Microsoft has created a real-time AI-generated rendition of Quake II gameplay (playable on the web).

Friday Xbox's general manager of gaming AI posted the startling link to "an AI-generated gaming experience" at Copilot.Microsoft.com "Move, shoot, explore — and every frame is created on the fly by an AI world model, responding to player inputs in real-time. Try it here."

They started with their "Muse" videogame world models, adding "a real-time playable extension" that players can interact with through keyboard/controller actions, "essentially allowing you to play inside the model," according to a Microsoft blog post. A concerted effort by the team resulted in both planning out what data to collect (what game, how should the testers play said game, what kind of behaviours might we need to train a world model, etc), and the actual collection, preparation, and cleaning of the data required for model training. Much to our initial delight we were able to play inside the world that the model was simulating. We could wander around, move the camera, jump, crouch, shoot, and even blow-up barrels similar to the original game. Additionally, since it features in our data, we can also discover some of the secrets hidden in this level of Quake II. We can also insert images into the models' context and have those modifications persist in the scene...

We do not intend for this to fully replicate the actual experience of playing the original Quake II game. This is intended to be a research exploration of what we are able to build using current ML approaches. Think of this as playing the model as opposed to playing the game... The interactions with enemy characters is a big area for improvement in our current WHAMM model. Often, they will appear fuzzy in the images and combat with them (damage being dealt to both the enemy/player) can be incorrect.
They warn that the model "can and will forget about objects that go out of view" for longer than 0.9 seconds. "This can also be a source of fun, whereby you can defeat or spawn enemies by looking at the floor for a second and then looking back up. Or it can let you teleport around the map by looking up at the sky and then back down. These are some examples of playing the model."

This generative AI model was trained on Quake II "with just over a week of data," reports Tom's Hardware — a dramatic reduction from the seven years required for the original model launched in February.

Some context from The Verge: "You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run," said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. "We've talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity."
"Is porting a game like Gameday 98 more feasible through AI or a small team?" asks the blog Windows Central. "What costs less or even takes less time? These are questions we'll be asking and answering over the coming decade as AI continues to grow. We're in year two of the AI boom; I'm terrified of what we'll see in year 10."

"It's clear that Microsoft is now training Muse on more games than just Bleeding Edge," notes The Verge, "and it's likely we'll see more short interactive AI game experiences in Copilot Labs soon." Microsoft is also working on turning Copilot into a coach for games, allowing the AI assistant to see what you're playing and help with tips and guides. Part of that experience will be available to Windows Insiders through Copilot Vision soon.

According to Bloomberg, India is set for a surge in tech startup IPOs valued at around $100 billion by 2027, with major players like Flipkart, PhonePe, and Oyo preparing to go public. From a report: A report from Indian investment bank The Rainmaker Group suggests that the new wave of IPO hopefuls is in a stronger financial position than their predecessors. Many of the startups that were listed during the 2021-2022 boom struggled post-IPO, with fintech firm Paytm losing roughly 63% of its value and beauty retailer Nykaa slipping 4% since going public.

"The financial health of companies set to list in the next two years is significantly better than those that went public earlier," said Kashyap Chanchani, managing partner at Rainmaker. He noted that two-thirds of the firms eyeing IPOs are already profitable and have improved transparency, making them more attractive to investors.

An AI system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft -- a difficult task requiring multiple steps -- without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI. From a report: "Dreamer marks a significant step towards general AI systems," says Danijar Hafner, a computer scientist at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, California. "It allows AI to understand its physical environment and also to self-improve over time, without a human having to tell it exactly what to do." Hafner and his colleagues describe Dreamer in a study in Nature published on 2 April.

In Minecraft, players explore a virtual 3D world containing a variety of terrains, including forests, mountains, deserts and swamps. Players use the world's resources to create objects, such as chests, fences and swords -- and collect items, among the most prized of which are diamonds. Importantly, says Hafner, no two experiences are the same. Every time you play Minecraft, it's a new, randomly generated world," he says. This makes it useful for challenging an AI system that researchers want to be able to generalize from one situation to the next. "You have to really understand what's in front of you; you can't just memorize a specific strategy," he says.

The U.S. and China "are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker," the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries."

"The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at a conference in March, adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all." China's government has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. "Embodied" AI is listed as a priority of a new $138 billion state venture investment fund, encouraging private-sector investors and companies to pile into the business. It looks like the beginning of a familiar tale. Chinese companies make most of the world's EVs, ships and solar panels — in each case, propelled by government subsidies and friendly regulations. "They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge," said Jeff Burnstein [president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Michigan]....

Humanoid robots need three-dimensional data to understand physics, and much of it has to be created from scratch. That is where China has a distinct edge: The country is home to an immense number of factories where humanoid robots can absorb data about the world while performing tasks. "The reason why China is making rapid progress today is because we are combining it with actual applications and iterating and improving rapidly in real scenarios," said Cheng Yuhang, a sales director with Deep Robotics, one of China's robot startups. "This is something the U.S. can't match." UBTech, the startup that is training humanoid robots to sort and carry auto parts, has partnerships with top Chinese automakers including Geely... "A problem can be solved in a month in the lab, but it may only take days in a real environment," said a manager at UBTech...

With China's manufacturing prowess, a locally built robot could eventually cost less than half as much as one built elsewhere, said Ming Hsun Lee, a Bank of America analyst. He said he based his estimates on China's electric-vehicle industry, which has grown rapidly to account for roughly 70% of global EV production. "I think humanoid robots will be another EV industry for China," he said. The UBTech robot system, called Walker S, currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars including software, according to people close to the company. UBTech plans to deliver 500 to 1,000 of its Walker S robots to clients this year, including the Apple supplier Foxconn. It hopes to increase deliveries to more than 10,000 in 2027.

Few companies outside China have started selling AI-powered humanoid robots. Industry insiders expect the competition to play out over decades, as the robots tackle more-complicated environments, such as private homes.
The article notes "several" U.S. humanoid robot producers, including the startup Figure. And robots from Amazon's Agility Robotics have been tested in Amazon warehouses since 2023. "The U.S. still has advantages in semiconductors, software and some precision components," the article points out.

But "Some lawmakers have urged the White House to ban Chinese humanoids from the U.S. and further restrict Chinese robot makers' access to American technology, citing national-security concerns..."

Nintendo has announced plans to introduce Virtual Game Cards for its Switch console in late April, allowing users to share digital games across multiple systems, the Japanese gaming company said during its Nintendo Direct event. The new feature will enable players to virtually load and eject digital games between Nintendo Switch consoles, mimicking the flexibility of physical game cartridges.

Users can play a single digital title on up to two systems, requiring only a one-time local connection between devices. The company has also confirmed that Virtual Game Cards will be compatible with both current and next-generation hardware. The system will also feature a family sharing option, allowing users to lend digital games to family members for two-week periods before automatically returning to the owner's account.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: World of Warcraft Classic's Hardcore mode has set itself apart from the average MMO experience simply by making character death permanent across the entire in-game realm. For years, Blizzard has not allowed any appeals or rollbacks for these Hardcore mode character deaths, even when such deaths came as the direct result of a server disconnection or gameplay bug. Now, Blizzard says it's modifying that policy somewhat in response to a series of "unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks" undertaken "with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences." The World of Warcraft developer says it may now resurrect Classic Hardcore characters "at our sole discretion" when those deaths come "in a mass event which we deem inconsistent with the integrity of the game." WoW's Classic Hardcore made it a hotspot for streamers, especially members of the OnlyFangs Guild, who embraced the challenge that one mistake could end a character's run. However, as Ars Technica reports, a series of DDOS attacks timed with their major livestreamed raids led to character deaths and widespread frustration, prompting streamer sodapoppin to declare the guild's end.

Blizzard responded by updating its Hardcore policy to resurrect characters lost specifically to DDOS attacks. "Recently, we have experienced unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that impacted many Blizzard game services, including Hardcore realms, with the singular goal of disrupting players' experiences," WoW Classic Associate Production Director Clay Stone wrote in a public message. "As we continue our work to further strengthen the resilience of WoW realms and our rapid response time, we're taking steps to resurrect player-characters that were lost as a result of these attacks."

Valve's early anti-piracy efforts, which eventually led to the Steam platform, were sparked by co-founder Monica Harrington's nephew using her money to buy a CD burner for copying games, she revealed at last week's Game Developers Conference. Harrington said her nephew's "lovely thank you note" about sharing games with friends represented a "generational shift" in piracy attitudes that could "put our entire business model at risk."

Half-Life subsequently launched with CD key verification in 1998. When players complained about authentication failures, co-founder Mike Harrington discovered "none of them had actually bought the game," confirming the system worked. Although easily bypassed, this early protection influenced Steam's more robust DRM implemented with Half-Life 2 in 2004, which became the industry standard for PC game distribution.

NPR reports on research "into whether our defenses built up from past flu seasons can offer any protection against H5N1 bird flu." So far, the findings offer some reassurance. Antibodies and other players in the immune system may buffer the worst consequences of bird flu, at least to some degree. "There's certainly preexisting immunity," says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine who is involved in some of the new studies. "That's very likely not going to protect us as a population from a new pandemic, but it might give us some protection against severe disease." This protection is based on shared traits between bird flu and types of seasonal flu that have circulated among us. Certain segments of the population, namely older people, may be particularly well-primed because of flu infections during early childhood.

Of course, there are caveats. "While this is a bit of a silver lining, it doesn't mean we should all feel safe," says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University's School of Medicine whose lab is probing this question. For one thing, the studies can't be done on people. The conclusions are based on animal models and blood tests that measure the immune response. And how this holds up for an individual is expected to vary considerably, depending on their own immune history, underlying health conditions and other factors. But for now, influenza researchers speculate this may be one reason most people who've caught bird flu over the past year have not fallen severely ill....

Research published this month is encouraging. By analyzing blood samples from close to 160 people, a team at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago were able to show that people born roughly before 1965 had higher levels of antibodies — proteins that bind to parts of the virus — which cross-react to the current strain of bird flu.
This week U.S. federal officials also "announced funding for avian influenza research projects, including money for new vaccine projects and potential treatments," the Guardian report. The head of America's agriculture department said it would invest $100 million, as part of a larger $1 billion initiative to fight bird flu and stop rising egg prices, according to the nonprofit news site Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Mozilla has warned that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google would harm independent browsers and reduce competition in the browser market. The DOJ and several state attorneys general last week filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google search case that would prohibit all search payments to browser developers, a move Mozilla says would disproportionately impact smaller players.

"These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture -- and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users," said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, which generate revenue from hardware and operating systems, Mozilla relies primarily on search revenue to fund browser development. Mozilla argues that cutting these payments would not solve search dominance but would instead strengthen the position of tech giants.

Mozilla also warned that the proposal threatens its ability to maintain Gecko, one of only three major browser engines alongside Google's Chromium and Apple's WebKit. "If we lose our ability to maintain Gecko, it's game over for an open, independent web," Surman said, noting that even Microsoft abandoned its browser engine in 2019. "If Mozilla is unable to sustain our browser engine, it would severely impact browser engine competition and mean the death of the open web as we know it -- essentially, creating a web where dominant players like Google and Apple, have even more control, not less."

Firefox serves 27 million monthly active users in the U.S. and nearly 205 million globally.

Microsoft is preparing to launch an AI-powered Copilot for Gaming soon that will guide Xbox players through games and act as an assistant to download and launch games. From a report: Copilot for Gaming, as Microsoft is branding it, will be available through the Xbox mobile app initially and is designed to work on a second screen as a companion or assistant.

Microsoft is positioning Copilot for Gaming as a sidekick of sorts, one that will accompany you through games, offering up tips and guides and useful information about a game world. During a press briefing, Sonali Yadav, product manager for gaming AI, demonstrated several scenarios for what Copilot for Gaming could be used for. One involved a concept demo of Copilot assisting an Overwatch 2 player by coaching them on the mistakes they made when trying to push without teammates.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) is acquiring Niantic's gaming division for $3.5 billion through its subsidiary Savvy Games Group. Niantic's titles include the hit mobile game Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom. "Despite launching almost a decade ago, Pokemon Go is still amongst the highest-grossing mobile games in the world, with 30 million monthly players," notes the BBC. From the report: Scopely is one of the biggest names in mobile gaming, with its most successful title, Monopoly Go, being downloaded more than 50 million times and generating more than $3 billion in revenue. Pokemon itself is jointly owned by Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures, which licensed the brand to Niantic so it could develop the game.

Ed Wu, who leads the Pokemon Go team at Niantic, said in a blog post he believed the move was "a positive step" for the game's future. "Pokemon Go is more than just a game to me, it's my life's work," he said. "I won't say that Pokemon Go will remain the same, because it has always been a work in progress. But how we create and evolve it will remain unchanged, and I hope that we can make the experience even better."

According to The Verge, Sonos has abandoned its plans to release a streaming video player this year. From the report: The news was announced by the company's leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos' next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company's future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table "for now." [...]

Pinewood was designed to offer many of the same streaming video apps as other devices on the market along with deep universal search and content aggregation. But as I reported last month, Sonos also intended for it to double as an HDMI switcher and support passthrough functionality for gaming consoles, 4K Blu-ray players, and more. The box was also set to allow new configurations of surround sound systems using Sonos' many speakers.

Magnus Carlsen "announced this week that he is auctioning off the Italian luxury brand jeans that started a dress code dispute at December's World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships," reports the Associated Press. ("Condition: Pre-owned," says the listing on eBay, where by Friday night bidding on the charitable auction was up to $14,100.)

But Carlsen drew more attention on The Joe Rogan Experience last week — partly by saying "I have no chance against my phone." (Although he'd also described beating a fan's computer program, according to Firstpost, by playing "some kind of anti-computer chess, where I just closed up the position as much as possible and gave it as few possibilities as possible to out-calculate me.") Carlsen admitted that he rarely plays against chess engines due to their overwhelming strength, but acknowledged their value as training tools. "I rarely play against engines at all because they just make me feel so stupid and useless. So, I think of them more as a tool than anything else."
And this led Carlsen to add "If I started cheating, you would never know," reports Indian Express: It's not just a throwaway line about cheating either. On a two-hour-long podcast, where he touches on mostly everything under the sun, Carlsen fixates on cheating in chess. He also details how a player of his calibre would need very little to cheat in chess. "I would just get a move here and there (from an aide). Or maybe if I am playing in a tournament I just find a system where I get somebody to signal to me when there's a critical moment: a certain moment where a certain move is much better than the others. That's really all I would need to go from being the best to being practically unbeatable. There's so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation," Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table...

"If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people," Carlsen admits on the podcast... "As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess," says Carlsen on the podcast.
The article adds that Carlsen does not believe Hans Niemann used anal beads to cheat — and that he thinks Niemann has become a much better chess player since the incident. But... "Top level chess has been based on trust a lot. I don't trust Niemann. Other top players still don't trust him and he doesn't trust me," says Carlsen. "There is still something off about him now. We played an over-the-board tournament in Paris last year where there was increased security and he didn't play at nearly the same level there."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Activision has finally admitted to using AI-generated content in its games and Call of Duty players aren't the least bit surprised. [...] After years of suspicions from the CoD community, it's now been confirmed by Activision directly that AI-generated content has indeed been featured throughout the FPS franchise. Upon visiting the Black Ops 6 Steam page, fans will notice a new change. Activision has now been forced to disclose its use of Artificial Intelligence in the game's creation. "Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets," Activision said in a statement provided to the platform.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A computerized system that calls balls and strikes is being tested during Major League Baseball spring training exhibition games starting Thursday after four years of experiments in the minor leagues. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is an advocate of the Automated Ball-Strike System, which potentially as early as 2026 could be used to aid MLB home plate umpires, but not replace them...

Stadiums are outfitted with cameras that track each pitch and judge whether it crossed home plate within the strike zone. In early testing, umpires wore ear buds and would hear "ball" or "strike," then relay that to players and fans with traditional hand signals. The challenge system adds a wrinkle. During spring training, human umps will call every pitch, but each team will have the ability to challenge two calls per game, with no additions for extra innings. A team retains its challenge if successful, similar to the regulations for big league teams with video reviews, which were first used for home run calls in August 2008 and widely expanded to many calls for the 2014 season.

Only a batter, pitcher or catcher may challenge a call, signaling with the tap of a helmet or cap; and assistance from the dugout is not allowed. A challenge must be made within 2 seconds... MLB has installed the system in 13 spring training ballparks that are home to 19 teams.
After a full season of testing in the Triple-A minor league, roughly 51% of the challenges were successful. Interestingly, the system makes its call exactly halfway across home plate> , where human umpires consider the strike zone to cover the whole 17 inches from the front to the back of home plate.

Valve has made Team Fortress 2's full client and server code public, allowing fans to modify, extend, or rewrite the game as long as their projects remain non-commercial. Game Rant reports: Valve has made Team Fortress 2's server and client code fully public, with the studio encouraging fans to explore the game's files and make it what they want. The game's code is now available thanks to a new update to the Source SDK, which dropped earlier this week. Fans have already been creating TF2 mods for years, but what this essentially means is that fans can make brand-new games. However, there's one catch: any and all TF2 mods must be released for free. "The majority of items in the game now are thanks to the hard work of the TF2 community." Valve wrote. "To respect that, we're asking TF2 mod makers to continue to respect that connection and not to make mods that have the purpose of trying to profit off Workshop contributors' efforts."

"TF2 mods may be published on the Steam Store, and after publication will appear as new games in the Steam game list," Valve continued. The new SDK update also includes new 64-bit binary support and fixes for multiplayer Source games like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source. Time will only tell what fans come up with as they dig deep into the inner workings of the game, but given how passionate and talented the Team Fortress 2 community has proven to be, players can expect to see some incredible creations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, many AI researchers have been working to integrate a so-called "world model" into their systems. Ideally, these models could infer a simulated understanding of how in-game objects and characters should behave based on video footage alone, then create fully interactive video that instantly simulates new playable worlds based on that understanding. Microsoft Research's new World and Human Action Model (WHAM), revealed today in a paper published in the journal Nature, shows how quickly those models have advanced in a short time. But it also shows how much further we have to go before the dream of AI crafting complete, playable gameplay footage from just some basic prompts and sample video footage becomes a reality.

Much like Google's Genie model before it, WHAM starts by training on "ground truth" gameplay video and input data provided by actual players. In this case, that data comes from Bleeding Edge, a four-on-four online brawler released in 2020 by Microsoft subsidiary Ninja Theory. By collecting actual player footage since launch (as allowed under the game's user agreement), Microsoft gathered the equivalent of seven player-years' worth of gameplay video paired with real player inputs. Early in that training process, Microsoft Research's Katja Hoffman said the model would get easily confused, generating inconsistent clips that would "deteriorate [into] these blocks of color." After 1 million training updates, though, the WHAM model started showing basic understanding of complex gameplay interactions, such as a power cell item exploding after three hits from the player or the movements of a specific character's flight abilities. The results continued to improve as the researchers threw more computing resources and larger models at the problem, according to the Nature paper.

To see just how well the WHAM model generated new gameplay sequences, Microsoft tested the model by giving it up to one second's worth of real gameplay footage and asking it to generate what subsequent frames would look like based on new simulated inputs. To test the model's consistency, Microsoft used actual human input strings to generate up to two minutes of new AI-generated footage, which was then compared to actual gameplay results using the Frechet Video Distance metric. Microsoft boasts that WHAM's outputs can stay broadly consistent for up to two minutes without falling apart, with simulated footage lining up well with actual footage even as items and environments come in and out of view. That's an improvement over even the "long horizon memory" of Google's Genie 2 model, which topped out at a minute of consistent footage. Microsoft also tested WHAM's ability to respond to a diverse set of randomized inputs not found in its training data. These tests showed broadly appropriate responses to many different input sequences based on human annotations of the resulting footage, even as the best models fell a bit short of the "human-to-human baseline."

The most interesting result of Microsoft's WHAM tests, though, might be in the persistence of in-game objects. Microsoft provided examples of developers inserting images of new in-game objects or characters into pre-existing gameplay footage. The WHAM model could then incorporate that new image into its subsequent generated frames, with appropriate responses to player input or camera movements. With just five edited frames, the new object "persisted" appropriately in subsequent frames anywhere from 85 to 98 percent of the time, according to the Nature paper.

"Magnus Carlsen, the world's top chess player, is bored of chess," the Washington Post wrote Friday: Carlsen has spent much of the past year appearing to dismiss the game he has mastered: It was no longer exciting to play, he told a podcast in March. In December, he withdrew from defending a world championship because he was penalized for wearing jeans to the tournament.

How would the world's best player spice up the game? Change the rules, and add a touch of reality TV.

Ten of the world's top players gathered in a German villa on the Baltic coast this week to play in the first tournament of a new chess circuit, the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, that Carlsen co-founded. The twist: The tour randomizes the starting positions of the chess board's most important pieces, so each game begins with the queen, rooks and knights in a jumble. [It's sometimes called "Chess960" or Fischer random chess — with both players starting with the same arrangement of pieces.] Players have to adapt on the fly. Carlsen is backed by a cadre of investors who see a chance to dramatize chess with the theatrics of a television show. Players wear heart-rate monitors and give confession-booth interviews mid-match where they strategize and fret to the audience. Some purists are skeptical. So is the International Chess Federation, which sent a barrage of legal threats to Freestyle Chess before it launched this week's event.

At stake is a lucrative global market of hundreds of millions of chess players that has only continued to grow since the coronavirus pandemic launched a startling chess renaissance — and, perhaps, the authority to decide if and how a centuries-old game should evolve... The format is an antidote to the classical game, where patterns and strategies have been so rigorously studied that it's hard to innovate, Carlsen said. "It's still possible to get a [competitive] game, but you have to sort of dig deeper and deeper," Carlsen said. "I just find that there's too little scope for creativity."
The article also includes this quote from American grand master Hikaru Nakamura who runs a chess YouTube channel with 2.7 million subscribers). "An integral part of regular chess is that when you play, you spend hours preparing your opening strategy before the game. But with Fischer Random ... it's a little bit looser and more enjoyable." And German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner (one of the investors) says they hope to bring the drama of Formula One racecars. ("Cameras mounted at table level peer up at each player during games," the article notes at one point.)

The first Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour (with a $750,000 prize pool) concluded Friday, according to the article, but "Carlsen did not play in it," the Post points out. "He was upset in the semifinals by German grand master Vincent Keymer." Carlsen's reaction? "I definitely find Freestyle harder."

But Chess.com reports that Carlsen will be back to playing regular chess very soon: Global esports powerhouse Team Liquid has announced the signings of not just one, but two superstars of chess. Five-time World Champion and world number-one Magnus Carlsen and the 2018 challenger, world number-two Fabiano Caruana will represent the club ahead of the 2025 Esports World Cup (EWC)... Carlsen and Caruana, fresh from competing in the Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, will first represent Team Liquid in the $150,000 Chessable Masters, which begins on February 16 and serves as the first of two qualifying events in the 2025 Champions Chess Tour. The top-12 players from the tour qualify for the EWC.
In an announcement video Carlsen reportedly trolls the FIDE, according to Indian Express. "The announcement video sees Carlsen wear a Team Liquid jersey along with a jacket and jeans. He then asks: 'Do I have to change?' To this, someone responds: 'Don't worry, we're pretty chill in esports. Welcome to Team Liquid.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica written by Kevin Purdy: There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia's "List of video games notable for negative reception." Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them.

Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that "following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration," Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was "too far away from the standards you deserve," so they are focusing on the 2026 version. [...]

The developer's statement notes that preorder customers are getting refunds. Answering a question that has always been obvious to fans but never publishers, the company notes that, no, Football Manager 2024 will not get an update with the new season's players and data. The company says it is looking to extend the 2024 version's presence on subscription platforms, like Xbox's Game Pass, and will "provide an update on this in due course." Fans eager to build out their dynasty team and end up with Bukayo Saka may be disappointed to miss out this year. But a developer with big ambitions to meaningfully improve and rethink a long-running franchise deserves some consideration amid the consternation.

AMD will launch its new Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards in March 2025, promising "high-quality gaming to mainstream players" amid struggling sales. The company's gaming division reported $563 million in Q4 2024 revenue, down 59% year-over-year. The new cards will target the same market segment as Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti ($799) and 4070 Super ($599), featuring a 4nm TSMC manufacturing process, ML-enhanced FSR 4 upscaling, and next-generation ray-tracing accelerators.

Steam Hardware Survey shows AMD's current RX 7000-series cards have minimal market presence, with only the 7900 XTX and 7700 XT registering on the list. Industry research indicates AMD sells approximately one GPU for every seven or eight sold by Nvidia. The launch timing could be opportune, as Nvidia's upcoming RTX 5070 features fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 4070 Super it replaces.