While many folks on the internet felt the death knell of Mythic yesterday was a stab to the heart of free to play, recent numbers from the market research outfit Newzoo put in to perspective just how insanely successful the top-end of the free to play world is. Sure, you see these games on the top of the top grossing charts but it's unreal to consider the scale of things when compared to long-running household brands in video gaming.
As pointed out by A List Daily, in Q1 of 2014, Candy Crush grossed more money than all Nintendo games combined. Sure, that's easy to rationalize by saying "Well Nintendo didn't have any big releases and Q4 is where they make all their cash," but the fact remains, that's a mind-blowing thing to be able to report. They're not ahead by a small margin either, King is making 56% more money than Nintendo. King has mentioned in the past that Candy Crush generates 2/3 of their revenue, so, that game alone is beating everything Nintendo did.
It's a curious time to be alive as a gamer, as if you're 30-something or older right now, you grew up with the NES and Nintendo has likely played a massive part in both your overall life as well as contributing to your personal identity as a gamer. It's odd to see the company falling farther and farther behind in financials, because, come on, it's Nintendo.
I'd love to see an alternate universe where Nintendo was similarly riding the mobile gaming tidal wave, just to see how much these reports would change. I mean, my grandma knows Nintendo IP, that combined with something along the same lines as Candy Crush in regards to a free game with nearly universal appeal would be insane I'm sure. But, maybe that could be an episode for a future Sliders series reboot.
Rich Geldrich has a lot to say about this subject, and I agree with pretty much everything on his list. The present state of OpenGL is incredibly frustrating, and it has caused me to be much more blunt and rhetorical than I might normally be. There are those who think that OpenGL and not D3D aught to be the primary API target for PC game development. They believe that OpenGL and D3D are basically the same and that OpenGL gaming would just take off if we developers would be more open-minded. These people are mistaken. OpenGL is a bad investment for anyone with ambitious graphical goals.
Reason #1:
OpenGL is highly fragmented across platforms. “Write-once run anywhere” is a myth. Mobile GL, Linux GL, Windows GL, and Mac GL, are all different from one another, and offer varying levels of feature support.
Reason #2:
OpenGL driver quality is highly variable, and lags abysmally behind DirectX. This is not hard to understand. DX games are the primary driver for GPU sales, so it is natural that the vendors direct their attention there. It is also, certainly, a solvable problem, but given the dominance of Windows for gaming, the IHVs have little incentive to solve it at present.
Reason #3:
The real problem is that OpenGL, as designed, is inferior to its competitors in several very important ways, which I will spend the rest of this post laying out.
GLSL Is Broken
Threading is Broken
Texture And Sampler State Are Orthogonal
Too Many Ways to Do The Same Thing
OpenGL’s Error Handling is Wrong
There Are Too Many Small Inefficiencies
Graham Sellers (OpenGL guy at AMD): https://twitter.com/grahamsellers/statu ... 4543174657Driver Quality
Driver quality and performance problems with DX are largely hidden because hardware vendors are actively fixing things when they get early pre-release builds of major games before release and then put out driver updates when those games ship. This same process could work equally well for GL.
Valve's VOGL project is going to be a key enabler of this process in that developers will be able to send GL captures of their application directly to hardware vendors. Vendors won't need to get builds, and traces are way easier to track down and debug.
You know, when people _keep_ posting cr*p about what you work on every day...
these tests where done on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with Nvidia 331.79 and AMD 14.6 beta drivers
We’re happy to announce that we’ve released an update for PC, PS3, and X360 today containing the new improved “Netcode” for Battlefield 4. The update will be released later this week on PS4 and Xbox One.
Ubisoft and Nvidia have announced the next chapter in their strategic partnership bringing amazing PC gaming experiences to life in Ubisoft's highly anticipated upcoming titles including Assassin's Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, The Crew and Tom Clancy's The Division.
Nvidia's GameWorks team is working closely with Ubisoft's development studios to incorporate cutting edge graphics technology and gaming innovations to create game worlds that deliver unprecedented realism and immersion. Nvidia's GameWorks technology includes TXAA antialiasing, which provides Hollywood-levels of smooth animation, soft shadows, HBAO+ (horizon-based ambient occlusion), advanced DX11 tessellation, and Nvidia PhysX technology.
"Working with Nvidia has enabled us to bring an enhanced gameplay experience to our PC players," said Geoffroy Sardin, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Ubisoft. "We look forward to continuing our partnership with Nvidia on our biggest upcoming titles."
This announcement builds on the successful collaboration between Ubisoft and Nvidia that added visually stunning effects to Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs.
"We're excited to continue our long-term partnership with Ubisoft in bringing our latest PC technology to their games", said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at Nvidia. "Through GameWorks, we have been able to add unique visual and gameplay innovations to deliver amazing experiences for these stellar Ubisoft games. I can't wait to play them myself."
”As part of our strategy to focus on the EVE Universe, today CCP conducted a restructuring that resulted in the layoff of 49 people in our publishing organization. Though it is hard to say goodbye to our friends and family, this action concludes the process we started several months ago. CCP has provided severance packages and job placement assistance for those affected.”
“Development teams and plans for EVE Online, EVE: Valkyrie, DUST 514, and ‘Project Legion’ are not impacted by the restructuring.”
However, Polygon‘s sources claimed that this is actually a major blow to CCP’s Reykjavik office, and employees at other locations are affected too. Investor pressure is apparently to blame.
So that’s bad. CCP is an impressively large company – at least, as far as technically independent developers go – but it’s bled more than 100 employees in only a couple months. That’s a big blow by almost any standard.
Moreover, a report recently emerged at The Guardian that didn’t exactly paint World of Darkness’ development process in a positive light (or dark I guess, since vampires don’t do the whole light thing). The report claims that the game was directionless, de-prioritized, and stymied by a general state of disarray in CCP’s upper management.
Re: Știri din industrieNintendo of Europe is closing its headquarters in Großostheim, Germany with the loss of 130 jobs, the company has announced.
The business will now be run out of Nintendo's Frankfurt office, with its Großostheim building and warehouse sold off.
Lol, Minecraft a ajuns pay to win de unul singur?Minecraft is pretty popular, but it's also kind of a time sink. To get around this, some servers allow impatient players to pay for perks, letting them essentially buy their way to the top, or to whatever measure of "victory" they aspire. The only problem is that this runs contrary to the terms of the Minecraft EULA, which forbids monetization of content created by Mojang, as well as mods and plugins. "You can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them," it states. "We have the final say on what constitutes a tool/mod/plugin and what doesn't."
It's the kind of thing that people generally click past and ignore, but that may not be an option for much longer. Mojang looks set to begin cracking down on Minecraft servers that allow players to pay for perks.
Developer Erik "Grum" Broes recently emphasized in a chat that server owners are not allowed to make money from the game without permission. As noted by Reddit, Broes called out WoodyCraft for offering perks on its servers in exchange for "donations," saying that regardless of the fact that most of those perks are based on plugins, "You cannot make money with Minecraft without our permission."
That doesn't mean the end of donations, as Broes acknowledged that they're allowed by the Minecraft EULA. "But we'll most likely hack down on the fact that most people give 'perks' for donations—which under almost all laws makes it a purchase," he explained. "You cannot 'give' people ranks based on an outside payment. It's really simple, money you spend outside of the game cannot reflect inside the game at all."
These results are taken from the same demo files and settings with only the kernel version and mesa version being changed. You can also see the addition of Unigine Valley which did not actually run on the 10.0 drivers which is a big step up in itself. The other games ran from 46% increases all the way to 462% which I am pretty sure must be a bug in Portal or something because I did not believe my eyes even after running repeated tests .
The majority of the source games ran with 2xAA so there is an increase to be seen there when it used to limit the games quite a bit but now it seems its no longer an issue as although not benchmarked here, I can comfortably run each game at a minimum of 40fps now. From these results, its no wonder that AMD wants to drop its catalyst driver for FOSS principles when you see results like this that catalyst just isn't getting on it's own.
zme-ul » Tue Jun 17, 2014 3:16 am wrote:daca mai ajunge vreodata Romania in Campionat Mondial, alerg in curu' gol prin Crang
General Manager Klemens Kruezer said that Nordic has recently recently closed a separate agreement for the trademark, one that was negotiated outside of the 2013 bankruptcy auctions where Nordic acquired numerous parts of the THQ catalog including the Darksiders series.
Kruezer says that the agreement will allow Nordic to publish titles, potentially including the upcoming MX vs ATV, with THQ branding.
"E3's a retail show," he said. "It's a retail show, it's a console show, so it didn't really feel like the right place for us to talk about Windows, but Windows and gaming on Windows is critical to Microsoft's success."
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