E3 might be canceled this year, but the big gaming companies are forging ahead regardless—either as part of Summer Games Fest or with their own presentations and livestreams. Arguably the top dog these days is Sony, which will host what it claims to be a meaty “PlayStation Showcase” on May 24.

The show will last more than an hour, making it quite a bit longer than the usual PlayStation State of Play livestreams, which are usually 30 minutes or so. While Sony has mostly moved beyond the old industry marketing cadence of centering heavily on E3 every June, this looks to be as close to an E3 presser as Sony will offer this year.

Sony promises “a wealth of new games” for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR2 from a wide range of development studios. “Expect a glimpse at several new creations from PlayStation Studios, as well as spellbinding games from our third-party partners and indie creators,” a blog post announcing the event says.

Of course, the announcement didn’t say which games to expect, but we have a few educated guesses based on the expected release windows of previously announced titles. You can almost surely expect Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2, which is slated to be the platform’s big fall or holiday exclusive. Likewise, Insomniac is working on Wolverine for a later date, and we’ve seen almost nothing of the game to date—this could be the perfect time to show it.

It’s also just a few weeks before the expected ship date of (likely timed) PS5 exclusive Final Fantasy XVI, so another glimpse at that one is possible—though we’ve seen a lot of it already. Death Stranding 2 is a possibility, too, and Sucker Punch is known to be working on a Ghost of Tsushima sequel—though it might be too early to show gameplay from either of those.

Based on the timing, we wouldn’t be surprised to see teasers for Diablo IV and the PS5 version of Honkai: Star Rail, either. PSVR2 remasters of recent VR classics also seem likely (Beat Saber, anyone?).

As noted above, the blog post promises new IPs, too, so we’ll be curious to see what some PlayStation studios without announced titles might unveil, like Bend Studio, Bluepoint Games, or Housemarque.

The stream will start broadcasting at 4 pm ET on May 24. Sony has streamed on both YouTube and Twitch in past events of this format.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939994

French painters Jean Siméon Chardin and Édouard Manet both created well-known paintings that depicted children blowing bubbles through straw-like tubes, albeit more than a century apart. Those realistic depictions of bubble dynamics have now inspired two physicists at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, who conducted their own soap bubble experiments to learn more about the early formation stages of bubble dynamics. They describe their experimental results in a forthcoming paper to be published on May 22 in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Bubbles may seem frivolous, but there is some complex underlying physics, and their study has long been serious science. In the 1800s, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau outlined four basic laws of surface tension that determine the structure of soapy films. Surface tension is why bubbles are round; that shape has the least surface area for a given volume, so it requires the least energy to maintain. Over time, that shape will look more like a soccer ball than a perfect sphere as gravity pulls the liquid downward (“coarsening”).

More recently, French physicists in 2016 worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. The researchers found that bubbles only formed above a certain speed, which depends on the width of the jet of air. In 2018, we reported how mathematicians at New York University’s Applied Math Lab had fine-tuned the method for blowing the perfect bubble based on a series of experiments with thin, soapy films. In 2019, physicists at MIT and Princeton University demonstrated how to develop spherical bubbles uniformly by confining them in a narrow tube. Something about the interactions between the walls of the tube and the bubble makes the whole system less sensitive to irregularities in the initial conditions.

In 2020, physicists determined that a key ingredient for creating gigantic bubbles is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths. That produces a soap film able to stretch sufficiently thin to make a giant bubble without breaking. Varying the length of the polymer strands resulted in a sturdier soap film. Last year, French physicists created “everlasting bubbles” from plastic particles, glycerol, and water. The longest-lasting bubble survived for 465 days.

Ideally, scientists would like to be able to form bubbles with a uniform size and shape, like the liquid droplets that form from a dripping faucet. That could help control the formation of drops and bubbles in applications such as microfluidics, inkjet printing, or medical imaging. Droplets and bubbles start with the flowing water or air elongating into a neck, then pinching off from the main flow to collapse into spheres. It’s what happens every time you dip a bubble-blowing wand into the bubble solution and gently blow through the film that forms along the ring.

But droplet and bubble formation are inverse physical processes. Droplets forming off a dripping faucet is a universal process from a physics standpoint. That means they will be fairly uniform in size and spacing, even if there are differences in initial conditions, such as the viscosity of the water, surface tension, or in the size of the faucet opening. However, mix air or gas into a large vat of liquid (like injecting air into a Jacuzzi tub), and bubbles will form in a more random, scattershot fashion.

Marc Grosjean and Elise Lorenceau, co-authors of this latest paper, wanted to learn more about the factors underlying bubble formation, particularly in the less-studied early stages. They were particularly intrigued by bubbles that linger when attached to a straw-like tube instead of pinching off, as depicted in paintings by Chardin and Manet. The latter’s Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867) depicts a boy—modeled by the illegitimate son of Manet’s future wife, who appears in several other works by the artist—blowing soap bubbles, at the time a common symbol for the ephemeral nature of life. Among Manet’s influences was Chardin’s Soap Bubbles paintings; there are three versions painted between 1733 and 1734. There is also a small boy blowing bubbles in Chardin’s The Washerwoman.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939471

For a marquee game on 6-year-old hardware (which was already relatively underpowered when it launched in 2017), the open-world construction set of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a pretty impressive technical feat. Digital Foundry recently laid out how the game’s day-one patch ensures the software “holds very close to the 30 frames per second target” for “nearly the entirety” of their playtime.

Still, Digital Foundry does note that Tears of the Kingdom‘s frame rate can still drop down to 20 fps at times, especially when Link’s signature Ultra Hand ability is activated in crowded areas like Kakariko Village or Goron City. For those situations, though, Switch users with a hacked console can use overclocking tools to make the game run more smoothly.

In a recent video, Modern Vintage Gamer (MVG) walks viewers through the overclocking options offered to Tears of the Kingdom players who have installed a tool like sys-clk on their hacked systems. Pushing the CPU up from around 1 GHz to 1.5 GHz leads to “really not much difference at all” in MVG’s testing. By contrast, increasing the GPU speed from 768 MHz to just 900 MHz (in docked mode) results in frame rates that are “definitely smoothed out,” though there are “still… times where it does drop its frame rate.”

The biggest performance improvement, though, comes from speeding up the system’s memory clock from 1.6 GHz to above 1.8 GHz. That increase removes what MVG calls “probably the biggest bottleneck of everything on the hardware right now” leading to a situation where “no matter what I do here, I can’t get the frame rate to drop below 30 fps.” And that improvement sticks around even if the CPU and GPU are held at their original clock speeds.

As always with overclocking, this kind of performance improvement isn’t without risk. Overclocked components create more heat, which can lead to component damage/failures or system shutdowns, especially if the ambient temperature is too high where you’re playing. Even overclocking that falls short of bricking your system can lead to increased fan and/or battery usage, meaning higher electricity usage and shorter play times when away from an outlet. All of these risks might be especially pronounced for the memory overclocking described here, which pushes past what Digital Foundry once called “the hard limit of the Tegra X1” that powers the Switch.

For players who just can’t stand the thought of frame rate dips while traversing Hyrule, though, the risk may be worth it. And for those who want to mitigate that risk with some dodgy-looking accessories, you can always invest in a questionable external fan for the system dock.

Listing image by Nintendo

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939662

The ruins of the ancient necropolis of Neapolis lie some 10 meters (about 33 feet) below modern-day Naples, Italy. But the site is in a densely populated urban district, making it challenging to undertake careful archaeological excavations of those ruins. So a team of scientists turned to cosmic rays for help—specifically an imaging technique called muography, or muon tomography—and discovered a previously hidden underground burial chamber, according to a recent paper published in the Scientific Reports journal.

As we’ve reported, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn’t find any hidden chambers.

Muons are also used to hunt for illegally transported nuclear materials at border crossings and to monitor active volcanoes in hopes of detecting when they might erupt. In 2008, scientists at the University of Texas, Austin, tried to follow in Alvarez’s footsteps, repurposing old muon detectors to search for possible hidden Mayan ruins in Belize. And physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been developing portable versions of muon imaging systems to unlock the construction secrets of the soaring dome (Il Duomo) atop the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower in Florence, Italy, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 15th century. The dome has been plagued by cracks for centuries, and muon imaging could help preservationists figure out how to fix it.

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber, which was subsequently mapped out using two different muon imaging methods.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle’s energy and trajectory. It’s similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers would appear in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

Neapolis was a Hellenistic city in a hilly area rich in volcanic tuff rock. That made it soft enough to sculpt out tombs, worship spaces, or caves for housing. The necropolis in what is now the Sanita district of Naples was one such creation, used for burials from the late fourth century BCE to early first century CE. The site was buried in sediment over time by a series of natural disasters, most notably flooding by the lava dei vergini (“lava of the virgins”). Unlike the volcanic lava that famously engulfed Pompeii, this “lava” was made up of mud and rocks that came loose from the hills during heavy rains.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939194

The European Commission (EC) has officially approved Microsoft’s long-proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision, concluding a long-running “in-depth investigation” that has long been expected to go Microsoft’s way. But the decision is in direct conflict with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which says it “stands by its decision” to block the deal in that Brexit-separated country.

Microsoft will fix it

Months ago, the EC’s preliminary investigation of the Microsoft/Activision deal concluded that the proposed merger could reduce competition in areas including cloud gaming services and PC operating systems. And despite the EC’s final decision, today’s final report on the matter affirms some of those preliminary competition concerns.

“If Microsoft made Activision’s games exclusive to its own cloud game streaming service, Game Pass Ultimate, and withheld them from rival cloud game streaming providers, it would reduce competition in the distribution of games via cloud game streaming,” the EC concluded. Such a move could “also strengthen the position of Windows in the market for PC operating systems,” the European regulators wrote.

Because of those concerns, the EC’s decision is conditional on certain assurances Microsoft has made to preserve competition. Those include a free license for any cloud streaming service to allow its users access to “any Activision Blizzard PC and console games” for at least 10 years. Anyone who has purchased any current or upcoming Activision-Blizzard games (or accessed them through a subscription) will “have the right to stream those games with any cloud game streaming service of their choice and play them on any device using any operating system” throughout Europe.

With this commitment in place, the EC says it’s satisfied that the merger will “represent a significant improvement for cloud game streaming compared to the current situation.” The Commission notes that “cloud game streaming service providers gave positive feedback and showed interest in the licenses” and points to existing Microsoft agreements with cloud providers such as Boosteroid.

In the end, European regulators said they were not concerned about the merger’s effects on the market for non-cloud console gaming. Despite Sony’s concerns, Microsoft “would have no incentive to refuse to distribute Activision’s games to Sony” after a merger, the EC said, partly because “there are four Sony PlayStation consoles for every Microsoft Xbox console bought by gamers” across Europe.

Even if Microsoft did make the Call of Duty franchise an Xbox exclusive, the decision would “not significantly harm competition in the consoles market” because the series “is less popular in [Europe] than in other regions of the world, and is less popular in [Europe] within its genre compared to other markets,” European regulators wrote.

“The European Commission has required Microsoft to license popular Activision Blizzard games automatically to competing cloud gaming services,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement provided to Ars Technica. “This will apply globally and will empower millions of consumers worldwide to play these games on any device they choose.”

“The EC conducted an extremely thorough, deliberate process to gain a comprehensive understanding of gaming,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement provided to Ars Technica. “As a result, they approved our merger with Microsoft, although they required stringent remedies to ensure robust competition in our rapidly growing industry.”

An international conflict

The EC decision conflicts directly with that of the UK’s CMA, which specifically said last month that “the only effective remedy” to its cloud gaming competition concerns “is to prohibit the Merger.”

In a tweeted statement this morning, the CMA argued that “Microsoft’s proposals, accepted by the European Commission today, would allow Microsoft to set the terms and conditions for this market for the next 10 years. They would replace a free, open and competitive market with one subject to ongoing regulation of the games Microsoft sells, the platforms to which it sells them, and the conditions of sale.”

Microsoft and Activision are currently working on an appeal of the CMA decision on their deal, which could take months to work through the UK’s bureaucratic process. Even if that appeal fails, some analysts think Microsoft could carve the UK out of any merger agreement and use geofencing to apply different cloud gaming rules for the UK market.

Microsoft and Activision are also facing a lawsuit from the US Federal Trade Commission seeking to block their acquisition deal. An evidentiary hearing in that case is set for August 2.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1939342

It has been too long since we binged all 10 episodes of Apple TV’s 2021 epic sci-fi series Foundation, loosely adapted from Isaac Asimov’s hugely influential Foundation series of novels. We’re finally getting a second season this summer, announced with the release of the first teaser.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As I wrote in my review, Asimov’s Foundation series is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen. The author admitted that he wrote strictly for the printed page, and he always refused invitations to adapt his work for film or TV. But Asimov was more than happy to let others adapt his work to a new medium, and he was wise enough to expect that there would—and should—be significant departures from the print version. That’s just what showrunner David S. Goyer (Dark Knight trilogy, Da Vinci’s Demons) set out to do with Foundation, describing it as more of a remix than a direct adaptation. Reviews of S1 were mixed, but I personally found the first season to be:

… a visually stunning, eminently bingeable new series … [and] … a smashing success in storytelling. This series respects Asimov’s sweeping visionary ideas without lapsing into slavish reverence and over-pontification. That said, how much you like Goyer’s vision might depend on how much of a stickler you are about remaining faithful to the source material.

(You can read my November 2021 interview with Goyer and science adviser Kevin Hand of Jet Propulsion Lab here.) Ars Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson loved the series, too, declaring Foundation to be “a fascinating tale that was told well, with a cast I enjoyed watching, and with a visual language that really connected with something in my head.” 

Asimov’s fundamental narrative arc remains intact, with the series taking place across multiple planets over 1,000 years and featuring a huge cast of characters. Perhaps the biggest change from the books is the replacement of the Empire’s ruling committee with a trio of Eternal Emperor clones called the Cleons—a genetic dynasty. Brother Day (Lee Pace) is the primary ruler, with Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) serving in an advisory/legacy role. Meanwhile, Brother Dawn (played as a child by Cooper Carter and as a teenager by Cassian Bilton) is being groomed to take over as the new Brother Day. Technically, they are all perfect incarnations of the same man, at different ages, and this is both the source of their strength as a team and of their conflicts.

Pace’s Brother Day is front and center in this teaser, which bodes well for S2, since his arc—indeed, the entire Cleon subplot with its gripping family drama—was one of the most interesting aspects of S1. Per the official premise:

More than a century after the season one finale, tension mounts throughout the galaxy in Foundation season two. As the Cleons unravel, a vengeful queen plots to destroy Empire from within. Hari, Gaal, and Salvor discover a colony of Mentalics with psionic abilities that threaten to alter psychohistory itself. The Foundation has entered its religious phase, promulgating the Church of Seldon throughout the Outer Reach and inciting the Second Crisis: war with Empire. The monumental adaptation of Foundation chronicles the stories of four crucial individuals transcending space and time as they overcome deadly crises, shifting loyalties and complicated relationships that will ultimately determine the fate of humanity.

Mann and Bilton will reprise their roles as Brother Dusk and Brother Dawn, respectively. Also returning for S2 are Jared Harris as Hari Seldon; Lou Llobell as Gaal Dornick; Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin; and Laura Birn as Eto Demerzel, one of the last surviving androids from the ancient Robot Wars, who serves the Cleons. And we’re getting some new faces in the mix: Isabella Laughland as Brother Constant; Kulvinder Ghir as Poly Verisof; Ella-Rae Smith as Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion; Holt McCallany as Warden Jaegger Fount; Rachel House as Tellem Bond; Nimrat Kaur as Yanna Seldon; Ben Daniels as Bel Riose; and Dimitri Leonidas as Hober Mallow.

The second season of Foundation debuts on Apple TV+ on July 14, 2023.

Listing image by YouTube/Apple TV+

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1938528

Disney+ plus Hulu equals Disnulu?

Someone may or may not come up with a better name than that, but by the end of 2023, there will be a new streaming app combining the libraries of Disney+ and Hulu, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed during an earnings call last night.

Iger clarified that customers will still be able to sign up for Disney+ or Hulu only—or ESPN+ only, for that matter. However, the new app will bring a “one-app experience” in the US with Disney+ and Hulu’s selection of movies and TV shows.

The move is somewhat natural, considering Disney owns 67 percent of Hulu. Iger explained the business rationale behind uniting the libraries, calling it a “local progression” of Disney’s consumer offerings “that will provide greater opportunities for advertisers while giving bundle subscribers access to more robust and streamlined content, resulting in greater audience engagement and ultimately leading to a more unified streaming experience.”

Disney already offers a similar service outside the US in Star, which combines Disney+ offerings with content from other Disney properties, like FX Networks and Freeform.

Comcast owns 33 percent of Hulu and has a deal enabling it to sell that share to Disney in 2024 for its “fair market value,” as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Under previous CEO Bob Chapek, Disney said that it would “love” to completely own Hulu, even before 2024.

When asked by Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar if the new app will help Disney change Hulu’s “cost structure,” including by “dropping content spending or the number of titles on Hulu,” Iger responded by saying that any final deal is in Comcast’s hands “to some extent.” He added that Disney has had “constructive” conversations with Comcast about selling Hulu.

Disney combining its properties comes as other previously siloed streaming services are uniting. On May 23, the world will meet Max, a combination of HBO Max and Discovery+. Meanwhile, streaming services are becoming more open about sharing their content with other platforms, as seen in Amazon looking to license its original movies and shows and HBO Max shows winding up on Roku and Tubi. Users are getting tired of managing a large number of streaming service subscriptions to find the content they want to watch, and uniting programs seems to be one approach streaming companies are using to try to appease and maintain subscribers.

Higher price, cheaper library

During Wednesday’s Q2 2023 earnings call, Iger also revealed that Disney+’s ad-free tier will see a price hike in 2023.

At the same time, Disney plans on spending less on content in general, with most of the reductions said to be coming in 2024 and going into 2025. The CEO argued that much of the programming Disney+ has made is not driving subscriber numbers. Meanwhile, marketing for big projects with big money potential, like Avatar: The Way of Water, The Little Mermaid, and Guardians of the Galaxy, has been spread thin.

If you think that people will cancel if Disney+ raises prices, that’s not what the bigwigs at Disney believe. When the company raised prices for its ad-free subscription in 2022 by $3, the damage was reportedly not that bad.

“We were pleasantly surprised that the loss of subs due to what was a substantial increase in pricing for the non-ad-supported Disney+ product was de minimis,” Iger said. “It was some loss, but it was relatively small. That leads us to believe that we, in fact, have pricing elasticity.”

Disney+ has been losing subscribers since Q4 2022 and is said to have lost 4 million this year, with US and Canada losses totaling around 300,000.

Disney doubling down on a cheaper library and a price hike for no ads may be a hard sell, as viewers already have many on-demand libraries to choose from. The streaming landscape is evolving quickly, and in a few months, it may be harder to convince people to pay more for a smaller-budget library without ads, considering the questions around the value of Disney+’s library and the many options users have, including free ones.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1938510

There are two kinds of GPUs you can buy right now if you want to build or upgrade a gaming PC: affordable but old ones and new but expensive ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have been leaning on older products, sometimes with price cuts, to fill the very large gaps in the middle and low ends of their current lineups. But a slowly building buzz of rumors and leaks suggests things should change before long.

A source speaking to VideoCardz dot com says there are three GeForce RTX 4060-series GPUs coming in the next couple of months, starting with an 8GB version of the 4060 Ti that could be announced as soon as next week and released by the end of the month. A 16GB version of the 4060 Ti and an 8GB version of the 4060 could be announced at the same time but launch at some point in July (Nvidia used the same simultaneous-announcement, staggered-release strategy for the 4090 and 4080 series).

It’s not surprising that the 4060 Ti looks like a big step down from the recently released RTX 4070—4,352 CUDA cores instead of 5,888, a 128-bit memory bus instead of 192-bit, 8GB instead of 12GB. But it also looks less-than-promising as a step up from 2020’s RTX 3060 Ti, which used a 256-bit memory bus, 4,864 CUDA cores, and the same amount of RAM. Extra cache memory, higher clock speeds, and the updated Ada Lovelace architecture should all make the 4060 Ti faster than the 3060 Ti in the end, but it may not be a huge generational leap.

AMD’s new RX 7600 looks like a more straightforward upgrade over the last-generation RX 6600; both cards will reportedly use 8GB of memory on a 128-bit bus, but the 7600 reportedly has 2,048 compute units instead of the 6600’s 1,792. This is the only new Radeon card on the radar right now, though—there are no rumors of an RX 7600 XT or any variants with additional RAM. AMD also hasn’t released any RX 7700 or 7800-series cards yet; so far, we’ve seen more integrated GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture than dedicated desktop GPUs.

The RX 7600 will reportedly be launched on May 25, a day after the reported launch date for the RTX 4060 Ti. These dates could change, and AMD and Nvidia routinely tweak their plans in response to what the other company is doing.

An interesting wrinkle for both cards, according to VideoCardz, is that they’ll use an eight-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface instead of the more-typical 16-lane setup. This won’t be a problem for modern systems since eight lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth is well in excess of what mid-range cards need to communicate with the rest of your system. But the interface could be limiting if you drop the cards into an older PCIe 3.0 system—testing from TechPowerUp found that an RX 6600 XT with an eight-lane interface lost a couple of percentage points of performance in a PCIe 3.0 system, and the difference could be more pronounced for faster cards.

VideoCardz didn’t publish any pricing information for either the 4060 Ti or the RX 7600. Nvidia launched the 3060 Ti for $399 and the RX 6600 launched for $329, and neither company has been lowering the prices for its next-gen upgrades so far. Similar pricing for the 4060 Ti and RX 7600 is probably a best-case scenario, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see small increases.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1938525

Geralt of Rivia looked good, moved smoothly, and responded swiftly to commands. There was just one problem: He was constantly sucker-punching the villagers of White Orchard. Over and over again, he raised his fists against tavern keepers, kids running in the street, and detachments of Nilfgaardian soldiers. That last one begat a brutal death. Sometimes, right after taking an unprovoked swing, the camera would furiously spin around my white-haired avatar, making me feel like I, too, had caught one in the head.

I played the latest version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Asus’ new ROG Ally handheld gaming PC ($700, available June 13, preorders start today) as a personal benchmark. Having completed the game three times previously (Xbox/PC/Switch, Yennefer/Triss/neither), I was looking to spot differences on this emerging platform. Asus’ new device can run The Witcher 3—and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Forza Horizon 5, and Hitman 3—more powerfully than the Steam Deck or almost any other “portable” device around, minus questionably portable gaming laptops. The device runs Windows, so it has fewer game compatibility issues than Valve’s Steam Deck (however admirably far that system has advanced). What would make The Witcher or any other playthrough different on the Ally, a Switch-sized device that boasts 7–13 times the power of that platform? “Random violence” wasn’t the answer I expected, so I dug in.

My first thought was that the thumb sticks could be the problem, as they seem to have bigger dead zones and feel less sturdy than the ones on the Steam Deck. Or maybe it was pre-release video hardware reacting to a game known for uneven performance. I updated everything I could, recalibrated the sticks, and double-checked my in-game settings. I played the same build of the game on a Steam Deck with Windows loaded, in the same location, but couldn’t recreate the problem.

Eventually, I figured it out: It was the touchscreen. The Ally’s right stick is too shallow, and it’s too close to the right side of a screen with small bezels. Whenever my thumb glanced too close, the overly sensitive touchscreen picked it up as a left click. The default left-click mouse action in The Witcher 3 is an attack. Like some malevolent specter of Polish folklore, the Ally had made Geralt’s world richer, but it whispered violent thoughts to him whenever the Thumb Moon cast its shadow over the 1080p sea.

You can, of course, disable a touchscreen in Windows 11 through a series of tiny-target Device Manager taps on the Ally’s 7-inch screen. Someone could even make a batch script or tiny executable that enables or disables the touchscreen on the fly. Or Asus could add a touchscreen toggle to the Command Center, which pops out roughly 95 percent of the time that you click its left-side button, or it could allow me to set that up in the Ally’s confusing per-game profile system.

But when I have time to devote to involved, graphically intensive games, the last thing I want to do is fix up a Windows installation—and an awkwardly scaled one at that. I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally’s combination of Windows 11 and Asus’ own Armoury Crate software. I legitimately forgot my Steam Deck had a touchscreen until I ran Windows 11 on it for side-by-side comparisons. Asus has a lot more work to do before its device reaches that kind of game-focused flow.

When you’re inside a game, the Ally performs better than nearly any device its size—you’ll see that in the benchmarks. But everything else about my experience with the Ally makes it hard to recommend as a $700 device you can buy from Asus this month. If you want to get 39 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 instead of 33 with the same settings on the Steam Deck or eke out some ray tracing at just over 30 frames per second, the Ally can do that. The same goes if you’re desperate to play Windows-only, cheat-detecting PC games like Destiny 2 on your couch (and you’ve decided against high-end streaming).

But most people should probably wait until Asus, like Valve before it, gets a lot of feedback and hopefully improves its software. Not that some hardware fixes couldn’t help, too.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1937954

Following its acquisition of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM) film studio, Amazon is launching the Amazon MGM Studios Distribution unit, which will be responsible for distributing Amazon original movies and TV shows, including the massive library it got through MGM.

In March 2022, Amazon closed its $8.5 billion purchase of MGM, giving it power over 4,000 movies, including 12 Angry Men, Creed, Robocop, Rocky, and Stargate and 17,000 TV shows, including The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been a hit for Hulu, and Fargo, which has aired on FX, plus upcoming releases.

Amazon MGM Studios Distribution will also seek to distribute Amazon original content previously limited to Amazon Prime Video, including the Coming 2 America movie and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel TV show.

Amazon’s announcement Monday said it expects “significant third-party licensing and transactional revenue” through distribution, including “bundles” for specific geographies. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Amazon MGM Studios Distribution would explore licensing content to foreign networks in addition to other streaming services and airplanes.

As media streaming services have grown in quantity, so has competition. And many viewers are getting streaming fatigue, tired of figuring out which subscription they need to watch their desired content. Meanwhile, titles and deals are often shifting, forcing customers to frequently evaluate the pros and cons of having multiple streaming subscriptions.

As noted by Bloomberg, Amazon’s purchase of MGM has been an example of new media taking a page from traditional media distribution. At the time of acquisition, it committed to spending up to $1 billion for releasing films for theaters, rather than going straight to on-demand.

In a statement accompanying Amazon’s announcement Monday, Chris Ottinger, who has been in charge of MGM distribution for over 10 years and will head Amazon MGM Studios Distribution (reporting to Brad Beale, an Amazon executive pre-acquisition and now VP of Worldwide Licensing & Distribution, Amazon and MGM Studios), said the new division will “break through the current sales mold by creating custom packages that will fulfill our client’s individual content needs.”

Amazon said it will hold meetings for potential clients starting this month, so you may see some previously Amazon exclusives outside of Prime Video soon.

Licensing could be a way forward for streaming services as competition gets thicker, viewers seek simplicity, and revenue stays top-of-mind. As of January, viewers could find titles on Roku and Tubi that were previously only available on HBO Max. And in February, Bloomberg reported that Disney was considering being more giving with its content, after seeing stock plummet and reportedly losing billions by not sharing programs with former partners like Netflix.

Meanwhile, failing to play well with others could result in streaming services missing the opportunity to license some wildly popular titles. For example, Nielsen data analyzed by Bloomberg in April found that Netflix represents 70 to 80 percent of the US’s most-watched TV shows weekly. Streaming services willing to engage in some give and take may be able to better satisfy viewers, who have a lot of avenues to access movies and TV shows these days.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1937777