What’s up, guys? Welcome back to Newsweave. A quick heads up, this week, So, if you guys enjoy these videos, make we’re going to start today with Stop Killing Games because previously we talked about how they were trying to make the push and get to 1 million signatures. Well, now you can see clearly has just crossed that without too much issue. Coming in now at 1.2 million signatures. Here’s the thing, though. As they’re going to be going through this and verifying these signatures, they’ll most likely find some that just don’t meet certain requirements and they’ll have to throw them out. And it’s hard to say exactly how many, but it’s still worth continuing to try to get signatures and bring this to light because this is something I believe that does it needs to be put in front of lawmakers. Has to be a spotlight on this thing as we head towards the the digital future. This is going to be a thing. What what do you do with games when they they run to end of life and there was no plan for them maybe having some sort of offline mode or a mode that can exist without having a call to servers constantly like Anthem. Again, I know it’s not the b the greatest game out there, but it is still a game that maybe people want to go back to in 10 years. Well, at the beginning of next year, it’s shutting down, as in they’re breaking the internet connection for it, online connection, which means it just can’t function despite the game be able to be played completely alone in like a single player format. So, just want to throw that back out there. Still have a lot of work to do for Stop Killing Games. It’s going to run until the end of this month. Also, Call of Duty WW2 did go into Game Pass. That was for PC and for Xbox. And it appears, at least on the PC side through the Windows Store, there was bit of an issue. one that kind of leans into the idea of your entire computer being hacked. And look, we can see this posted. This is over on Call of Duty updates where they say Call of Duty WW2 on PC Microsoft Store was brought offline while we investigate reports of an issue. You might be wondering what issue is this. Well, it seems to be RCE or or RC exploits or that’s remote command execution, which I mean it’s pretty serious. someone can essentially take over your PC completely through Call of Duty WW2 specifically through the Windows Store. That version for some reason is is running into this problem. And there were there were some screenshots that were being posted of this happening. And yeah, you can’t really have a game out there that lets people take over other people’s PCs because who knows what happens after after that connection is established there. So, they’ve pulled it down for now. Um, when will they put it back up? Hard to say. It could even be by the time you’re seeing this video, but at least for now, they kind of have to work that out first. Let’s talk about today’s guys, with some of the quick news out of the way, let’s get into the bigger stuff. Let’s start right away with Nintendo accidentally leaking some games that are coming up for the Switch 2. And so remember how that CRT filter for the Nintendo 64 application that was shown off in a video which like you can see it here. And this is their N64 Nintendo Classics features update where they showed all this off in the Switch 2 exclusive feature that didn’t go over the best online because it seems like something with a CRT filter that should work for even the Switch one, right? But even though this video is a month old now, someone noticed something this weekend and it happens around the 42nd mark as like the settings menu is pulled up naturally go through it. They blur the background part. So it’s kind of an overlay. They blur out the back which would have all your box arts so you can focus in much more on some of the text or options that are in front of you. Well, I guess a person who was just watching realized something or just or just noticed it that the background looks like a familiar box art that’s not part of the Nintendo 64 NSO library right now. So, with that in mind, people started going through and matching up all kinds of box arts. So, like Nintendo everything just started like putting all these different X messages together. One from Mama Luigi saying, “I looked into a bit more and other people have caught this before me.” And Glover is also very clearly above Smash 64. I thought it was something else, so I cross reference every N64 box and nothing else is remotely close. Smash Brothers seems to be the biggest one, by the way, that people are noticing here. But then there’s also Donkey Kong 64 apparently, a game called Scars and even Forsaken. So like there there have been a few people that have taken all the box arts, blurred it, and set it up here. So like 910 is one example where they have an image of all the box arts there and kind of what people are are are sort of visualizing here. Okay. So I did see a good example from Andre at Game Explain where he went ahead and just blurred out Smash Brothers, lined it up and sort of did the the layer like the layer setup where you can hide and then and then make it visible so you can kind of go do the back and forth. And yeah, look, it’s it looks about right. It’s it’s almost one to one. And this all I know sounds crazy when you really think about it. It’s like that’s where we are right now with looking at a a heavily blurred background and it is kind of it’s the squinting meme from from X the GIF where people are like oh if you squint a lot like really squint you’ll see it. Yeah, if you really squint you’ll see it. But also yes that’s where we are because everyone’s kind of still waiting for a Nintendo Direct to happen. And when this starts to go around, people get excited cuz it’s like, “Oh, look, something Nintendo related, some kind of announcement for this new system that I have.” And there we are. People looking at the background for something like Smash 64. I will say Smash 64 would be very exciting to see go into Nintendo Switch Online. It’s a classic title from back in the day. For some, it may even open up the possibility of Smash Brothers Melee going into the Gamecube app. And that’s very possible, I guess. But Smash Brothers 64 is one of the like I mean it’s the original game in a massive franchise now and it’s one that probably I’m sure many people haven’t experienced. It is much more simplistic than where we are now with Smash Brothers Ultimate clearly. But I still think having that kind of a classic title available right there would be awesome. Although the online play may be questionable. It it’s so hit or miss with that though. So with the Gamecube as an example, we’ve been playing it a lot recently. Soulcalibur 2. Nate and I played online one night for a bit more than an hour and it worked fine. But then we tried Mario Strikers recently when that dropped and it wasn’t great online with four people. It was stuttering and it felt like you were always behind with your button presses just based on the way that the latency was set up there online. So super shots were completely out the out the window. You just weren’t going to do those. But the computer hit it every time. It’s gonna have to turn it off. So Smash Brothers, maybe not the best experience online, but just offline playing with some friends, it would be awesome. So sure, I I I hope this is indeed a thing and maybe it’s set up for uh a direct coming up where they do that or they can just drop an announcement of a new road map of titles if they want. Strange way for this to get out there, though. I’m not really sure. Did Did they just have like a like a a build that’s internal that just has this stuff available and they blurred it out? Well, if you remember with the treehouse for the Gamecube, they had Mario Strikers on there and they realized it a little late and they’re like, “Oh, yeah. Don’t don’t don’t look at Mario Strikers.” And then we all figured that’s the next one up, I guess. Guess what? It was the next one up because it just came out. Next up, let’s talk a bit more about Microsoft and their Xbox cutbacks that have been happening. And we’ve been getting more and more information around this as naturally the affected studios or people who have been laid off decided to just take to social media and share some of their frustrations. So the one for example is Romero Games which as you figure by the name was found and formed by John Romero back in 2015. Well they had a contract with Microsoft and we can see this is over on VGC. They’re citing the journal where they say Romero Games is working on a firsterson shooter made in Unreal Engine 5. According to the anonymous employee, there is a chance another publisher could swoop in and save the project and Romero Games. But as of now, its operations have ended, saying, quote, “We’re trying to find other ways of funding the project, but for now, it’s completely closed and the studio is closed. That studio had more than 100 employees there, and it was all based on this contract with Microsoft. And when they made these cuts and pulled funding, that’s kind of it. like you don’t really have much of a future there when there’s no way to be able to fund or back up your game that’s probably been in development for a couple of years. And as we’ve seen with Microsoft, I mean, they were cutting games that I mean, they cut out the initiative completely after they were around for seven years. So, probably a contract like this that might have been a couple of years in probably wasn’t a huge deal for them. Unfortunately though, this seemed like a game that we didn’t see it or anything, but there seemed to be a lot of confidence around this game behind the scenes and with you assume John Romero and the studio working on a firsterson shooter in Unreal Engine 5. I I mean the the the ingredients are there, the components are there to make you assume a very good firsterson shooter. Now, on top of that, Turn 10 did come up before and it seemed like they had some pretty significant cutbacks, about half the studio, which I kind of speculated then where their place was, which would be mostly support. And well, we can see this. This is over on Eurogamer with Fred Russell, who worked at the studio as content coordinator for four years until 2016, shared a post on Facebook with images from across his time working on the series, saying, quote, “Turn 10 studios has shuttered the Fortza Motorsports base, and the team is no more. A very sad day for one of the best car racing video games. I loved my time there.” In a follow-up reply, Russell added, “Forza Horizon will continue at this point.” Another reply from Russell says, “The studio is open to support the Horizon side. Shuttered the Fortza Motorsport side only.” So obviously a shame because Fortza Motorsport is like one of the original franchises for Microsoft. Goes back to the original Xbox. It was pretty much conceptualized as a competitor to Gran Turismo and it’s been alongside of it ever since. So this is this is a deep cut. I will say I will say that for Microsoft’s just overall lineup and catalog and it does show a situation where the spin-off that being Fortza Horizon overtook the original with motorsport. Now that just leaves turn 10, I guess to work on the engine which is like Fortza Techch and then help out with Fortza Horizon which we’re kind of expecting a Fortza Horizon game for next year. So I guess that’s just what they’ve been working on there alongside of Playground Games who’s also working on Fable. But there we are. So, I guess Fortza Motorsport itself has been shelved probably indefinitely and it’s full speed ahead on the Fortza Horizon side, which yes, I know is just more popular, but there is something to having that long-standing franchise with Fortza Motorsport that’s legitimately been there since the beginning. We’ve had a Fortza game on every single generation of Xbox up to this point. Now, we also had a report that came out from the Seattle Times that finally, I’d say, made the connection between what’s happening here on the gaming side and what’s happening at Microsoft overall. Now, this year, they have let go of 15,000 employees. And it does appear that this is, as some analysts and experts saying, a retooling, quote unquote, as Microsoft is working to divert funds towards AI. At the beginning of this year, Microsoft mentioned that they would be investing $80 billion into AI this year. That’s quite a bit of money. It’s a huge deal when they bought Activision Blizzard with 70 billion. Stack another 10 billion on top of that. That’s how much they’re looking to drop into AI this year. And the big thing now is there’s some massive players. We look at gaming and that’s just like a like a small pond compared to the ocean of some of these companies all together for this whole AI initiative right now. And it’s a big competing race currently between companies like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, big big companies like I said. And the push right now is for AGI or artificial general intelligence because apparently once they get there, going to artificial super intelligence will take significantly less time because you’ll have the AI work on the AI. And if you get general intelligence, which is just about how bit can reason and think like us, and then they can push themselves up to super intelligence, and then you probably get Skynet or Voltron or or Ultron, I should say. Um, but we’ll see how I guess how that works out because look, here’s the thing. AI is going to be disruptive one way or the other. it’s all going to work out and AI is going to solve all our problems or turn on us and be our extinction or it’s not going to work out and these big companies are going to burn like half a trillion dollars and perfect dark will get cancelled. So there you go. It’s disruptive either way and something tells me right now with Microsoft continue to be re continue to retool we’re probably going to hear about more layoffs and cutbacks here probably over the next few weeks. And in our last bit of news, let’s talk about Virtuos, who had quite a bit to say about the Switch 2, its capabilities, and even its sales potential. Now, this was all done in an interview with WCCCF Tech. And I’ll have that linked down below if you can read through it because there are many questions that were asked here. But first, let’s start at the top here. This is from Owen O’Grady, who’s the technical director at Black Shamrock. that’s a virtuous subsidiary where they say gamers increasingly want AAA games on the go and so I think we will see the Switch to surpass its predecessor that being in terms of like sales. So they’re thinking it might surpass the 150 160 million mark. Uh this is precisely because is a Nintendo console renowned for innovation and its unique gameplay experiences and because it meets the growing demand for gaming on the go offering indie gems, Nintendo exclusives, now AAA blockbuster titles. When asked about kind of the the the abilities of the Switch 2 and where they would place it alongside of something like a a Series S or PS4, they say GPU- wise, the Switch 2 performs slightly below the Series S. This difference is more noticeable in handheld mode. However, the Series S does not support technologies like DLSS, which the Switch 2 does. This makes the GPU capabilities of the two consoles comparable overall. CPU- wise, there is a clearer distinction between the two consoles. The Switch 2 is closer to the PS4 in this respect, having a CPU just a bit more powerful than the PS4’s since most games tend to be more GPUbound than CPUbound when well optimized. The impact of the this difference largely depends on the specific game and its target frame rate. Any game shipping at 60fps on the Series S could easily port to the Switch, too. Likewise, a 30 FPS Series S game that’s GPUbound could also port well. Games with complex physics, animations, or other CPU intensive elements might incur additional challenges in reaching 30 or 60 FPS or require extra optimization during porting. And I think this is about where people have settled now with where the Switch 2 ranks, if you want to call it that, above the PS4 by a fair amount since it also has a solid state drive compared to the spinning hard disk in a PS4. So load times general as we’ve already seen with comparisons. It’s it’s not even a competition there. But the Series S does just have a better CPU. I mean it has to line up with the Xbox Series X CPU because the big difference there is more so on say the memory bandwidth and the GPU side. All right. So any kind of series computations and stuff on the CPU side has to still kind of line up and be one to one more or less between Series S and Series X which yes does give it an advantage there. But if you have a game, say running at 60 fps on the Series S and it does have some CPU limit limitations on the Switch 2, you might have it cut the frame rate in half, for example, down to 30 and then it still just port over without too many issues. And Virtuoso does a lot of a lot of port work. So yes, they would know like this is up their wheelhouse. So clearly, while you may look at that and be like, I don’t know if it’s going to hit 160 million consoles sold, you can look at what Virtuous says about things like uh CPU GPU rankings and where they believe it is in terms of power. And yeah, that’s probably a very good or well-educated opinion on that one. But I think that’s about right where people are thinking it’ll be around the Series S with some CPU limitations. And before we go to the comment of the day, we’ll take a look at the poll that I posted up yesterday where I ask, “Are you currently subscribed to Game Pass?” 73% say no, 27% say yes. So, I do think right now Game Pass has kind of plateaued. And you can say that because we haven’t seen any new numbers. And you feel like if they were doing really well, they would just start throwing numbers around for Game Pass because that also leans into subscription, which is what Microsoft really wants to do since they are a software company at heart. But if it has kind of plateaued there, like that 35 million or so mark, well, it’s not going to get to the hundred million they were looking for by really towards the end of this de this decade. They were thinking by 2027 or 2028 they might be around that mark. I don’t know if it’s happening. Call of Duty is there and while it’s still sold pretty well as we saw with the MPs and stuff, it’s not it it doesn’t seem like it’s really pushing Game Pass to the level they want it to. And that is kind of the question I have. If it does plateau even with big franchises like Call of Duty there, how do you get Game Pass up to the 100 million mark? And is it even possible? That’s the stuff Microsoft has to contend with here, especially when you’re looking at how many studios they have and how many projects they have in the works. And we’ll finish up with the comment of the day as you’re seeing here. This is from Jan who says, “I have a feeling Arrowhead wanted this and bargained for it for a deal or partnership with PlayStation in the future, but I’m sure we’ll hear more about this eventually. I I think just Arrowhead wanted to do it in the first place. They were asked many times in their Discord like more than a year ago about an Xbox version.” And Arrowhead’s not owned by PlayStation. So, in their mind, it’s like, well, yeah, let’s let’s put it on this platform that’s asking for it right now. But Sony is the one who has to weigh that and go, “This is makes sense for us because we’re trying to get more people to the PlayStation. Maybe those are people that just are never going to come over and this is a live service game and we’re already putting Marathon over there anyway. We’re letting Bungie kind of work that out.” Okay, maybe we can make that happen and we’ll just get more money from it. So, I think we still need to see a a big single player game make the jump before people are like, “Oh, the floodgates have opened. Spider-Man’s going, you know, Horizon’s going there. or God of War will be on Xbox. I think we got to see a single player game, somewhat large single player game, go to another platform before we really start thinking about it that way. But hey, Hell Divers 2 is it’s it’s a big deal. PlayStation’s publishing it. It’s their IP and now it’s showing up on Xbox after a massive su massively successful launch on PlayStation. Seems like they need more. And yeah, something tells me Arrowhead was right there just to just to give them the nudge to get them over the the finish line. And ladies and gentlemen, that’s going to do it here for Newsweave. If you enjoyed this