Game Tech News

Sony shared good news last week as part of its quarterly report. The company has shipped a full 60 million PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro ($399 at Amazon) consoles. The company also sold 2.9 million devices in the past three months, up from 2.3 million devices shipped in the same period last year. That’s a significant achievement given the PS4 is now a mature console, and it implies Sony has had good luck with its PS4 Pro hardware refresh cycle.

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Back in the 1960s, Alka-Seltzer found an incredible way to double its sales volume. It involved no new products, no dramatic advertising campaigns, and no celebrity spokespeople or clever jingle. The company simply started showing two tablets dropping into water, rather than just one. This didn’t quite double sales, but it did send them soaring — and the rest, as they say, is history.

Nintendo seems to be betting that it can sell the Switch similarly, despite having previously forecast that supplies will remain constrained through the end of the year. In an investor Q&A session, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima gave some additional information on what Nintendo plans to do through the end of the year and how it’s thinking about its new console property.
According to Kimishima, Nintendo is on track to build more than 10 million Switches this year, up from 2.74 million shipped in its last fiscal year (Nintendo’s fiscal year isn’t aligned to the calendar year).

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Last year, Bethesda ruffled many feathers by announcing that reviewers will no longer get early access to new games. So with this week’s release of Prey, the reboot of the tumultuous franchise of the same name, Bethesda can’t rely on pre-release reviews to help move copies. Their solution? Bring back the good ol’ days of the pre-release demo!

If you’re curious about how well Prey looks and plays on consoles, you can see for yourself with the “Opening Hour” demo on both PS4 and Xbox One. We’ve spent some time with the demo running on the PS4, and found it to be entertaining if a bit hammy at times.

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The term “mixed reality” has been thrown about a lot as of late, but pinning down a precise definition has proven elusive. After spending the day at Stanford University’s SCIEN-hosted workshop, which was full of augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) luminaries, it appears the one thing everyone can agree on is there isn’t a standard definition for either term. Let’s see if we can do a bit better.

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AMD made a number of concrete announcements at Computex, building on what we heard from the company last week and the week before at its Financial Analyst Day. AMD has confirmed that its Epyc server family, which we’ve covered several times in the last few weeks, will launch on June 20th. AMD doesn’t expect a quick server ramp — CEO Lisa Su has told investors that the company will bring up production over the next few quarters — and has set a goal of retaking 10 percent of the data center business. To put that in perspective, Intel’s data center business was worth $17.2 billion in 2016. Even a 5 percent revenue share, half of AMD’s current target, would be worth about $215 million per quarter to AMD, and those are high-margin dollars that improve the company’s overall financials.

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Seagate and Microsoft have teamed up before to offer Xbox-branded external storage options, and the storage manufacturer has recently refreshed its product line to match the style of last summer’s Xbox One S. Beyond that, however, these new drives also offer a several-month subscription to Microsoft’s new Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

We haven’t covered Game Pass before, so let’s take a moment to do so. Game Pass is, to some extent, an answer to Sony’s PlayStation Now game-streaming service, but there are some key differences between the two. Like the Sony program, Microsoft’s has a monthly fee attached — $9.99 — but unlike Sony, these games aren’t streamed to you as you play them. Instead, you download them directly, which is where Seagate comes in.

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There’s always been a tug-of-war between pirates, developers, and the purveyors of various DRM solutions. Over the years, we’ve seen a variety of DRM schemes come and go, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Over the last few years, one system, Denuvo, has developed a reputation for being difficult to crack. At one point pirates thought the system might be uncrackable, and while that’s since proven untrue, Denuvo is still used by some games for at least short periods of time as a way to boost sales. Now, there’s a three-way argument over Rime, an adventure-puzzle game released on May 26, over whether the Denuvo DRM baked into the title is slowing down the game.

According to the cracker, known as Baldman, Rime implements Denuvo by conducting hundreds of thousands of “trigger” events per second to ensure that the version of the game being used is, in fact, legitimate, as described below:



Rime’s developers, it should be noted, take some exception to this. According to Cody Bradley, lead producer on Rime for Grey Box, there’s only a small performance hit associated with Denuvo, and the only thing the application is doing is ensuring that the copy protection associated with Steam or Origin is still attached to the game.

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You’d think the question of how to connect headsets to game consoles would be a settled issue by now, given that voice chat has been a standard feature of Xbox and PlayStation games for years. Nintendo, however, has never supported such options in the same way. Prior to the Switch, voice chat was implemented on a per-game feature in selected titles. Earlier this year, Nintendo announced that it would use a smartphone app for many of its basic matchmaking and lobby functions, as well as for handling voice chat capabilities. The third-party peripheral manufacturer Hori has released a diagram showing how its new, Splatoon 2-themed headset will work, and the diagram isn’t exactly simple.



Hori is clearly trying to inject some custom design into the process — the squid-shaped splitter echoes some of Splatoon’s themes — but there’s no denying how bass-ackwards this entire setup is. You’ve got a splitter for a smartphone and the Switch (Buy now on Amazon), with a third cable for the headset. To be clear, you don’t have to have the headset, unless you want to be able to hear your teammates and the game audio at the same time. But these aren’t compromises Sony and Microsoft ask players to make.

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A brace of news reports this week highlighted an interesting scenario in console world (and arguably for PCs as well, though I’ll address that separately). First, Sony executive Jim Ryan was openly dismissive of backwards compatibility as a major focus or feature for the PS4, noting that few console players actually took advantage of the feature when it was available and that it wasn’t seen as important within Sony.

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Just over five years ago, BioWare released Mass Effect 3, the final title in the original Mass Effect trilogy and the most controversial of them all due to its various endings and how player choices did — or, more accurately, didn’t — impact the endgame outcome. BioWare would later take the unprecedented step of patching the game’s ending in an attempt to placate angry fans. But while the game was controversial, it also did quite well, with over 6 million copies sold by January 2017.

It would’ve been extremely difficult to follow up the plot of Mass Effect 3 with a new sequel that took place with the original cast of characters, and BioWare opted not to try. Instead, the next ME game would focus on an entirely new galaxy with new alien species, a fresh cast of characters, and a plot arc that only tenuously connected to the original Mass Effect universe.

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