TechCrunch News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.

Sanlo, a fintech startup that helps gaming companies manage finances, announced Wednesday the closed beta launch of its webshop tool, giving select game developers and studios a plug-in-play solution that works alongside their existing tech stacks. Gaming companies can join the waitlist starting today.

Apple finally updated its App Store guidelines to allow global developers to host retro game emulators on iOS. Now, you don’t need to jailbreak your iPhone or download any sketchy software — you can get a sophisticated emulator right in the palm of your hand for free on the App Store.

Last month, a hacker wreaked havoc during an esports tournament of the popular shooter game Apex Legends, hacking two well-known streamers mid-game to make it look like they were using cheats.

What does Taylor Swift have in common with a group of improv comedians pretending to be wizards? They can both sell out Madison Square Garden (… and also, their fans kind of hate Ticketmaster now).

Apple News is testing a new game for iOS 17.5 called Quartiles, which requires players to organize a grid of 20 syllables into 5 four-syllable words. Spotted by Gadget Hacks, the interface for Quartiles looks a lot like the New York Times’ newest hit, Connections. Did Apple News sherlock the New York Times?

I was happy — excited, even — to check out Shure’s latest USB microphone. Its predecessor, the MV7, has been my default podcasting mic since it was launched toward to end of 2022. I’ve recorded more than 100 episodes of my show on the thing — not to mention using it for meetings, social engagements and even telehealth visits.

Apple updated its App Store rules Friday to allow emulators for retro console games globally with an option for downloading titles. However, the company warned that the developers are responsible for making sure that they follow copyright rules.

Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year.

Bitkraft Ventures — a games investor based out of Denver, Colorado, but with European founders — has raised its third fund, coming in at $275 million. The fund will make seed and Series A investments in gaming studios, and platforms to support game production. The moves comes at a time when games investments have actually declined 72 per cent year on year, according to a recent Pitchbook report.

Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform made by ex-Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS app is getting a big update that will bring a wave of new discovery-first features, including an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse by category, and more.

Turkey has gained a well-earned reputation as a veritable cauldron of mobile games startups, leading to the rise of VCs dedicated to the sector. The latest to join this coterie is Laton Ventures, a new gaming-focused VC that has raised a $35 million fund. Founding Partner — and Solo GP — Görkem Türk says he’s aiming to build a bridge between the Turkish gaming ecosystem and the rest of the world, investing in the pre-seed and seed stages. The fund is legally domiciled in the Netherlands.

Video game giant Activision is investigating a hacking campaign that’s targeting players with the goal of stealing their credentials, TechCrunch has learned.

With the Vision Pro finally available, many consumers are curious about Apple’s AR/VR headset and the apps that come with it. While some are from companies you recognize — Disney+, Max, TikTok, Zoom, Reddit and others — there are plenty of independent developers that launched visionOS-optimized apps.

With the Vision Pro finally available, many consumers are curious about Apple’s AR/VR headset and the apps that come with it. While some are from companies you recognize — Disney+, Max, TikTok, Zoom, Reddit and others — there are plenty of independent developers that launched visionOS-optimized apps.

The Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general filed a massive lawsuit against Apple on Thursday morning, accusing the company of monopolistic smartphone practices. Meanwhile, Fortnite maker Epic Games has been accusing Apple’s iOS App Store of antitrust violations for years in an ongoing, arduous legal battle.

On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal.

On Sunday, two competitive esports players appeared to get hacked during a live streamed game, prompting the organizers to postpone the tournament.

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network and pick up knowledge for professional purposes, and for recruitment — a business that now has more 1 billion users. Now, to boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.

AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google Deepmind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that learned to play multiple 3D games like a human, but also does its best to understand and act on your verbal instructions.

Google announced a number of new features for Google Play listings for games including AI-powered FAQs, displaying the latest YouTube videos, new immersive ad formats, and support for native PC game publishing. The announcements were made at the Google Games Developer Summit held in San Fransisco.

Earlier this year, Readyverse Studios – co-founded by blockchain tech company Futureverse and Ernest Cline, the mind behind the sci-fi franchise Ready Player One – announced “The Readyverse,” an interactive platform for metaverse games and experiences. Readyverse Studios partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) to help bring the popular novel to the metaverse across web3. WBD distributed the 2018 film adaptation directed by Stephen Spielberg.

Sea is “still making changes” and has yet to launch its popular mobile game Free Fire in India, more than six months after announcing plans to do so.

The NYT Games app is debuting a new redesign to help users discover games and track their progress more easily. The redesign comes nearly a year after the New York Times renamed its games-focused app from “NYT Crosswords” to “NYT Games” to better represent its growing family of games. The redesign, which features new game card designs and streamlined navigation, is the company’s next step in building out its gaming hub.

DISH-owned streaming service Sling TV announced today the launch of its new gaming platform called “Arcade,” featuring classic arcade games like Tetris, Wheel of Fortune, Sweet Sugar, Solitaire Clash, Poker Online and Doodle Jump, among others.

Web3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The move comes as the startup wants certain teams to be concentrated at the company’s Paris headquarters to improve communication and efficiency, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Making a video game successful is already hard. Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task. A new technology company called k-ID aims to make this process much easier for game makers, by offering a framework that protects publishers and developers against the pitfalls that come with non-compliance, including regulatory sanctions, reputational risk, and other consequences.

The much-teased and oft-leaked Nothing Phone (2a) is now officially official, just under a week after it made its limited debut at the company’s MWC after party. Nothing’s third phone is the first that goes directly after the mid-tier/budget space, with a starting price of $349.

“Denial is a river that flows through Cupertino!,” said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, a notorious Apple critic who also sued the tech giant for anticompetitive practices, in a post on X, weighing in on today’s news of the European Commission’s historic €1.84 billion fine against the iPhone maker. The EC ruling, which favors Spotify, hinges on Apple’s approach to its anti-steering clauses that prevented Spotify and other music streamers from directing users to their websites.

A lot has changed at HTC in the decade since a small team broke off to form its mixed reality division. In fact, it’s a fundamentally different business in several meaningful ways. For one thing, you can’t call HTC a phone company any longer. Contrary to popular perception, the Taiwanese corporation does still produce handsets — primarily mid-range devices for the Asia market.

Sony is laying off around 900 employees in its PlayStation division, the company announced on Tuesday. The cuts will impact 8% of the division’s global workforce, as Sony becomes the latest company to announce major cuts in recent weeks and months. Sony also announced that it will be closing its London Studio in the U.K.

With the Vision Pro finally available, many consumers are curious about Apple’s AR/VR headset and the apps that come with it. While some are from companies you recognize — Disney+, Max, TikTok, Zoom, Reddit and others — there are plenty of independent developers that launched visionOS-optimized apps.

Hardware is difficult, to paraphrase a famous adage. First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up. Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new video from the Bay Area startup’s Head of Media, Sam Sheffer.

PlayStation VR often gets overlooked in conversations about mixed reality. These days, it seems all anyone wants to talk about is Apple Vision Pro versus Meta Quest. But Sony has been an enduring presence in VR for years now, throughout the industry’s various ups and downs (mostly downs, if we’re being honest here).

Honor of Kings, Tencent’s massively popular mobile game, has its eye set on the international market in 2024.

OpenAI’s new — and first! — video-generating model, Sora, can pull off some genuinely impressive cinematographic feats. But the model’s even more capable than OpenAI initially made it out to be, at least judging by a technical paper published this evening.

Before the world became fixated on artificial intelligence, thanks to generative AI’s advances, cryptocurrency was the darling of many investors. So when some venture capital firms started swiftly switching their focus between AI and crypto, the industry’s onlookers scorn their opportunism. Meanwhile, a wave of entrepreneurs emerged as fervent advocates for the convergence of AI and crypto. Vitalik Buterin, the core founder of the Ethereum blockchain network, posted an article last month musing on the four possible applications of “AI + crypto,” sparking enthusiasm among his Twitter followers. The use cases have yet to be proven at scale.

We may not be using the M word much these days, but the race to build an interconnected avatar-driven virtual world didn’t take the last year off.

The foundational vocabulary of any new medium is inherited from that of its predecessor. Take, for instance, the early days of television, when so many shows were effectively radio programs caught on film. The new medium’s success is dependent on the development of its own vocabulary, distinguishing itself from earlier paradigms.

With thousands of preorders for the Vision Pro rolling in, many consumers are curious about Apple’s AR/VR headset and the apps that will arrive alongside the new device. While some are from companies you recognize — Disney+, Max, TikTok, Zoom, Reddit and others — there are plenty of independent developers launching visionOS-optimized apps on Friday. So far, more than 600 apps and games have been designed for the Apple Vision Pro, Apple said earlier this week.

In 2000, Paradox Press published “Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.” The book was Scott McCloud’s follow-up to his seminal 1993 work, “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” Where the earlier title explored the history and visual language of sequential art, the second volume finds the medium at a crossroads. The turn of the millennium presented new technologies that threatened to upend print media.

Lego Fortnite is only two months old, but Epic Games is already out with an even bigger collaboration.

Update, 1/31/23 at 1:15 PM ET: Pokimane has now confirmed she left Twitch to stream on YouTube.

Since Apple launched the Vision Pro last Friday, I’ve been hammering home the importance of immersive content. This isn’t a radical suggestion by any means. At this point we’re all keenly aware that hardware platforms live and die by content offerings.

Four years after leaving iOS, Fortnite is coming back — but only European players will be dropping in this time.

Alongside the numerous changes Apple is making to its platforms to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company is also updating its rules around streaming game services and other apps that provide access to mini-apps or games. The changes could impact companies like Netflix, which has expanded into mobile and cloud gaming in recent months, as well as efforts from other tech giants like OpenAI, which offers a GPT store, and Meta, which in 2022 had shut down its attempt at running a standalone Facebook Gaming app after failing to gain traction.

The Pokemon Company said Thursday it has not granted any permission to “another company,” referring to Palworld-developer Pocketpair, to use Pokemon intellectual property or assets and “intends to investigate and take appropriate measures” against the fast-growing survival game operator.

Wizards of the Coast and Resolution Games have announced their collaboration to bring Dungeons & Dragons to virtual reality.

Krafton has more in store for its battle royale shooting game PUBG, its biggest mobile title, according to Goldman Sachs.

Epic’s standalone survival crafting game saw its first update on Tuesday, smoothing out some of the new game’s rough edges and adding a flurry of quality of life improvements.

Riot Games is laying off about 530 employees, which represents 11% of its workforce, the Tencent-owned company announced on Monday. The League of Legends maker is also sunsetting its five-year-old publishing group, Riot Forge.

Beijing has quietly pulled the proposed curbs on the video game industry from the official website, weeks after the draft guidelines wiped tens of billions of dollars off the market value of local titans.

When Palworld made its inauspicious debut in a teaser a year or so back, few thought this strange, blatant Pokémon ripoff would be anything but a quickly forgotten oddity. But after its Early Access release last week, the game has broken records and sold millions — reflecting the pent-up demand for a truly modern Pokémon-type game that the franchise’s developers seem unwilling to provide.

Remember the Virtuix Omni? I’ll never forget trying out an early version of the virtual reality treadmill in a hotel suite many E3s ago. The system, which features a concave platform and slippery shoes, was clever enough to influence Ready Player One’s take on the space. The electronics-free system finally started shipping earlier this year.

Build a Rocket Boy, a Scotland-headquartered game development company founded by one of the former lead developers behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, today announced it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding.

Just over two years ago, Netflix announced it would enter a new business: gaming. Amid a mobile gaming market dominated by free-to-play and ad-supported business models, Netflix’s plan was to make its games free without ads or in-app purchases. The gambit may now be starting to pay off. In 2023, Netflix Games downloads increased by over 180% year-over-year, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. In total, the games have been downloaded 81.2 million times worldwide across the App Store and Google Play in 2023, with the fourth quarter accounting for around 53% of those downloads.

Just a few weeks after its most recent round of layoffs, Unity is once again reducing its workforce. This time, around 1,800 employees will lose their job in the coming weeks as the company is trying to improve its financial performance after a difficult year.

We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previous article, but what is it actually like in person?

For two years, Netflix subscribers have been able to download tons of mobile games, all included for free with their subscription. Netflix has developed more than 75 mobile games, boasting popular IPs like Grand Theft Auto, Love is Blind, Monument Valley, and Oxenfree, among many others.

When it comes to figuring out a formula for a hit game that keeps players coming back year after year, Saxs Persson would know. Now at Epic Games overseeing the Fortnite ecosystem, Persson previously spent 12 years at Mojang building Minecraft into the stratospheric success it is today.

We’ve known about the Vision Pro for more than half a year now (not to mention the years of rumors), but Apple’s first “spatial computing” device is one of consumer electronics’ biggest question marks heading into the new year. The $3,499 headset was given an “early-2024” release time frame when it was unveiled at WWDC in June, but since then, the company hasn’t gotten more specific.

2023 was an absolute unit of a year for gaming. No one could possibly have played all the awesome titles that came out across platforms. I certainly didn’t. But that also means that you have options for grabbing a last-minute gift for that gamer in your life! I’ve gathered a few of the best titles that happen to be the type someone might have put off while playing the latest Final Fantasy or Call of Duty.

California’s Civil Rights Department reached a settlement with Activision Blizzard late last week two years after the state regulator brought a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, pay inequities and a culture of sexual harassment at the video game company.

Xbox has brought is Cloud Gaming service to Meta Quest VR headset devices, as both companies said it would at the launch of the latest Quest 3 hardware earlier this year. The Xbox Cloud Gaming app has a beta label, and it’s limited to Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets (sorry OG Quest owners) but it basically delivers a huge-screen virtual cloud gaming experience so long as you have a compatible controller to work with and a Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

Google losing the antitrust lawsuit brought by Epic Games concerning the Play Store will have far-reaching implications for the mobile app economy.

Temu, the Chinese e-commerce company whose app is now attracting longer engagement times than Amazon, is Apple’s most downloaded free app in the U.S. for 2023. The Cupertino-based tech giant today released an App Store feature that showcases the top iPhone apps of the year, free and paid, as measured by app installs — its proxy for overall popularity. This year, apps from Chinese-based companies have taken over spots previously held by U.S. tech giants like Meta and Google, as CapCut and TikTok, which hail from Beijing-based ByteDance, came in at No. 3 and No. 5, respectively.

E3’s decades-long history has been peppered with ups and downs. The annual Los Angeles-based gaming expo saw a decade of steady growth after it was founded in the mid-90s. The mid-00s, on the other hand, were an altogether different story, as the event struggled, downsized and moved out of the LA Convention Center.

If you still think of Fortnite as a colorful, cartoony battle royale game, you might be surprised to learn the extent of Epic’s true ambitions.

On Monday, a jury sided with Epic Games over Google in an antitrust case that could reshape how app marketplaces like Google Play are allowed to operate.

Hasbro is laying off 1,100 employees, according to anSEC filing. The company behind franchises like Dungeons & Dragons and Transformers, Hasbro already laid off 800 employees in January. While some employees will find out about the fate of their jobs on Tuesday, others will be cut in the coming year. By 2025, Hasbro told shareholders, the company hopes to save about $350 million to $400 million in costs.

Generative AI is attracting a significant level of investment, including in the gaming space. Titan AI, a new mobile games studio, raised over $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Berkeley SkyDeck. Titan AI joins several other generative AI gaming startups that aim to reduce the cost and speed of creating 2D and 3D content for games. Depending on the complexity, mobile games can cost upwards of $250,000 to make.

In just 22 hours, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has racked up 85 million views, breaking a MrBeast video’s record for most YouTube views in 24 hours. That ranking excludes music videos, but the hype around this long-awaited game could smash past those records too — right now, the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours is the music video for K-Pop sensation BTS’ song “Butter,” which was viewed 108 million times in that timespan.

The first fruit of the partnership between Fornite-maker Epic Games and Lego is due out this week — along with a host of other games within a game that expand Fortnite’s horizons considerably.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Microsoft is talking to partners about launching an Xbox mobile store, as first reported by Bloomberg. Spencer made the comment during an interview at the CCXP comics and entertainment convention in Brazil on Thursday.

With a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer on the horizon, Netflix just got its hands on Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, the company announced today.

YouTube is expanding its games ambition by rolling out access to a set of online games for Premium users after first testing them with select users back in September. The Google-owned company has started notifying Premium users that they can start trying out more than 30 mini-games.

ByteDance’s gaming ambition has been an expensive, short-lived pursuit.