While semantics count for some, gamers win either way. In New Hampshire, just off the western shore of the vacation destination Lake Winnipesaukee, there’s a town called Laconia. With a population somewhere south of 17,000, it’s barely a blip on a map—except on Bike Week, when around 300,000 motorcyclists…
Project Helix is set to open the closed-console ecosystem, but the details will matter. Last summer, we here at Ars made the argument that the company’s next Xbox console should give up the walled garden approach and just run Windows already. Now, newly named Microsoft Executive Vice President for…
Titles like Ghost of Yotei will remain exclusive to Sony’s hardware. Sony no longer plans to bring current and future single-player games to personal computers, according to Bloomberg. The report specifically names last year’s Ghost of Yotei and the soon-to-be-released Returnal successor, Saros, as games whose PC plans have…
Lawyers tell Ars the state has a tough road ahead, even as Valve is uniquely vulnerable. For years now, Valve fans have been making jokes about the company’s slow transition from game maker to glorified digital hat and knife paint marketplace. This week, though, a lawsuit brought by the…
The ability to resell Steam items for real value is key to the state’s case. New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users…
Stories and lesson learned from an impossibly large community modding project. Despite being regarded as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind disappointed some fans upon its release in 2002 because it didn’t match the colossal scope of its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls…
But Asha Sharma faces scrutiny for lack of gaming experience. Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma…
Microsoft CoreAI exec Asha Sharma will take over in surprise executive shake-up. Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer announced he will retire after 38 years at Microsoft and 12 years leading the company’s video game efforts. Asha Sharma, an executive currently in charge of Microsoft’s CoreAI division,…
Director says PC is the “foundation” when targeting “high-end environments first.” For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game’s core console versions. There are some signs that may be starting to change, though,…
Games appear to be mostly unmodified ports of the well-regarded remakes. For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs and balance issues present in the originals—partly by also including the rosters…
