Month: December 2024

Macau international visitation numbers during the three-day New Year’s holiday from December 31, 2022, to January 2, 2023, plunged compared to the same period in the year before.

Down between 33% and 42%

The Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China saw an aggregate of around 62,000 tourists for the holiday, bringing the total number of visitations including local comings and goings to 352,000 and registering an average of under 21,000 per day.

Macau welcomed the highest number of international arrivals on New Year’s Eve, 28,000, and that number fell to just 18,000 on the first day of 2023. In comparison, the same three-day period in 2021 registered 42,000 on New Year’s Eve and 31,000 on New …

Spain-based online casino software specialists MGA Games has inked a supply agreement with StarVegas, an iGaming platform owned by the operating company BeatYa Online Entertainment PLC, which is part of Novomatic Interactive division, Greentube.

The new partnership, which further expands the firm‘s presence in the Iberian betting markets following its recent collaboration with Portuguese operator Nossa Aposta, will see a diverse selection of 30 localized titles from MGA Games “launched progressively” on the Spanish-facing online casino site, StarVegas.es.

Progressive Addition:

Included in the integration are classic 3-reel slots as well as the recently released table game Grand Croupier Roulette, video bingo, and Poli Diaz Megaways, the first slot fro…

As Front Office Sports reports, Steve Cohen, the owner of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, will not allow the neighboring New York City FC (NYCFC) of Major League Soccer to use the Mets parking lot free of charge. Cohen is reportedly negotiating a casino development project in the area of the City Field Stadium located in Queens, New York City.

Stadiums Locations:

Citi Field is a baseball stadium located in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York City. It opened in 2009 and is the home field of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets. The Yankee Stadium is a baseball and soccer stadium and the home field of the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball, and New York City FC of Major League Soccer. The distance between the two stadiums is around 7 m…

The gaming regulator for the small European nation of Malta has announced the launch of a closed consultation concerning proposed amendments to its Player Protection Directive for locally-licensed online gambling activities.

The Malta Gaming Authority used an official Friday press release to declare that it is now seeking feedback to its suggested changes in hopes of being able ‘to strengthen and clarify the current player protection framework’. The watchdog also stated that this agenda will help future initiatives to improve its safeguarding policies including ‘the eventual publication for licensees of detailed player protection guidelines.’

Definitive deadline:

Malta is home to almost 520,000 people while its gaming regulator pronounced th…

Melco Resorts has expanded its Macau properties with three new gaming areas for foreign players. The news comes amid the strong recovery of the gambling industry in the special administrative region.

The company chairman and chief executive officer, Lawrence Ho, spoke about the new areas during the recent opening of an indoor water park at Studio City. In an interview with Inside Asian Gaming, Ho addressed the new areas, saying that they are Melco’s way to keep up with the increasing number of foreign tourists.

The CEO said that now both City of Dreams and Studio City have gaming areas for foreigners. He noted that two of them are in the former property, and another one in the latter, providing extra gaming tables for visitors.

Ho no…

Mohegan Casino Las Vegas located at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, opened its doors for visitors two years ago. On Thursday, the venue confirmed that in light of its two-year anniversary, it joined forces with Virgin Voyages to deliver unique experiences for its loyal customers. Thanks to the new collaboration, the members of the company’s exclusive rewards program, Momentum Rewards, will be able to benefit from a unique giveaway.

Similar to other leading gaming companies, Mohegan’s rewards program also offers unique benefits and perks for its members. Tapping into Momentum, members can increase their status level by wagering on slot machines as well as table games. Starting from Core status…

One of the biggest online gambling platforms in Italy, NetBet Italy, partnered with the leading iGaming provider, 1X2 Network, creating an inevitable force to conquer the Italian market. 

Two industry leaders partnered to strengthen their positions:

Since both companies are very successful in creating immersive gaming experiences for a range of their fans, this partnership will mean delivering even greater products and services.

NetBet Italy already created a name for itself in the Italian market. Its gaming products, such as casino games, sports betting, and various virtual sports options, are known for their quality and…

All of us have pressures to endure in our working lives, and some of us have more than others. However, despite the perks, being the CEO of Nvidia seems like it’d come with a hefty dose of responsibility right now, as the company rides the crest of the AI hardware wave.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference this week, Jensen Huang admitted that working with just about every major tech company you can think of isn’t the easiest of rides:

“Our company works with every AI company in the world today…I don’t know one data center, one cloud service provider, one computer maker we’re not working with. And so what comes with that is enormous responsibility.

“…delivery of our components, and our technology, and our infrastructure, and our soft…

For just €60 a month on the darkweb you can sidestep the pesky ethical limitations of services like ChatGPT with a new, degenerate Large Language Model (LLM), known as WormGPT. 

Designed by one ballsy hacker, WormGPT cares not for the confines of morality, and can be asked to undertake all manner of nefarious tasks, including malware creation and “everything blackhat related”, as the developer says (via PC Mag).

Built around the 2021 open-source LLM GPT-J, WormGPT was trained on malware creation data. As such, its main goal is to give would-be threat actors a place to generate malware, and related content such as phishing email templates.

WormGPT works similarly to ChatGPT in many ways: it processes requests made in natural human language, and pumps out whate…

Making a videogame is a tough business at the best of times, and for Ukrainian studios like Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World, these are much closer to the worst of times: Ukraine suffered a full-scale invasion by Russia in early 2022, and while the country has defended itself far more ably than many expected, it still faces relentless daily assaults in a war that’s cost tens of thousands of lives.

GSC Game World has faced other challenges since the invasion began: A new office in Prague suffered a major fire just a year after it opened, and in 2023 Russian hackers leaked early Stalker 2 test builds. Some members of the development team have joined the Ukrainian armed forces to fight the Russian invasion; at least one has died.

Understandably, Stalker 2 itself has been dela…

First reported by the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk seems to be waving the white flag in his dispute with Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who Musk had previously dubbed “Brazil’s Darth Vader.” Musk’s social network, X, “The Everything App,” formerly known as Twitter, was blocked in Brazil at the end of August following Musk’s refusal to comply with court orders.

The dispute stems from Musk’s reinstatement of a number of formerly-banned X, “The Everything App” accounts tied to Brazil’s right wing. Following the presidential election victory of Lula da Silva in 2022 and an attempt to overturn the election by supporters of right wing former president Jair Bolsonaro, Moraes has overseen a crackdown on those elements, including ordering social media compa…

It’s been a rough couple of years for the games industry—and even laying it out like that feels like an understatement. Back in February, the number of layoffs and studio closures were already numerous enough to fit into a horrifying chart, and things haven’t exactly slowed down since.

One of the more high-profile recent shocks came from Microsoft, which shut down studios Arkane Austin—developers of Prey and Dishonoured—as well as Tango Gameworks, the studio behind surprise hit Hi-Fi Rush.

It was an especially messed-up situation because, as plenty of developers noted in the aftermath: A studio probably shouldn’t sink after a single flop like Redfall, but even if they do make an excellent game, that still won’t save them from the margin-fuelled m…

Just a month after admitting to inappropriately messaging a minor on Twitch, getting fired from his own game studio, and announcing a hiatus from streaming, Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm is about ready to go back to business as usual.

The disgraced streamer posted on X today for the first time since June, sharing an image of himself playing chess across from an unseen opponent who’s playing with checkers pieces. A not-so-deep interpretation of the post is that Beahm is following through on his promise that he’s “not f***ing going anywhere,” as he stated before his self-imposed 36-day hiatus, and that he believes he’s several moves ahead of his detractors and accusers.

The list of his “opponents” is only getting longer. In the time since Beahm’s last statement, several streaming …

While AI ethics continues to be the hot-button issue of the moment, and companies and world governments continue to wrangle with the moral implications of a technology that we often struggle to define let alone control, here comes some slightly disheartening news: AI chatbots are already being trained to jailbreak other chatbots, and they seem remarkably good at it.

Researchers from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have managed to compromise several popular chatbots (via Tom’s Hardware), including ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft Bing Chat, all done with the use of another LLM (large language model). Once effectively compromised, the jailbroken bots can then be used to “reply under a persona of being devoid of moral restraints.” Crikey.

This process is ref…

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High-end Intel Z690 motherboards used to be ridiculously expensive, with many of them over $500. Well, thanks to Black Friday, they’re not anymore and here are three sumptuous mainboards that are all sporting a healthy 50% discount.

So if you’re looking to give an Intel 12th gen or newer CPU a real home for overclocking, and still have lots of scope for storage, networking, and connectivity, then these may well be the perfect ones for you.

MSI …

Square Enix appears to have learnt its lesson when it comes to sparkly new technology—just with a considerable input delay. Earlier this year, Square Enix’s president Takashi Kiryu spoke glowingly of generative AI, which carried strong echoes of the company’s equally ill-timed love affair with NFTs.

In a newsletter from January, he stated: “I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create,” and that the company would be “aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.”

As reported by michsuzu on Twitter (and later spotted, then translated by Automaton), in a June 21 call to investors, Kiryu see…

Just a couple of weeks after finishing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is making some changes to its Xbox studio structure. In an internal memo acquired by The Verge, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to president of game content and studios, a role that will put him in charge of ZeniMax and its subsidiary studios, including Bethesda Softworks.

“ZeniMax will continue to operate as a limited integration entity led by Jamie Leder, President and CEO, reporting to Matt,” Spencer wrote. “All ZeniMax development studios and ZeniMax Central Services teams will continue reporting to Jamie to maintain and optimize current content development and production cycles. Also, to deepen our partnership and accelerate mutua…

Earlier this week, the CEO of Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead Games flatly denied the existence of heavy machine guns—Johan Pilestedt has track record of being tongue-in-cheek, though it’s not clear whether he accidentally blurted out some Super Earth secrets or fired a knowing wink our direction, here.

Turns out, we are getting not one, but two heavy weapons to help us in our march against the bots: the LAS-99 Quasar Cannon and the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun (HMG), which are both available in-game right now. 

Both of these heavy-duty weapons should help thin the herd of Super Earth’s foes by offering even more anti-armour options—though the LAS-99 Quasar Cannon appears to be geared most towards taking out tanky enemies, as it’s shown obliterating Autom…

In a move that may bring new meaning to the term “cloud-computing”, HyperScale Nexus Holding Corp, a business centred around providing Nvidia H100 GPUs for AI and HPC markets, entered into an agreement to acquire the Colorado based American Cannabis Company inc last month. The company describes itself as providing industry specific advisory and consulting services, manufacture of cultivation products, and facilities for cannabis startups.

HyperScale Nexus meanwhile provides “unparalleled cloud services, managed hosting and professional services” with their current stock of 30,000 leased Nvidia H100 chipsets, although quite what that’s got to do with the acquisition of the American Cannabis Company remains hazy. 

All that being said, it’s not the first time we’ve seen a …

After being gone for more than a year, Blizzard’s biggest games will soon return to China. Blizzard confirmed tonight that it has struck a new deal with NetEase to bring all the games covered by the previous publishing agreement, including World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, “and other titles in the Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and StarCraft universes,” back to the Chinese market. The new deal will take effect this summer.

“We at Blizzard are thrilled to reestablish our partnership with NetEase and to work together, with deep appreciation for the collaboration between our teams, to deliver legendary gaming experiences to players in China,” Blizzard president Johanna Faries said in a statement. “We are immensely grateful for the passion the Chinese community has shown for Blizzard game…

Horror always dabbles in childhood imagery for scares: it’s why creepy dolls, animatronic toys and horrible sentient toys that hug you to death are basically genre cliches. So it’s not particularly surprising that Resident Evil 4’s latest promotional trailer pillages the breezy sanctity of children’s anime towards its own grizzly ends. I’ve played the RE4 Chainsaw demo and can confirm that this trailer is much, much creepier.

Dubbed ‘Leon and the Mysterious Village’, the one minute romp has a gun-toting, baby-faced Leon wandering around a quaint Spanish countryside in search of Ashley. Starry-eyed and naive, Leon approaches a group of folksy locals to ask after Ashley, but I think you know where this is going: a guy with tentacles growing out of his bac…

I’ve been playing Skyrim for a whopping 12 years thanks to its hard-working mod community, constantly downloading new quests, texture packs and ambitious features. But long before that I was spending my days playing through custom scenarios and fiddling around with the map editor in Age of Empires 2—the genesis of my love for modding. And thanks to Age of Empires 2 modder Grouchy_Bluejay4511, both of these brilliant games have now been combined. 

Over on Reddit, Grouchy shared screenshots of their current project, where they’ve remade Skyrim in the venerable RTS. The first is unmistakably Whiterun, with the Jarl’s fancy home, Dragonsreach, looming over the city. Smaller settlements have also been recreated in less detail, and you can see Helgen (on fire, naturally), Riv…

Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling. AMD’s frame generation technology. On the same GPU at the same time. Really? It’s cats and dogs living together! Or just the first game to enable that combo, namely Ghost of Tsushima, originally a Playstation 4 title and released just yesterday on PC.

That Nvidia leans into AI isn’t exactly news. And it’s the reason why you can’t have Nvidia Frame Generation on anything but the latest RTX 40-series Nvidia GPUs. Because Nvidia’s take on frame gen uses fancy AI Tensor cores and Optical Flow accelerators. And only the Ada architecture of the RTX 40-series has that stuff in the right specs to run Frame Generation.

But not AMD. Its frame gen is technically simpler and can run on the shaders of any fairly modern GPU, including Nvidia graphics cards. Up unt…

Game Dev Tycoon was a bit of a phenomenon back in the day. Released in 2012, Greenheart Games’ first major title quickly achieved viral success due, in part, to being a neat little management game about the industry itself—making it a popular choice for YouTubers and streamers. 

Over a decade later, the studio’s ready to put its next game out into the wild: Tavern Keeper, a game about, well, keeping taverns.

I had the chance to sit down with Patrick Klug, director and manager of Greenheart Games, and had an early peek into the game itself. At a glance, Tavern Keeper looks like a cosy little inn management game—and it is—but the more time I spent looking at it, the more little elements of craft revealed themselves to me. 

In Tavern K…

Amazon has revealed that its upcoming Fallout TV series will debut on Prime Video in 2024, and will be at least partially set in sunny Los Angeles, the city “where dreams come true.”

The admittedly slight update on the Fallout series came from the Prime Video Twitter account, which shared this image—and only this image—earlier today.

2024 isn’t the most precise release date ever, but it’s more than what we had. Filming began in July 2022, and we previously expected that the show would air sometime in late 2023. It’s entirely speculative, but the lack of a more definite date in today’s announcement makes me think that we probably won’t see it very early in the year—2024 is only four months away, after all.

The Amazon image also reaffirms that the Fallo…

Developer Airship Syndicate has announced the resurrection of its action RPG Wayfinder, but with a difference: it’s junking all the stuff players hated the first time around. In its previous form Wayfinder was always-online, featured microtransactions, and was free-to-play. Now it’ll have an offline mode, no microtransactions whatsoever, and an upfront price tag of $25 in early access (first spotted by Kotaku).

“We’ve seen a shift in the industry where players are OK paying for a premium title if it means respect for their time and wallets,” says Airship’s president Ryan Stefanelli. “It’s one we prefer ourselves, frankly, and we believe it’ll make the game much easier for people to enjoy.”

That’s particularly the case on PC, of course, where Valve’s pioneering …

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update has been an ongoing venture for creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone for most of this year, ever since the patch was released on PC in March.

150,000 players flooded back into the cosy game when the update went live, but for the longest time, 1.6 has only been accessible to those playing on PC.

Work on porting the update to console and mobile has taken a lot of time, so much so that Barone even admitted it was encroaching on Haunted Chocolatier’s development. But even after Barone announced the release date for console and mobile (November 4), some players were wondering why it’s taken so long when the PC update was ready months ago.

“I’ve always released on PC first because it’s sort of a ‘beta test’ to make sure there are no critical (eg, …

One of the questions that vexed early Christians was about the nature of Jesus himself. Was the Messiah human, divine, or something in-between? After many years, many quarrels, and some light episcopal violence, the Church arrived at its answer: The hypostatic union. Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, which he’s allowed to be because he’s god. So there.

Fortunately, it won’t take a few hundred years of conclaves and punch-ups to discern the nature of Father Justin, an AI priest released last week by “media ministry” and Q&A group Catholic Answers. He fully sucks. So much so that he’s been summarily defrocked (via Futurism) and demoted to a mere “virtual apologist” after giving his flock disastrous answers. For instance, that you can baptise a baby with Gatorade (per…

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• Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero | $599.99 $249.99 (save $350)
• MSI MEG Z690 Ace | $549.99 $249.99 (save $300)

High-end Intel Z690 motherboards used to be ridiculously expensive, with many of them over $500. Well, thanks to Black Friday, they’re not anymore and here are three sumptuous mainboards that are all sporting a healthy 50% discount.

So if you’re looking to give an Intel 12th gen or newer CPU a real home for overclocking, and still have lots of scope for storage, networking, and connectivity, then these may well be the perfect ones for you.

MSI …

AMD’s upcoming Strix Halo APU is one of the more exciting chips on the horizon, what with its console-like specs and the promise of a more efficient and just maybe more affordable portable gaming. Now a new rumour has emerged indicating it could be a chiplet design using the very same eight-core CPU CCDs as AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 desktop processors.

This particular info dump comes courtesy of some slides posted on the Chiphell forum.  The slides purportedly show the AMD Strix Halo APU, also occasionally referred to as Sarlak, composed of a pair of eight-core Zen 5 CCDs or Core Chiplet Dies plus a monster SoC tile containing various I/O functionality, the memory controller plus Strix Halo’s defining feature, namely its honking great iGPU.

Hold that thought, we’ll come back…

Making a videogame is a tough business at the best of times, and for Ukrainian studios like Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World, these are much closer to the worst of times: Ukraine suffered a full-scale invasion by Russia in early 2022, and while the country has defended itself far more ably than many expected, it still faces relentless daily assaults in a war that’s cost tens of thousands of lives.

GSC Game World has faced other challenges since the invasion began: A new office in Prague suffered a major fire just a year after it opened, and in 2023 Russian hackers leaked early Stalker 2 test builds. Some members of the development team have joined the Ukrainian armed forces to fight the Russian invasion; at least one has died.

Understandably, Stalker 2 itself has been dela…

Tool up, gang. We’re mounting a daring raid to find and secure the Dragon Age uber-plot document, a thing which is apparently real and which details the entire series’ meta-narrative, culminating in some kind of explosive denouement that would render any more games in the series impossible.

How do I know this? Because former BioWare dev and Dragon Age lore creator David Gaider told Eurogamer that such a thing is out there. It’s been out there since before Dragon Age: Origins, in fact. “There was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan,” said Gaider.

His approach to worldbuilding was to “seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game,” but to also layer in “the overall uber-plot, which I didn’t know for certain that we would e…

I will admit, an AI Rickrolling a human completely off its own digital back has a certain appeal, and I’m willing to suspend some disbelief in the hope that maybe this customer service chatbot really did decide to fake-out a user with an OG meme. Freaky as that thought might be.

But oh, sweet memories. Home from school, dinner’s cooking, and I’m browsing the forums. Someone’s explaining why I’m wrong to think a Frost-spec Death Knight can play DPS effectively, linking out to some previous WoW patch notes, a link I’m invested enough to click on. I anticipate a wall of text. But lo, before me, a boyish figure clicks his heels and swings his hips to hypnotic ’80s synth, singing words that teach me the simple beauty of love and commitment. What a wholesome and innocent game that’s b…

Another month, another set of results from Valve’s PC hardware survey. It’s comforting to know that some things never change but if you’re Nvidia, then it will be even more comforting to note that one thing has changed—in the space of 12 months, its RTX 40-series of desktop graphics cards and laptop GPUs have an 80% bigger share of all the surveyed machines.

In the October 2023 survey, Ada Lovelace graphics processors accounted for 10% of all the sampled machines, whereas in the latest figures reported, it’s climbed to 17%. While the number itself might not seem all that impressive, it’s a sizeable increase.

For something to increase in this survey, another thing needs to go down and in the case of Nvidia’s GPUs, the GTX 10-series (aka Pascal) saw the bigges…

It’s been a rough couple of years for the games industry—and even laying it out like that feels like an understatement. Back in February, the number of layoffs and studio closures were already numerous enough to fit into a horrifying chart, and things haven’t exactly slowed down since.

One of the more high-profile recent shocks came from Microsoft, which shut down studios Arkane Austin—developers of Prey and Dishonoured—as well as Tango Gameworks, the studio behind surprise hit Hi-Fi Rush.

It was an especially messed-up situation because, as plenty of developers noted in the aftermath: A studio probably shouldn’t sink after a single flop like Redfall, but even if they do make an excellent game, that still won’t save them from the margin-fuelled man…