After Fortnite came out for iOS in April and Switch in June, there was only one leading platform it hadn’t come out on. Soon, that will be rectified: The wildly successful battle royale game will be available on Android sometime this summer. But you won’t find it in the Play Store — instead, you’ll have to visit the Fortnite website to grab the launcher, which will download the game.
"On open platforms like PC, Mac, and Android, Epic’s goal is to bring its games directly to customers. We believe gamers will benefit from competition among software sources on Android. Competition among services gives consumers lots of great choices and enables the best to succeed based on merit," Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told TechCrunch over email.
But that also means Epic won’t have to pay out the 30 percent cut Google takes out of in-app purchases from software downloaded from the Play Store. That’s reasonable for consoles, but not for open platforms like Android, according to Sweeney.
"There’s a rationale for this on console where there’s enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30 per cent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service," he toldGamesIndustry.biz.
This would sound like a studio grumbling about having to pay out more profits if Epic hadn’t halved the cut it takes from companies on its own Unreal Engine Marketplace — and retroactively paid out old sales under the new split. Plus, since they’ve launched on every other platform, they have a better idea what it takes to publish on different devices than other studios. Young players might find it troublesome to hunt down the game outside the Play Store, but Fortnite is probably big enough that most probably won’t have too much trouble grabbing it off its website.
Back at CES in January, French company Blade seemed to promise the moon. For a monthly fee, the company would give users access to a high-end Windows 10 machine, with the latest CPU from Intel and a beefy Nvidia 1080 GPU built in. The computer would be housed at a server farm, which means as long as you had an…
Sennheiser has released a Bluetooth mic that gives you a way to make sure your video comes with crisp sounds — even if you’re recording from afar. It says its new device called Memory Mic can record "broadcast quality" audio even if you’re shooting the video from a distance with a phone. Say, when you’re recording your kid on her first bike ride, when you want to shoot a video of a musician that captures the whole stage or if you’re shooting a cooking show for YouTube. The device initially connects to your phone via Bluetooth, but it can apparently continue recording even if you go out of range.
Your phone’s built-in mic will still pick up ambient sounds for a more accurate representation of your recording conditions, which is great if you want to relive particular moments. The Memory Mic can record and store up to four hours of audio, and its accompanying app will automatically sync it with the video you take. It’s now available from Sennheiser’s website and various retailers for $200.
A little under a year ago, news broke that Disney was planning its own streaming service for a 2019 launch. The logic from Disney’s perspective is hard to avoid: why let someone else get rich streaming its content? Between Disney’s vast back catalog of animated features plus the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, it’s got a lot of greatest hits, after all. A month later it was therefore no surprise when it revealed it would not renew a deal with Netflix that has allowed the latter to stream some of the biggest blockbusters of the decade.
But there’s a snag to this plan, as is often the case when intellectual property is at stake. On Thursday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that in 2016, when Disney sold the TV broadcast rights for the original Star Wars films to Turner Broadcasting, it also sold it the streaming rights. Until 2024. And the AT&T-owned broadcaster has no desire to give them back early—at least not at a price that the House of Mouse considers palatable.
That’s somewhat of a blow for Disney. The Star Wars franchise features heavily in what we know so far about its plans for the streaming service, with live action and animated series already in the works. But for the first five years of its existence, it won’t be able to stream any of the first six Star Wars films themselves.
I wonder, shortly after signing that contract with Turner, did anyone in the Disney boardroom realize they had a bad feeling about this?
Some folks love video games so much, they find ways to play despite prohibitive disabilities. One such gamer took to Reddit last week to boast about scoring over 7,500 lifetime kills in the first-person shooter Call of Duty: WWII — entirely without eyesight. He goes by the handle ‘tj_the_blind_gamer’ and uploads gameplay to his YouTube channel, which he created after discovering there weren’t any other sightless Call of Duty streamers. He plays for his own enjoyment — but streams it to show the world that blind gamers are out there, racking up kills.
"It’s just simply more fun for me, to know that I have the skill to play a game most people consider to be a visual game and still be able to enjoy that experience with friends," TJ, who preferred to keep his identity private, told Engadget.
TJ was born with poor vision due to a condition called retinopathy of prematurity, losing sight in his left eye at five years old and in his right at 14. All the while, he played the Call of Duty series even as his vision deteriorated, and was on Call of Duty: Ghosts when an accident completely ended his eyesight. A year and a half later, he taught himself how to play video games all over again.
So how does one play video games while completely blind, especially a frantic shooter like CoD: WWII? Mostly by hearing footsteps. TJ tracks enemy players by sound alone, using surround-sound headphones, dialing down the background music and choosing in-game perks that enhance audio feedback. He navigates maps similar to how a bat or dolphin might, but instead of sending out high-frequency pings to understand the environment, TJ shoots ahead and listens (items, walls and the ground all have different sounds when shot).
"The closer you get the more distinct the sound becomes, resulting in being able to identify when they are behind a wall or out of your characters conceivable site," he said in a Reddit comment. "I can identify when I go behind a wall and an enemy is within a clear line of sight enough to not shoot through a wall. This also translates to footsteps and gunshots, I have enough experience and practice to even put that skill into long-range combat."
He plays and records gameplay on the PS4, using text-to-speech accessibility settings to navigate through menus. When he wants to hear his CoD: WWII stats, he asks Alexa’s dedicated Call of Dutyapp. While he streams, a screen reader on his phone announces chat from the audience.
It’s not a perfect system. Hitting enemies at a distance is often too difficult to secure kills, TJ noted on Reddit. There are other challenges, too. An update reduced footstep noise and his kills per game noticeably lowered. In lieu of a menu interface, CoD: WWII has a between-mission "headquarters" where players walk around talking to certain characters to access different modes, and TJ had to ask his livestream audience for directions.
Some of the feedback TJ gets is clearly heard in the streams, like triumphant pings when he gets kills and his character’s screams when he dies himself, as well as each gun’s signature sound. There are still things that TJ can’t possibly know during games because they only have visual cues. Incoming grenades get a directional indicator on-screen, while leftover weapons on the ground get a pop-up visual notification. For someone like TJ whose playstyle depends solely on sound, these obstacles seem far more lethal than to the average player. It is, of course, a design challenge — relegating mundane alerts to visual-only to avoid overwhelming players — but it’s regrettable that TJ gets taken out by errant explosives which sighted players dodge more easily.
TJ made the Reddit post to call attention to blind gamers: "I do my best to show everybody that even though people with disabilities may not play video games as often as people without disabilities, we still do. Even though I cannot see, I still play just as good, sometimes better, than several of my subscribers who have sight," he wrote. His YouTube channel is similarly dedicated to raising awareness — showing viewers what the rest of his life is like, with videos exploring parenting and correcting assumptions about living with blindness. He’s also started releasing game guides, like for Call of Duty: WWII and Diablo 3, to help other visually-impaired or blind players get through games.
Video games may include accessibility features, but they aren’t uniformly supported between titles. Unfortunately, most blind people TJ has encountered don’t want to try playing video games, even if those titles have specific settings that might help. He has a few suggestions to make games more appealing — or at least less frustrating — to those with visual impairment. In his opinion, more realistic audio engines with more detailed sounds would help, as would keeping menu navigation finite (not looping) so blind players know where it starts and ends.
On a personal note, he’d love if video editing software was compatible with screen readers (the technology that vocalizes text and descriptions of what’s on-screen), which would conceivably help him cut and trim files before he puts them online. Currently, he can only record his PS4 play and upload the raw footage of gameplay, overlayed with his live commentary.
And before you ask, no, TJ doesn’t know of any surgical options to restore his sight — but at this point, he wouldn’t want his vision back. He’s immensely proud of what he’s done and how much he’s capable of, and his YouTube channel is evidence of it. "All of these accomplishments have defined me, I do not want to stray away from what my channel is based around," he wrote. "Being blind and a gamer."
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