Microsoft MSFT has claimed that Sony SONY has paid lockdown fees to developers to prevent games from appearing on Xbox Game Pass and other competing subscription services.

In a filing with Brazil’s Economic Defense Council (CADE), Microsoft also alleges that Sony is intentionally attempting to stunt the growth of Game Pass by engaging in anti-competitive practices related to the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

Microsoft has hit back at Sony’s recent claim that the company’s upcoming acquisition of Activision Blizzard ATVI is anti-competitive and that the call of Duty Franchise is influencing users’ console choices and it lacks a true rival.

However, Microsoft previously claimed that the title would remain cross-platform despite its ownership. A strategy of not distributing Activision Blizzard games on competing consoles would only be viable if the games could attract large numbers of players to the Xbox ecosystem, which would result in revenue to offset losses incurred by not selling those Titles on competing consoles emerge.

This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company also suggested that Ubisoft, Riot Games, Bandai Namco and Google all published the competitions call of Dutywith such titles as Apex Legends, Battlegrounds, Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) and more. You can see the full list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

While the US Federal Trade Commission continues to privately investigate the deal, foreign regulators, such as Brazil and New Zealand, are releasing filings for public viewing.

In June, Sony launched a revamped version of its PlayStation Plus subscription service to better compete with Game Pass. Sony may try to thwart Microsoft’s attractive subscription services to threaten its dominance of the digital console game distribution market.

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Sluggish consumer spending on video games is dampening the outlook

For the first quarter of fiscal 2023, Microsoft expects gaming revenue to decline in the low to mid-single digits due to declines in first-party gaming content on Xbox consoles.

As for games potentially coming to Xbox Game Pass, ads for titles such as Elden Ring, Soul Hackerand GTA V have been spotted on the Xbox storefront. All of these titles appear to have recently been made xCloud compatible as well.

The numbers reflect a broader decline in consumer spending on video games. According to market research firm NPD, Americans spent $12.4 billion on video games in the second quarter, down 13% year over year.

In the three months to June, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo NTDOY each recorded disappointing results in their respective gambling businesses. In the most recent reporting quarter, gaming revenue decreased 7% (down 5% at cc) due to a decline in Xbox content and services and Xbox hardware.

Nintendo reported a 15% decline in operating profit for the April-June period. The company behind the Super Mario Franchise claimed that poor performance due to global semiconductor shortages impacted Switch console production and sales.

Nintendo sold 3.43 million units of its Switch portable console in the quarter, down 23% year over year, while software sales fell 8.6% to 41.4 million units.

Sony sold 2.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the quarter, slightly up from the 2.3 million units sold in the same period last year.

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The world came, competed, and left a sizable debt.

The World Games 2022, held in Birmingham last month, cost $65.1 million to produce – $10 million less than originally forecast. However, the 11-day event fell short of its revenue goals, generating approximately $51 million from sponsorships and ticket sales, leaving a deficit of $14.1 million, according to CEO Nick Sellers.

“I couldn’t be prouder of our team at the World Games 2022 Organizing Committee in Birmingham,” said Sellers. “But for many reasons, our revenue has left us in deficit. We are working with our public and private partners to close the gap and settle all our debts as soon as possible.

“We have every intention of raising the funds involved and paying our suppliers.”

On Monday, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin delivered a letter to City Council members urging them to approve a $5 million “final funding proposal.”

“I respectfully request that this matter be brought before the full council for consideration on Tuesday, August 23,” the mayor wrote. “If you agree, I will ask the leadership of the Birmingham Organizing Committee (BOC) to be present at this meeting.”

Council President Wardine Alexander: “The World Games were a success for the city and region. We have been able to showcase Birmingham and surrounding cities in over 100 countries around the world and welcome thousands of people to Birmingham. The Council continues to work with the Mayor to review and address the motion we have before us; especially in relation to the needs of our local providers.”

Sellers said the BOC has “guaranteed Mayor Woodfin and the City Council that any additional funds it contributes will go directly towards paying the Birmingham area sellers as part of our plan to settle all outstanding bills.”

Sellers said the BOC made the same commitment to the Jefferson Commission, “and paid our remaining bills to our international partners. This is critical to ongoing economic development efforts.”

Continue reading:

World Games had high costs and hard-to-measure gains for Birmingham

Those 11 days in July changed us forever

The economic gains of the World Games must also improve lives

Commenting on the continued funding from the County Commission, President Jimmie Stephens said, “The Commission has already provided significant funds to the World Games. The debt will be settled at a later date.”

Aside from the BOC’s calculations, Stephens says the commission is addressing $1.3 million in overtime expenses from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department “related to the World Games.”

Other previous funders included the Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau and various corporations, which contributed $27 million to fund the Games.

Numerous factors contributed to the shortfall, Sellers said — most stemming from economic assumptions made when public and private sector officials first bid for the Games in 2015. The most important of these: predictions about the number of visitors that the event would attract to the region, especially international visitors.

The recent COVID-19 surge has likely contributed to the lack of international travelers coming to Birmingham from Europe or, more importantly, China. Chengdu is hosting the 2025 Games and an expected sizable contingent of its organizing group has not materialized, Sellers said.

This resulted in less than expected ticket sales (approximately 60,000 individual tickets plus those included in sponsorships) and lower than expected occupancy at hotels outside of downtown and surrounding areas. Also, the games were originally scheduled for July 2021 but were postponed to the following year due to the global pandemic. The delay added millions in additional costs to the budget.

Additionally, Sellers said two sponsors — representing $2.5 million in pledges of support — withdrew about a month before the Games began.

In short, the deficit was not entirely surprising.

“It was a massive undertaking,” Sellers said. “We have communicated an expected budget deficit to our public and private partners since the pandemic. The challenging economy and the recent spike in COVID made the deficit worse than expected. However, we are confident that our partners will stand with us and support this latest investment to help us balance budget and meet our commitments to our suppliers, most of whom are local.”

In an email to Woodfin and Sellers last week, Greg Barker, president of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, mentioned meeting with consuls general and/or ambassadors from 18 countries, seven “nationally recognized” side selection advisors and 14 executives from eight countries worldwide companies.

“All of these activities are sure to produce positive results in economic development and would not have been possible without the World Games,” he wrote.

Alexander said: “The city will continue to return on our investment for decades to come as we work to position Birmingham as a destination for major events and entertainment, while incorporating the lessons we have learned from hosting the world games.”

“We hope that all of our partners who have helped make the World Games possible will join us to ensure all responsibilities are met.”

While we might picture a scientist as a chemist concocting substances in a laboratory, or a biologist diving with marine animals, the reality is often far more mundane. Much of science involves collecting and analyzing data, and that process isn’t always very exciting. Imagine counting bacteria in a petri dish or determining if two stars look alike in an image of the Milky Way.

But a number of research projects have found a way to buck this trend and turn the tedious work of data collection and analysis into something fun and even rewarding. By creating games that integrate the process of data collection into their mechanics, players can contribute data and even gain new insights just by playing along. Gamification, along with the growing movement known as citizen science, which invites volunteers to participate in real scientific research, is changing what it means to do science in its own way.

Gamifying Science

Games that combine citizen science with rewarding play explore cancer treatments, help cure Alzheimer’s, explore the basics of language, and more. The games are not only intended to be fun, but also address a prevalent problem with crowdsourcing projects: the dropoff rate. Citizen Science games address the problem with game mechanics that allow players to uncover and engage valuable data through the simple act of playing. The results are impressive: Volunteers were able to process Stall Catchers with the citizen science game 50 times as much data as a scientist working alone. and research in The lancet of volunteer citizen scientists who played the game Cell Slider, it was found that players classified images of tumors more than 90 percent accurately, which was close to the accuracy of trained pathologists.

“The concept is that without really knowing the background of the problem, without knowing the science of the problem, the player is able to do something that helps solve the problem,” says Jay Alderman, the vice president from Balanced Mediaa video game company that has developed several citizen science video games.

The studio’s newest game is called a pattern matching challenge Rocks & Runes. Players place cartoon bombs on a colorful rune-filled board with the aim of destroying rocks and matching runes. The game will look familiar to anyone who’s ever played Candy Crush, and it takes a full five minutes to get the hang of it.

But beneath the explosion of color and the whirl of point multipliers, player choices are actually sorting data from FDA-approved drug compounds to identify those that might be useful against multidrug-resistant chemotherapy. By eliminating bricks with bombs, players virtually eliminate the ineffective properties of existing drugs and point machine learning algorithms to more useful compounds to filter out promising candidates from thousands of drugs.

Still, a player doesn’t even need to know about the potential scientific benefits to enjoy the game. Adding enough reward to gameplay to keep players interested in the game itself is a fundamental goal in developing citizen science games, said Nathan Bowden, senior game designer at Balanced Media.

“With everything we do, we try to do it through the lens of ‘is this fun?’ to look at,” he says.

Designers often look to existing video game archetypes – pattern recognition, first-person shooters, and more – for inspiration. Sometimes the real challenge is simply finding the right paradigm for a particular data set or scientific problem, says Bowden. When designing Wiley Wizarda game that uses the same dataset as Rocks & Runes, the designers played around with half a dozen different game ideas before settling on one, a spooky cartoon world where a wizard fights ghosts.

“There’s just so many different ways you can wrap a piece of research into a single mechanic,” says Bowden.

Open screen games

Another citizen science game glyph, takes a different approach. Instead of creating rigid rules or a defined game path, the project, which examines and compares alphabets from around the world, instead offers players an almost blank slate.

The simple game challenges players to come up with a set of rules to distinguish letters from alphabets around the world. The goal says Oliver Morin, one of the developers of the game and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, aims to develop a kind of grammar of letter shapes that the researchers can use to study how letters evolved and how letter shapes affect our life cognition. The researchers could have paid the participants for the work, as is often the case with other lab experiments, Morin says. But by gamifying the data collection process, he hopes they can reach people who are much more creatively involved in the process and more likely to come up with unique solutions.

“We need creative players who want to push the boundaries of the game and create unique types of data that we could never collect in an experiment,” says Morin.

Players get points for coming up with rules for classifying the letter shapes (think: these are all round, these all have a vertical line), with additional points for being the first person to suggest a specific rule. The response so far has been encouraging, says Morin, with a few thousand players from around the world. It’s ideal for a small game like theirs, he says, where the real goal is to reach people who might be very interested in the challenge. Your current top player has more than 60,000 points, which is weeks of gameplay.

“This person really spent weeks coming up with the most elegant, understandable, but innovative classification they could think of to understand letterforms,” ​​says Morin. “There’s no way a paid participant would be able to do that in a few hours.”

At Balanced Media, designers have explored other ways to get gamers involved, including creating games to play in live Twitch streams that allow gamers to broadcast games and interact. They have created a new game in the style of the classic arcade game “Asteroids” that can be played directly on Twitch between matches. Players must separate matter from antimatter by drawing a straight line across the screen, a simple task that helps sort through the same drug data as Rocks & Runes and Wiley Wizards.

Other citizen science games offer even more ways to get involved. The popular one stable catcher The game challenges players to find “stalls,” or clogged blood vessels, in images of mouse brains to advance Alzheimer’s research. And in the iPad game NeMO-Netplayers classify corals to train an algorithm that monitors the health of coral reefs around the world.

There may soon be even more opportunities for players to do Citizen Science. Or to put it another way: maybe we’ll have more entertaining citizen science games soon. The technology and infrastructure that support the video game industry continues to grow, opening up new opportunities and audiences as it does so.

“It’s giving us more and more ways to present these things to a player,” says Bowden. “It’s incredibly exciting what potential there is.”

Would you like to try something yourself? Find dozens of Citizen Science games on SciStarter.