Report: Trump admin looking into Tencent’s US gaming investments

Enlarge / SHENZHEN, CHINA - AUGUST 19: A woman walks outside the headquarters of Tencent on August 19, 2020 in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images) The US government is reportedly scrutinizing Chinese tech giant Tencent and the US gaming companies in which it has an investment interest. Bloomberg reports that...

22m

How do music festivals adapt to a pandemic? They Fest in Place, of course

Ben Gibbard, I salute you for doing an at-home live-streamed concert every week from March through May as we all adjusted to the quarantimes. Like so many current realities, no one could've seen "musicians as the new Twitch stars" coming back in January. Yet in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry relied heavily on livestreams—typically...

5h

Sony makes it official: PlayStation 5 won’t natively support PS1, PS2, PS3

Enlarge / Were you hoping to play classic PlayStation discs on the newest PlayStation 5 console later this year? If so, we have bad news. (credit: Aurich Lawson) Wednesday's deluge of PlayStation 5 news mostly revolved around brand-new content launching alongside the console on November 12. Lost in the fray was a key detail that confirmed an August...

18h

The end of the 3DS marks an inflection point for portable gaming

A few of the 3DS variation that were, until recently, supported by Nintendo. [credit: Mark Walton ] Nintendo seems to have halted production on all variations of the Nintendo 3DS, marking the first time since 2004 that Nintendo is not producing...

1d

It’s now possible to detect counterfeit whisky without opening the bottle

Enlarge / Inside a dunnage warehouse of Highland Park whisky distillery. A new portable spectrometer would help detect counterfeit whiskies. (credit: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Image) There's nothing quite like the pleasure of sipping a fine Scotch whisky, for those whose tastes run to such indulgences. But how can you be sure that you're paying...

1d

PlayStation 5 event: $499 with a disc drive, $399 without, on Nov. 12

Fancy, reflecting eyeballs for FFXVI. [credit: Sony ] As part of a PlayStation 5 showcase today, Sony finally revealed the launch pricing for the PlayStation 5: $499.99 for the standard edition (€499.99, £449.99, ¥49,980) or $399 for the...

1d

Apple asks to block iOS Unreal Engine development in new court filing

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Apple's conception of Epic trying to evade punishment for its breach of Apple's developer agreement with regards to Fortnite. (credit: Epic Games) As the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple moves toward a September 28 hearing, the iPhone maker is mincing no words in arguing against Epic's request for a preliminary...

1d

Review: We do not recommend the $299 Oculus Quest 2 as your next VR system

Enlarge / It looks the same as its predecessor, but Oculus Quest 2 is quite different—and mostly in disappointing ways. (credit: Sam Machkovech) The long-rumored (and recently leaked) Oculus Quest 2 is here, in my home, on my face. I received it earlier this month, along with news that this would be Oculus's cheapest "all-in-one" VR system yet: starting...

1d

Sony pushes back on reports that it’s reducing PS5’s launch availability

The entire PS5 hardware library, as revealed by Sony. [credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment ] Sony has issued a rare denial in response to a recent report from Bloomberg suggesting the company has cut back production of the upcoming...

2d

Nvidia RTX 3080 review: 4K greatness at $699—and good news for cheaper GPUs

Your new favorite $699 GPU—unless AMD has anything to say about it in October. For some people, summarizing the Nvidia RTX 3080 difference may revolve around a slew of high-end—and sometimes proprietary—technologies. Ray tracing. Deep-learning super sampling. Crazy-fast memory bandwidth. In some cases, Nvidia's...

2d