Device Promises Ad-Free Internet

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When you’re surfing through your favorite web pages – like this one, perhaps – chances are you run into all sorts of ads, including pop-ups, side ads and more. Sometimes they can be really obtrusive and get in the way of your web viewing. For those seeking to get away from them, at least to some extent, there is hope with a little device called AdTrap.

This device manages to block ads from not only websites, but also videos, music streams and mobile apps that use a Wi-Fi connection. No software or configuration to your OS are required to use AdTrap, it’s just a device that plugs in between your router and your modem to block them. It also works on mobile devices, ad blocking on devices that utilize 3G and 4G.

The device, built by Chad Russell and Charles Butkus, could very well be the target of legal backlash from certain companies. The pair is ready, however, with not only a law firm from Silicon Valley to back them up, but also a special “whitelist” feature for AdTrap, which allows users to let certain ads in should they prefer them.

Following a successful KickStarter campaign, AdTrap is set to launch for $139. A release date hasn’t been given yet, but the creators are looking to sell it at major stores, including Best Buy and Costco.

Source: Mashable

 

‘Disruptive Things’ Excite Cliffy B

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Former Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski is speaking on two panels this weekend at the Escapist Expo in North Carolina. The game developer has been laying low since his keynote speech at the East Coast Games Conference in March. Speaking with [a]list daily he explains why he’s more excited about Valve’s Steam Box and Oculus VR’s Oculus Rift than Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One in this exclusive interview.

[a]list daily: A big topic at the Escapist Expo will be next gen consoles PS4 and Xbox One. What do you feel will define next gen gaming?

Cliff Blezinski: Things like the Steam Box and the Oculus Rift, honestly. I’m friends with a lot of folks in Microsoft. Microsoft has been very good to me throughout my career. I’m friends with the folks at Sony. But when I think about my gamer instincts and where I’m going to see a lot of the most disruptive and innovative gaming I don’t see it in the $250 million budgeted game that cost $100 million to market. Because when you have that high of a budget the amount of risk being taken decreases exponentially. I was more excited about playing games like Gone Home than any console release. I am thoroughly excited to dive into Grand Theft Auto V, but it’s sitting on my desk looking like War and Peace to me right now. I’m going to have to clear out a good two weeks of doing nothing in order to just deep dive into it. In the meantime I’m on my Nintendo DS and I’m on my laptop playing Steam games. I got to fire up Two Brothers and I finished Thomas Was Alone and Gone Home. I don’t know if it’s because I’m rubber banding and rebelling against my AAA background, but I will buy a Playstation 4 and an Xbox One. Am I more excited for that than the Rift and Steam I think Sony and Microsoft are going to do just fine and it’s a known entity. A known entity is not that exciting to me. It’s the disruptive things that are exciting to me.

[a]list daily: I was able to check out the Oculus Rift in HD at Gamescom.

Cliff Blezinski: The thing is, it’s not perfect yet. There are so many things that need to be solved with VR in order to truly make it work. And with each issue that they solve, whether it’s latency or the angle at which it rotates, it gets better. The amount of people who can’t experience VR and get in reduces it quite a bit. They know what they’re doing over there (at Oculus) and I think Rift could eventually be its own platform. Putting Team Fortress 2 and Half Life on it is a mistake. The experiences that are going to be the best ones are the ones that are custom made for the pacing of that kind of experience. I got more excited by the trailer for EVE Valkyrie on the Rift than anything I saw at E3 this year.

[a]list daily: That’s a cool game to play. Have you had a chance to play Valkyrie?

Cliff Blezinski: No. I don’t just tweet just to build the community and to talk sh*t. I also hope that somebody will contact me and say, “Hey, we saw your tweet, you want to come in and see us.”

[a]list daily: What do you think of the Virtuix Omni full body accessory for the Oculus that you checked out at San Diego Comic Con?

Cliff Blezinski: It’s not the experience I want right now. I think VR is new enough that just a straight VR experience like sitting in a cockpit needs to be solved first. They’re somewhat putting the cart a little bit before the horse. It’s comfortable if you’re walking and when you’re turning. To their credit, it largely works. But I think showing Half-Life 2 is a mistake because the pacing means that you can clear two rooms and you’re exhausted and you can’t even go on because you had to run so much. The kind of experience that you want for that, and for the Rift in general, is something more like Myst or Dear Esther, where you’re just exploring and where the gameplay isn’t very intense. I know it’s sacrilegious to say, but even a deer hunter game where you’re creeping through the woods and slowly turning around and trying to find your prey, will make a lot more sense for something like the Omni. It largely works, but I believe it’s still a ways off for really being viable for the majority of the population.

[a]list daily: What has crowd funding opened up for game developers today?

Cliff Blezinski: What Chris Roberts is doing with Star Citizen is amazing to me. That’s him bucking the system in not going to a traditional publisher. He wants to make his game and publisher say traditionally that genre hasn’t sold for years, therefore it’s not going to sell, therefore we’re not going to market it, therefore you have a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are thousands of PC gamers that are so hungry for that kind of experience that they’re throwing money at the idea that they can run around in their hanger and see multiple ships before the game’s even released. That’s the new order. No offense to my friends at Game Informer, but the old model of be quiet with your game for two years and then boom! the game is on the cover is over. You should build your community while you build your game now. That way from Day One they feel like they’ve had a hand in the development and you’re building almost a religion, you’re building zealots and an evangelizer experience. That’s the new world order.

eSports Fueling PC Gaming Growth

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Editor’s note: This article is a reprint of one that appears on NewZoo’s web site.

This Saturday will see 15,000 spectators descend on the Staples Center in Los Angeles to watch the League of Legends World Championship Final Event. Gaming as a professional sport has been around for a long time and has enjoyed mass popularity in Asia for years. Now the phenomenon is breaking out of niche status, attracting millions of game enthusiasts as followers in the West. Sudden mass uptake of eSports over the past year has also made game video streams the fastest growing content on the web, including YouTube and specialized destinations like Twitch.tv, who raised $20 million this week to support its explosive growth and global expansion.

Gaming on PC more popular than consoles

While Western press focus their attention on the next-gen console battle between Xbox One and PlayStation 4, PC Gaming is leading the industry in eSports and video content as well as in number of gamers on a global scale with around 900 million players. From a screen perspective, games played on the computer screen also gross more revenues than games played on TV: $27.6 billion or 39 percent versus $25.4 billion or 36 percent. Worldwide that is. The PC platform continues to shape trends and lead innovation in the industry in terms of game genres, free-to-play business models and now… eSports and video content. The new consoles Xbox One and PS4 will provide integrated functionalities allowing console gamers to follow the path originally carved out by PC gaming. Console-based eSports leagues do exist but not on the same scale as the PC franchises such as Starcraft, Dota2, World of Tanks and League of Legends.

Facts and figures on PC Gaming, eSports and game video content

  • Games played on a PC will generate $27.6 billion this year, 39 percent of the total games market. This includes money spent on casual websites and social networks. Without these “casual” segments, the global PC/MMO market is worth $21 billion. Approximately 40 percent of the 900 million PC/MMO gamers worldwide spends money on, or rather within, these games.
  • This year, American gamers account for $4.3 billion in spending on PC/MMO games or 20.3 percent of the global PC/MMO market.  The Asia-Pacific region represents $11.0 billion or 52.6 percent of the PC pie.
  • Of all PC/MMO gamers worldwide, 19 percent or 230 million can be called an enthusiast or core gamer, based on a combination of variables such as time, spending behavior and genre preferences.  This group of consumers is largely responsible for the growth of eSports and game video content.
  • Over 100 million Americans play PC/MMO games, almost two thirds of all gamers. 21 percent or 23 million of these gamers can be considered to be enthusiast or core gamers. Using the same variables for console gamers leads to a number of 24.1 million Americans. There is an enormous overlap between these two groups: 18.7 million gamers can be considered both console as PC/MMO game enthusiasts.
  • Game video community website Twitch saw its unique viewer audience grow from 3.2 million per month in June 2011 to over 44 million in August this year.
  • Early this year, Youtube reported that time spent viewing gaming content more than doubled from 2011 to 2012, making it the fastest growing content category. Almost half, 47 percent, was spent on content generated by consumers.
  • The largest international eSports league, the ESL, reports that 33 million hours have already been spent this year watching their eSports video content, up almost 100 percent since last year. Over 750,000 gamers visited ESL’s Intel Extreme Masters Series 7 events.
  • Global prize money for the bigger eSports events will be over $12 million this year, four times higher than in 2010. An increasing number of non-gaming companies are jumping on the opportunity to become partners of eSports events, including RedBull, Logitech and Plantronics.
  • The worlds’ largest payment service provider for games, GlobalCollect, reported that the fastest growing countries from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013 in terms of online payments for PC/MMO games were Malaysia, Thailand and Korea, each with over 100 percent growth.

Source: Newzoo

UK Report: Youth Tablet Adoption Surging

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Tablets aren’t just great day-to-day tools for older people and professionals – kids are apparently getting into them as well.

A research report by U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom indicates that tablet usage among the younger ages has picked up quite a bit, particularly when it comes to watching videos, playing games and looking things up on the Intenret.

The report indicates that media consumption among kids is on the rise with tablets, but that there’s also a drop for those between the ages of 5 and 15 years old with a mobile phone, down from 49 percent to 43 percent in 2003. This marks the first time in eight years, through Ofcom’s reporting, that there is such a drop.

Meanwhile, in that same age group, the use of tablets has tripled, rising from 14 percent to 42 percent in that same time frame. This is again with children aged 5-15, while infants 3 to 4 loom more in the 28 percent usage rate.

“Tablet computers are growing fast in popularity, becoming a must-have device for children of all ages,” states the report.

Source: TechCrunch

Game Sales Bring In Billions For Tencent

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Tencent really has come a long way over the past few years, and most recently passed $100 billion in market value with just a handful of products. Founded in 1998, Tencent’s rapid growth has been due to its ability to change direction when needed. Speaking at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University, Tencent president Martin Lau explained that the company moved more than half of its 20,000 employees to mobile development when it became apparent how fast the mobile market was growing.

Since that time, Tencent’s mobile portfolio has achieved impressive results. Looking at monthly active users, Tencent’s mobile messaging tool Weixin has 236 million MAU, its QQ instant messenger has 818 million MAU, Tencent mail has 274 million MAU, and Tencent Weibo microblogging has 220 million MAU.

“A lot of people say, ‘You have a hodgepodge of different services, so what is the core ’” Lau said. “The core, I would say, is the comprehensive social infrastructure. At core, we are a social company.”

Tencent has racked up an impressive $4.5 billion in revenue for the first half of 2013 alone, and only nine percent of that has come from ads. Over half (53 percent) of Tencent’s revenue came from games, mostly from the sale of virtual goods in games — that’s an annual game revenue of over $4 billion, making Tencent one of the largest game companies in the world. Some 70 percent of Tencent’s overall revenue came from the sale of virtual goods, with the rest coming from ecommerce.

Tencent has invested heavily in U.S. game companies in recent years, with hundreds of millions invested in Riot Games, Epic Games, and most recently Activision.

Source: AllthingsD

 

Milanese Puzzled By Submarine ‘Accident’

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It’s not often you see a weird occurrence happening overseas, especially one involving a submarine. But how about one that was actually planned?

That was the case in Milan earlier this week, when a submarine appeared to have broken through the street. However, citizens have nothing to worry about — it’s actually an elaborate campaign that was put together by ad agency M&C Saatchi Milano.

The promotion was a tie-in with insurance firms Europ Assistance IT and Gerertel, put together through an organized stunt. The idea behind it was to promote being safe-guarded against unlikely events, both personally and with possessions.

Be on the lookout for the unexpected, because you never know when a submarine will pop up.

Source: This Is Colossal

Great Power With Greater Efficiency

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As great as today’s current-generation game consoles are, they’re a real sucker when it comes to energy. They manage to take up 70 to 100 watts in active use, mainly due to the high-powered graphics chips, including the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii U. Compared to an Apple TV using only 6 watts of power, that’s quite a bit.

That said, a Polygon report indicates that future consoles, like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, won’t be such power mongers. According to Microsoft Senior Compliance Manager Tim Calland, systems like the Xbox One are “designed from the ground up to maximize computational power per watt.”

Multicore design is a huge benefit when it comes to power consumption. “One major difference we have now versus the Xbox 360 is scalable architecture, which means that it deals with tasks by just using the amount of computing capacity needed for the work to be done. Gaming is the big high-power experience, but when we are doing lesser functionality like streaming media, we’re using much less energy than the Xbox 360 did when we launched… We have eight cores now and we only use the amount that we need. That wasn’t an option in the last generation.”

Even at full capacity, the Xbox One will generate “eight times the computational power for the same amount of energy as Xbox 360 at launch.”

We’ll see how they fare when the PlayStation 4 launches on November 15 in the U.S., and the Xbox One one week later.

Source: Ars Technica

Amazon Goes Hands-On For e-Reader

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Amazon usually takes the digital route when it comes to promoting its new products. For the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, however, it has a different plan – a three-month tour.

The tour kicked off starting yesterday, with a stop at the High Line in New York City, where it’s expected to stay through Sunday. Here, users can stop by to check the e-reader out, and ask Amazon staffers more about the product. They’ll also receive a $5 coupon should they want to purchase the device afterwards.

The tour will continue on through a number of locations, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and Sacramento. Most  stops will be mall-oriented, save for the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey and the Galleria at Roseville in Sacramento.

The goal of the event, according to Neil Lindsay, VP of marketing at Amazon, is to get the device “in as many hands as possible.” This move could very well drive sales, with coupons keeping track of who’s buying what.

The Kindle Paperwhite is available now through Amazon for $119.

Source: Mashable

 

 

PS Vita TV And Sony’s Future

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In a lengthy interview with GamesIndustry International, Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida had a lot to say about the company’s future, as well as its handheld division with the PS Vita and its spin-off PS Vita TV system, which will release in Japan later this year.

Regarding the PS Vita TV’s release outside of Japan, Yoshida simply stated, “I don’t think we are saying that we have no plans – we have no plans that we can discuss!”

He also talked about the markets revolving around the system’s release. “The market situation is very different between Japan and the Western market in terms of whether it’s a portable market, whether it’s a console market…especially the situation with Vita in Japan right now is quite healthy,” said Yoshida. “Lots of new titles have been announced and we’re launching the new hardware here first.”

Continuing on, Yoshida stated, “What’s exciting about PS Vita TV for the future is, of course, that once the cloud gaming services are started this is a very easy, low-entry product that will let you enjoy libraries of hundreds of games without downloading or any storage.”

You can read the interview in its entirety below.

Source: GamesIndustry International

 

Paid Apps Getting Rarer

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The App Store has certainly shifted quite a bit over the last few years. Upon its introduction, users were thrilled to get their hands on some new apps, even if they came with a mildly high price tag. These days, though, the mood has changed, and “free” apps are looking like the way to go.

Flurry reported earlier this year that the shift of popularity from paid to free apps has continued, with about six percent growth over the last three years from 84 percent to 90 percent. In addition, developer A/B testing indicated that free apps, supported by in-program purchases, were the most popular.

“It suggests that developers are not just moving to free apps because everyone else is or it seems like the thing to do. Many of them have actually tested different price points,” said Flurry’s Director of Research, Mary Ellen Gordon, PhD. “Based on the trends, I would guess that by next year the (weighted) percentage of apps that are free will be somewhere between 91 and 93 percent — greater than it is now, but not 100 percent because there will probably always be certain specialized apps that are able to charge for downloads.”

It looks like the shift to free-to-play apps is greater than most people anticipated.

Source: TechCrunch