UK regulatory body the Competition and Markets Authority is reportedly preparing to share its preliminary judgement on Microsoft's revised Activision Blizzard deal next week.

The CMA is, of course, Microsoft's last remaining hurdle in getting its proposed $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard over the finish line after the UK regulator made the shock decision to block the deal in April, highlighting concerns relating to the burgeoning cloud gaming sector and arguing the deal would risk "stifling competition in this growing market".

Following the CMA's decision - and the Federal Trade Commission's failure to secure a temporary halt on the deal in a US court - Microsoft returned to the UK regulator with a revised proposal, saying it would sell the streaming rights for all Activision Blizzard games released in the next 15 years to Ubisoft should the new deal be approved.

A self-proclaimed white supremacist pleaded guilty Tuesday to making online threats toward the jury and witnesses at the trial of a man who killed 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the U.S. Justice Department said.

As part of his plea agreement in federal court for West Virginia’s northern district, Hardy Carroll Lloyd admitted that the actual or perceived Jewish faith of the government witnesses and victims in the trial of Robert Bowers prompted him to target the jury and witnesses.

Lloyd, 45, of Follansbee, West Virginia, faces more than six years in prison if the plea agreement is accepted by the court.

The Justice Department described Lloyd as a self-proclaimed leader of a white supremacy movement. Prosecutors said Lloyd, who was arrested on Aug. 10, sent threatening social media posts and emails along with comments on websites during Bowers’ trial. Lloyd pleaded guilty to obstruction of the due administration of justice.

What began as a routine band performance of Talkin' Out the Side of Your Neck by Cameo at an Alabama high school football game ended in a troubling confrontation when a police officer tased the marching band director for refusing to stop the music.

The altercation occurred Thursday around 9 p.m. local time after a game at Jackson-Olin High School in Birmingham, Ala.

Minor High School band director Johnny Mims, 39, and his ensemble of 145 students were about a minute away from being done with their final song when a police officer approached the podium. According to both Mims and the Birmingham Police Department, officers asked Mims to stop the performance so they could clear out the stadium. Mims responded that the song was about to end and the performance was agreed on by both schools.

"Nothing we were doing at the time was being a danger to the community, fans or the school," Mims told NPR on Monday. "Everyone was enjoying themselves. That's the part I'm having a hard time grappling with."

As the students finished their performance, officers attempted to arrest Mims for not complying. Police said the band director "refused" to place his hands behind his back and allegedly pushed an arresting officer.

In an email chain between Microsoft executives dated May 2022 is a list of third-party games earmarked as potential day-and-date Game Pass titles. One of the games mentioned is Red Dead Redemption 2 “D&D for gen9”, which Microsoft expected to come out during the second quarter of its 2023 financial year (October to December 2022).

“Gen9” refers to the ninth generation of consoles, aka the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. Rockstar has yet to announce a next-gen update for Red Dead Redemption 2, despite the many calls from fans. IGN has asked Rockstar for comment.

It’s worth noting that even if Microsoft’s listing for this apparent Red Dead Redemption 2 next-gen update was accurate at the time, Rockstar’s plan for the title may have changed. It may have been delayed or even canceled. Rockstar released a PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch port of its predecessor, Red Dead Redemption, in August, and is currently working on Grand Theft Auto 6.

(OP: Emphasis mine)

What's Coming To Xbox Game Pass

• Party Animals (Console, Cloud) - September 20
• Payday 3 (Console, PC, Cloud) - September 21
• Cocoon (Console, PC) - September 29
• Gotham Knights (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3 | Our Review
• The Lamplighter’s League (Xbox Series X/S, PC, Cloud) - October 3

What’s Leaving On September 30

• Beacon Pines (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Despot’s Game (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Last Call BBS (PC)
• Moonscars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Outriders (Cloud, Console, and PC) | Our Review
• Prodeus (Cloud, Console, and PC)

GENERAL UPDATES

• We're implementing some updates to how we load your accessories, like gun buddies and weapons skins, so that it will reduce your load times. This will land mid-patch.

AGENT UPDATES

Sage

• We’ve updated Sage’s voice lines and added interaction lines with more Agents.

COMPETITIVE UPDATES

• There has been a wave of competitive rank boosting with bots and real players. In an effort to protect against this abuse, we have introduced restrictions where Ascendant players and higher can only invite players with Platinum rank and higher to their competitive party.
• We will continue to actively monitor botting abuse and ban any accounts suspicious of this behavior.
• For more information on our Gameplay Systems and our approach to combating disruptive behavior, check out our recent VALORANT Systems Health Series.

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS UPDATES

• Made some back end updates for Combat Reports in order to fix instances where all the correct information wasn't showing. Please let us know if there are any weird behaviors—especially after death and pre-round start.

BUG FIXES

Gameplay Systems

• Fixed a rare bug where you would be revealed unintentionally in places that you shouldn’t be seen after purchasing a weapon.
• Fixed an issue where the Spike plant and defuse UI bar did not appear for minimal HUD observers.
• Fixed a bug where vision cones would flicker at the start of a round on Sunset.

"Dragon Age in the early days had its fair share of identity crises," Flynn says. "Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big singleplayer RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?"

"Dragon Age on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that," Flynn says.

Dragon Age: Origins does have a quite prolific modding community that's created new party members, tons of hairstyles and armor sets, combat mods, and more. The output for Dragon Age 2 was noticeably smaller. Then BioWare switched to DICE's Frostbite Engine, notoriously difficult for modders to use, especially without official tools, and Dragon Age: Inquisition's modding community was hamstrung.

"I wish we'd kept that up and stuck to that," Flynn says of shipping Dragon Age games with modding tools. "Unfortunately we got, I'd say, a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wish we would have kept more of a PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity for Dragon Age."

Flynn describes the move to Frostbite as a push to standardize tools internally across BioWare's then-growing studios. "We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare," Flynn says, explaining that the studio hoped to create a more common vocabulary across teams who could share what they'd built with one another's projects.

A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

"For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

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"However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA games than Stadia," Zimring says.

According to the statement, Google would also offer to pay some, or all, of the costs associated with porting a game to Stadia's Linux-based streaming platform to try and get more games on the platform. Still, in Google's eyes, this wasn't enough to compete with easier platforms to develop for, such as Nvidia's GeForce Now.

In the lead-up to Diablo 4's first season back in July, the game received a patch that was universally unpopular. That feels like an understatement—the community revolt was fierce enough to cause an honest-to-Lilith emergency broadcast where the devs stated: "we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again".

Far from repeating the mistakes of the past, it seems the Diablo team are slowly reversing them entirely. As spotted by Gamesradar, a hotfix has increased the experience gain for killing monsters in World Tier 3 by 5%, and 15% in World Tier 4.

This goes some way to fixing the nerfs which had players up in arms—nerfs that crushed XP bonuses for killing higher level monsters (from 25% at three levels or higher to a piddly 15% at around ten levels higher) alongside the World Tier bonuses they're just now u-turning on.

While this is technically good news, it looks like plenty of players would prefer these missteps were never made in the first place. In a post on the game's subreddit, players took the hotfix less like a kind gift and more like an overdue admission the devs had messed up. The top-rated comment by user SQRTLURFACE reads: "Classic Blizzard. Reduce XP, then Give XP back, call it a hotfix/patch."

The overhauled Runtime Fee policy plan being considered by Unity Technologies will cap the fee to 4% of the game's revenues over $1 million.

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While the changes aren't official yet, Bloomberg got hold of a meeting recording where Unity executives outlined the new plan, which reportedly caps the Runtime Fee at 4% of the game's revenues over one million dollars. Developers will also be asked to report the installation figures themselves instead of being forced to deal with Unity's proprietary technology. Lastly, the installation threshold won't be retroactive, so only new installations made after the policy's announcement will count toward reaching the Runtime Fee thresholds.

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth seems to have addressed one of the biggest issues of the original, as an official document from Square Enix suggests the game will have open-ended gameplay in the vein of a full-on open-world title.

The document, which can be found on the Square Enix Press website, provides an overview of the upcoming RPG. In the System section on page 13, the game's world is said to be divided into several regions, each one offering different environments to explore, and players are free to decide where to go and how to get there.

Document link

Spencer said in no uncertain terms that Microsoft could exit the gaming business if this projection became reality. Microsoft needs the light green and blue segments (PC and cloud) to get much larger and much faster by fiscal year 2027, or it could opt out of the business altogether.

I do not believe that that is what the future Xbox business would look like. This is a presentation from our devices organization to the gaming leadership team, so this is the view from the team that is chartered with building our hardware on what the future business would look like.

I can fairly safely say that if we do not make more progress than this off of console, we would exit the gaming business. If this were the outcome, we would -- I don't believe we'd still be in the business.

A majority of our customers are found off of our own hardware, I would hope by earlier than 2030. So, when you asked me if I agreed with this chart that the light green and blue depending on what colors you see there would have to be much larger much earlier. I would say by FY26, '27 that we should be in that position, or we'd have to make a different decision with the business.