EA course-corrects, will allow new Dragon Age sequel to be a solo RPG... just like all the other Dragon Age games

You know that the bar is really fucking low when this counts as a good thing.

As reported by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg:

Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. has made a major pivot on the next game in the popular Dragon Age series, allowing the developers to remove all planned multiplayer components from the game, according to people familiar with the matter.

Dragon Age is a series of fantasy games from the EA-owned developer BioWare. The next Dragon Age, which doesn’t yet have an official title or release date, had previously been designed with a heavy multiplayer component, said the people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the press. In recent months, it has transformed into a single-player-only game after EA was stung by a recent multiplayer flop.

That "recent multiplayer flop" was, of course, Anthem, further development on which was stopped by EA earlier this week. Up until that point, EA had been all in on loot-box-laden "live service" games, with their corporate strategy depending heavily on developing and publishing only "live service" multiplayer games going forward, but after lukewarm reception for Star Wars Battlefront, the PR disaster that was SW:BF2's planned loot box system, and the utter embarrassment that was Anthem's release, it would seem that they're rethinking that strategy.

And, yes, this is a good thing. Here's hoping that other AAA developers follow suit, giving up on forcing free-to-play monetization into full-price games, and return to just making good, feature-complete, finished games again.

Microsoft proves they've learned nothing, start testing full-page ads for Microsoft Edge to roll out in Windows 10

I am surprised only that people are surprised.

As reported by Windows Latest:

In production builds, Microsoft is A/B testing a new ‘feature’ that is designed to nag users with fullscreen window-less Microsoft Edge recommendations in the OOBE screen.

The nag will appear when users set up their PC, sign in to their system after applying updates, or when they click on a new ad banner within the Settings.

[...]

In the Settings app, there’s a new banner that appears to be rolling out to non-Insiders [...] the advert appears across the top of the Settings app window, just above the settings options. The banner states that you can “get even more out of Windows” and it surprisingly launches the OOBE (out of the box experience) screen [where] there’s a new page titled “Use recommended browser settings” that advises users to restore the Microsoft Edge and pin the browser to the desktop and taskbar.

[...] If you try to skip the setup, the pop-up will appear again in future.

Unfortunately, you cannot permanently disable these recommendations in Windows 10.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Windows is malware, and Microsoft should absolutely be facing antitrust action of their own for this shit. Microsoft controls over 80%, and nearly 90%, of the desktop/laptop OS market at a time when COVID-19 has pushed demand for desktop/laptop PCs to heights they haven't enjoyed for nearly ten years, and they've clearly decided to abuse that gatekeeper position to push their own products in the most anti-competitive, anti-consumer manner possible. 

I'm looking for the EU, at least, to bring action against Microsoft for this latest over-reach, but the US Department of Justice should also be scrutinizing the Redmond firm for this sort of behaviour, which was rampant during the Windows 10 rollout, and clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.

For more details, along with screen shots, click through to Windows Latest's article.

Big Tech anti-trust actions finally aim at correct target

Given the actively evil toxicity of Facebook, and the overtly anti-competitive tactics which Amazon was using to wreak havoc on the entire retail sector of the developed world, it seemed odd to me that so much focus was on "don't be evil" Google. 

It's not that Google weren't also abusing their monopoly position to do anticompetitive things, because it certainly looks like they were and still are, it's just that of all the problematic, amoral Big Tech firms, Google just wouldn't have been high on my priority list, if I were calling the antitrust shots. Even Apple, whose stance against right-to-repair and obsession with trapping consumers on their "ecosystem" for all time are more problematic to my mind than Google giving Android licenses away for free, would have been pretty far down on my antitrust hit list.

Well, apparently someone in the EU has woken up to reality, because they're finally starting to move against the real Big Tech problem children. From HuffPost:

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform.

The EU’s executive commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company.

The commission said it takes issue with Amazon’s systematic use of non-public business data to avoid “the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance” for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU.

[...]

Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

Better late than never, I guess.

The EU, for their part, claim to have been working on this antritrust case since 2018, in which case I just have to say, OMFG, get a handle on that bureaucracy, folks! And Amazon, naturally, "disagree with the preliminary assertions of the European Commission," which it pretty standard boilerplate for this sort of thing, and should surprise almost nobody. Odds are not in Amazon's favour, though; the EU typically don't bring antitrust actions unless they can prevail, which is the typical outcome, so look for Amazon to face big fines and strong restrictions in the not-too-distant future.

Whether this is a sign of emboldened officials around the world finally find the stones to reign in all of the Big Tech firms remains to be seen of course. If the EU takes on Facebook, in addition to Amazon, Apple, and Google, we'll have our answer. Don't expect that to happen until early next year, though, at the earliest, because... I mean... 2018? Damn.

Someone finally noticed...

 ...and it only took them four days. From Janet Swift, at I Programmer:

NetMarketShare Bows Out

This news item was supposed to be about the latest desktop browser statistics and the fact that during October Edge had experienced an increase in its share. However, more newsworthy is the fact the October is the final month for which NetApplications.com will collect these statistics.

Reporting the way in which Chrome has come to be the dominant the desktop browser, documenting Firefox's decline and, until recently, the failure of Edge to gain a foothold, has been a part of I Programmer's routine fare. So it came as a shock to discover that this months figures are the last, at least for the foreseeable future.

Well done, Janet Swift! As far as I can tell, you and I are the only two people to actually notice that huge banner announcement at the top of their stats page... and their home page... It makes me wonder what all the other chuckleheads are doing. 

Journalism!

NetMarketShare's closure announcement has received zero attention; their last set of released statistics, though, are a different matter

Days after posting their farewell until next time message, NetMarketShare's announcement they're shutting down after 14 years of service still hasn't generated a single tech media article or blog post (except, apparently, mine).

The evidence of NMS's influence, however, continues to trickle in,with the latest Chromium Edge browser numbers being the big story yesterday, and Wimdows 7's enduring popularity being the story today.

As reported by bleeping computer:

Windows 7 won't die, still second most popular operating system

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 7 saw a drop from 22.77% to 20.41% last month. The report shows that 20.41% of desktops still use Windows 7. Even worse, some are still using Windows XP, according to the report.

I can't help but wonder how bleeping computer will react next month, when they finally realize that frantically refreshing NetMarketShare.com isn't going to make the end-of-November numbers magically appear... because NMS aren't publishing any.

Also... in other news, Windows 7 is still the world's second-most-popular PC operating system, in spite of the fact that you can still get Windows 10 from Microsoft, for free (bleeping computer's article "helpfully" provides the steps). If you were wondering just how badly Microsoft pissed off their customers with the GWS fiasco... wonder no longer.

The other other Big Tech antitrust problem

With Amazon, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech firms, how long do you think it will take for America's broadband ISPs to get the same attention? Because they probably should.

So says an excellent piece by arstechnica's Tom Simonite:

The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. “If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples,” says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband—Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T—argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. [As many as] 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds [and] New America’s Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

[...] Children without reliable Internet have been forced to scavenge bandwidth outside libraries and Taco Bells to complete virtual school assignments. In April, a Pew Research Center survey found that one in five parents with children whose schools had been closed by coronavirus believed it likely they would not be able to complete schoolwork at home because of an inadequate Internet connection.

Such problems are arguably more material than some of the antitrust issues that have recently won attention in Washington. The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company’s payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult—it requires moving.

I live in Canada, where broadband access is more affordable, so this issue wasn't top of mind for me, but Simonite's piece raises some excellent points; the telecom oligopoly that has been allowed to develop south of the border is just insane, and absolutely needs to be reigned in, or broken up, or at least broken open. Here's hoping that Democrats get a chance to do so; with everything they'll have to deal with (assuming they get control House, Senate, and White House, of course), their dance card is going to be pretty damn full for the next couple of years.

Simonite's piece is excellent, and well worth a read - there's a lot more over at arstechnica than what I've extracted above - so go give them some clicks.

End of an era: Intel might move to outsourcing for chip manufacture

For years now, one of the things that has most clearly separated AMD and Intel was simply where their chips were physically made.

AMD, lagging behind Intel in almost every measurable way, sold off their chip foundries years ago to cut costs and raise capital, in a move which was largely considered indicative of their weak position at the time. Intel, by comparison, continued to own their own chip foundries, preserving a degree of vertical integration which was generally seen as a competitive strength.

But Intel has struggled to update their chip manufacture processes; their recent announcement that next year's Rocket Lake processor will, once again, be a 14nm chip, at a time when rival AMD is rumoured to be planning a move from 7nm to 5nm, speaks clearly to Intel's struggles in moving beyond 14nm chips to reach even 10nm, which would still be well behind the curve in terms of processor manufacturing.

If that last para made very little sense to you, here are the Coles notes: smaller is better when it comes to microprocessors, with smaller chip elements allowing chips to be smaller while having more capabilities, drawing less power, generating less heat, and running faster. This is the heart of Moore's Law, with the increasing areal density of transistors resulting in an exponential increase in computing power.

AMD's 7nm processors aren't just smaller; they're also better-designed, which is why their Zen 3 generation of Ryzen chips now outperforms Intel's products in every measurable way. But AMD didn't have to figure out the manufacturing process for Ryzen; TSMC had done that already, so AMD could just focus on design. Suddenly, what had seemed like a competitive disadvantage (i.e. AMD being forced to rely on a third party to bring the products to market) works to AMD's advantage.

So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Intel, after spending the last several years being clobbered by AMD+TSMC, are finally flirting with outsourcing chip production themselves. As reported by The Oregonian:

Intel is laying the groundwork to toss the old model out the window. It is openly flirting with the notion of moving leading-edge production from Oregon to Asia and hiring one of its top rivals to make Intel’s most advanced chips.

The company says a decision is likely in January.

It’s a momentous choice that follows a string of manufacturing setbacks at the Ronler Acres campus near Hillsboro Stadium, failures that have cost Intel its cherished leadership in semiconductor technology – perhaps forever.

There's no guarantee that Intel will do this, of course; even if they do move forward, there's no guarantee that this change will save them (AMD's processors aren't just smaller, remember - they're also better-designed). But the simple fact that Intel are considering this move speaks to the weakness of their position; much like the AMD of years ago, Intel might just have no choice but to outsource, if they want to stay in business. Rocket Lake was their last, desperate attempt to steal some of AMD's Zen 3 thunder, and it totally failed; most tech media outlets didn't even notice the Rocket Lake announcement, or care, which is pretty much the prevailing sentiment where Intel are concerned, generally.

Intel are in serious trouble; they might not be on the verge of insolvency, but they are on the verge of irrelevancy, if they aren't already completely irrelevant to a PC industry that they were totally lording it over just two years ago. After years spent charging premium prices for tiny performance increases, moving to outsourcing now may just be too little, too late. 

Whatever the outcome, though, there's no doubt that a solid decade of Intel dominion over the PC is well and truly over. That era is at an end.

End of an era: NetMarketShare throw in the towel

Confirming something that I'd suspected for some time now, OS and browser tracking site NetMarketShare confirmed the obvious today:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
After 14 years of service and being used as a primary source in tens of thousands of articles and publications, we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data. All billing for existing accounts has been stopped. All outstanding balances are being refunded.

Why? An upcoming change in browsers (https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints) will break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time.

In addition, we have focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process. It is the most complex part of our codebase. As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day.

Well... That escalated quickly.

This week in Facebook: Hypocrisy, incompetence, and partisan political bias, and that's just one of their policies

As reported by HuffPost:

Under mounting pressure to quell the flood of partisan misinformation coursing through its platform, Facebook announced a new policy in September: It would stop accepting all new political ads during the week preceding the presidential election.

[...]

In theory, as Zuckerberg touted, the policy would prevent political advertisers from spreading new messages to targeted audiences before fact-checkers and journalists had time to scrutinize them — reducing the risk of false and misleading claims going viral in the run-up to the vote.

In practice, it has been a disaster. [...] Chaos ensued almost immediately: Thousands of previously approved ads from Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign and multiple progressive groups were wrongly blocked due to a “technical flaw,” potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.President Donald Trump’s campaign managed to launch new ads post-ban. And in violation of its own rules, Facebook approved ads from the president’s campaign prematurely declaring victory, as well as hundreds of ads bearing the misleading text “ELECTION DAY IS TODAY” or “Vote Today.”

Days later, Facebook is still putting out fires amid searing accusations of partisan bias and negligence. The company’s stunning failure to properly enforce its own high-profile policy at such a critical time has raised alarm about its preparedness for the fallout of the election — the results of which could be inconclusive for days or even weeks.

“[Facebook’s] implementation certainly has only inspired more fears over how they’re going to be able to handle these last-minute election-specific rollouts,” [Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech] said. “It constantly feels like they’re dealing with optics — they’re thinking of everything as optical problems and never as structural problems.”

And that, friends, is Facebook in a nutshell, and why I think that the U.S. DOJ's antitrust action again Google was aimed at entirely the wrong target. Google might be problematic and monopolistic, but Facebook is actively evil. Google and Amazon are cuddly kittens by comparison; sure, they might be problematic in terms of business competition, but they have nothing on the corrosive toxicity and greed of Zuckerberg & Co.

Of all the Big Tech firms, Facebook is the most responsible for the deepening divisions in our discourse and society, structurally dedicated to encouraging the worst impulses of humanity for no other reason than their own material gain. Facebook is actively undermining civility, privacy, and democracy itself, and worst of all is that they aren't even doing it for ideological reasons; no, Facebook's undermining of civilization is being done, almost entirely, for the money.

Facebook is fairly begging to be broken up, but Trump's DOJ won't touch them; after all, their "mistakes" and "accidents" seem to trend entirely in one direction, and that direction mostly favours Trump and his supporters. Hopefully the DOJ of a President Biden, or a new Congress in which Democrats control both House and Senate, will take action against the most urgent Big Tech threat.

In the meantime, it falls to the rest of us to keep on doing what we've already been doing: deleting Facebook from our lives. Facebook is the problem; it's time for more people to stop being part of that problem.

VR won't be a "meaningful" part of interactive entertainment for YEARS, according to SONY

Among all the languishing and failed VR products, Sony's PlayStation VR stands out as the closest thing VR has to a success story. Sure, Google's Cardboard VR or Samsung's Gear VR may have moved more units, but PSVR has handily outsold all integrated-display VR headsets, combined. The problem is that even those industry-leading sales numbers are far below VR's early projections; worse yet, they were entirely front-loaded, with basically nobody buying in after that first wave of early adopters.

PSVR fans kept showing up for E3, year after year, hoping for a big VR announcement from Sony, only to leave disappointed. The next-gen PS5, which will land in stores only days from today equipped with more than enough grunt for VR, does have a camera module available for sale, but it isn't PSVR-compatible; if you want to use your last-gen PSVR with the next-gen PS5, you'll need an adapter. The only thing that could speak more loudly to VR being low on the priority list for Sony would be some sort of official statement to that effect, from Sony themselves.

And now, as reported by The Washington Post, we have exactly that:

Though immersion appears to be the focal point of Sony’s PS5 push, Ryan says there won’t be any immediate leaps forward from Sony in the most immersive gaming experience, virtual reality (VR). PlayStation was at the forefront of the virtual reality market for consoles, having launched a PSVR headset in 2016. While 5 million headsets were sold by January this year, sales were slowing in 2020. There are currently no public plans for a PS5-specific headset. Instead, Sony is offering adapters to use the PS4′s PSVR headset with the new console.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”

And that, as they say, is that. The most successful player in the VR game has no plans for a next play, anytime in the near-to-foreseeable future. Stick a fork in VR, folks; it's done.

VR apologists will likely look to Ryan's "at some stage"/"in the future" remarks as signs of life, but don't be fooled; that's just the corpse, twitching. Sony has to say something to assure buzzword-sensitive investors that they haven't given up on one of tech's juicier buzzwords, because admitting that VR's years-long campaign is ending in defeat could cause the share price of whoever admits it first to drop sharply, something which Sony would rather avoid. 

But their reluctance to flee the VR field first should not be mistaken for a desire to keep fighting the VR fight; Sony is done with VR, unless and until somebody else succeeds in convincing consumers to adopt the technology en masse. With the second-biggest player being Facebook VR née Oculus, who have nailed their VR fortunes to the larger platform's declining user count, that's looking less and less likely to happen.

Of all the companies doing VR business, the only one that might have been making money from VR was Sony. What we've now learned is that even Sony are not making enough money from VR for the tech to be worth any more investment. 

Oh, sure, Facebook and Valve have deep enough pockets that they can probably continue to lose money on VR for a while yet, but don't expect that to propel VR into the forefront of the public consciousness; it won't, and neither will the upcoming Ready Player Two (the sequel to VR-advert/movie Ready Player One, which also didn't more the needle on VR).

It's all over save the shouting; how long the likes of Facebook and Valve will keep shouting into the VR void remains to be seen.

A busy week for corporate bullshit

After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"

Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.