Remember that silly app, Yo, where you could ping someone with just a tap? Well, Kevin Jonas does. At the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York, the Jonas brothers talked about why they are creating apps. After seeing the Yo app raise over $1 million in funding, Kevin said it made launching startups look easy. “If they could do that, look what I can do,” said Kevin, about… Read More
Next Thursday is PS4 Pro day. Announced two months ago at an event in New York, the souped up version of Sony’s console has been designed with 4K and high dynamic range gaming in mind, featuring amped up specs, including an eight-core x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU, a GPU offering double the power of the earlier PS7 and a 1TB hard drive. Until now, however, Sony hasn’t offered up a list… Read More
Nintendo has revealed its new console, the Switch (which was codenamed the NX prior to its public debut). The thing that makes Switch different from any other console out there by a major game maker is its ability to quickly transition from home console to portable, thanks to a tablet format for the primary gaming hardware, and modular a modular ‘Joy-Con’ controller design. Is… Read More
At its core, Zwift is indoor cycling software. But layered on top of its functionality is a community that in the two years the company has been operating has grown in both scale and shear strength. At an event at Rapha’s cycling in SF, I found myself surrounded by core users proudly flaunting their team names and meeting, often not for the first time. Even Barry Bonds showed up to… Read More
Yesterday saw the introduction — after many leaks and rumors — of the Nintendo Switch, the company’s next game console. It isn’t due to arrive until March of next year, which is infinitely frustrating because it looks amazing for several reasons, not all of them obvious. Here’s why I’m more excited about the Switch than for any Nintendo product in a long time. Read More
Pokémon Go players will get the chance to participate in the game’s first ever in-game event this Halloween, starting Wednesday October 26 and running through November 1. The event will feature higher encounter rates for spooky Pokémon, including Drowzee, Zubat, Gastly, Gengar, Golbat, Haunter and Hypno, and trainers will also get more candy for catching, buddy training and… Read More
Xiaomi has added another mobile VR headset to its portfolio: announcing the Mi VR today — which it says is its first virtual reality headset with an inertial motion controller. Read More
Game Broadcasting for Windows 10 is coming, which brings built-in game streaming to the platform at the OS level. The tech for this is built using Beam, the TechCrunch Battlefield company acquired by Microsoft earlier this year. The Game Broadcasting tools provided by Beam incorporate interaction options for spectators, including the ability to make suggestions. On stage at the Windows… Read More
Minecraft, having already come to just about every other platform, is now on Apple TV, or will be soon at any rate. Well, that’s pretty much the news! Read More
Consumer virtual reality has a clear new leader today, and it’s the just-launched PlayStation VR. Unequivocally, this is the best VR experience currently available outside of the kinds of high-flying, super-secret test rigs that exist out there for army training or whatever that cost millions of dollars. That includes top-of-line hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as… Read More
Pokémon Sun and Moon’s release for 3DS rapidly approaches, and the Pokémon Company is unveiling eight new Pokémon unique to the new games, including six evolutions of Sun/Moon characters and two Alola-region variants of existing pocket monsters.
The new Pokémon include two evolutions of a new dragon/fighting type that looks like a good candidate for inclusion in my primary lineup of six. Read More
Rockstar is toying with the emotions of fans of its popular western adventure game Red Dead Redemption, with a couple of teaser images that are clearly leading up to a big announcement. Fans and industry observers suspect we could finally see the studio announce a sequel to the 2010 Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game. Red Dead Redemption was itself a follow-up to Red Dead Revolver, a… Read More
Razer, the company that develops hardware and services for gamers and the world of gaming, has made an acquisition to catapult it to more platforms and more people: The company has acquired THX, the legendary audio and video quality assurance company that was originally founded by George Lucas as part of Lucasfilm. Razer’s CEO Min-Liang Tan said in an interview that the terms of… Read More
Rockstar games confirmed a sequel to Red Dead Redemption is on the way for release in Fall 2017, tweeting the date along with the promise of a trailer arriving this Thursday, October 20. The follow-up to Rockstar’s epic Western action-adventure game series has been teased through Rockstar’s account, leaving many to suspect a sequel was planned, but now we know for sure. The… Read More
Nintendo’s got a gift for repurposing. In the 30+ years since it was first released, the NES and its beloved range of intellectual properties have been repackaged in just about every way imaginable – and heck, even that system’s most beloved protagonist was on-loan from a platformer about a giant ape with a princess-stealing problem. Mind, none of this is a criticism, really.… Read More
HP Inc. isn’t a name that comes to mind when you think of “enthusiast PC gaming system,” but the more endearing folks at HP think that recent tweaks made to OMEN gaming brand can change brand perception in the eyes of PC gamers, like myself. Read More
When we look back through the annals of time, there, etched in the history books will be “2016: The year of VR.” And what a year it’s been. We’ve already seen the Samsung VR launch to great applause, but with the imminent release of the PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift devices, the sector is about to shift into overdrive. But VR is not exactly new — the concept has… Read More
In just a few minutes, Nintendo will unveil (update: meet the Nintendo Switch) the first official teaser for the Nintendo NX, the company’s next flagship console. While the console isn’t supposed to come out until March 2017, people are excited — including investors. A few minutes after Nintendo teased the NX preview on Twitter, Nintendo’s shares jumped. The company… Read More
Nintendo finally unveiled the successor to the Wii U and 3DS — the Nintendo Switch. Interestingly, Nintendo won’t just be showing off its own games before the release. In the press release, the company announced that it has partnered with most of the big video game companies. For once, Nintendo wants to partner with third-party developers in a big way. While many video game… Read More
Even with an abundant number of Android set top boxes floating around, the promise of the Remix Mini managed to capture Kickstarter’s imagination in a big way, pulling in $1.6 million in pledges when it closed in August of last year. The device’s success was due in no small part to pricing – the company was offering early birds a first-gen version of the system for $20, a… Read More
With its latest title, educational game-maker Osmo is tackling a subject that’s close to CEO Pramod Sharma’s heart — entrepreneurship. Co-founded by Sharma and Jérôme Scholler (both former Googlers), Osmo makes iPad games that combine touchscreen gameplay with real-world objects and physical activities in front of the screen. Past games have covered topics like coding,… Read More
Nintendo showed off its new console, the Nintendo Switch, for the first time, in a video earlier today. It’s basically a tablet to which you connect two controllers when you’re carrying it around, and then you use a regular controller when the tablet is plugged into the TV. In other words, it’s a kind of hybrid console where you can play both while you’re on the move… Read More
Pokémon GO fever may be receding in the U.S., but in Norway it’s still raging. The country’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, was caught red-handed playing the game in parliament. Read More
Looking cool has never been Google’s strong suit. This is the engineer-led company that brought us Google Glass, after all. Yet some beanie-clad Mountain View designer seems to have had a vinyl-fueled revelation. Google is late to the game of non-cardboard virtual reality headsets. Oculus, Samsung, HTC, and others have popularized sci-fi looking VR masks. So to standout, Google needed… Read More
Should a self-driving car full of old folks crash to avoid puppies in the cross-walk? Is it OK to run over two criminals if you save one doctor? Whose lives are worth more, seven-year-olds or senior citizens?
In, This new game called the “Moral Machine” from MIT’s researchers, a car’s breaks fail and you have to choose whether it crashes into a barrier, killing the… Read More
Messaging platform Telegram is powering up on the chatbot front, with the launch of what it dubs a “bot-powered gaming platform” — in a bid to try to drive more engagement via addictive new features. Read More
Amazon Game Studios this week showed off the first games that will be integrated with live-streaming site Twitch, which Amazon acquired for over $1 billion in 2014. The new games will run on Lumberyard, the game engine powered by Amazon Web Services, that debuted earlier this year. These integrations will allow gamers to stream their broadcasts in real-time, overlaid with live stats,… Read More
What happens when the world’s biggest YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg tells his 48 million YouTube subscribers to download and play his new mobile game? The game promptly shoots up to the top of the App Store, and the servers crash under the load. That’s what happened, at least, following the iOS and Android launch of “PewDiePie’s Tuber… Read More
Nintendo has further taken the wraps off the must-have gaming gadget of the holidays — which is to say, the one we’re all buying ourselves as soon as it’s available. An aggressively retro-themed video released today visually demonstrates three of the the NES Mini’s features. Brace yourself, it’s about to get real nerdy in here. Read More
It appears that Twitch-integrated games are not the only thing Amazon has been working on with the live-streaming site it owns. A small number of Twitch users are now reporting seeing a new section called “Twitch Prime” pop up in their profiles. According to a banner ad spotted by one user, Twitch Prime will include perks like “free loot every month,” as well as… Read More
Twitch, the video game live-streaming service acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars back in 2014, kicked off its annual TwitchCon conference this afternoon with a keynote. With keynotes generally come a bit of news… and sure enough, here’s what’s new: Twitch Prime: As we scooped right before the Keynote, Twitch officially confirmed Twitch Prime. Included for free… Read More
Civilization is a game I’ve been playing for more or less 15 years, across multiple iterations of the series, and yet each new version always seems to feel fresh. After spending nearly 20 hours with a special preview version of Civilization VI, I can safely say that the same is true of this upcoming game, which manages to deliver all the familiarity you’d want as a Civ fan, with… Read More
On this week’s episode of TCBC, after a brief Disrupt-induced hiatus, longtime TechCruncher Greg Kumparak dishes on Pokémon Go – what made it so appealing at launch, what’s going on with product development, and where he’d like to see it go in the future.
Greg and I are both big Pokémon fans, so it’s a subject about which we have no shortage of things to say. Read More
The Philadelphia 76ers became the first American professional sports franchise to own an e-sports team with the purchase of pro gaming outfits Dignitas and Apex. If this isn’t proof positive that online pro gaming is big business, I don’t know what is. Read More
