Tag Archives: Xbox 360 software

Technology

Xbox Game Pass Is About To Get One Of 2022’s Best Games

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Image: Raw Fury

Just because the spooky season has passed doesn’t mean Microsoft’s Netflix-like subscription service is fresh out of spice to stimulate your gaming senses for the rest of November. While November’s assortment of games isn’t quite as loaded as last month’s helpings, it does feature a diverse hodgepodge of games, including one of the best-written titles to come out of 2022.

Here’s everything coming to and leaving Xbox Game Pass in the coming weeks:

November 15

  • Pentiment (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Somerville (Cloud, Console and PC)
  • Vampire Survivors (Cloud)

November 17

  • Dune: Spice Wars (Game Preview) (PC)
  • Ghostlore (Game Preview) (PC)
  • Lapin (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Norco (Cloud and Console)

November 22

  • Gungrave G.O.R.E (Cloud, Console, and PC)

November 29

  • Insurgency: Sandstorm (Cloud and Console)
  • Soccer Story (Cloud, Console, and PC)

November 30

  • Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (PC)

Read More: A Stunning Southern Dystopia Is One Of The Best-Written Games Of The Year

The creme de la creme of this month’s assortment of Game Pass games isn’t the spice melange of the Dune real-time strategy game but rather a little-known text-based point-and-click adventure game called Norco. You play as Kay, a 20-year-old woman who returns to her childhood home after the passing of her mother from cancer. When you aren’t completing your mother’s half-finished chores with the help of a self-aware robot named Million, you’re searching the industrial underbelly of New Orleans for your brother Blake, who went missing shortly after your mother’s passing. In our review of Norco, Kotaku said the game is “a stunning piece of magical realism” with exceptional dialogue that “plays its cards with enormous subtlety.”

If you missed out on playing this gem when it was a Game Pass PC offering back in March, now’s your chance to give this Disco Elysium-esque game a try. Fair warning, Norco contains instances of violence, suicide, substance use, and mature language.

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If you’re in the upper echelon of Game Pass’ Ultimate tier and feel a tingle in your spine at the fact that “LeBron James frame data” is a phrase you can say now that makes sense, you get the added bonus of a free MultiVersus MVP pack drop this month. Obviously, reaping the benefits of this bundle’s variant, ring-out, and banners requires you to have the MultiVersus installed on your gaming device. And all Game Pass subscribers will get a bounty of DLC updates for The Elder Scrolls Online: Firesong (available today), The Elder Scrolls Online: Dark Heart of Skyrim Celebration (available on November 17), and Dead by Daylight: Forged in Fog (available on November 22).

Game Pass, much like the saying “out with the old in with the new,” is losing some games to make way for the new hotness. The following games are going back into the Xbox vault as of November 30:

  • Archvale (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Deeeer Simulator (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Console and PC)
  • Mind Scanners (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Mortal Shell (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Undungeon (Cloud, Console, and PC)
  • Warhammer 40,000 Battlesector (Cloud, Console, and PC)

      

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Business

The test run of Netflix’s password crackdown isn’t going well

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Netflix
Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Everyone get your tiny violins ready, we have some bad news for Netflix that we feel really, really bad about. Really. We feel sooo bad for Netflix. We’re holding back tears over here, screaming to the heavens about how Netflix doesn’t deserve to be punished and how too many bad things happen to the perfectly nice streaming services that never do anything wrong. Not ever!

But yeah, the bad news: The test run of Netflix’s new system for cracking down on people who are sharing their password, currently happening in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru, is not going well. Super sad, right?! Apparently, the core issue is one of messaging, with Netflix charging people the equivalent of $2 or $3 extra to share their account with anyone outside of their “household,” but the exact definition of “household” seems… predictably vague and limiting.

Apparently, the official Netflix stance is that a household is “exclusively people a subscriber lives with” and not a subscriber’s immediate family. This comes from Rest Of World, which says that the National Institute For The Defense Of Free Competition And The Protection Of Intellectual Property believes this could be taken as “a way of discriminating against users arbitrarily.” Basically, the idea seems to be that a Netflix account would be tied to a physical location, which just sets up a lot of questions that Netflix doesn’t seem to have solved—like what if you move, or you’re on vacation, or your child goes off to school?

Rest Of World spoke to “more than a dozen” Netflix subscribers in Peru who said that they were confused about the new rules and that Netflix wasn’t even enforcing them, with an anonymous customer service rep saying they were told that, if a customer calls and complains, they should be given a special verification code that will let them use their account in multiple locations. So even Netflix doesn’t seem particularly concerned with sticking to this system.

The downside is that these all seem like solvable problems, or—if you want to be cynical—problems that Netflix could just ignore. Limiting an account to a physical location is only a problem if you think Netflix gives a shit about screwing over customers. Seeing as how we’re even talking about an anti-sharing crackdown in the first place, it seems pretty obvious just how much Netflix cares.

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Entertainment

Netflix launches new Top 10 tracker website

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Red Notice
Photo: Netflix

We’ve criticized the way Netflix handles viewership data in the past, pointing out that some of the platform’s claims about the popularity of certain titles doesn’t make sense or that all of the numbers are questionable given the fact that Netflix counts watching a few minutes of a thing as watching the whole thing. Lately, though, Netflix has tried to offer more context for how it determines that information in hopes of appeasing skeptics.

Now, Netflix has presented its most explicit attempt yet to showcase a legitimate ranking of its most popular shows and movies, all through a surprisingly slick and seemingly data-driven website with some easily digestible streaming statistics. The website, Top10 On Netflix, features running lists of the most popular movies, the most popular TV shows, and the most popular non-English movies and TV shows.

It even lists which countries include a particular movie/show in their respective top 10s, allows you to bring up lists specifically for other countries (which often include things that aren’t on American Netflix), tracks how long movies/TV shows have been in the top 10, and (at least on the global chart), has archived data going back to previous weeks, and allows you to see how many hours have been spent watching something—so even if it’s just a couple of minutes per person, it could still mean that a lot of people watched those minutes.

The whole thing is still clearly a marketing tool, since the data is coming from Netflix and therefore represents information that Netflix wants you to see, but it is at least interesting to see this kind of transparency from the company. Yes, it’s good for Netflix to be able to say “look how popular Red Notice is” after Red Notice comes out, but everything that’s not on this list is presumably less popular than the things that are. You’d never catch Disney, for example, saying that any one thing on Disney+ is less popular than any other thing.

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Technology

Netflix’s Attempt at Gaming Is Awkward As Hell

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Photo: Brianna Provenzano/Gizmodo

Today, after months of reading and writing about Netflix’s highly anticipated, if bizarre, foray into gaming, I finally stretched my hands out like a cartoon character and sat down with my iPhone to see what all the fuss is about—and to get a better idea of what the most popular streaming platform in the world sees its role in the gaming space as being.

As an iOS user, I had to wait my turn; Android users were first able to download the new games from the Google Play Store on Nov. 2, which was also the day a new ‘Games’ tab showed up within the Netflix app on their phones. Those in the Apple ecosystem have to download the games in a similarly roundabout way, but in our case, it’s because Apple has strict policies that require games to be downloaded as standalone entities from the App Store.

Stranger Things 3: The Game
Photo: Brianna Provenzano/Gizmodo

Just in case you’re curious, the five new games do seem eminently playable. Stranger Things: 1984 is a cutesy 8-bit RPG that does a good job of capturing the charm of the hit show itself (“Looks like I picked a bad day to quit smoking,” a tiny pixelated Jim Hopper laments when you tap on his ashtray in the game’s first scene). Stranger Things 3: The Game, which was actually first released in 2019 to mixed reviews, is there too; the other three games are not pegged to anything specifically Netflix-branded but are still fun in the way that getting a ball in a hole or playing cards can be fun when you’re trying to pass the time on public transportation.

But the fact that the games are pleasant isn’t necessarily a surprise. When Netflix acquired Night School Studio, the indie game developer that’s known for having a couple of cult classics under its belt, back in September, it was a good sign that the platform had its finger on the pulse of the gaming scene and wanted to nail the kind of narrative gaming it had set out to produce. In reality, the more compelling question has always been less ‘Are these games good?’ and more so, ‘What are they doing here in the first place?’

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All colors on sale today
Gizmodo describes these premium headphones as “annoyingly incredible.” This is the lowest we’ve seen the Apple AirPods Max yet.

Stranger Things: 1984 has charmingly retro 8-bit graphics
Photo: Brianna Provenzano/Gizmodo

While Netflix is still the undisputed king of streaming, it’s obvious that the platform has been having some anxieties about how to hold onto its crown—particularly as it watches relative newcomer Disney+ charge into its lane, threatening to supplant it by 2024. Netflix has market share to protect and shareholders to appease, after all; the company isn’t going down without a fight. But what has sprung forth from the platform in recent months has been nothing short of an unstemmed tide of efforts to set itself far afield of its streaming counterparts that, to put it bluntly, reek of desperation and are weird as hell.

In fact, Netflix’s strategies to shore up subscribers in 2021 seem like they could fit pretty comfortably into two buckets, both of which are what I’m sure executives imagine very cool young people want: Have Games and Be TikTok. Back in March, the platform unveiled “Fast Laughs,” the TikTok-like infinite scroll feed that serves as a highlight reel of the platform’s comedy offerings. Just one day before its games debuted on iOS, Netflix also announced that it was testing a “Kids Clips” feature that will ostensibly help to expose young viewers to its vast library of children’s content.

Everyone loves video games, but no one is going to subscribe to a streaming service just so they can play Shooting Hoops, a game that is, for some reason, not actually about basketball, but about getting a tiny basketball with a gun on the end of it into a hoop. That’s putting aside the fact that you have to download the games separately; you can’t simply stream them directly within Netflix.

Everyone loves TikTok, but no one wants to use an endless scroll feature embedded within the Netflix mobile app to watch 15-second clips of funny moments from the platform’s shows. I feel like I can see the beads of sweat forming on Netflix’s brow, and it’s making me uncomfortable.

You know where Netflix should really be ramping up investments? Its international programming offerings, where the platform has seen promising successes this year both in its adoption of more Africa-centric and African-produced programming and with Squid Game, the South Korea-produced undisputed runaway hit. But honestly, what do I know—I’m not a CEO, I’m just an idiot addicted to Shooting Hoops.

Netflix’s new games—Stranger Things: 1984, Stranger Things 3: The Game, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, and Teeter Up—are now available for current subscribers on Android and iOS.

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Entertainment

Netflix’s Squid Game Will Reportedly Generate $900M in Value

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Photo: Giuseppe Cacace / AFP (Getty Images)

A look at Netflix’s show data, which is normally held under lock and key and not available to the public, has provided a new information on what the success of South Korean drama Squid Game means to the company. In short, buckets and buckets of money and lots of people sticking around until the end.

Citing confidential data in internal Netflix documents, Bloomberg published a report on Sunday stating that Squid Game will generate roughly $900 million in value for the company. This number doesn’t refer to sales—the company doesn’t sell specific shows—but rather reflects the unique way Netflix determines a show’s contribution to its bottom line based on how many subscribers have watched it.

The number alone would be impressive, but what makes it truly outlandish is the fact that the show only cost $21.4 million to make. Some entertainment executives maintain that producing Squid Game in the U.S., where top talent demands top dollar and studios work according to union production regulations, would probably have cost five to 10 times more.

Bloomberg’s report also provided a detailed look at data the press, investors, Hollywood, and even show creators have been itching to get their hands on for years.

For instance, while Netflix releases data on how many people watched at least two minutes of a show on some occasions, it doesn’t reveal how many people watch more than that or how many people finish a show. Until now, at least.

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According to Bloomberg, Netflix reportedly estimates that 89% of viewers who started watching Squid Game have gone on to watch at least 75 minutes. That translates to more than one episode. For reference, 132 million that have watched at least two minutes in the show’s first 23 days.

When it comes to how many people actually finished watching the show in the 23 days since its premiere, the outlet reports that this amounts to 66% of viewers, or 87 million people.

Overall, viewers have seemingly spent more than 1.4 billion hours watching Squid Game, Bloomberg stated.

The data is illuminating and will likely fuel Netflix’s appetite for even more international content and motivate other studios to look outside U.S. borders for good shows. As a fellow K-drama and international show fan, this makes me happy. There are so many amazing shows being made across the world, and I appreciate the opportunity to find more of them on mainstream streaming platforms.

Netflix isn’t very happy Bloomberg published its confidential internal data, though. The company told Bloomberg through its attorney that it would be inappropriate for the outlet to publish the data in the documents.

“Netflix does not discuss these metrics outside the company and takes significant steps to protect them from disclosure,” the attorney told the outlet.

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Technology

Netflix to move into video game development

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We’re just saying: We would play it.
Photo: Netflix

Back on Sunday, we reported on a rather weird wrinkle in Netflix’s ongoing efforts to make the most of its relationship with TV mega-creator Shonda Rhimes: The news that the streaming service/content creator would also be developing video games and virtual reality experiences based around Rhimes’ projects. (“Now you, too, can thrill to the challenge of trying to get Regé-Jean Page to do one measly cameo for Bridgerton season two!”)

As it turns out, though, Netflix’s gaming ambitions weren’t relegated to stories about ribald looks and ripped bodices; the streaming service has actually decided to get into video games in a fairly serious way. This is per The Hollywood Reporter (working, in turn, from a report from Bloomberg), which notes that Netflix has just hired Mike Verdu as its new vice president of game development. Verdu’s most recent gig was at Facebook-owned VR firm Oculus, but he was previously a bigwig at Electronic Arts’ mobile gaming division, helping to figure out ways to turn The Sims into a microtransaction-powered phone game, which, hooray.

But, hey: No fair judging the guy before he’s even had a chance to start developing all these fancy new Netflix games, especially when we have some pitches burning a hole in our heads. Give or take a few Stranger Things games, Netflix has a lot of untapped IP that’s ripe for gaming development, and we’d love to help Verdu tap it, whether it’s creating an Orange Is The New Black prison escape simulator, or an Old Guard action game, or maybe just that fake “Control Bo Burnham” video game from Inside.

Really, we can roll these out as quickly as we can scroll our way through Netflix’s gargantuan, memory-resistant labyrinth of original content. Queen’s Gambit chess simulator. She-Ra dating sim/action-RPG. BoJack Horseman career management sim. Maybe a Witcher video game (No; it’d never work.) And, oh, god, we’d actually play this one: A WarioWare-esque microgame collection where you get to play through every single sketch from I Think You Should Leave. Did we just The Secret that into reality? Fingers crossed!

That’s to say nothing of the possibility of meta games about Netflix itself. Take on the power of life and death in Show Canceler. Carefully maneuver your films into week-long theatrical runs in Oscars Bid. And run from the least comprehensible creatures in the universe in Yes, There Are Still People Who Make Us Send Them DVDs In The Mail. The possibilities are endless! We can’t think of any more right now, mind you, but we’re damn near certain that they are.

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Wait, no, don’t end the article, we just thought up an amazing idea for a Russian Doll adventure ga—

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Technology

Netflix Is Expanding Into Video Games

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Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY / Contributor (Getty Images)

Eyeing an even bigger slice of the media pie, Netflix is planning an imminent expansion into the video game space, and has reportedly tapped a former Electronic Arts and Facebook executive to helm the initiative.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg News was the first to report that Netflix had selected Mike Verdu — most recently vice president of augmented reality and virtual reality content at Facebook — to serve as vice president of game development. Once installed at the platform, Verdu will report to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, according to Bloomberg.

The announcement represents just the latest push by Netflix into a space beyond streaming content like television shows and movies — a realm that the platform has signaled to its 200 million subscribers for years that it was eager to delve into. Netflix first hinted at a potential market expansion during the E3 gaming conference in 2019, when it announced a planned mobile game based on the “Stranger Things” franchise.

Since then, Netflix has been less than coy about its proposed expansion: In a 2019 letter to shareholders, the company named — Fortnite — a popular video game known that has something to do with dancing, if I’m not mistaken — as its primary competition. And in May of 2021, The Information first reported that Netflix was seeking an executive to boost its investments in the gaming space. It’s also not the first time Netflix has sought to blur the line between traditional streaming content and more avant-garde media, including recent interactive features like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Carmen Sandiego.

If the stock market is to be trusted — and let’s face it, it’s not — Netflix is making moves that appeal to stakeholders, with shares rising 2% in extended trading on Wednesday following the announcement of Verdu’s appointment. If all this keeps going apace, it looks like we’d all better brace ourselves for My Octopus Teacher: The Interactive Deep Sea Experience by 2025.

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