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A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team’s efforts as “scrappy,” which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world’s top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft’s lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it’s true that the overall global console user base hasn’t really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe’s big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

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Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

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With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it’s not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there’s still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover… With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.

He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.

Indeed the patch from Huawei’s Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It’s great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.

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The date for the introduction of the EU’s new entry-exit system has been pushed back again until November, allaying fears of long queues at the border during the October half-term holidays.

The launch of the new biometric checks for foreign travellers, including Britons, entering the EU, has been delayed from 6 October until at least 10 November, with many smaller airports yet to have facilities in place.

The move will again raise questions over the readiness of a system that has been long delayed from the planned 2021 start, with the French insisting the additional border controls should not be introduced before the Paris Olympics.

Under the entry-exit system (EES), non-EU citizens will have to register their biometric information – including fingerprints and facial scans – at the border, under the supervision of an EU officer, on their first visit.

There have been warnings of long queues at British points of entry – including the Port of Dover, and Eurostar’s St Pancras terminal – where the French and EU border is physically located in England, before passengers board ferries or trains.

The cross-Channel train operator said the process would add only a few seconds to border queues and not cause chaos, although passengers would have to ensure they arrived in time for the additional layer of biometric checks.

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Microsoft is integrating Nvidia’s GeForce Now service into its store pages for Xbox games.

At the time of publication, the new “play with cloud” button isn’t available just yet, so it’s not clear whether this is simply a link to the main homepage of GeForce Now or whether this deep links and launches the game directly on Nvidia’s cloud gaming service.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now RTX 4080 tier is the most impressive cloud gaming service available right now, with Nvidia even claiming the end-to-end latency beats an Xbox Series X running locally on a 60Hz TV.

Microsoft and Nvidia are no strangers when it comes to cloud gaming partnerships, though.

Both companies signed a 10-year deal to allow Nvidia to license Xbox PC games for GeForce Now, including Activision Blizzard titles.

Nvidia also rolled out an update to GeForce Now earlier this year that allows members to sync their Xbox accounts and Microsoft Store purchases to the cloud gaming service.

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2024 has had plenty of upsets.

Games from small teams — like Palworld, Balatro, and Animal Well — rocketed up the sales charts, outstripping titles with much larger budgets.

Meanwhile, the pace of big releases from major companies like Sony and Nintendo has slowed, as mass layoffs have continued to rattle the increasingly consolidated industry.

As perilous as the year has been for people who make games, it’s offered a diverse bounty for those who play them.

NPR network staffers and contributors have explored this breadth, from cozy puzzlers like Botany Manor to meditative adventures like 1000xResist to updated juggernauts like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.

Sortable by platform and genre, we invite you to find your next favorite game on the list below.

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"I’m very aware that I could wake up tomorrow and my job could be gone,” says Jess Hyland.The video game artist says the industry she’s spent almost 15 years working in is on “shaky” ground at the moment.A boom in players and profits during the pandemic sparked a flurry of investments, expansions and acquisitions that, in hindsight, now look short-sighted.Gaming remains profitable, but thousands of workers worldwide have lost their jobs, and successful studios have been shut down over the past two years.More closures and cuts are feared.

There’s lots of worry about the future," says Jess.Some bosses are talking up the potential of generative AI - the tech behind tools such as ChatGPT - as a potential saviour.Tech giant Nvidia has shown off impressive development tool prototypes, and gaming industry heavyweights such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the tech.It’s claimed AI tools can save development time, free workers up to focus on creativity and provide a more personalised user experience.With budgets at the blockbuster end of the industry spiralling as audience expectations rise with them, it sounds like a perfect solution.But not to everyone.

Publicly available AI image generators, for example, can quickly output impressive-looking results from simple text prompts, but are famously poor at rendering hands.

It’s a view echoed by Chris Knowles, a former senior engine developer at UK gaming firm Jagex, known for its Runescape title.

Copyright concerns over generative AI - currently the subject of several ongoing legal cases - are one of the biggest barriers to its wider use in gaming right now.Tools are trained on vast quantities of text and pictures scraped from the internet and, like many artists, Jess believes it amounts to “mass copyright infringement”.Some studios are exploring systems trained on internal data, and third parties advertising ethical tools that claim to work off authorised sources are springing up.Even then, the fear is that AI will be used to turn out assets such as artwork and 3D models at scale, and the expectation on workers will be to produce more output.

The AI industry is currently trying to reassure governments and regulators over concerns about its future use, as shown by a recent law passed by the EUIt will also have to work hard to win over another group - gamers.Online shooter The Finals received a backlash over its use of synthesised voice lines, and developer Square Enix was criticised for the limited use of generated art in its multiplayer game Foamstars.Jess believes growing talk about AI has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s special about that - sharing experiences crafted by other humans”.

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One of the telltale signs of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “out of video memory” error message that pops up in games such as Fortnite.

Cassells claims that his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th-gen Core chips and that his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs.

But Cassells reckons there’s a more substantial underlying problem here than mere glitches of instability solved by motherboard configurations.

“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing,” he claims.

This 13900K went into a gaming PC with a lower-end motherboard that by design can’t max out the chip’s power usage.

Cassells also recommends players, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, to avoid Raptor Lake processors.

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Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

When it comes to the ARM64 (AArch64) changes for this next kernel version, there’s been a lot of work on virtual CPU hotplug handling so that it should now be properly working on ARM64 ACPI-enabled systems.

Another change with Linux 6.11 ARM64 is expanding the speculative SSBS workaround to more CPU cores.

Arm’s Speculative Store Bypass handling is now being extended for additional affected CPU cores of he A710, A720, X2, X3, X925, N2, and V2.

There are also ARM64 ACPI updates, GICv3 optimizations, perf updates for more hardware, and other smaller changes.

See this merge request for all the ARM64 feature patches slated for Linux 6.11.

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In what has been a financially difficult year for the industry, which has seen mass layoffs, many of the world’s largest video game companies and influencers have quietly partnered with the oil-rich Saudis.

Some critics have labeled the investments “games washing,” an attempt to polish the country’s reputation and human rights abuses with entertainment and tourism, as it has been accused of doing with its professional golf and soccer leagues.

“Three years ago, I would have had my own prejudices as well, thinking about what Saudi is and what it is not,” said Ralf Reichert, the chief executive officer of the Esports World Cup Foundation.

Once a country that effectively banned movie theaters and strictly restricted tourism, Saudi Arabia has poured wealth into sports and entertainment at a staggering rate.

The fund recruited Brian Ward, a former director at Electronic Arts and vice president at Activision Blizzard, to be the company’s chief executive officer.

“Participating in a region of the world with a pretty egregious track record of human rights is difficult,” said Steve Arhancet, the team’s co-chief executive officer.

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