Displaying items by tag: Gaming

It looks like the folks at the European Commission have decided that Microsoft buying out Activision Blizzard for $69 billion (with a B) is not going to be a violation of their antitrust rules. The approval means that there are only a few roadblocks to the deal going through. South Korea and China have not decided yet, while the US and UK have challenged it. The deal has been called the world’s biggest gaming takeover and is viewed by many as a bad thing for competition as it would leave Microsoft in control of a majority of game development groups.

Game reviews are always fun things to do. I mean it is playing a game and then writing about anything you found while playing it (sounds like fun). The challenge comes from being objective in your writing Vs subjective. Something that I might personally dislike in a game might be the thing that makes a game fun for someone else. It is with that in mind that we bring you our first game review in years. We will be breaking the game down into a couple of areas, objective and subjective findings. So. Let’s kick this off with the fun part, the subjective part.

The UK’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority has added new restrictions on Microsoft and Activision Blizzard after already issuing a formal anti-trust warning over the deal back in January. Now the regulator has added additional orders that prevent either party from “acquiring an interest” in each other without written permission from the CMA.

After Phill Spencer’s recent comments on why Microsoft can’t beat Sony or Nintendo via “normal methods” we started to wonder why he would make this kind of statement. So, with our usual OCD we dove into some of the things that are happening at both Microsoft and Microsoft Gaming. Microsoft has been in an interesting spot and not for the first time. They seem to get into this spot where they are in between strategic and tactical projects. In this “down” time we tend to seem them look to shore up documentation, investigate acquisitions to expand their reach, and start to plan for their next conquest.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming recently admitted that Xbox is not able to beat rivals Nintendo and Sony using normal methods. The means that Spender is talking about is the release of console specific titles. He feels that gamers are not likely to change allegiances simply because Xbox comes out with a new Xbox only title regardless of how anticipated that title is. He is right about this, but it also works in the opposite direction. Xbox gamers are not likely to switch to Sony or Nintendo simply because of a premier title.

A not so new feature at DecryptedTech is going to be our thoughts on gaming, game releases, and the game industry as a whole. This is actually not something new to DecryptedTech. In the past we had our Short Attention Span reviews of AAA titles where we jumped in with both feet to see if a new game release could even capture our attention. Now we are looking to dive a little deeper into each game.

Elden Ring, from developer FromSoftware seems to have a flaw that is allowing an interesting attack for PC players. The flaw allows invaders, malicious players that enter another player’s world to cause a game crash, this crash leads the player into an endless death loop once the player can get back online.

Over the last couple of days, we have received information that would indicate nVidia is not moving to HBM 2 for their consumer GPUs (outside of some extremely high-end models). Instead, they appear to be focusing on improvements found in GDDR5X and GDDR6. Conversely, AMD appears to be focusing on HBM for many of their high-end and even some mid-range cards. The two very different paths has sparked something of a debate amongst fans of both products (as you can imagine). The questions are, why chose one over the other at this point and is HBM a truly viable option for AMD?

This is going to be a little bit of a departure from how we would normally approach covering specific technology. Instead of addressing the state of hardware based on what we have actually worked with, we are going to look at VR from the standpoint of a consumer looking to buy for the first time. There are a couple of reasons to do this; the first is that we do not have either an Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or any other PC based VR technology. We do have the Oculus powered Gear VR, but that is in a category all on its own which we will cover in some detail below.  So with the preface out of the way, let’s get started

The experts have all weighed in. 2016 will be the year of Virtual Reality. The problem is that the experts are very often wrong. Still that has not stopped multiple companies from pushing out new VR headsets, APIs, development kits and more. The craze has gone so far as to start effecting the way that companies are making core hardware. We already know that AMD is pushing for VR mastery with new products and by showing which existing products also have a level of VR support.