Enlarge / Mark my words, if any of you jerks abandon the unit, there'll be hell to pay... (credit: Valve)

Anyone who has played a bit of Counter-Strike probably knows the frustration of having a teammate bail on a match early on, leaving your team at a 4-on-5 disadvantage. The recently launched Counter-Strike 2 is trying to limit this problem by imposing a harsh new penalty for players who leave a match before it's over. But that system is already drawing angry reactions from players who feel they've been punished unfairly for unintentional match departures.

In CS: GO, abandoning a competitive match early resulted in a "cooldown" period before you could join a new match. Those periods started at 30 minutes for the first offense and rose to a full week for a fourth offense (one offense was also expunged from the count every seven days).

That punishment system carried forward to the closed CS2 beta in recent months but was reportedly ineffective at slowing down extremely high match abandonment rates. A series of popular posts on the CS:GO subreddit last month asked for stronger punishments, complaining that "almost every single match now has one leaver... I get it, you haven't played CS in years and you're butthurt that you're losing but you're just wasting everyone else's time if you leave."

Enlarge / Meta's estimated Quest software sales are worryingly close to those for the Wii U at a similar point in its life. (credit: Ars / Kyle Orland)

During Wednesday's Meta Connect keynote presentation, the company announced a new milestone for its line of standalone Quest headsets: $2 billion in lifetime revenue from Quest apps and software since the platform launched back in 2019. On first glance, that's a pretty big number that suggests the formation of a pretty healthy VR software ecosystem.

But looked at in context, Ars' analysis suggests the Quest software market is roughly the same size as that for the Wii U at a similar point in its short life cycle. That's not a great comparison for Meta to be facing, since the Wii U was rightly considered an embarrassing flop by the standards of the video game market.

Comparing apples to... VR apples

In making that comparison, Ars compared Wii U software unit sales numbers from Nintendo's own quarterly reports to estimated software sales numbers based on Meta's sporadic public announcements of Quest revenue milestones. To convert revenue numbers to unit sales estimates for the Quest, Ars divided total Quest revenue by the median sale price for best-selling Quest software ($19.99) and the mean sale price for that same software ($17.60).

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  The release will include the California-based expansion that was recently launched. [credit: Sony ]

Sony has announced that the sprawling open-world sci-fi epic Horizon Forbidden West will make its way to PCs "in early 2024," almost two years after it debuted on the PlayStation 4 and 5 and four years after its predecessor Horizon Zero Dawn reached PC gamers.

Titled Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition, the PC release will include both the base game and the recently released Burning Shores DLC, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Southern California. The complete edition will also launch on PlayStation 5, but a bit earlier, on October 6 of this year.

The PC port will be handled by Nixxes, which previously did a mostly bang-up job porting Sony studio Insomniac Games' Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales to PC. Sony hasn't announced any details about PC-specific features for the game, but some recent ports of first-party PlayStation games have included features like ultrawide monitor support, DLSS AI upscaling, and more. The Spider-Man games prominently featured ray tracing, but ray tracing was part of the PS5 feature set for those games already. Horizon Forbidden West does not have ray tracing on PS5, so its inclusion in the PC version is less certain.

Enlarge / It's what you signed up for. (credit: Intercept Games / Private Division)

When it comes to early access games, the only thing harder than code and quality assurance may be setting expectations.

Kerbal Space Program 2 was initially announced for 2020, then, after a whole bunch of development shifts, arrived in early access in February 2023—a bit too early, as suggested by player feedback. There were complaints about missing features and missing tutorials, but now there's an issue with having too much of something: Windows registry entries.

As detailed in a bug report, Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2) drops lots and lots of "PqsObjectState" entries into the Windows registry. The initial bug report offers a 322MB text file of them, to the point that the game started throwing "PlayerPrefsException" errors and refusing to load. The issue seems to be with how the game is using the Unity engine's PlayerPrefs game preference storing system.

Enlarge / The Quest 3 release date is unveiled at the Meta Connect conference.

Following a small tease in July, Meta has announced an October 10 release date for its Quest 3 headset. The follow-up to 2020's hot-selling Quest 2 and 2022's overpriced Quest Pro will start at $499 for a 128GB model or $649 for a 512GB model.

The lower-end model comes bundled with a copy of Asgard's Wrath 2 (available in winter 2023), while the higher-end model also includes a six-month subscription to the Meta Quest+ software subscription service.

The new headset upgrades the Snapdragon XR2 line powering previous Quest headsets to a "Gen 2" chipset, according to specs posted online. That means double the processing power and 30 percent more total resolution than Quest 2 (2064×2208 pixels per eye; 25 pixels per degree). The Quest 3 also sports 8GB of RAM, up from the 6GB of the Quest 2 but down from the 12GB on the Quest Pro.

Enlarge / A new, FIFA-less era begins for EA Sports. (credit: EA)

EA has suddenly removed downloadable versions of FIFA 23 from multiple digital storefronts. The delisting comes earlier than expected for the title and coincides with the company's launch of the newly FIFA-license-free EA Sports FC 24.

While many reports suggest there has been a recent mass purge of all legacy FIFA games from online stores, EA has a history of delisting older sports titles at a pretty regular cadence. FIFA 22, for instance, was delisted from digital storefronts in May, roughly seven months after the launch of the subsequent FIFA 23. And FIFA 21 wasn't taken down from Steam until June 2022, about eight months after FIFA 22's launch.

FIFA 23, on the other hand, has been delisted less than a year from its October 2022 launch. SteamDB tracking data suggests that the delisting came on September 21, the day before the new EA Sports FC became available for a 10-hour early access trial for EA Play members. The Steam store page for FIFA 23 now notes that the delisting comes "at the request of the publisher" and that the game "will not appear in search." The game also no longer appears on Steam's EA publisher page.

Enlarge / A partnership of 13 years has ended over a complete lack of trust in the company behind the Unity engine. (credit: Boston Unity Group)

The "first official Unity user group in the world" has announced that it is dissolving after 13 years because "the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." The move comes as many developers are saying they will continue to stay away from the company's products even after last week's partial rollback of some of the most controversial parts of its fee structure plans.

Since its founding in 2010, the Boston Unity Group (BUG) has attracted thousands of members to regular gatherings, talks, and networking events, including many technical lectures archived on YouTube. But the group says it will be hosting its last meeting Wednesday evening via Zoom because the Unity of today is very different from the Dave Helgason-led company that BUG says "enthusiastically sanctioned and supported" the group at its founding.

"Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities," the group leadership wrote in a departure note. "Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about."

Doctor Who marks its 60th anniversary this year with three specials featuring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, with the first slated to air in November. The latest trailer shows the good Doctor reunited with his former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and facing off against two classic adversaries from the Whovian archives: an alien race called the Meeps and a celestial being known as The Toymaker, played by Neil Patrick Harris.

(Spoilers below for prior seasons of Doctor Who.)

When the BBC announced that Ncuti Gatwa would succeed Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor as the new incarnation of Doctor Who, fans naturally expected Gatwa to make his first appearance in the traditional regeneration sequence. Instead, in the 2022 special "The Power of the Doctor," Whittaker's Doctor regenerated into an incarnation bearing a striking similarity to the Tenth Doctor—both played by Tennant. It was a savvy marketing move given the enormous popularity of Tennant's Doctor. With showrunner Chris Chibnall stepping down and Russell T. Davies re-assuming the reins for the show's 60th anniversary, what better time to revisit that character, along with my personal favorite of the companions, Donna Noble?

Enlarge (credit: Unity)

If there's one thing Unity Create President and General Manager Marc Whitten wants to make clear, it's that he appreciates your feedback.

"It's been a very feedback-giving week for Unity," Whitten told Ars, possibly the biggest understatement he made during an interview accompanying the new, scaled-back fee structure plans the company announced today. "There was a lot more [feedback than we expected] for sure... I think that feedback has made us better, even though it has sometimes been difficult."

But Whitten was also quick to find the bright side of the tsunami of backlash that came Unity's way in the week since the company announced its (now outdated) plans for per-install fees of up to $0.20 on all Unity games starting in 2024. That's because that anger reflected "the extraordinary passion that our community has for their craft, their livelihoods, and their tools, including Unity," Whitten said. "When Unity disappoints them, in a way where they're overly surprised or whatever, they give very, very critical feedback. I don't love hearing every single one of those pieces of feedback—sometimes they can be pretty pointed—but I love that that passion exists."

Enlarge / Unity is hoping you will see this logo in a better light after today.

Unity has made major changes to the per-install Runtime Fee program it announced last week and made apologies for a policy that united large swathes of the game development community in anger.

In a new blog post, Unity now says that projects made on current and earlier versions of Unity will not be subject to the new runtime fee structure. Only projects that upgrade to a new "Long Term Support" (LTS) version of Unity starting in 2024 and beyond will have to pay the charges, the company says.

This change should eliminate at least some of the legal confusion over projects started under one set of terms being moved to a new set unilaterally. Unity has also restored a GitHub page that was set up in 2019 to help developers track Terms of Service changes and reinstated its commitment that "you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version."

Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has given its provisional approval to recently proposed modifications to Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. While the approval is not final, the announcement suggests that Microsoft will soon clear the final regulatory hurdle in its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition, which was first announced over 20 months ago.

The CMA initially blocked the Activision acquisition back in April, saying that the purchase would "substantially lessen competition" in the nascent cloud gaming market. But after the US Federal Trade Commission's attempt at a merger-blocking injunction lost in court in April, Microsoft and the CMA went back to the drawing board to negotiate a settlement.

That led to Microsoft's August announcement that it would sell those Activision streaming rights to Ubisoft. The CMA now says it "has provisionally concluded" that this sale "should address these [previously identified] issues."

Enlarge

In the wake of Unity's sudden fee structure change announcement last week, a European trade group representing thousands of game developers is calling on governments to "update their regulatory framework" to curb what they see as a "looming market failure" caused by "potentially anti-competitive market behavior."

In an open letter published last week, the European Games Developer Federation goes through a lot of the now-familiar arguments for why Unity's decision to charge up to $0.20 per game install will be bad for the industry. The federation of 23 national game developer trade associations argues that the new fee structure will make it "much harder for [small and midsize developers] to build reliable business plans" by "significantly increas[ing] the game development costs for most game developers relying on [Unity's] services."

The organization also publicly worries about "professional game education institutions" that may need to update their curriculums wholesale if there is a mass exodus from Unity's engine. "Many young industry professionals who have built their career plans on mastering Unity’s tools [will be put] in a very difficult position."

Enlarge / Microsoft's Phil Spencer speaks at the DICE conference in Las Vegas. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Yesterday's massive leaks from the Microsoft vs. FTC case have a large swath of the gaming world expecting that a more powerful, disc-free Xbox Series X refresh could be coming as soon as next year. But Xbox boss Phil Spencer is warning that players shouldn't put too much stock in what he called "old emails and documents."

"It is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited about right now, and in the future," Spencer wrote on social media late Tuesday. "We will share the real plans when we are ready."

Spencer followed up that post with a memo sent to the Xbox team, apologizing for the unintentional disclosure of internal plans. "I know this is disappointing, even if many of the documents are well over a year old and our plans have evolved," the memo reads, in part. "I also know we all take the confidentiality of our plans and our partners’ information very seriously. This leak obviously is not us living up to that expectation... That said, there’s so much more to be excited about, and when we’re ready, we’ll share the real plans with our players."

Enlarge / Archaeologists excavating the ruins of an early 16th-century Polish castle discovered a carved strategy board game called Mill. (credit: Tomasz Olszacki)

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time. At least that's one possible scenario for the existence of a game board recently discovered by archaeologists in the castle ruins; it's also possible the board could have been carved by children or by servants after the castle was completed, or it may have been meant as a symbolic message.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was simply replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

This latest discovery isn't quite as old as that in terms of the actual carved board, but the game could be just as ancient. According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it's a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Enlarge / A leaked internal slide deck shows an unusually detailed preview of the Xbox Series X's proposed mid-generation refresh. (credit: Microsoft)

The US Federal Trade Commission's case against Microsoft didn't ultimately block the company's proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but leaked documents from the case are giving us an unusually detailed look at Microsoft's near-future plans for the Xbox. Court documents published by the Verge include a slide deck, complete with renders, that detail a mid-generation refresh of both Xbox Series consoles, plus a revamped controller with an updated design and new features.

The biggest changes are coming to the Xbox Series X. Codenamed "Brooklin," the updated console looks like a marriage of the original boxy monolith that is the Series X and the cylindrical design of Apple's old "trash can" Mac Pro. The console would be all-digital, ditching its optical drive but stepping up from 1TB to 2TB of internal storage. The port on the front changes from USB-A to USB-C, and the console would include Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 upgrades.

On the inside, the console's CPU and GPU would use a 6 nm manufacturing process instead of the current 7 nm process. Because the specs are changing, this means power consumption will go down, and the deck indicates that the console's power supply will be 15 percent smaller than the current Series X (that measures out to around 270 W, based on the 315 W capacity of the current power supply). An "all-new southbridge" will "modernize IO," and a "new low-power standby mode" would use just 20 percent as much power as the current console's standby mode.

Enlarge / Unity CEO John Riccitiello (credit: Unity)

The recently promised "changes" to Unity's controversial new per-install fee plan for developers could include hard limits based on a company's total revenue and developer self-reporting of installation numbers, according to a new report.

Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier cites a recording of a (threat-delayed) Unity all-hands meeting in reporting that the company is tentatively considering limiting total fees to 4 percent of a game's revenue. That change would potentially ameliorate concerns that some developers could literally bankrupt themselves with games that generate lots of installs but relatively little revenue per player under the currently proposed fee structure.

Bloomberg's report suggests this limit would apply to "customers making over $1 million," and it's not clear how smaller games and developers would be impacted by the potential change. For comparison, Epic's Unreal Engine currently charges a flat 5 percent royalty on all developer revenue after the first $1 million from studios using the engine.

Enlarge / Unity says it will be announcing changes to its recently revealed fee structure in the coming days. (credit: Unity)

After nearly a week of protracted developer anger over a newly announced runtime fee of up to $0.20 per game install, Unity says it will be "making changes" to that policy and will share a further update "in a couple of days."

In a late Sunday social media post, Unity offered apologies for the "confusion and angst" caused by the sudden announcement of the policy last Tuesday. "We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy," the post reads. "Thank you for your honest and critical feedback."

It's currently unclear whether those changes will amount to tinkering around the edges of the fee structure as currently planned or represent a more complete rollback of the idea of charging install fees in the first place. But even a full about-face might not be enough to satisfy some longtime Unity developers at this point.

Enlarge / Pray I don't alter it any further... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Star Wars)

If you were developing a Unity Engine game on Monday, you did so with the general understanding that you wouldn't be charged additional royalties or fees beyond your subscription to the Unity Editor software itself. If you were developing that same game on Tuesday, you were suddenly subject to shocking new terms that would impose charges of up to $0.20 per install (starting next year) after certain per-game revenue and install thresholds were reached.

This change led to a firestorm of understandable anger and recrimination across the game development community. But it has also led some to wonder how such a massive change is even legally possible. Can Unity just unilaterally alter the fee structure its developers were relying on, even for development projects that were started (or even completed) under completely different legal terms?

The answer, it seems, depends on how you interpret some seemingly contradictory clauses that have appeared in various Unity terms of service in recent years.

Enlarge / Gotta say, this looks like a lot more than 3 points of damage. (credit: Digital Eclipse)

The original Wizardry, started by a Cornell University student in 1978 and released in 1981, was a mostly text-based affair, with just enough primitive Applesoft BASIC graphics to hint at what was happening. It was published by a newly formed Sir-Tech software, with just enough polish to stand out from the Ziploc-bagged crowd. And it was polished and play-tested enough to find its audience. It's likely the first party-based RPG, and it all but created the genre "dungeon crawler."

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, as has been released in early access for PC today after two years of development, is a whole lot more than just "enough." It's adding fine-looking graphics, a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements to navigating and managing your party, and quicker combat and spell selection. But it's built on top of the same code as the original. "You can even view the original Apple II interface as you play," developer Digital Eclipse says.

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  Here's how combat looked in the Apple II version of Wizardry, and … [credit: Digital Eclipse ]

There are more enhancements to come, too, as the game is under development—you can even read the team's "Roadmap to October." It costs $30 now on Steam and GOG, but will likely cost more at final release. Console versions look like they'll follow after the final PC release, "before the end of 2024."

Enlarge / The common "Powered by Unity" logo

Unity Technologies has temporarily closed two of its offices amid what the company says are threats to employee safety. The move follows Tuesday's announcement of a highly controversial new fee structure for the company's popular Unity Engine.

News of the closures started dripping out via social media this morning, with employees describing "credible threats" reported to law enforcement and "safety threats" targeting the company's San Francisco and Austin, Texas, offices. "Surprising how far people are willing to go in today's age," Unity Product Manager Utsav Jamwal wrote. "Unfortunate."

In a statement provided to multiple news outlets, a Unity spokesperson said that the company had "been made aware of a potential threat to some of our offices. We have taken immediate and proactive measures to ensure the safety of our employees, which is our top priority. We are closing our offices today and tomorrow that could be potential targets for this threat, and are fully cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation."