Month: February 2024

The first Activision Blizzard game to join Xbox Game Pass will be Diablo IV, and it’s due to land on March 28. The move means Diablo IV will be playable on Xbox and PC at no extra charge to Game Pass members — of which there are 34 million, Xbox announced today. 

This is just the first step in Xbox’s broader plan to offer Activision Blizzard titles in its monthly subscription service, now that Microsoft fully owns the studio.

“There will be even more to play as we begin to fulfill our commitment to offer Activision and Blizzard games with Game Pass, both new releases and classic games from its legendary catalog,” the Xbox Wire reads. Xbox plans to share more information about additional Activision Blizzard titles hitting Game Pass “soon.”

Diablo IV is a big get for Game Pass, and there are plenty of other popular franchises in Activision Blizzard’s roster, including Call of Duty, Overwatch, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Tony Hawk, World of Warcraft and Starcraft.

Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in October 2023, after nearly two years of antitrust investigations from authorities in the United States and abroad. The deal was worth nearly $69 billion, the largest in Microsoft’s history. As part of negotiations with regulators, Microsoft agreed to offload the streaming rights for Activision Blizzard games onto Ubisoft, opening the door for their inclusion in Game Pass, Ubisoft+ and other cloud services. That deal lasts for 15 years, and Microsoft signed similar 10-year agreements with Nintendo and a few other streaming hubs.

In the US, the FTC is continuing to investigate the acquisition and recently accused Microsoft of misrepresenting its plans for Activision Blizzard following layoffs in January that affected 1,900 employees across the company’s gaming segments. In the process, at least one Blizzard game was canceled and Skylanders studio Toys for Bob was gutted.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/diablo-iv-will-be-the-first-activision-blizzard-title-on-xbox-game-pass-204734655.html?src=rss

Times are a-changing at Xbox. The brand’s leaders have confirmed plans to bring more Xbox games to other platforms — that almost definitely means PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. Both of those consoles have a far larger install base than Xbox Series X/S, which are estimated to have shipped a combined 27 million units, compared with 54.8 million PS5s and nearly 140 million Switches.

On the latest edition of the Official Xbox Podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says his team is bringing four of its games to “the other consoles.” He didn’t name the titles, but contrary to previous rumors, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not coming to PS5 or Switch for now. Reports have suggested that Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo and Gears of War would be among those crossing the great divide. 

Spencer did confirm that the Xbox games that are coming to PlayStation and Switch have been on Xbox and PC for at least a year already. “A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let’s say, on Xbox and PC — there’s always growth, franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in,” he said. 

“Two of the other games are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size,” Spencer added. “And as they’ve realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, so equals to those or just other games like that in our portfolio.”

Spencer said Xbox isn’t going to commit to porting other titles to more platforms beyond those four games just yet. He urged folks who play games on “those other platforms” not to assume every Xbox game will be come to their systems, but suggested that his team is going to take notes based on the impact of the initial four games and take things from there.

That said, this doesn’t mark a major change in strategy, Spencer argued. Xbox’s philosophy has long been about helping players access its games from anywhere, including through the cloud, and tiptoeing onto other consoles is just a part of that.

“By bringing these games to more players, we not only expand the reach and impact of those titles, but this will allow us to invest in either future versions of these games, or elsewhere in our first-party portfolio,” an Xbox Wire blog post reads. “There is no fundamental change to our approach on exclusivity.”

President of Game Content and Studios Matt Booty noted on the podcast that Xbox will continue to release its first-party games on Game Pass on their release date, and that “Game Pass will only be available on Xbox.” Still, Booty acknowledged that Microsoft wants to bring more of its games to more players.

Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond assured fans that Microsoft isn’t looking to get out of the console hardware business. In fact, the team has “some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we’re going to share this holiday.” Previous leaks indicated that Microsoft was building an all-digital version of the Xbox Series X that has improved Wi-Fi connectivity and more power efficiency.

Microsoft is also looking ahead to the next Xbox. “We’re also invested in the next generation roadmap,” Bond added. “And what we’re really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they’re building.” A leak last September indicated that the next Xbox is slated to arrive in 2028 and that it will be support “cloud-hybrid games.”

Microsoft’s gaming division looks vastly different than it did a few months ago. The company finally completed its protracted $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard in October, significantly swelling its headcount in the process. In January, Microsoft said it was laying off 1,900 people from the gaming teams. It also canceled at least one game, a survival title that Blizzard was working on.

Even though the Activision acquisition immediately and significantly improved the bottom line of Microsoft’s gaming division, the company is looking to make that part of the business more profitable. Reducing headcount is one way of doing that. Selling games to new audiences on other platforms is an arguably healthier approach, even though it might come at the expense of turning some former Xbox loyalists away from the brand.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/xbox-confirms-four-of-its-games-are-coming-to-more-popular-consoles-201419203.html?src=rss

OpenAI on Thursday announced Sora, a brand new model that generates high-definition videos up to one minute in length from text prompts. Sora, which means “sky” in Japanese, won’t be available to the general public any time soon. Instead, OpenAI is making it available to a small group of academics and researchers who will assess harm and its potential for misuse.

“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” the company said on its website. “The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”

One of the videos generated by Sora that OpenAI shared on its website shows a couple walking through a snowy Tokyo city as cherry blossom petals and snowflakes blow around them.

Another shows realistic-looking wooly mammoths walking through a snowy meadow against a backdrop of snow-clad mountain ranges.

OpenAI says that the model works as a result of “deep understanding of language,” which lets it interpret text prompts accurately. Still, like basically all AI image- and video-generators we’ve seen, Sora isn’t perfect. In one of the examples, the prompt, which asks for a video of a Dalmatian looking through a window and people “walking and cycling along the canal streets,” omits the people and the streets in the video entirely. OpenAI also warns that the model can struggle to understand cause and effect — it can generate a video of a person eating a cookie, for instance, but the cookie may not have bite marks.

Sora isn’t the first text-to-video model around. Other companies including Meta, Google and Runway, have either teased text-to-video tools or made them available to the public. Still, no other tool is currently able to generate videos as long as 60 seconds. Sora also generates entire videos at once, instead of putting them together frame-by-frame like other models, which makes sure that subjects in the video stay the same even when they go out of view temporarily.

The rise of text-to-video tools has sparked concerns over their potential to more easily create realistic-looking fake footage. “I am absolutely terrified that this kind of thing will sway a narrowly contested election,” Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in artificial intelligence, and the founder of True Media, an organization that works to identify disinformation in political campaigns, told The New York Times. And generative AI more broadly has sparked backlash from artists and creative professionals concerned about the technology being used to replace jobs.

OpenAI said that it was working with experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content and bias to test the tool before making it available to the public. The company is also building tools capable of detecting videos generated by Sora and including metadata in the generated videos for easier detection. The company declined to tell the Times how Sora had been trained, except stating that it used both “publicly available videos” as well as videos licensed from copyright holders.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openais-new-sora-model-can-generate-minute-long-videos-from-text-prompts-195717694.html?src=rss

The Apple Vision Pro is officially two weeks old, and the apps are starting to roll in. TikTok was conspicuously absent on launch day, but now our long national nightmare has come to an end. The Vision Pro has a native TikTok app.

This isn’t just the iPad app with a new coat of paint. There are some neat features here that take advantage of Apple’s well-regarded and prohibitively-expensive headset. The navigation bar and like button are moved entirely off-screen, giving users an uninterrupted view of video content.

TikTok

This extends to comment sections and creator profiles, as they both now appear as expansions alongside the feed, which TikTok says provides “a more immersive content viewing experience.” To that end, TikTok integrates with the headset’s immersive environments, so people can watch short-form videos on the moon or surrounded by the lush flora of Yosemite.

TikTok also works with the Vision Pro’s Shared Space feature, allowing the app to exist somewhere in your peripheral as you work on other stuff. The location of the app will remain static, so it’ll be in the same place every time you put on the headset (provided you are in the same room.)

You may notice that these features are primarily intended for content consumers, and not creators. Engadget reached out to TikTok to ask about creator-specific features and we’ll update this post when we hear back.

The app’s available for download right now, though it likely won’t be accessible for TikTok’s core userbase of 10 to 19 year olds. The Apple Vision Pro costs $3,500. That’s like an entire childhood of allowances.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-vision-pro-now-has-a-native-tiktok-app-193214818.html?src=rss