Enlarge (credit: Amazon) Amazon’s Prime Day promotions are often a good indicator of which way the company’s many-headed borg is facing, and this year, one Amazon entity is screaming quite loudly: Twitch. Ars’ Jeff Dunn has already summed up a bunch of discounts and offers to expect this coming Prime Day, but in Twitch’s case, ..
Tag : Gaming & Culture
(credit: Opening image based on Eve Online assets courtesy CCP Games.) Long before loot boxes became the bane of the Internet’s existence, in-game purchases at large could cause a bit of commotion within certain gaming communities. Roughly seven years ago, for instance, a simple monocle almost brought down one of the most active gaming communities ..
(credit: Sam Machkovech) In April, Valve rolled out a privacy policy change that effectively hobbled Steam Spy in its Ars Technica-inspired method for estimating game sales data based on public user profile information. Now, Valve Head of Business Development Jan-Peter Ewert says the company is “working on new tools and new ways of getting data ..
Talking with Dictionary.com CEO Liz McMillan at the 2018 Collision Conference. (video link) NEW ORLEANS—Despite the ever-connected nature of life today, there remains a moment that all of us eventually encounter. Whether talking to a friend, texting with a family member, or emailing and chatting with coworkers, a word pops up that simply stymies. Wait, ..
Andrew Cunningham In November 2016, Nintendo surprised everyone by going back to its roots and releasing the NES Classic. The delightful emulator/nostalgia-fest sparked unanticipated demand, including near-instant supply issues and 200-percent-plus markups in secondary markets. So in December of 2016, we decided to build our own version instead. Last April, Nintendo bizarrely halted sales of ..
Enlarge / Artist’s conception of what Google’s gaming hardware might look like. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Apple) Google could be the next major company to announce efforts to stream high-end games from remote servers. Kotaku cites five unnamed people familiar with the company’s plans in reporting on the existence of an effort to roll out ..
Jeff Dunn Update: Contrary to an initial statement we received from a GameStop representative, GameStop made the NES Classic Edition available online, both individually and through bundles, at 12am ET. Individual consoles sold out on the site a couple hours later then came back around 10:10am. As of 11:40am, they are sold out again. Best Buy ..
Enlarge / Yarrrrrr As expected, the unpatchable Nintendo Switch exploit published months ago has now led to the existence of piracy-enabling custom firmware for the system. In an ironic twist, though, the makers of that firmware have introduced anti-piracy code to prevent people from pirating their own work. While there is a free version Team ..
Enlarge / The moon is in rough shape. Warning: plot spoilers for Prey are contained herein! Prey: Mooncrash is hiding a lot more beneath the surface than its premise lets on. The DLC’s surprise announcement and release at E3 2018 promised an endlessly repeatable, never-repeating experience—a distinctly roguelike take on the first-person shooter genre. That ..
Enlarge / The McLaren Senna, the cover car for “Forza Horizon 4,” is unveiled at the Mixer booth at E3 2018 on Tuesday, June 12, 2018 in Los Angeles. (credit: Casey Rodgers/Invision for Microsoft/AP Images) LOS ANGELES—Microsoft’s presence at this month’s E3 had its share of Xbox surprises, but a new annual Forza racing installment wasn’t ..
