The National Videogame Museum will be opened in Frisco, Texas, which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The board of the Frisco Community Development Corporation voted last week, unanimously approving the terms to open up the museum. The board has teamed up with travel and tourism authorities to raise $100,000 for startup costs, with the Museum founders agreeing to match dollar-for-dollar.

By April 2015, the Museum will start a capital campaign in order to raise money to expand out the facility. We should expect The National Videogame History Museum to approach major industry sources, such as the aforementioned console makers, and large publishers in order to get donations to get the construction started. The collection that the Museum holds is already large, with the Classic Gaming Expo starting in 1999 which gets filled up easily, and it's only 7000 square feet.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - Ubisoft is a very close partner of NVIDIA, with the hardware giant helping the software giant in most of its games, including the soon-to-be-released Far Cry 4. In Monterey Bay last week, we were greeted with an early peek at the GeForce GTX 980, as well as a slew of games, one of which was Far Cry 4.

We found out that Far Cry 4 will be utilizing a bunch of NVIDIA technologies, with an injection of features that will ensure that the PC version of Far Cry 4 will stand far and away from the console versions, current-generation consoles included. We have HBAO+, PCSS, TXAA, God Rays, Fur, and Enhanced 4K Support, as well as NVIDIA's just-announced MFAA, DSR and much more.

Starting with HBAO+ or horizon-based ambient occlusion, a technology that improves on ambient occlusion, which provides a much more realistic shadow around objects that occlude rays of light.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - NVIDIA has now officially launched its new Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs, but at its Editor's Day event last week in the beautiful Monterey Bay, California, the company reiterated its stance on PC gaming.

The company has said that out of the 330 million or so PC gamers in the world, around 200 million of those game on GeForce GPUs, which is a huge number of gamers on NVIDIA hardware. One of the driving forces behind this, is that PC gaming is now considered a sport, thanks to eSports titles like League of Legends, StarCraft and many more.

The amount of eSports tournaments has grown considerably from 2000, where only 10 tournaments took place, to 279 in 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, that number has grown exponentially, to 1151 eSports tournaments last year. Professional eSports gamers are making some serious cash, and there are more people than ever tuning into live streams, with 40,000+ in live attendance at some of these events.

We all know Halo is for the most part, an Xbox exclusive, but Microsoft is pledging better PC support, where is does the first-person shooter stand on the PC? Executive Producter on the game, Dan Ayoub, explains: "We've definitely heard the questions about PC. Right now we're a couple months out from the Xbox version's release, and that's our main focus right now. That's quite honestly where all our headspace is right now".

Considering that Halo: Master Chief Collection is close to release, one would've thought there is no better time than now than to release it onto the PC. But, with four games with one of them receiving a complete graphical overhaul, it might have been too much for the company: releasing an Xbox One version, and a PC version.

Ayoub added: "From a technical standpoint, you look at the architecture of the Xbox One and there are some similarities to the architecture of a modern PC. That certainly makes that sort of cross-platform development easier. But beyond that the ease goes away. Master Chief Collection is massive. We have to coordinate four games, 100-plus maps, a lot of new cinematics, and Halo 2 Anniversary". Microsoft seems to be all-in with Halo on Xbox, with Ayoub saying: "We wanted to do a great job on console. The anchor of Halo: Master Chief Collection is the ten-year anniversary of Halo 2 on console. So our approach was to focus primarily on console as a result of that".

The researchers of Villanova University and Rutgers University have published a study where there have made a comparison using the sales of violent video games with criminal statistics across the United States. Interestingly, it was discovered that contrary to a certain belief, the number of criminal activities seems to drop at the time when AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty are released.

The co-author of this study Patrick Markey said, "Various measurements of video game use are related to decreases in violent crime such as homicide." Markey has been studying about this issue for a while, and according to him such games earn a bad reputation among some people, the belief is that violence is something that young men enjoy. But he also pointed out that doesn't mean that violent games encourage people to be violent in the real-world.

He added, "We always have to be careful with correlational data. Correlation doesn't mean causation. But we haven't just looked at sales of games and violent crimes. We have taken into account trends in the data. We remove stuff that typically happens, like a spike in murders during summer and high sales of games near the Holidays, and it's still negative. To me what is most amazing is that is never positive. It is always statistically negative."

Microsoft has confirmed it will pay $2.5 billion to purchase Mojang, the company responsible for Minecraft. Minecraft has sold more than 54 million copies across the world, and the three founding executives of Mojang will reportedly leave the company. The game is the top paid app for both the Google Android and Apple iOS, and with only 4 employees, brought in $287 in revenues during 2013

"At Microsoft, we believe in the power of content to unite people," the company said in a press statement. "Minecraft adds diversity to our game portfolio and helps us reach new gamers across multiple platforms. Gaming is the top activity across devices and we see great potential to continue to grow the Minecraft community and nurture the franchise."

News of the acquisition sent shockwaves through the Minecraft community, with many gamers worried about which direction Microsoft would take. Meanwhile, Microsoft hopes to draw gamers mobile platform instead of focusing on the Xbox One or PC.

Destiny shook up the gaming industry after launching earlier this week, topping $500 million in sales to retailers during launch day. The game title was made by Bungie and published by Activision, with hype surrounding the game building over the past few months. Sales to retailers doesn't provide an exact tally of game sales to consumers, but indicates retailers expect it to continue to be a sought after game title.

"Since the beginning, we've been confident that our investment and belief in Destiny would pay off," said Eric Hirshberg, head of Activision game publishing. "But not many people believed we'd be able to say it did so on day one. We have more confidence than ever that Destiny will become one of the iconic franchises of this generation, and Activision's next billion dollar brand."

Video game blockbusters are big money, with gamers often preferring to continue playing storylines as they develop over multiple titles. Some analysts predict Destiny could sell 10 million units to consumers before the end of the year, indicating it could become a major influence to help push console sales.