Microsoft Claims Sony Pays Developers ‘Blocking Rights’ To Keep Games Off Xbox Game Pass

In a lengthy document submitted to the Brazilian government as part of its investigation into Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has claimed Sony pays developers “blocking rights” to prevent games from appearing on Xbox Game Pass. From a report: The accusation appears in a 27-page rebuttal of Sony’s recent objections to Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard buyout, made to Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) as part of its investigation. Much of Sony’s argument had focused on Call of Duty – which it claimed had “no rival” and was “so popular that it influences users’ choice of console” — with the PlayStation maker suggesting, among other things, that the inclusion of Call of Duty on Microsoft’s Game Pass service would hamper its ability to compete.

Microsoft’s response is as wide-ranging as Sony’s initial objections, touching on everything from the fact it has previously managed to grow Game Pass without Activision Blizzard’s titles — suggesting Call of Duty mightn’t be quite as “essential” as Sony claims — to a reiteration of its assurances that it won’t be making Call of Duty an Xbox console exclusive. It’s here that Microsoft takes a swipe at Sony, pointing out (as per a Google-translated version of its filing) that for all its concerns around exclusivity, “the use of exclusive arrangements has been at the heart of Sony’s strategy to strengthen its presence in the gaming industry.” Microsoft says Sony’s concerns are “incoherent”, given that, by virtue of PlayStation’s dominant market share, the company is a leader in the distribution of digital games – especially when, as Microsoft claims, Sony has actively hampered the growth of Game Pass by paying for “‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.” Further reading: Microsoft Justifies Activision Blizzard’s $69 Billion Acquisition By Telling Regulator Call of Duty Publisher Doesn’t Release ‘Unique’ Games.

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Twitch Founder Justin Kan: Web3 Games Don’t Need To Lure Players With Profit

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Top crypto VCs are constantly touting the potential of video games as one of the most compelling use cases for blockchain technology. […] TechCrunch talked to Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and more recently, Solana-based gaming NFT marketplace Fractal, to get his thoughts on what it will take for this subsector of web3 to live up to the hype. Kan said that web3 gaming has a long way to go — while there are about 3 billion gamers in the world, including those who play mobile games, he noted, far fewer have bought or interacted with any sort of blockchain-based gaming asset. Kan sees this gap as an opportunity for blockchain technology to fundamentally change how video game studios operate. “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said.

In some ways, web3 gaming was been built in response to the success of games such as Fortnite that were able to unlock a lucrative monetization path for gaming studios through micro-transactions from users buying custom items such as outfits and weapons. Web3 game developers hope to take that vision a step further by enabling players to take those custom digital assets between different games, turning gaming into an interoperable, immersive ecosystem, Kan explained. Kan has made around 10 angel investments in web3 gaming startups, including in the studio behind NFT-based shooter game BR1: Infinite Royale, he said. Still, he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all. “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.”

[T]he appeal of an open gaming ecosystem is more about the principle of the matter than it is about making a living. “I actually think that people equate NFTs and games with this play-to-earn model where people are making money and doing their job [by gaming], and I think that’s completely unnecessary,” Kan said. “Having digital assets in your game can work and be valuable, even if nobody is making money and there’s no speculative appreciation or price appreciation on your assets,” he added. It’s common for popular games to attract new development on top of their existing intellectual property. Kan shared the example of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO), a video game in which custom “skins” have sold for as much as $150,000 each. “I funded a company that builds on top of the CSGO skins,” he said. “CSGO changed the rules about what was allowed and actually confiscated over a million dollars just from this company — so yeah, I don’t want to build on top of these non-open platforms anymore.” “Kan sees blockchain-based games as just a ‘more economically immersive’ version of the marketplaces that already exist in video games,” adds TechCrunch. “He doesn’t think users will flock to blockchain gaming just to make money, though.”

“I think that web3 games are just being more open and saying, instead of this being a black market, we’re going to make this a real market and people’s economic participation is going to vary to different levels. There’s gonna be people who only play the game and never buy things with money. There’s gonna be some people who are making some side money because they’re really good at the game, and they’re getting some things in the game they’re selling [or trading].”

He added: “In order for this market to actually be big, it’s going to require normal people who want to play games for fun to play these games. That doesn’t exist yet. I think most of the market today is people who are crypto-native.”

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28 Years Later, Super Punch-Out!!’s 2-Player Mode Has Been Discovered

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Ars Technica: While Punch-Out!! has been one of Nintendo’s most beloved “fighting” series since its 1984 debut in arcades, it has rarely featured something common in the genre: a two-player mode. On Monday, however, that changed. The resulting discovery has been hiding in plain sight on the series’ Super Nintendo edition for nearly 30 years. Should you own 1994’s Super Punch-Out!! in any capacity — an original SNES cartridge, a dumped ROM parsed by an emulator, on the Super Nintendo Classic Edition, or even as part of the paid Nintendo Switch Online collection of retro games — you can immediately access the feature, no hacking or ROM editing required. All you need is a pair of gamepads.

[T]oday’s Super Punch-Out!! discovery revolves around a simple series of button combinations, which require nothing more than a second controller. The two-player mode is hidden behind an additional, previously undiscovered menu, which lets solo players skip directly to any of the game’s boxing combatants. It’s essentially a “level select” menu, which many classic games featured for internal testing, and speedrunners could arguably use it to practice against specific opponents more quickly.

This menu can be accessed by holding the R and Y buttons on player two’s controller at the “press start” screen, then pressing Start or A with player one’s controller. Do this, and a new menu appears, displaying all 16 boxers’ profile icons. Pick any of these icons to engage in a one-off fight; once it’s over, you’re dumped back to the same boxer-select menu. In this menu, friends can access a two-player fight if player two holds their B and Y buttons down until the match starts. You won’t hear a sound effect or any other indication that it worked. Instead, the match will begin with the second player controlling the “boss” boxer at the top of the screen. Combine the “ABXY” array of buttons with “up” and “down” on the D-pad to pull off every single basic and advanced attack. All credit goes to the coder responsible for the new @new_cheats_news account on Twitter, notes Ars.

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Development Suddenly Resumes on Linux Distro CutefishOS

Last month fans were worried about CuteFish OS, with its domain timing out, emails going unanswered, and a Twitter feed that hadn’t posted anything since March.

But “now it looks like the original development team behind CuteFishOS is coming back to life,” according to this report from The New Stack — with a Reddit user planning a fork now saying that’s been put on hold, since “I’d be duplicating work for no reason.”

Last Sunday — on July 31st — CuteFish’s official repository on GitHub was updated with a new announcement in its profile. “Your Favorite CutefishOS are back now!” [sic]

It also promised “New website in the works (coming soon).” and pointed to a new URL.

You can see the changes happening right before your eyes. That website’s domain — OpenFish.org — was registered just ten days ago, on Thursday, July 28th — and it’s still a work in progress. On Thursday afternoon it was pointing to a non-English-language page hosted on the Pakistani cloud platform QCloud — but by Thursday night it was showing a testing page for a NGNIX HTTP server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

And there’s now also a new README file in CuteFish’s GitHub repository listing five items as “progressing.” The first item is “official website preparation,” but other items include collating the previous pull requests and issues, “fix the existing problem,” and eventually adding new features. The sole contributor to the repository appears to be a Chinese coder going under the name of Biukang.

“We are preparing for the restart of CutefishOS,” says Biukang’s GitHub profile now.

But the article still hails last month’s discussion of a fork as “a chance to see open source communities mobilizing into action just to fill a perceived void.”

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Purism’s ‘Librem 5 USA’ Smartphone Achieves Major New Shipping Milestone

Purism posted an announcement Thursday about their privacy-focused “Librem 5 USA” smartphones. “New orders placed today will ship within our standard 10-business-day window.”

The Librem 5 USA now joins the Librem Mini and Librem 14 as a post-Just In Time product, one where instead of relying on Just In Time supply chains to manufacture a product just as we need it, we have invested in maintaining much larger inventories so that we can better absorb future supply chain issues that may come our way.

For anyone who is new to the product, the Librem 5 USA is our premium phone that shares the same hardware design and features as our mass-produced Librem 5, but with electronics we make in the USA using a separate electronics supply chain that sources from US suppliers whenever possible. This results in a tighter, more secure supply chain for the Librem 5 USA.

The Librem 5 USA uses the same PureOS as our other computers and so it runs the same desktop Linux applications you might be used to, just on a small screen.

PureOS on the Librem 5 USA demonstrates real convergence, where the device becomes more than just a phone, it becomes a full-featured pocket-sized computer that can act like a desktop when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or even a laptop (or tablet!) when connected to a laptop docking station. All of your files and all of your software remains the same and follows you where you go. Applications just morph from the smaller screen to the larger screen when docked, just like connecting a external monitor to a laptop.

Everyone who has backed the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA projects hasn’t just supported the production of the hardware itself, they have also supported a massive, multi-year software development effort to bring the traditional Linux desktop to a phone form-factor. Projects such as Phosh (the GUI), Phoc (the Compositor), Squeekboard (the Keyboard), Calls (for calling), Chats (for texting and messaging), and libhandy/libadwaita (libraries to make GTK applications adaptive) all required massive investment and many of these projects have already been moved to the GNOME infrastructure to better share our effort with a larger community.

We are delighted to see that many other mobile projects have recognized the quality of our efforts and adopted our software into their own projects….

The Librem 5 USA was designed for longevity and because we support right to repair, we also offer a number of spare parts in our shop, including replacement modems so you can make sure you support all the cellular bands in a particular continent, replacement batteries for when you ultimately wear out your existing battery, and plenty of other spare parts that haven’t had sufficient demand to post formally on our shop (yet). If you need a spare part that isn’t yet on the shop, just ask.

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From Software Developer To CEO: Red Hat’s Matt Hicks On His Journey To the Top

ZDNet’s Stephanie Condon spoke with Red Hat’s new CEO, Matt Hicks, a veteran of the company that’s been working there for over 14 years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from their discussion: Matt Hicks, Red Hat’s new CEO, doesn’t have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company’s new leader, Hicks says. “The markets are changing really quickly,” he tells ZDNet. “And just having that intuition — of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering — I know that’s intuition that I’ll lean on… Around that, there’s a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition.”

Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company’s strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it’s not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. “You can’t just be the best coder in the room,” he says. “Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference — they really start to define people’s careers.”

Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn’t relish earlier in his career. “I think a lot of people don’t love that,” he says. “And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can’t be heard, if you can’t influence, it’s harder to deliver on those opportunities.” Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat’s mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier — then Red Hat’s VP of engineering, and later Hicks’ predecessor as CEO — moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. […] “As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge,” writes Condon. “Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It’s working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM’s end-to-end software platform, and it’s partnering with ABB, one of the world’s leading manufacturing automation companies. It’s also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025.”

“There’ll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that,” Hicks says. “And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries — because it’s newer, and it’s evolving.”

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Groupon Cuts Over 500 Staff, Plans To Focus ‘Only On Mission-Critical Activities’

Groupon confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s laid off more than 500 of its employees — 15% of its 3,416-person headcount. It’s also re-organizing the company to focus “only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support.” From the report: “Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we are taking decisive actions to improve our trajectory,” CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. The chief executive says that the layoffs, as well as a reinvestment in marketing and initiatives that drive customer purchase frequency, will set the company up to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2022.

In a letter to staff, Deshpande said that Groupon is reducing its North America sales teams to focus on “self-service merchant acquisition capabilities.” It is also re-organizing the company to focus “only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support.” “In addition, we are proposing to reduce cloud infrastructure and support functions as we wrap up cloud migrations.” Groupon is also closing its Australia Goods business, more than a decade after launching there in the first place. Finally, Groupon said that it will “rationalize” its real estate footprint to be more in line with hybrid work. “Over the past few years, the number of Groupon shoppers has fallen sharply,” adds TechCrunch. “According to Statista, 22.2 million visitors to the company’s site purchased at least one offer in Q1 2022, down from nearly 54 million in Q4 2014.”

The report notes that these cuts aren’t as large as the ones made in 2020 when Groupon said it would lay off or furlough 2,800 employees following the COVID-19 pandemic.

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DOJ Is Preparing To Sue Google Over Ad Market As Soon As September

According to Bloomberg, the Department of Justice is preparing to sue Google as soon as next month, “capping years of work to build a case that the Alphabet unit illegally dominates the digital advertising market.” From the report: Lawyers with the DOJ’s antitrust division are questioning publishers in another round of interviews to refresh facts and glean additional details for the complaint […]. Some of the interviews have already taken place and others are scheduled in the coming weeks […]. They build on previous interrogations conducted during an earlier stage of the long-running investigation […].

An ad tech complaint, which Bloomberg had reported was in the works last year, would mark the DOJ’s second case against Google following the government’s 2020 lawsuit alleging the tech titan dominates the online search market in violation of antitrust laws. Still undecided is whether prosecutors will file the case in federal court in Washington, where the search case is pending, or in New York, where state attorneys general have their own antitrust case related to Google’s ad tech business […].

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NVIDIA Publishes 73k Lines Worth Of 3D Header Files For Fermi Through Ampere GPUs

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution… NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs. Phoronix’s Michael Larabel reports: To NVIDIA’s Open-GPU-Docs portal they have posted the 73k lines worth of 3D class header files covering RTX 30 “Ampere” GPUs back through the decade-old GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” graphics processors. These header files define the classes used to program the 3D engine of the GPU, the texture header and texture sampler layout are documented, and other 3D-related programming bits. Having all of these header files will be useful to the open-source Nouveau driver developers to save on their reverse-engineering and guessing/uncertainty over certain bits.

NVIDIA’s Open GPU Kernel Driver is for only GeForce RTX 20 “Turing” series and newer, so it’s great seeing NVIDIA now posting this documentation going back to Fermi which is squarely to help the open-source community / Nouveau. […] The timing of NVIDIA opening these 3D classes back to Fermi is interesting and potentially tied to SIGGRAPH 2022 happening this week. Those wanting to grab NVIDIA’s latest open-source GPU documentation can find it via this GitHub repository.

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VR Is As Good As Psychedelics At Helping People Reach Transcendence

David Glowacki, an artist and computational molecular physicist, has created a VR experience called Isness-D that aims to recapture a transcendence experience he had when he fell in the mountains fifteen years ago. “[O]n four key indicators used in studies of psychedelics, the program showed the same effect as a medium dose of LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of ‘magic’ mushrooms),” reports MIT Technology Review. From the report: Isness-D is designed for groups of four to five people based anywhere in the world. Each participant is represented as a diffuse cloud of smoke with a ball of light right about where a person’s heart would be. Participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience.

[…] To create it, Glowacki took aesthetic inspiration from quantum mechanics — as he puts it, “where the definition of what’s matter and what’s energy starts to become blurred.” For their paper, Glowacki and his collaborators measured the emotional response Isness-D elicited in 75 participants. They based their measurements on four metrics used in psychedelics research — the MEQ30 (a mystical experience questionnaire), the ego dissolution inventory scale, the “communitas” scale, and the “inclusion of community in self” scale. Communitas is defined as an experience of intense shared humanity that transcends social structure. Participants’ responses were then compared with those given in published, double-blind psychedelics studies. For all four metrics, Isness-D elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics. On the mystical experience scale, Isness-D participants reported an experience as intense as that elicited by 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD, and stronger than that induced by microdoses of either substance. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

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