In The News
Bronze, silver and the ever-elusive gold. Not to mention some pretty atrocious outfits. All of these things could soon be within reach for esports professionals. Talks are ongoing for esports to potentially join the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
“Tony Estanguet, co-president of the Paris Olympic bid committee, told The Associated Press that he will hold talks with esports representatives and the IOC about the possibility of gaming joining the 2024 program,” AP reports. “Estanguet believes that a contest of digital prowess should be considered a legitimate sport if the Olympics is to maintain its relevance for new generations of fans.”
Your brain may react differently depending on the game you’re playing. Call of Duty, for example, shrinks your hippocampus (part of the brain dealing with memory, emotions and spatial navigation) while Mario Kart enlarges it. That’s according to “a study published Tuesday in Molecular Psychiatry,” NPR’s Courtney Columbus reports. Not to worry, though, one professor told NPR, “‘I would never interpret this finding as a big warning against action video games.’” Who needs a big hippo-whatever, anyway?
Google and Blizzard are teaching AI how to play StarCraft II, and they want your help!
“Anyone who wants can tinker with DeepMind’s new toolset, SC2LE, to facilitate their own AI research” can, Engadget’s David Lumb writes. “The bundle includes a pair of kits up on GitHub: first, Blizzard’s machine learning API, which has Linux tools for the first time, and then an open source version of the DeepMind toolset called PySC2. Blizzard also provided some extra goodies, like a dataset of anonymized 1v1 game replays for programmers to parse through, along with sample code and some sample bots. DeepMind also provided a white paper for reference.”
Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene spoke a bit about what he plans to do about Battlegrounds, and how long he hopes to support the game for. “Greene said he sees Battlegrounds as more of a platform/service than a one-off release. You can expect developer Bluehole to support the game for many more years to come,” GameSpot’s Eddie Makuch reports. “‘This game to us is not just a game that we’re going to push out a full launch and stop working on. We want to go back to it in maybe a year’s time and look at doing like Erangel 2.0 with everything we’ve learned over the past year and just redoing the whole island to make it that little bit better and more polished.’”
If you had $1,365 to spend on something, would you spend it on a 3DS bundle? Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft reports that the “Ace Attorney 1 – 6 Premium Edition” bundle includes “Ace Attorney 1 to Ace Attorney 6, an Ace Attorney 4 mini soundtrack CD, a original box, a set of 15 postcards, a box for those postcards signed by art director Takuro Fuse, a sheet signed by Ace Attorney designer Shu Takumi and a 7 gram pure gold memorial plate.”
Tales from the Borderlands now has an oral history, thanks to writer Duncan Fyfe, who “has written and compiled an oral history of Telltale’s Tales From the Borderlands, the 2014-2015 narrative adventure based on the world of Gearbox’s Borderlands,” Game Informer’s Imran Khan reports. “The article covers the genesis of how the game was first pitched, how it needed to differ from Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Gearbox’s pensiveness, and more.”
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice has received a pretty warm welcome so far. Not only does it seem to be a good game, but as H.B. Duran at AListDaily points out, “it’s a demonstration of emerging game development technology while offering an empathetic, first-person view of mental illness … The project is supported in part by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation committed to a greater public understanding of science and health. Ninja Theory worked closely with experts in the field of mental illness, as well as people who shared their real-life experiences.”
Tempo Storm and NVIDIA are officially partners. They made the announcement yesterday and are celebrating by giving away one “GeForce GTX 1080 and five GeForce USB drives.”
NetEase hauled in $1.4 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2017. “For the three months ended June 30th, revenues for NetEase games were reported as $1.4bn, up 46.5% when compared to the same period last year,” James Batchelor at GamesIndustry.biz writes. “The main drivers of this growth were identified as mobile RPG Onmyoji and the new mobile version of New Ghost.”