Two of the biggest outlets in games media are the latest to face layoffs. A number of editorial staff across both Giant Bomb and GameSpot revealed they’d been let go on Thursday, just months after the sites were purchased by the Fandom wiki network.
The layoffs were announced during a surprise all-hands meeting with Fandom CEO Perkins Miller, according to two sources familiar with the event. Roughly 40 to 50 employees were affected across the company, with at least some managers caught completely off guard by the cuts to their teams. Miller told staff that the Fandom network remained profitable despite the cuts, but declined to answer any questions, sources said.
Previously owned by Viacom CBS, Giant Bomb and GameSpot were both sold to Red Ventures in 2020, which then turned around and sold them again to Fandom last October, along with Metacritic, TV Guide, and other sites. “We’re thrilled to add these powerful, authoritative brands into the Fandom platform, which will expand our business capabilities and provide immersive content for our partners, advertisers and fans,” Miller said at the time. Fandom, whose business model revolves around plastering ads over free, user-generated content, is itself owned by private equity firm TPG Capital.
Fandom declined to comment.
G/O Media may get a commission
Up to $100 credit
Samsung Reserve
Reserve the next gen Samsung device All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.
Giant Bomb in particular has faced a number of shakeups recently. Co-founder Jeff Gerstmann left last summer to start a solo Patreon-funded podcast and former co-host Dan Ryckert returned to take his spot. Since then, the show has expanded its roster and included more crossover with GameSpot talent. Jess “Voidburger” O’Brien, who became a full-time Giant Bomb member in 2021, and Jason Oestreicher, who began back in 2014, were two of the people laid off today.
The latest gaming media cuts come just a month afterIGN faced its own surprise layoffs as its team was preparing to cover the 2022 Game Awards. Before that, Comcast shutdown its recently revived gaming network G4, Tencent gutted the staff at Fanbyte, and other sites like Game Informer, Polygon, and TechRadar cut staff numbers, too.
While the layoffs come at a time when companies from Microsoft to Amazon are reducing staff and advertisers are slashing budgets ahead of a recession manufactured by the Federal Reserve, not everyone is feeling pain. The CEO of IGN’s parent company, Vivek Shah, made roughly $16 million in 2021. TPG CEO Jon Winkelried, meanwhile, earned over $80 million that same year, in addition to the hundreds of millions he raked in during his decades long career at Goldman Sachs.
Update 1/19/23 5:01 p.m. ET: Added more information about the extent of the cuts and the all-hands where there were announced.
John Carmack, legendary game designer, rocket guy and VR enthusiast, has announced that he is leaving both Meta/Facebook, and the virtual reality business itself, behind after a decade as one of its most prominent champions.
Carmack’s position was as an executive consultant. Having initially sent his farewell message to colleagues in an internal memo, when that was leaked in part to the media he decided to post the whole thing—including some clarifications—on his Facebook page instead.
Here it is in full:
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization’s performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
As his clarification states, while his comments may seem damning, they’re not necessarily related to any individual people he worked with, or decisions made above him. They’re more about his clear passion for the idea of optimisation itself, a structural and systemic issue that, at a company as big as Meta, might have been maddening for a guy used to writing code and firing rockets into space.
This would normally be the part of a story where I would drop some conjecture, maybe how such a high-profile departure might spell trouble for Meta’s efforts in the space, but lol, I think Meta are doing a good enough job of shouting that from the rooftops themselves.
According to The Verge, which was provided with a render of the new hardware, HTC is planning to reveal yet another consumer-focused virtual reality and augmented reality headset at CES 2023 next month, with features that will potentially rival the recently-announced Meta Quest Pro, including full-color passthrough video.
Although the full announcement and reveal is still a few weeks away, HTC teased some early details about the unannounced hardware to The Verge. Like the Meta Quest Pro and older Quest models, the headset will be a self-contained, all-in-one unit (unlike most of HTC’s other offerings, which requires a permanent connection to a gaming PC) with roughly two hours of battery life and support for controllers with six-degrees of detected motion, plus hand-tracking.
The unnamed headset will also include front-facing and side-facing cameras, allowing the wearer to still see their surroundings in full color, facilitating augmented reality and mixed reality experiences. That was arguably the most compelling reason to splurge on the recently announced, $1,500 Quest Pro, as Meta’s older headsets only provide a grainy, black and white video feed of a user’s surroundings to help ensure they don’t crash into anything (or anyone). However, the new HTC headset will potentially outperform the competition, with HTC promising enough detail to allow users to still read text on computers and smartphones through the passthrough video, while the addition of a depth sensor will also make it much better at accurately mapping a user’s surroundings and inserting virtual content into it.
The render of the new headset doesn’t provide too many additional details, although it doesn’t look substantially different to the recent HTC Vive Flow, which looked like an over-sized pair of safety glasses. That goes with hints HTC posted this October that its next big product will be compact and lightweight.
G/O Media may get a commission
HTC will also reveal details about the new headset’s pricing at CES, but Shen Ye, the company’s global head of product, told The Verge that it doesn’t plan to subsidize the hardware by collecting and selling users’ data, and as a result the new hardware will probably be considerably more expensive than the $400 Meta Quest 2. That’s good news for those who value their privacy, but it could make the new headset a tough sell for most consumers, who seem happy to trade privacy for heavily discounted hardware.”
Update 12/16/22 at 2:05 PM:
This article originally stated that the Vive Focus 3 required a PC connection, which is not the case. We regret the error.
Image: Meta / Kotaku / Oleg Krugliak (Shutterstock)
Meta’s Facebook is (was?) one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with billions of users. However, its failing virtual reality metaverse project, Horizon Worlds, isn’t doing nearly as well. In fact, a new report shows that barely anyone is spending much time in Horizon Worlds at all, with most user-created worlds going completely unvisited. Meanwhile, Second Life and VRChat have more concurrent users, according to folks at Meta.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, internal documents and employees at Meta paint a picture that nobody is really playing Horizon Worlds, its free-to-play virtual reality metaverse that lets users create and visit “worlds” with friends or strangers. Think Roblox, but more cold and heartless. The company initially hoped to have 500,000 monthly active users visiting these various virtual worlds. Now that number has been revised to around 200,000.
Internal stats show that most players don’t stick around after their first month in Horizon Worlds and Meta has seen a steady decline in active users since spring. WSJ reports that of all the user-created worlds in the game, only about nine percent are visited by more than 50 players. The majority of the rest are never visited by anyone besides the initial creator. The end result is a lot of empty, barren digital lands. Even Questy’s—-a world created by Meta as part of a larger Super Bowl marketing push—-is a giant flop, with very few users visiting.
“An empty world is a sad world,” said one document seen by the WSJ.
And while theQuest 2 headset has sold very well, a lot of the customers aren’t returning to play anything. It’s reported that more than half of all Quest headsets stop being used by players after only six months.
Read More: The Metaverse Is Already Here For Cows And Its Very Sad
As for why people aren’t flocking to the expensive metaverse that Facebook has created, a survey run by Meta researchers found users mostly complained about being unable to find worlds they liked and rarely found others to interact with. Other complaints included in-game people not looking “real” enough. Some even had issues with the lack of Horizon World avatar legs. I guess that explains all the fanfare around legs being added to the game earlier this month, even if the announcement was a lie.
The WSJ notes that the researchers at Meta only spoke to 514 people because of how few folks are playing, calling the current active playerbase “small and precious.” It’s not surprising to hear that, according to those familiar with Horizon Worlds, the app has fewer concurrent users than VRChat and 2003’s Second Life.
The rest of the report isn’t much better and is further evidence that the VR metaverse future that so many companies and tech bros are trying to peddle is likely not going to stick with folks. Hell, the people who work at Meta don’t want to use Horizon Worlds. And Meta seems to get how unpopular all this shit is with your average consumer, as it’s now begun to pivot its new VR headsets toward big companies that can be tricked into making their employees wear a VR headset for eight hours a day at work. But at least folks will always have the Walmart Metaverse to hang out in between breaks, right?
Earlier this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to demonstrate that, having spent billions of dollars to create a virtual reality universe (Horizon Worlds) that looked like it was from 2004, his company was working on improving that universe to make it look like it was from 2009 instead. Integral to this upgrade was the fact that avatars would no longer be mere floating torsos, but would soon have legs.
It was a very weird video existing in a very weird space, as Ethan wrote at the time:
Today’s model is clearly an extension of that early rendering, and finally brings the VR platform past the likes of Fire Emblem: Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS, another game that lacked legs. And that was with Meta only spending $10 billion this year on the technology. Who knows what another small fortune will bring? If anything can catapult the Oculus storefront into the green, it’s a burgeoning market for VR feet pics. It might seem like we’re being ridiculous here, but do know that the live chat alongside the virtual audience watching all of this unfold absolutely exploded when Zuckerberg started talking about feet.
While the updates expecting to bring full-body avatars aren’t expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?
Anyone who has ever been around *checks the culture* any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help.
As UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”
Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to photo tricks shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company trying to sell us something that isn’t out yet.
But there’s something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a Kinect demo—a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009—has ended up with its own dumb feet-related moment.
Who knows, maybe when it’s eventually released the tech will looks exactly like this! Maybe it won’t. Maybe none of us will ever actually use Horizon Worlds and it will remain a mystery forever.
As of last week, a long-held dream of playing Valve’s landmark 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 in virtual reality has finally come to fruition. The journey began nearly 10 years ago, when a man named Nathan Andrews managed to hack together a functioning version of the all-time classic in VR. This was before any Vives, Indexes, Quests, or Oculi. With a primitive Sony HMZ-T1 and specialized motion-tracking gear, Andrews risked a resonance cascade scenario to splice together a working foundation for a full Half-Life 2 VR mod. Over the next decade, dozens of volunteers would contribute to the off-then-on-again project, all in hopes of one day bashing enemies with a crowbar in semi-lifelike virtual reality.
And now Half Life 2: VR Mod is ready to play, thanks to the hard work of the Source VR Mod Team and their free, open beta available on Steam. There’s more work to be done for sure—a public roadmap shows what’s to come—but the entire main campaign is already up and running, and pretty surreal to experience. Sharp corners and all, Half-Life 2: VR Mod is well worth checking out right now if you can.
The differences are quite immediate. The G-Man’s opening scene grants a whole other sense of scale since you have active depth perception. Images flash and appear inside of him as fully realized 3D spaces, which you can actually peer inside of and see with greater depth and dimension. This new presentation grants more weight to the whole scene.
Gif: Valve / Source VR Mod Team / Kotaku
As a video game graphics experience in VR, it’s super cool. Your eyes can track flying debris and exploding barrels with the ease and speed of just turning your head. The violence and realistic physics of Half-Life 2 are no longer just simulations appearing on a screen in front of you; they’re happening in a 3D space you feel a sense of presence and dimension in. It all feels so natural that it’s easy to forget this is the end result of a decade of hacked tech created by enthusiastic fans.
And while there’s still more work to be done on the weapons, it is a thrill to be able to virtually hold, examine, and fight with these classic video game armaments. Smashing the aggressive, flying manhacks with a crowbar in VR is so obscenely fun that I want a mini spin-off mod of this alone. And my Fitbit tells me I’m earning “Zone Minutes” by whacking these things. The 9mm pistol feels fun to aim and shoot (and yes, I am only aiming with one hand). More modern VR games tend to have smoother reload mechanics, so this mod’s feel a bit clunky sometimes, but the action remains just as hectic and fun.
Half-Life 2 VR Mod Brings City 17 To Life
In a way it feels like Half-Life 2 was always supposed to be this way. It is very easy to lose yourself in this mod, both as a VR experience and a Half-Life one. It easily pushes past the status of “tech demo” or “mod,” feeling like it’s shaping up to be a solid VR game in its own right.
The Half-Life 2: VR Mod project is currently being worked on by users from the Flatscreen to VR Discord server, led by WormSlayer, whose involvement goes back to the earliest days of the project. Back then, WormSlayer caught sight of Andrews’ early prototypes and offered his talents, starting with work on the gun models.
WormSlayer’s description of the mod’s early days sounds like something you’d need to slap together to survive City 17 itself. The assemblage of tech included a “Sony head-mounted TV, a gun controller for a console, and a professional 3D tracking system [Andrews] had access to,” WormSlayer told Kotaku. That headset in question was the Sony HMZ-T1, which sported “an eye-watering resolution of 640×720 per eye, and a 45-degree field of view,” WormSlayer said. That headset would be left behind in favor of the Oculus DK1, the first hardware the just-incorporated Oculus (now Meta) ever released. You can see footage from those early days in a 2013 YouTube video.
Nathan Andrews
As such an early consumer VR experiment, the project was destined for some roadbumps as new tech hit the scene, quickly aging out existing standards. “Valve and Oculus both abandoned the idea of treating a VR headset as just another monitor,” WormSlayer said. “This was a sound idea for many reasons, but it effectively broke VR support in Half-Life 2.”
After that switch up, the team gave up for a while. Andrews retired from the project entirely. Eager VR community members, however, persuaded WormSlayer to reconsider dropping it all together. “[They] were confident they could hack OpenVR support into the old project,” WormSlayer said. And so the project sparked to life again, making great progress before once again resuming its slumber as essential contributors moved on.
Thankfully, the nascent Half-Life 2: VR Mod would indeed see a second resurgence when the Flatscreen to VR community mustered up a new team. Now that the public beta is out and playable, they’re focusing their efforts on bringing the project to a fully polished and finalized state.
As playable and fun as it is right now, Half-Life 2: VR Mod still has some issues, primarily regarding performance. “The old engine is very single-threaded and only supports DirectX 9, so even with our hacked-together DXVK implementation, we’ve been fighting to hit FPS targets in some places,” WormSlayer said. While I’ve yet to get to some of the more chaotic scenes of the game’s latter half, I’ve found performance so far to be quite good. Given that there’s no teleport-style movement option, however, this mod might be tough on the stomach if you’re new to VR.
Ultimately, the physics and tech of Half-Life 2 are still a joy to play with 18 years later. VR only amplifies the physicality of its world, with the ability to virtually pick up and manipulate objects. Half-Life 2: VR Mod is no Half-Life: Alyx in terms of the sheer amount of interactable objects, but it fits in well as a VR-worthy prequel. And with the addition of the crowbar and a head-mounted flashlight, it has more than a few features and comforts of its own. Being able to virtually manipulate objects in the world is a refreshing way to revisit many of the game’s puzzles.
The most surprising thing for me, however, was how this experience is affecting my perception of the game’s characters, especially the silent protagonist himself.
Gif: Valve / Source VR Mod Team / Kotaku
Gordon Freeman is a quiet guy even when he’s frantically destroying shit. But even just being able to nod at an NPC marks a 100% increase in inter-character interaction. Playing Half-Life 2 and being able to wave at Dr. Kleiner as he shouts with excitement upon seeing you makes me wonder: Is Gordon Freeman even a waver? Does he give a thumbs up to indicate he understands? Does he shake or nod his head when people talk to him? How have I never thought about this for all these years?
NPCs also look at you at eye level in a very eerie way. This feeling exists in other, more modern VR games, but it’s surprising to find it so present in a game from 2004. The simplicity of the models, with gentle head animations and eyes that give a hint of personality and awareness, just barely inches the game out of the uncanny valley into something that starts to feel realistic.
I’m not saying nodding, gesturing, and looking people in the eyes are the hot features you list on the back of the box (that’s saved for viciously beating the shit out of metal manhacks with a crowbar and seeing this classic game in true 3D), but it sure does change the tone of Half-Life 2. One nitpick here: It’s a shame you can’t see your hands while piloting the airboat. Not only did my eyes never leave the G-Man as I blazed past him in my escape from the Combine, I would’ve loved to stare and point dead at him, as if to say “I see you motherfucker. I see you.”
I’m looking forward to playing through the rest of Half-Life 2: VR Mod, spotting the unique changes the new format adds and inspires. There’s still work to be done by WormSlayer and the team, including more improvements to the weapons, tweaks to make the game a bit easier for folks prone to motion sickness, and even some AI-upscaled textures to give the more aged aspects of the graphics a bit of a facelift. Those changes will be very welcome, but for now this first playable version makes for a great way to jump back into this classic game. If you like Half-Life and own a PCVR headset, you should download this yesterday.
It’s been a rough 24 hours for people broadcasting in purple. After a scandal broke that a Twitch streamer had been scamming viewers and peers alike out of an alleged $200,000 to fund a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive addiction, top personalities started exerting pressure on the live-streaming company to do something about the larger, underlying problem. Gambling, many have been arguing for a while now, has become a scourge on the platform, as a number of rich creators promoted potentially harmful content to young, impressionable fans. While Twitch appeared to just let it happen for a long time, the Amazon-owned platform announced a massive change regarding gambling streams today that will have big ramifications for creators and viewers alike.
According to a new update issued on social media, Twitch will no longer allow “streaming of gambling sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games that aren’t licensed in the U.S. or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protections.” The list currently includes Stake.com, Rollbit.com, Duelbits.com, and Roobet.com though Twitch says that it may expand as the company continues to evaluate the situation. Twitch will however continue to allow sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker. These appear to be the high-level changes that will take effect starting on October 18th, and Twitch is geared to share more specifics soon.
While we don’t yet have all the information regarding gambling on the platform, it’s likely that Twitch is sharing these key details early due to all the commotion that’s been kicked up in late September. Earlier this week, streamers like Pokimane suggested they would team up with some of the other popular personalities on the platform and strike during a high-volume time, like Christmas, unless Twitch issued a statement on the crisis or decreed new gambling rules.
While the new rules don’t ban gambling outright, they do take aim at some of the biggest websites that are either favored by streamers, or sponsor well-known streamers. And the ramifications will be huge: Not only is gambling one of the most popular categories of content, with the biggest faces on the platform such as xQc partaking, some creators like Tyler Faraz “Trainwreck” Niknam have stated that they make up to a million a month from the gambling companies they feature on-stream.
G/O Media may get a commission
$10 or more
Humble Bundle – Starlight Bundle
Benefit the Starlight Children’s Foundation For $10 or more, you can help hospitalized kids get access to video games—and get some sweet games for yourself too, including Lego Star Wars – The Complete Saga.
That’s not counting how much might be made from viewers gambling while sharing the referral codes streamers blast on stream (something they no longer can do), or any other sponsorships a Twitch streamer might receive through more conventional means on the platform. While these streamers have stressed in the past that they’ve told viewers not to gamble themselves, it was obvious that business was booming.
In its announcement, Twitch reminded people that it already had some gambling rules in place, but that “some people circumvent those rules and expose our community to potential harm.”
While the new rules aren’t live yet, people who pushed for this change are celebrating. There was, after all, plenty of skepticism over whether or not Twitch would do anything further about gambling, with some highly-visible creators like Hasan Abi expressing that the activity simply generated too much revenue for the platform to prohibit it outright.
“We did it y’all,” Pokimane, who got over 300,000 people expressing support against gambling streams in a single day, tweeted. “Public pressure, tweets, raising awareness, it all matters.”
After years in development, and loads of ups and downs along the way, the developers of a virtual reality mod for the original Half-Life 2 have announced a public beta that’ll be kicking off next month.
Half-Life 2: VR has been in development for so long that it was originally part of Steam’s Greenlight program back in 2017, and indeed has been worked on by some involved in the project since 2013. The slow going has been mostly due to the fact that, unlike Alyx, the game simply wasn’t designed to be played in VR, and so there are numerous sections that have been difficult if not impossible to port to a headset.
Buoyed by “overwhelmingly positive feedback from our private beta testers” in recent weeks, however, the developers have steeled themselves and now believe “that the game as it is now can not only be fully completed from start to finish, but it’s also very enjoyable to do so”.
As a result they’ve announced that next month they’ll be holding a public beta showcasing everything that’s up and running so far. Which, judging by the trailer below—that includes vehicle sections—is a lot:
Half-Life 2: VR — Public Beta Announcement Trailer
By now you’ve probably got some questions, particularly about movement and vehicles, which the developer’s FAQ section has answers for:
What movement options are available?
The mod features smooth locomotion, where the direction of motion can be configured to either follow your head or any of the two controllers. Turning can be configured to be either smooth or in fixed intervals (snap turns).
There is currently no teleport movement available, and it is unclear if it will become a viable option in the future.
How will you handle the vehicle sections? I don’t think I can stomach them in VR.
Right now, the vehicle rides do indeed require strong VR legs. However, there are some comfort options available to help you survive them. A classic movement vignette is available and can be activated for the vehicle rides. While riding the vehicles, the borders of your screen will be blackened, reducing your field of view and reducing the impact of the motion sickness. Additionally, you can choose to experience the vehicle rides from a 3rd person camera perspective. In this mode, the camera is following the vehicle at a distance and is not directly subjected to the vehicle’s rapid movements and turns, which should reduce motion sickness dramatically. It does, however, make controlling the vehicles a little more awkward.
In the future, we may implement an additional mode where the vehicle rides are put on a virtual 2D screen in front of the user, so that everyone has a chance to get through the vehicle sections in the game. This mode would of course be less immersive than the current ones as it’d remove any 3D effect from the experience.
That virtual 2D screen option sounds ideal for anyone who gets queasy! You can read more about the project, and see which areas they’re still tackling, at its website.
Bungie was served a bit of a loss this week in its ongoing legal war against cheat makers and sellers. On Wednesday, a federal judge dismissed Bungie’s copyright infringement claims against website AimJunkies while agreeing with the cheat seller’s legal defense that the Destiny publisher’s other, non-trademark-related claims should skip the court and be resolved via arbitration. However, this isn’t the end of the case.
As reported by TorrentFreak, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly has sided with AimJunkies and its legal team and dismissed Bungie’s copyright infringement claims against the site after the Destiny maker failed to show that AimJunkies had actually copied anything.
“Notably, Bungie has not pleaded any facts explaining how the cheat software constitutes an unauthorized copy of any of the copyrighted works identified in the complaint,” wrote Judge Zilly. “Bungie’s complaint must contain more than a ‘formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action.’”
Bungie will be allowed to fix its copyright claim and add more evidence, but at least for the time being the judge has dismissed it entirely.
Read More: Riot And Bungie Go After Valorant And Destiny 2 Cheat Sellers In Joint Lawsuit
Judge Zilly similarly agreed with AimJunkies in regard to many other claims in Bungie’s lawsuit regarding breach of contract, tortious interference, and unjust enrichment. The judge referred all non-trademark claims to arbitration, which is in line with Bungie’s own License Agreement. That agreement explained that aside from copyright and trademark disputes, all other legal conflicts should be resolved by mandatory arbitration. Last year, AimJunkies argued against much of Bungie’s lawsuit and pointed toward the agreement’s mandatory arbitration clause as part of its defense. Now, it seems that Judge Zilly sides with the cheat sellers, suggesting both parties find a solution to the non-trademark and copyright disputes outside of court.
Kotaku contacted Bungie about the recent dismissals and Judge Zilly’s decisions.
However, while AimJunkies might be pleased with these rulings and dismissals, the case isn’t over. Bungie’s claims that the site violated trademark laws were left intact, with the judge agreeing that Bungie’s other accusations are “sufficiently stated” and that the case can go ahead based on the remaining allegations. Those other claims include trademark violations and false origin claims.
AimJunkies reportedly told TorrentFreak that it’s not commenting on the matter just yet. However, the site’s owner did explain that they are in the final stages of selling the company to a group of investors in Ukraine.
Although the old top-down version of Grand Theft Auto was at one time ported to the Game Boy Color, the experience was nowhere near as fun as the notorious 3D versions of the game, so Sebastian Staacks decided to fix that and has come up with a way to actually play Grand Theft Auto V on the original Game Boy through the magic of game streaming.
As our various devices gain speed in accessing the internet rapidly increases through technologies like 5G and the recently demonstrated wifi 7, it seems inevitable that downloading giant video game installs or buying physical cartridges and discs will soon be a thing of the past. Streaming will undoubtedly be the real future of gaming, where titles run on powerful cloud servers while video of the gameplay is transmitted to players, exactly how services like Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming work—and there’s no more convincing demonstration of the true potential of game streaming than what Sebastian Staacks has come up with for their latest demo.
The last time we checked in with Staacks, they were demonstrating an original Game Boy streaming Star Wars. And while the movie has never looked worse than when it was compressed to 160 x 144 pixels running at 20 frames per second in four shades of gray, it was still a neat accomplishment. The secret behind the Game Boy’s newfound streaming capabilities was a custom cartridge Staacks designed and built around a wireless ESP8266 microchip and a custom PCB squeezed inside a Game Boy cartridge shell.
But Staacks is far from done with their custom Game Boy cartridge, and in a follow-up video and a new post on their personal blog, they share not only more details about the challenges of displaying full-screen video on the Game Boy’s screen which is limited to a tile-based rendering system, but also some new tricks added to the cartridge. Not only can it now be used to stream gameplay footage in real-time, but the Game Boy can also be used to actually play titles like GTA V using its own controls.
The experience doesn’t come anywhere close to playing Grand Theft Auto V on a PlayStation console, obviously. Not only will the Game Boy’s screen still burn your retinas, but the handheld lacks all the buttons and analog joysticks that help make 3D games feel so interactive. But the fact that you can is what makes this hack so impressive, and while Staacks has made the entire project open source for those wanting to attempt to build their own wireless cartridge, we’re going to remain hopeful that someone decides to build and sell these en masse for the rest of us.