In The News
Weekend in review:
Navy sailors operating periscopes on Virginia-class submarines will now do it with Xbox 360 controllers, Military.com’s Brock Vergakis reports. “Lockheed Martin and Navy officials have been working to use commercial off-the-shelf technology to reduce costs and take advantage of the technological skills sailors grow up with. The integration of the video-game Xbox controller grew out of that effort.”
Who’s spending what? Nintendo led the charge in August for most money spent on TV advertising at around $4.5 million, VentureBeat’s Eleanor Semeraro writes. PlayStation came in 2nd at $2.5 million, InnoGames 3rd at $1.5, Xbox 4th at $1.3 million and King 5th at $1.3 million.
“There was an uptick in gaming industry spend for television, jumping to an estimated $17.1 million from July’s $12.2 million. In total, 29 brands ran 81 spots nearly 9,000 times and generated over 1.1 billion TV ad impressions.”
Battleborn will receive no future updates, creative director Randy Varnell announced Friday. Here’s a portion of his letter: “As of this week, there will be no more Battleplans and there is currently no planned content after the Fall Update … Never fear! Battleborn is here to stay. Nothing is changing with Battleborn, and the servers will be up and active for the foreseeable future.”
Steam peaked at over 15 million players online Sunday.
Oh, and on that note, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has surpassed Dota 2’s record for highest peak player count. PUBG hit 1,342,857 concurrents. The previous record was 1,295,114.
Thank you, Jenna Tulls, for that $1 donation. Oh yes, commentators Phil “EE” Visu and Daniel “DC” Coke fell for some word play while they were reading out donations at Smash The Record.
“Much like Games Done Quick, those who donate can have a message and their name read aloud on the stream, and two charitable souls took advantage,” Kotaku’s Eric Van Allen reports. I’ll let you figure out the other name.
Flog is the word. Apparently, data miners have found a hidden emulator and copy of NES game Golf in Nintendo Switchs. “This game packs instructions specific for the Joy-Con controllers, at least according to the images they supplied,” Owen S. Good at Polygon reports. “Switchbrew found Golf, un-cleverly disguised by the file name “flog” they say. That washed out of a dump of title names from the Nintendo Switch’s file system back in July.”
Meet Android 21. It’s Dragon Ball FighterZ’s new original character, Siliconera’s Sato writes. “Bandai Namco revealed a new original female character for Dragon Ball FighterZ designed by Akira Toriyama named ‘Android 21’ … Ryokutya describes her as a busty scientist with glasses and long bushy hair, who looks like she’d appear in a Tales of game.”
Check this out. ZaziNombies LEGO Creations built a Sunshot from Destiny 2 entirely out of Legos. “Built with over 500+ LEGO bricks, we bring Destiny 2’s Sunshot exotic hand cannon down to Earth!”
Using video games to help charity is always good news, and Humble Bundle just announced how much it has helped raise. “The pay-what-you-want charity has reached the $100 million milestone,” James Brightman at GamesIndustry.biz reports. “‘After the first Humble Indie Bundle, we were overwhelmed by everyone’s generosity,’ said John Graham, COO and co-founder at Humble Bundle.”
A lot of ads aren’t being seen, and some people are better at dodging them than others. “DoubleClick has released a report on video-ad viewability for 2017, registering a massive disparity between YouTube and other sites’ figures,” AListDaily’s Will Drickey writes. “Consumers in France, South Africa and Hong Kong were the savviest at avoiding video ads, reporting viewability figures of 59, 59 and 57 percent, respectively.”
Is it … is it happening? Players are able to do cross-platform play on Fortnite between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Eurogamer’s Tom Phillips reports. “Fortnite reddit users first noticed something was going on when they spotted players with Xbox gamertags popping up in PS4 matches.”