Tag: Computer and Video Games

What Meltdown? Crypto Comes Roaring Back in the Philippines.

On a recent Tuesday night, around 20 people crowded into the second floor of Joniel Bon’s newly opened internet cafe in Quezon City, 10 miles from Manila. Seated at computers with 34-inch curved monitors, they began playing video games such as Heroes of Mavia and Nifty Island, as music from Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 […]

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Apple Reverses Course and Allows Epic Games to Start Competing App Store

Days after Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, complained publicly that Apple had blocked it from starting a competing app store in Europe, the technology companies said Apple had reversed course and would allow Epic to go ahead with its plan. The reversal highlights the way that Apple is changing its operations to comply with […]

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‘Dragon Ball’ Creator Akira Toriyama Dies Age 68

Akira Toriyama, who was one of Japan’s leading authors of comics and most famous for the highly successful manga and anime franchise “Dragon Ball,” died on March 1. He was 68. His death was confirmed on Friday by his manga and design production studio, Bird Studio, and Capsule Corporation Tokyo, which said in a statement […]

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Akira Toriyama Dies Age 68

Akira Toriyama, who was one of Japan’s leading authors of comics and most famous for the highly successful manga and anime franchise “Dragon Ball,” died on March 1. He was 68. His death was confirmed on Friday by his manga and design production studio, Bird Studio, and Capsule Corporation Tokyo, which said in a statement […]

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MLB The Show Will Include Women Players for the First Time

For the first time, women will don Major League Baseball jerseys in MLB The Show, the long-running popular video game. MLB The Show 24 will debut the option to create and play a female player in a reinvented version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which gamers direct a custom character’s […]

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Big American Tech Profits From Chinese Ad Spending Spree

The trade relationship between China and the United States has plenty of friction. But at least one area is booming: Chinese start-ups looking to establish a presence in the West are spending billions of dollars for advertisements on services owned by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies. Temu, the international arm of the Chinese […]

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Mark Dodson, Voice of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Gremlins’ Characters, Dies at 64

Mark Dodson, who voiced strange puppet creatures in “Star Wars,” including Salacious B. Crumb, the cackling monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt, and “Gremlins” films, died on Saturday. He was 64. His death was confirmed in statements on social media by his agent, Peter DeLorme, and the Evansville Horror Con, the Indiana fan convention where […]

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Can a Tech Giant Be Woke?

The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the […]

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Why Is Big Tech Still Cutting Jobs?

After a year of big layoffs, job cuts at the tech industry’s largest companies trickled into the first month of 2024. Google started the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and a promise of more cuts to come. Amazon followed by trimming hundreds of jobs in its Prime Video department. Meta quietly thinned out […]

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Jennell Jaquays, Who Unlocked Fantasy Dungeons for Gamers, Dies at 67

Jennell Jaquays, who made luminous fantasy paintings, classic adventures for tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and distinctive levels in popular video games like Quake II, died on Jan. 10 in Dallas. She was 67. Ms. Jaquays’s wife, Rebecca Heineman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome. During Ms. Jaquays’s […]

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Developers Pan Apple’s New Plan for App Store in Europe

After 15 years of dictating how apps are distributed on iPhones, Apple has been forced to take marching orders from European regulators. A new law to bolster tech competition has demanded that Apple open its devices to competing app stores and payment alternatives. But app makers say Apple’s response to the law, which is intended […]

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The Apple Vision Pro Is a Marvel. But Who Will Buy It?

Last week, I was ushered by an Apple employee through a security gate, past a manicured lawn, down a flight of stairs and into a tastefully decorated faux living room inside the Steve Jobs Theater to get a preview of the company’s new Vision Pro headset. Like other reporters who were given early tours of […]

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Deal Ends Dispute Over Records of Onetime King of Donkey Kong

Back in the 1980s, it seemed as if everyone with a spare quarter was playing the arcade game Donkey Kong, scooting up ramps and climbing ladders while avoiding barrels hurled by a giant ape. For most players, the video game provided a few minutes of excitement before inevitable defeat. But a handful of top players […]

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The Emmys Signal the End of the Peak TV Era

As “Succession” cast members marched up to the Emmy stage on Monday night to grab their statues for the show’s final season, they used it as one last opportunity to say goodbye. Kieran Culkin, after kissing his co-star Brian Cox on the lips, gave a tearful speech while accepting the award for best actor in […]

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Tencent and Netease Rally on Signs China May Ease Gaming Proposal

The stock prices of Chinese video game companies rebounded Wednesday after investors seized on signals that the government was having second thoughts about proposed regulations on gaming. Since the weekend, regulators have attempted to calm the market after shares of the two largest video game companies, Tencent and Netease, plunged on Friday. When trading resumed […]

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Google Allows More App Payment Options in Antitrust Deal With States

Google said on Monday that it would allow developers on its Play app store to offer direct payment options to users and would pay $700 million to settle an antitrust suit brought by state attorneys general, in the company’s latest move to navigate increased regulatory scrutiny of its power. The suit, brought in July 2021, […]

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Google Loses Antitrust Court Battle With Makers of Fortnite Video Game

A jury ruled on Monday that Google had violated antitrust laws to extract fees and limit competition from Epic Games and other developers on its Play mobile app store, in a case that could rewrite the rules on how thousands of businesses make money on Google’s smartphone operating system, Android. After deliberating for a little […]

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Another Google Antitrust Battle Reaches Court in Epic Games Case

For two months, Google has squared off against the Justice Department in court in Washington over claims that the company is abusing its dominant position in online search and advertising to crush rivals, a high-stakes antitrust case that could reshape the world’s most popular search engine. Now, it’s facing another legal challenge closer to home. […]

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Sam Bankman-Fried’s Wild Rise and Abrupt Crash

There comes a moment in the development of a new technology when the hype is so common it passes for common sense. Lawyers, accountants and regulators are nowhere to be found. Investors insist entrepreneurs take their money. The world trembles on the brink of change. For dot-coms, the moment was 1999. For artificial intelligence, it […]

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‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Is Surprise Box Office Hit

An evil pizzeria mascot, Freddy Fazbear, became a surprise box office sensation over the weekend, reinforcing a message that moviegoers have been sending to Hollywood all year: Give us something new. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” sold an estimated $78 million in tickets at theaters in the United States and Canada from Thursday night to Sunday […]

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Ghostly Presence

Tombstones are planted in the flower beds. A witch appears to have flown into a tree and is suspended there, broom sticking out from the trunk. An undead crone, motion sensitive, accosts passers-by from the hedge. On my otherwise very quiet, very nothing-to-see-here Brooklyn block, there’s a lot to see this time of year. I […]

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In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, New Power-Ups Really Pop

Nintendo’s mascot is boring. So for nearly four decades, it has fed the jumping plumber an increasingly bizarre diet of items. Oct. 17, 2023 Early into his newest adventure, Mario transforms into a large elephant. It’s not a costume like those in previous Super Mario video games, where acrobatics are imbued in the cat suits, […]

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How ‘A.I. Agents’ That Roam the Internet Could One Day Replace Workers

The widely used chatbot ChatGPT was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at the computer chip company Nvidia got their hands on the chatbot’s underlying technology, they realized it could do a lot more. Within weeks, they taught it […]

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The Upshot of Microsoft’s Activision Deal: Big Tech Can Get Even Bigger

President Biden’s top antitrust officials have used novel arguments over the past few years to stop tech giants and other large companies from making deals, a strategy that has had mixed success. But on Friday, when Microsoft closed its blockbuster $69 billion acquisition of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard after beating back a federal […]

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How Microsoft Turned the Tide in Its Regulatory Fight Over Activision

The first call that Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, made in early 2022 after his company announced a $69 billion deal to buy the video game publisher Activision Blizzard was to Kenichiro Yoshida, the chief executive of Sony. Activision made the blockbuster video game Call of Duty, and Sony made the PlayStation game console, which […]

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‘Xbox Wins?’ Gamers Cautiously Celebrate Microsoft Activision Deal

When Microsoft announced that it was spending $69 billion to buy the video game maker Activision Blizzard in January last year, Justin Katz was stunned. To Mr. Katz, a 34-year-old former professional video game player from Lansing, Ill., it was a seismic event that allowed Microsoft to claim victory over Sony in the console business […]

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Microsoft Closes $69 Billion Activision Blizzard Deal

Microsoft on Friday said it closed its $69 billion purchase of the video game giant Activision Blizzard, overcoming significant regulatory hurdles in Britain and the United States and signaling that the tech industry’s giants are still free to use their cash hoards to get even bigger. The deal, the largest consumer tech acquisition since AOL […]

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Microsoft Wins Critical Approval for Activision Deal by Britain’s C.M.A.

British regulators on Friday gave final approval to Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard, the last major obstacle for a deal that at one point seemed to be falling apart because of government objections on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain’s antitrust agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, said it […]

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Dancers and Video Game Characters Merge in the Uncanny Valley

Watch a TikTok video by @dem_bruddaz, and you might feel a queasy mixture of recognition and disorientation. You’ll see, say, a person running down a street. But wait — is it a person? Why does he turn at such precise 45-degree angles? Why are his gestures so oddly exaggerated? And is that a Grand Theft […]

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How a Pricing Change Led to a Revolt by Unity’s Video Game Developers

John Riccitiello probably should have seen the outrage coming. A video game industry veteran, Mr. Riccitiello is the chief executive of Unity Technologies, a company that isn’t a household name but is a fixture for more than two million game developers who use its software to power their games. For most of the company’s 19-year […]

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