Category: Technology

Xbox found itself with a fire in the rumor mill overnight. The Xbox Store began displaying icons indicating that Elden Ring, Soul Hackers 2 and Grand Theft Auto V were all bound for Cloud streaming via Game Pass Ultimate.

The rumor tore through social media overnight because, if true, it would have set an immense new precedent. Elden Ring is not currently available on Xbox Game Pass, nor is GTA V or souls hackers 2. Were they to become available on Xbox Cloud Gaming, they would be among the first big titles to bypass the Game Pass platform in favor of the cloud. Fortnite took the leap and went straight to Cloud Gaming in the last few months. Would these titles follow? Naturally, speculation was rife online as anything even tangentially related to From Software games sets tongues wagging. Elden Ring on Cloud Gaming seemed like a huge swerve. Could it be that some announcements set for Gamescom later this month had escaped into the world a little early?

The blaze in the rumor mill continued, right up until Xbox confirmed to Eurogamer that the ads had been “bugs” and had all been removed.

“We’re aware of a bug that incorrectly displayed some titles as available with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Eurogamer. “We rolled out a fix and this is now updated.”

A “bug” is a convenient explanation and is certainly plausible. The Xbox platform, its store, and even Game Pass are built on sprawling, complex systems. It would be very easy for erroneous information like this to slip through. On the other hand, Xbox has one of the biggest gaming trade shows of the year right around the corner, and accidental leaks most commonly occur in the weeks leading up to such an event.

Xbox will head to Gamescom 2022 at the end of the month with plans to provide updates on some of its most popular games.

Tegan Taylor: So Norman, last week you pitched a podcast idea to us, knee cast, based on your own experience with a dodgy knee, and we got such a big response on it, getting all sorts of…’use a walking stick, don’t limp, do this, do that, do your exercises’. Are you doing your exercises?

Norman Swan: I am, it’s agony. I tell you, the hardest one is your buttocks, to strengthen your buttocks is very hard.

Tegan Taylor: I’ll have to take your word for it.

Norman Swan: I’ve never really thought about my buttocks before and trying to strengthen them, it’s tough.

Tegan Taylor: Are you doing squats and deadlifts in the gym?

Norman Swan: I’m doing…what do they call it?…the Romanian dead lift.

Tegan Taylor: Oh yeah, I do some of those sometimes too.

Norman Swan: That’s good for your buttocks, I’m told. Next week I’ll give you an update on my hammies.

Tegan Taylor: We should be buttockscast. No, no, let’s keep on going with corona cast, to show all about the coronavirus. I’m health reporter Tegan Taylor.

Norman Swan: And I’m physician and journalist Dr Norman Swan, and it’s Wednesday, 10 August, 2022.

Tegan Taylor: And we’ve been hearing so much about Omicron variant B5, the biggest BI suppose that we’ve been dealing with recently, and we saw a big peak to this wave through the middle of winter here in Australia. It’s peaking in other places in the world as well though, it’s not just seasonal. But we are starting to see that tail off a bit. It’s still only August though, so is this a little lull or we are maybe on the downward curve of the B5 wave?

Norman Swan: Well, we probably are on the downward curve. It’s always hard to pick the peak, but the peak was probably just before our last corona cast…

Tegan Taylor: We time it well.

Norman Swan: We do time it well. And it seems fairly convincing. New South Wales, just by the time you listen to this Coronacast it may have turned the corner, but New South Wales interestingly on a daily case rate, at least up until the weekend, was 50% higher as a percentage of population, in terms of the daily cases, than the rest of Australia.

Tegan Taylor: So what could be behind that?

Norman Swan: It could be that New South Wales people are better at getting tested. Unlikely, but it’s possible. Remember, we’re not testing systematically the way we did at the height of the pandemic in 2020, 2021 and we are not doing it with PCR, so it’s hard to know, but there may be more testing going on. There may be behaviour, there are fewer people wearing masks indoors than other states, or it may be just the way the virus is circulating. It’s almost impossible to tell, there could be a variety of reasons for it.

Tegan Taylor: I mean, we know that these waves do tail off after a while, they’re called ‘waves’ for a reason, it doesn’t mean that the virus has gone away completely, it’s not unexpected that it would tail off at some stage, but we are thinking that now is the time.

Norman Swan: I think so. I mean, when you look at the aggregate seven-day average for Australia, it really is quite impressive, the way it is going down.

Tegan Taylor: What about deaths?

Norman Swan: Well, deaths have been running quite high, and the running average, at least when we are recording this, is around about 60 to 70 deaths per day. It does look as if there’s a turnaround in deaths, and you’d expect that with a delay in the peak. So the peak was about eight or nine days ago, you would expect the turnaround in deaths probably to be two or three weeks after that. But there is a bit of a turnaround at the moment, so hopefully they are going to continue going down.

Tegan Taylor: Okay, so if we are waving bye-bye to the B5 wave, what’s next? Is this the calm before BA6 or Centurion or some other terrifyingly new variant we haven’t even considered yet?

Norman Swan: Well, as we’ve seen, but it could change, there’s nothing terribly biological about it, is that we have seen a new variant every six months, and as we predicted on corona cast, B4, 5, it’s now really B5 is acting as if it’s a new variant, even though it’s a subvariant of Omicron. Well, 2.75 is the one they are talking about, which is still a subvariant of Omicron, and it’s a bit more infectious, it’s a bit more immune evasive, maybe more contagious in its own right, probably not more virulent. Interestingly the mutations are very complicated, it looks as though 2.75 is more susceptible than other Omicrons to the monoclonal Sotrovimab, which is used therapeutically.

Tegan Taylor: In terms of helping people get better more quickly?

Norman Swan: It’s particularly helping in hospital, that’s right, so it’s not one of the antivirals, it’s a monoclonal. It seems to be tailing off in India, mostly noticed in India but around the world, so it is unclear whether 2.75 will take over. I don’t think it’s one that one would lose sleep over. So the next one could be another variant of Omicron, it seems to be producing a lot of mutations, this family of subvariants, or it could be a new one entirely, or maybe there won’t be any at all, let’s hope.

Tegan Taylor: Wouldn’t that be nice! So how are we faring in terms of vaccination rates? We had very high levels of first and second doses, what about third and fourth doses?

Norman Swan: Well, if you go to the Commonwealth data on this, 96% of people eligible over the age of 16 have had two doses, but only 71% have had three doses who are eligible, and that means 5 million Australians who are eligible for a third dose haven’t had it, which means they are under-immunised, probably seriously under-immunised. And with fourth doses it ranges between 30% and 40%, but of course you can’t have your fourth dose until you’ve had your third dose, it’s kind of a catch.

Tegan Taylor: Indeed.

Norman Swan: So, it’s serious, people need to get their third doses and, if they are eligible, get their fourth.

Tegan Taylor: So can we talk about how severe the disease is that BA5 causes? I mean, I know we just said that we are basically bidding it farewell. Some of the way the severe disease manifests is whether or not you are fully vaccinated, and you just said that a lot of us aren’t. But inherently, how does it compare to other variants?

Norman Swan: Well, the epidemiological data are not entirely clear. There has been a lab study which has not been peer-reviewed, which has come out of Japan, where they’ve got lab models in both hamsters and in the test tube to look at how likely it is that these subvariants disrupt the surface of the lung and blood vessels, and their conclusion from that is that BA5…and this contradicts something we’ve been saying a bit on corona cast, so we have to actually correct that, is they think that BA5 has lower ability to cause disease than the ancestral variant. We’ve been saying, based on early data, that the ability to cause disease is the same as the ancestral strain, the Wuhan strain, but in fact they are saying here, based on this laboratory data, that it has lower pathology potential, but it does have more ability to cause damage than BA1 and BA2.

Tegan Taylor: Okay, so it’s sort of in the middle there.

Norman Swan: It’s worse in terms of inflammation and disruption to the lung tissue in the lab than BA1 and BA2, but still low when you compare it historically to Wuhan, and presumably by inference Delta, although they didn’t look at Delta in this study.

Tegan Taylor: Well, Norman, people continue to send in questions and comments to us via abc.net.au/coronacast, and I thought it would be good to get to a couple of them today. One of them is from Darren who is asking about how best to use a rapid antigen test. He’s saying; ‘RATs swab the nose, I assume that’s because it’s too hard to swab the lungs. Where does the virus actually replicate? Only in the lungs or in the nose too? And what’s the implication on RAT accuracy for someone who is a mouth breather?’ I think he’s saying if it’s only coming from your lungs and you’re not breathing through your nose, are you going to find it there?

Norman Swan: Well, it comes in through the nose, goes into the lungs and replicates there. And there is some evidence that the RAT test is more accurate when you swab the back of the throat, but it’s hard for people often to really effectively swab the back of the throat, but we’ve talked about this on corona cast before, there is a bit of evidence that it’s more accurate if you swab the back of the throat, and that’s presumably because of exactly what Darren is talking about, is that the virus does tend to replicate below the vocal chords, in the lungs and the bronchial tree, and therefore more likely to be up there in the throat than in the nose. I’m a natural mouth breather because I’ve got a septum problem in my nose and I’ve tested positive on two occasions.

Tegan Taylor: Well, there you go. Another question about where the virus goes in your body is from Finton who is saying; is the coronavirus caught by swallowing air into our stomach and then breathing air into our lungs when air passes through our nose? And he is wondering whether breathing through our mouth only, behind a mask, would provide better protection. Can you bypass coronavirus by only breathing through your mouth?

Norman Swan: I think we’re going to have to ask a didgeridoo player to answer this question. But seriously, you don’t need to overcomplicate this, you catch it by it coming in through your nose and mouth, depending where you breathe it in, it goes into your lungs, it replicates and that’s how you catch it. There is some evidence that you can catch it via your gastrointestinal tract, which we talked about early on, and we did talk about whether farting spreads the virus but luckily you’ve usually got a mask on your bum, and the percentage caught through an infected surface, my understanding is that it’s 1% or 2%, it’s actually quite rare.

Tegan Taylor: So, in terms of getting it through a surface.

And that a question from Annabel, saying; of the people who catch coronavirus, how many are asymptomatic? Because someone told her recently they had been really sick with it and they said you’ll know if you’ve had Covid. But she is going, but will I? How will I know? What symptoms will help me to know that I’ve definitely had Covid and not a different respiratory virus?

Norman Swan: Well, by definition if it’s asymptomatic you won’t know. And it’s a really good question, and again as testing has become less systematic, it’s really hard to know. An early study into Omicron at the beginning of the year suggested that it could be 16% or 17% are asymptomatic.

Tegan Taylor: I can only speak from my own experience, I wouldn’t have known it was Covid if I hadn’t tested, I just had a rubbish head cold and felt tired. I’ve felt like that a million times before.

Norman Swan: Yes, but that’s not asymptomatic, that’s symptomatic. What if you’ve just been bouncing around feeling great, no problems at all?

Tegan Taylor: That’s true. Well, if you’ve got any questions or comments, you can let us know by going to abc.net.au/coronacast.

Norman Swan: Or send it in to knee cast and we’ll answer those too.

Tegan Taylor: We’ll see you next time.

Norman Swan: See you then.

Update: It was simply a bug that led to an ad incorrectly suggesting Elden Ring, GTA 5, and other games would be coming to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft says.

In case you missed it, several games, including Elden Ring, GTA 5, and Soul Hackers 2, were spotted in store pages and ads sporting Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming branding, which led to speculation that those games would soon be added to the subscription-based catalogs.

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The Saints Row reboot is once again nicely showing off what it means to be a Saints Row game.

A new gameplay overview trailer for the upcoming Saints Row reboot has dropped that gives a really detailed look at what all you will be facing when it comes to taking over Saint Ileso. Just like the previous games, you will be able to purchase shops to expand the Saint’s influence throughout the city.

You can find all of this in the trailer below. Buckle up, because it is certainly a wild ride.

First, you’ve got the several factions that you will be facing off with. Seeing as this is a Saints Row game, it’s not even slightly a surprise that one of the factions, The Idols, dress up like they are at an EDM concert. The fact that some of them wear helmets like they are in Daft Punk is just the cherry on top.

Of course, no game like Saints Row is complete without a police presence. Turns out The Marshalls privatized the local police force and have more than enough “defense technology” to pose a legitimate threat.

One of the nicest touches to this trailer is that you are shown a nice piece of property that is said to be “on 3rd Street”. Longtime fans of the series will definitely take notice of that as throughout the original series, the gang was specifically referred to as the 3rd Street Saints. It’s a nice call out and reminder that this reboot was made with the upmost love.

The Saints Row reboot will be out Aug. 23, for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. We will most certainly bring you plenty of guides when the game launches, so be sure to be here.

Canon has officially partnered with Japanese toy company Takara Tomy to produce two “robots in disguise” Transformer toys that take the shape of the EOS R5.

spotted by TFormers and TheVerge, Takara Tomy is set to release a pair of Transformer toys that take the shape of Optimus Prime of the Autobots and Refraktor of the Decepticons. Refraktor might at first seem like an obscure character to pick to go alongside the Autobot leader Optimus Prime, but according to Transformers lore, the Decepticon is a combination of three separate robots named Spectre, Spyglass, and Viewfinder, which fits nicely into the idea of it hiding as a Canon camera.

Takara Tomy indicates that it works in tandem with various companies annually to produce fun collaboration products and in the case of Transformers, it works particularly hard to make sure that they not only function as toys, but also look the part of whatever original product they are trying to mimic.

This year, the company’s toys are being produced in collaboration with Canon and the result is an 80% scale model of the company’s full-frame mirrorless R5. Takara Tomy says that the camera body and lens can be removed like the actual camera, although as a toy it cannot actually take any pictures.

When not in the robot state, the toy looks strikingly like the Canon R5 and it is particularly impressive that the body and lens can be separated and still look like the R5 and 24-105mm that they were modeled after.

The lens cap that looks strikingly similar to the one found on Canon’s actual cameras can be removed and used as a shield.

Both robots come with a small camera that each can hold when in their “transformed” state. Optimus Prime ships with a tiny EOS R5 while Refraktor comes with a three-part camera that mimics the original concept of the Decepticon that, as mentioned, is made up of three separate robots.

The two Transformers are scheduled to be released in Japan on February 25, 2023 and pre-orders for each (Optimus Prime and Reflektor) are currently open between August 10 and September 28 for 19,800 yen, or about $150. Takara Tomy has, unfortunately, not made any mention of an international release.

Image Credits: Takara Tomy

Microsoft has claimed Sony pays for “blocking rights” to stop developers from adding their content to Xbox Game Pass. The explosive claims are part of documents (Word doc) filed with Brazil’s national competition regulator and part of a review of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

“Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth,” claims Microsoft in an August 9th filing to the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), as translated from Portuguese. “Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.”

Does this mean Sony is evil and Microsoft is casually out here revealing some dastardly business practices? The reality is likely to be a little more complicated on both sides. Sony could simply be paying for exclusive rights for its own streaming services, or it may have clauses in some publishing contracts that prevent some games it publishes from being published on rival subscription services.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It’s not clear exactly what Microsoft is referring to here, but contracts for publishing games can be complex, particularly when rights for streaming and subscription services are involved. Documents filed in the Epic Games v. Manzana trial last year revealed Microsoft had been considering lowering the revenue split for PC games “in exchange for the grant of streaming rights to Microsoft.”

If Microsoft had proceeded with its plans, that could have led to the company securing exclusive streaming rights on some games, preventing them from being available on rival streaming services. It all depends on how publishing contracts are written, and both Microsoft and Sony regularly secure game exclusives that involve timed releases, console exclusivity, and lots of marketing dollars.

Microsoft is attempting to convince Brazil’s CADE regulator that it should waive through the company’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is analyzing documents from Microsoft on its acquisition in the US, that correspondence is private. That’s not the case in Brazil, where its competition regulator offers up public documents that provide unique insight into the business competition between Microsoft and Sony.

Image: Microsoft

Documents from Brazil’s CADE have been analyzed by Xbox and PlayStation fans over the past week, with posters on ResetEra highlighting the juicy parts. The regulator has been asking Sony and other Microsoft rivals about the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Sony previously responded to Brazil’s regulator claiming that it would be difficult for other developers to create a franchise that rivals Activision’s Call of Duty and that it stands out “as a gaming category on its own.”

Naturally, Microsoft disagrees, and Ubisoft, Riot Games, Bandai Namco, and Google have all highlighted competition to Call of Duty in the form of apex legends, Battlefield, PUBGand more.

Microsoft also claims that adding Activision Blizzard content to Xbox Game Pass will actually increase competition somehow. “The inclusion of Activision Blizzard content in Game Pass does not impair the ability of other players to compete in the digital game distribution market,” claims Microsoft in one document, where the company also argues it increases the competition thanks to “high-quality content at lower immediate costs.”

Sony hasn’t responded to this particular point yet, but at $9.99 per month for Xbox Game Pass, it’s easy to imagine consumers picking that option to play titles like Call of Duty instead of paying $60 or more to purchase and own the game.

Image: Activision

Microsoft also argues that not distributing games like Call of Duty at rival console stores “would simply not be profitable” for the company. Microsoft has previously made it clear it will keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft says a strategy of not distributing Activision Blizzard games on rival consoles would only be profitable if the games could attract a high number of players over to the Xbox ecosystem, resulting in revenue to compensate for losses from not selling these titles on rival consoles.

Whether Microsoft’s claims about “blocking rights” are accurate, it wouldn’t be the first time Sony has used financial incentives to block game developers. Sony held back PS4 cross-platform play for years and implemented a crossplay revenue share for publishers that wanted to enable crossplay in their games.

Sony’s cross-platform revenue share forced publishers to pay Sony a royalty whenever PlayStation players contributed more than a certain percentage to the bottom line of a cross-platform game to “offset the reduction in revenue” from Sony enabling crossplay. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney testified last year that Sony was the only platform holder that required this compensation for crossplay.

We’ve reached out to Sony to comment on Microsoft’s claims and to Microsoft to clarify what Sony allegedly blocks. We haven’t heard back from either company yet, and we don’t expect either will comment on these explosive details. But we’ll be watching the documents from Brazil’s CADE carefully in the coming days to see if or how Sony responds to Microsoft’s claims.

Xbox Game Pass subscribers were hyped for the Elden Ring’s appearance on the cloud service. Game Pass includes many qualified AAA games in its library, but it wasn’t so reliable to see an AAA game released months ago. Gamers were wondering will Elden Ring will be on Game Pass, and we shared the details yesterday. After a short wait, Microsoft announced Elden Ring’s appearance on the Game Pass library, and the details are clear now.

With high expectations, Elden Ring was one of the year’s most anticipated games. FromSoftware didn’t let the gamers down, and the game made a big success in many ways. We can say that Elden Ring is a must-play game for RPG lovers, but it looks like gamers cannot play it via Game Pass for now. But why did the website show advice about the game’s playability? Here are the things you should know.

Elden Ring’s Xbox Game Pass Availability Was a Bug

Microsoft confirmed the game’s Game Pass support is a bug. And there is more; that bug isn’t only for Elden Ring. You might see a piece of similar wrong information for the other games like GTA V and Soul Hackers 2. You should check it twice when you visit a game included in the Game Pass library. The Verge editor Tom Warren shared the screenshots of the bug:

if you’ve seen Elden Ring and other games appear as if they might be playable on Xbox Cloud Gaming or Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft says this is a bug and it has rolled out a fix pic.twitter.com/cnYuANBaBo

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) August 10, 2022

Microsoft says the bug is fixed, but you might want to keep your eyes open. The bug was there for the Xbox Cloud Gaming service in the beta process. The reviews for the service are primarily positive, but that kinds of bugs are disappointed the gamers. We hope not to face any other problems with the games listed in the library.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is included in your Game Pass Ultimate subscription if available in your region. Elden Ring isn’t included yet, but you might want to give a chance to cloud gaming when you’re not at home.