Microsoft will add mouse and keyboard support to the Xbox One next week, the company announced during its X018 gaming event. From a report: In a surprising twist, Fortnite will be one of the first games to take advantage of the new feature. This update has been discussed for years, but the feature was given a concrete launch window back in September of this year, when Microsoft claimed that Warframe would be playable with a mouse and keyboard in October. The free-to-play first-person shooter will still be among the earliest games to enable this control option. Here's a roundup of everything else Microsoft announced at the gaming conference.

Unannounced, unadvertised freebie lands ahead of Microsoft's X018 conference. PUBG, the game that kicked off an international "battle royale" gaming sensation, is currently free for all Xbox One owners. From a report: Even if you do not have a paid Xbox Live Gold subscription, you can head to this link and claim what appears to be a permanent copy of the game for your Microsoft Account. Timed trials of Xbox One games tend to be exclusive treats for XBLG subscribers. Bizarrely, the Konami soccer game PES 2019, which launched at a standard $60 retail price point in August, is also free to claim as of today. (Here's that link.) Of course, there is the caveat that these games' giveaways could be yanked from accounts by Microsoft at any moment. In the meantime, we suggest clicking first, asking questions later. Update: Microsoft says the games will be free only till November 11.

An anonymous reader shares a report: VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments -- but that excitement has markedly cooled. The media has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and... wishful thinking? -- but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it. Oculus sold off to Facebook and has become little more than a parlor trick Mark Zuckerberg shows off at every F8 event. As Ben Thompson recently noted, the bet on the company is an awkward fit for Facebook that strays from Zuckerberg's strengths in several ways.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now tooling around on right wing defense projects, while co-founder Brendan Iribe has just left the company amid rumors of future headsets being shelved. Several prominent studios have shut down or ceased VR efforts, including Viacom and AltspaceVR, and Microsoft is a steadfast "no" when it comes to dipping its toes in the water via the Xbox. Sony has boasted about sales of the PSVR hitting 3 million in two years, but there are 82 million PS4 units in the hands of consumers (and keep in mind that Microsoft sold 35 million Kinects but still discontinued the product). With cumbersome hardware (which, let's be honest, looks really stupid to most people), absurd PC requirements, and nearly no AAA titles to lure the curious into the world of VR, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that we'll see a major shift to virtual reality any time soon.

Also worth noting: if you're looking to Magic Leap for a kind of bridge to the future with its AR efforts, don't get too wound up. Brian Merchant's excellent and detailed feature story for Gizmodo on the company's struggles to get around the same hardware, software, and consumer adoption issues that plague VR make it clear there is no easy answer in this space. In my opinion -- as someone who watched this new generation of virtual reality emerge from the earliest days, and was one of its biggest fans -- VR adoption will only happen when the barrier to entry is akin to slipping on a pair of sunglasses (and even then it's no sure thing). Most people don't want to wear a bulky headset, even in private, there's no must have "killer app" for VR, and no one has made a simple plug-and-play option that lets a novice user engage casually. Everyone I know who's tried a VR headset is blown away by the experience, but no one really wants to go deep on it except for what amounts to a rounding-error percentage of enthusiasts. Further reading: 'We Expected VR To Be Two To Three Times as Big', Says CCP Games CEO.

According to a recently published paper by Microsoft Research team, the company could be looking to launch physical controllers for mobile devices. From a report: The research paper documents some of the popular solutions to gaming via a touch screen, while hailing the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Portable (PSP) for circumventing touch-based control limitations with full joysticks and buttons. From the paper [PDF]: As smartphones and tablets have become pervasive, so has mobile gaming. Not surprisingly, popular games for these platforms are focused on touchscreen-based interaction. However, many types of game are less well-suited to mobile devices. Despite systems like AdaptControl which can adapt to the 'drift' typically occurring when using virtual on-screen controls, touchbased emulations of traditional gaming controls like Dpads, buttons and joysticks are often unsatisfactory.

Mobile gaming devices like the Sony PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS and Switch are dedicated mobile gaming platforms which overcome these limitations via physical controls. The success of the Switch is testament to the value of mobile gaming with physical controls. A number of cheaper products allow a smartphone to be clipped into or onto a modified handheld gaming controller; these include the ION iCade mobile, the GameCase, the GameVice and products from Moga. However, the fixed form of these accessories means they are bulky and inflexible.

Microsoft has unveiled "Project xCloud," its new game streaming service designed to work across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. "Scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey for us," explains Microsoft's cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry in a blog post. "We'll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations." The Verge reports: Microsoft has built custom hardware for its datacenters, as The Verge previously exclusively reported, so that existing and future Xbox games will be compatible with the services. Games will be streamed to devices, and Microsoft has been testing the xCloud service with Xbox wireless controllers connected to consoles, mobile devices, and PCs. Microsoft says its research teams are "creating ways to combat latency" via advanced network techniques combined with video encoding and decoding. This should make game streaming viable on 4G networks, too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime appeared at Seattle's Geekwire Summit on Wednesday to speak broadly about the company's future, and, while the talk didn't include new product reveals, it proved illuminating about what to expect from the big N in the future. The short version: Nintendo would rather be defined as an "entertainment" company, not a gaming one. Fils-Aime says the company currently has three "pieces of business": a dedicated video game business ("the way most of our consumers interact with us"), a mobile gaming business, and "leveraging our intellectual property (IP) in a variety of ways." The latter includes previously announced plans for a Universal Studios attraction in Osaka, Japan (still slated to open ahead of Tokyo's next Olympics hosting run in 2020) and a Super Mario film produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me). When asked about Nintendo's future focus on a company-wide level, Fils-Aime said: "It's about Mario, Zelda, Pokemon -- all these wonderful intellectual properties. How we leverage these across a variety of entertainment platforms is how we're looking to grow the company."

He went on to say that he doesn't see Xbox and PlayStation as competitors. Ars reports: "He counted the exact number of minutes per day and said that outside of the time a consumer spends eating, sleeping, working, and going to school, 'all of the rest of that time is entertainment time. That's what I compete for, minute by minute. That time you spend surfing the Web, watching a movie, watching a telecast of a conference: that's all entertainment time we're competing for. My competitive set is much bigger than my direct competitors in Sony and Microsoft. I compete for time. When I do that, I have to be creative and innovative in order to win that battle.'"

During a talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, Oculus' CTO, John Carmack, compared the company's newly announced Oculus Quest headset to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of power. Ars Technica reports: That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well. "It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said. Expecting Rift-level performance from a self-contained mobile headset like the quest isn't realistic, Carmack said, partly for simple electrical reasons. While a high-end gaming PC often draw up to 500 watts of power, Carmack said the Quest only uses about 5W, a tidbit that should be of benefit to the Quest's still unconfirmed battery-life statistics.

That relative lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC," Carmack warned. "With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform." That's not an insurmountable problem, Carmack suggested, as long as developers focus on the dozen or so things that players really need to concentrate on in an average game, rather than "thousands" of pieces of graphical fluff. He suggested developers look back to the lessons of platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo DS to see how developers crafted memorable experiences on much less-powerful hardware. Carmack went on to say that "realistically, we're going to end up competing with the Nintendo Switch... they'll pick up Quest as [a] mobile device, just like Switch."

Sony announced this week a major policy shift regarding crossplay with other consoles. PlayStation 4 previously wouldn't allow online games to connect to Xbox One or Switch players. This week, Sony is starting a beta test for Fortnite crossplay. From a report: Crossplay between consoles once seemed like a fantasy, but Xbox One and Switch have enabled people to play together for games like Fortnite and Rocket League. PlayStation 4 would permit crossplay with PC players, but it refused to connect to other consoles. Sony's excuse stated that such crossplay would hamper its capability to deliver a consistent experience. But the decision drew criticism from PS4 fans, especially those that were angry when they tried to install Fortnite on their Switch and found out they couldn't carry over their PS4 progress.

Xbox's Phil Spencer announced today that mouse and keyboard support is coming to Xbox One. Crytek's Warface will be the first game to test the feature when it becomes available in October via the Xbox Insider Program. IGN reports: The idea behind mouse and keyboard support will be as a tool for developers, so they can choose how they want the control style integrated, if they want it integrated at all. "If you're a dominant FPS player right now on controller and you're worried that all the sudden you're gonna get swamped because a bunch of mouse and keyboard players are gonna get flooded into your game, that's not what we're doing," said Spencer. "We're putting choice into the hands of the developers about the games that they want to bring." We can expect to hear more about mouse and keyboard support during the XO18 fan event in Mexico City on November 10.

PlayStation revealed in a blog post that PS Now subscribers will be able to download most PS4 and PS2 games currently in the PS Now Library and play them locally, offline. "Almost all PS4 games in the service, including Bloodborne, God of War 3 Remastered, NBA 2K16, and Until Dawn, will be available for download, in addition to the PS Now lineup of classic PS2 games remastered for PS4," the announcement reads. "This feature will be gradually rolled out to PS Now subscribers over the next couple of days, so if you don't see the feature on your PS Now today, make sure to check back again soon." Kotaku reports: While being connected to the internet isn't required to play PS Now games once they've been downloaded, the support page says your system will have to go online "every few days" in order to validate the PS Now subscription. In the past, PS Now had been exclusively for streaming games to your PS4. When it was announced in 2014, it was building off of Sony's 2012 acquisition of the Gaikai video game streaming service. While it offered a way for people to play older games on the newer console (since, unlike Xbox One, the PS4 isn't backwards compatible), it was hardly ideal due to problems with latency and its reliance on a consistently strong internet connection. Honestly, the only surprise here is that Sony didn't make this move sooner.

Nikita Prokopov, a software programmer and author of Fira Code, a popular programming font, AnyBar, a universal status indicator, and some open-source Clojure libraries, writes: Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy? Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera. A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.

At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don't know what's going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared. 16Gb Android phone was perfectly fine 3 years ago. Today with Android 8.1 it's barely usable because each app has become at least twice as big for no apparent reason. There are no additional functions. They are not faster or more optimized. They don't look different. They just...grow?

iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower. Don't worry -- you got exciting new capabilities like...running the same apps with the same speed! I dunno. [...] Nobody understands anything at this point. Neither they want to. We just throw barely baked shit out there, hope for the best and call it "startup wisdom." Web pages ask you to refresh if anything goes wrong. Who has time to figure out what happened? Any web app produces a constant stream of "random" JS errors in the wild, even on compatible browsers.

[...] It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs. Build systems are inherently unreliable and periodically require full clean, even though all info for invalidation is there. Nothing stops us from making build process reliable, predictable and 100% reproducible. Just nobody thinks it's important. NPM has stayed in "sometimes works" state for years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo Switch game save data stored in the cloud is only available "as long as you have an active Nintendo Switch Online membership." If you eventually cancel the $20/year subscription, Nintendo is "unable to guarantee that cloud save data will be retained after an extended period of time from when your membership is ended." That wrinkle in Nintendo's plan was not included in the details of yesterday's Nintendo Direct presentation, but it can be found digging through the FAQs and customer support pages on Nintendo's website this morning. On the plus side, Nintendo clarified that you will be able to transfer cloud-based saves between Switch systems just by signing in with your Nintendo account on as many consoles as you want. But Nintendo also said it will continue not allowing local backups of save data to an SD card or other outside storage. UPDATE: It's worth noting that cloud saves on PlayStation systems remain accessible for six months after you cancel a paid PlayStation Plus account, while cloud saves on Xbox Live are offered for free in perpetuity.

Microsoft today confirmed the rumors: Xbox All Access is a new subscription offering that ties a console to Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass for two years. From a report: "For no upfront cost and one low monthly price for 24 months, Xbox All Access gets you a new Xbox One S or Xbox One X, access to more than 100 great games through Xbox Game Pass, and online multiplayer with Xbox Live Gold," Microsoft's Bogdan Bilan explains. "That's more than 100 all-you-can-play games -- including highly-anticipated new Xbox One exclusives the day they're released, plus more games added all the time on the fastest, most reliable gaming network and an Xbox One console." As previously reported, Xbox All Access is available only in the United States and will cost $22 or $35 per month, depending on whether you choose an Xbox One S or Xbox One X console.

Claire Reilly, writing for CNET: After spending a night in an underground rock cave in the middle of the Australian desert, I learned three things: The silence is deafening. Your eyes never adjust to the darkness. And if nobody brushes the ceiling before you arrive, that clump of dirt is going to scare the living hell out of you when it drops on your face at 2 a.m. I've flown 1,200 miles for the privilege of sleeping in a hole in Coober Pedy. There's no Wi-Fi down here. The glare of my MacBook feels obnoxious in the subterranean stillness. The TV plays ads for a "local" cleaning service from the next town over, but that just happens to be 400 miles away. Australia is a country defined by "the tyranny of distance," but traveling to the underground opal mining town of Coober Pedy feels like taking a holiday on Mars.

In the middle of the South Australian desert and an eight hour drive in either direction from the nearest capital city (Adelaide to the south or Alice Springs to the north), Coober Pedy is off the grid and mostly hidden underground. More than half the residents live buried in the bedrock in cavelike homes called "dugouts" in order to escape freezing winters, scorching summers and the occasional cyclone. Often, the only sign you're walking on someone's roof is the air vent that's sprouted up next to your boots. While first nation peoples have lived in the central Australian desert for thousands of years, the Coober Pedy we know today wouldn't exist without opals. Miners rushed here in the 1920s, enduring extreme conditions to hunt for the multicolored gems, digging, bulldozing and eventually blasting out earth in a bid to find the elusive seam that would make them rich. Living in Coober Pedy is not just about surviving. It's about carving out a way of life in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

[...] "It's not like we're living thousands of kilometers under the ground," he tells me. "It's pretty similar to living in a normal house." Sam's family, who live in a dugout close to Crocodile Harry's, have solar panels for power -- but those generate only enough electricity for a few hours a day. Diesel handles the rest, he says. "We have to rely on tourists to pay for our fuel," he says. "Gasoline is valuable out here. Fuel is really expensive." That means no fridge running all day and night -- they keep nonperishable food and get the rest from town every day. Otherwise, life is pretty similar to what other 18-year-olds in the city experience. Sam says he can still charge his phone and use the TV "for a bit." "We have internet when the generator's on. Dad's got an Xbox but we don't even try to use the solar for that."

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has cornered the x86 console market with its handy semi-custom mix of processors and graphics. While we slowly await the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, today AMD and Zhongshan Subor announced that a custom chip has been made for a new gaming PC and an upcoming console for the Chinese market.

The announcement states that a custom chip has been created for Subor that is based on four Zen cores running at 3.0 GHz and 24 compute units of Vega running at 1.3 GHz. The chip is supported by 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which the press release states is also embedded onto the chip, however it is likely to actually be on the package instead. [...] Assuming that this custom chip is a single chip design, with CPU and GPU, this means that AMD is handily gaining custom contracts and designing custom chip designs for its customers, even for consoles that won't have the mass western appeal such as the Xbox or Playstation.

After returning to stores in June after a brief stint of sales back in 2016, the NES Classic is topping U.S. sales charts. Market research firm NPD reports that the NES Classic was June's highest unit-selling hardware platform in the U.S., beating the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. "The NES Classic managed to outsell these consoles despite only being on sale for a few days in late June," reports The Verge. From the report: While the NES Classic is priced at $59 compared to more expensive current-generation consoles, it's clearly still in demand 35 years after the original Nintendo Entertainment System debuted in 1983. The NES Classic comes loaded with 30 games including classics like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Pac-Man. While you can't insert vintage NES cartridges into it, the console supports game saves and connects to TVs via a HDMI cable. Nintendo hasn't revealed whether it now plans to introduce more miniature retro consoles.

One big area that Microsoft is focusing on with its next-generation Xbox is game streaming. According to a report from Thurrott.com, Microsoft is working on two new Xbox consoles. The "Xbox Two" will be a console similar to that of the Xbox One and Xbox 360, with updated hardware and specs. The other Xbox console in development will be limited to streaming games. The Verge reports: The streaming-only console will reportedly include a low amount of local compute for handling tasks like controller input, image processing, and collision detection. These tasks are essential to reducing latency in game streaming, and Microsoft is said to be planning to slice up processing between the game running locally and in the cloud in order to reduce input lag and other image processing delays. Microsoft is currently developing its next-generation Xbox console under the Scarlett codename. The software giant recently revealed it's also working on a game streaming service for Xbox that will work across any device. This is a key part of Microsoft's future plans with Xbox, and part of the company's vision for developing its "Netflix for video games" service, Xbox Game Pass.

Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is currently "all hands" on creating datacenters capable of powering the company's game streaming service. Referred to as codename "XCloud" internally, Microsoft has been experimenting with combining four lots of custom Xbox consoles into a single server blade for its datacenters. These servers will launch initially with developers in mind to build and develop games in the cloud instead of local debug machines, and then to stream games to consumers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.

So what is this streaming platform, exactly? Like Nvidia's GeForce Now, the Google service would offload the work of rendering graphics to beefy computers elsewhere, allowing even the cheapest PCs to play high-end games. The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games. Whispers have been quieter about Google's hardware, whatever that may look like, but the rumors we've heard suggest that it will link up with the streaming service in some way. We're not sure whether Google is looking to compete with the technical specs of the next PlayStation and Xbox or whether this Google console will be cheaper and low-end, relying on the streaming service to pull weight. The streaming platform, which is code-named Yeti, was first reported by the website The Information earlier this year.

At this month's E3, Microsoft confirmed "a first in the booming world of game streaming," reports Ars Technica. "It's a subtle thing, which we're dubbing 'stream-to-win,' and it sees Microsoft take its boldest step in battling the behemoth service Twitch." From the report: Horizon 4 will be the first Microsoft Studios game to recognize when players broadcast their live gameplay via Mixer and then give out bonuses within that game for doing so (Mixer is a Twitch-like service that Microsoft acquired in 2016 before re-dubbing it Beam). All Xbox One consoles received an update last year to integrate one-button "stream to Mixer" support, which players can swap to Twitch by going through the system's options.

In the week-plus since learning this about Horizon 4, we have been unable to find a comparable feature in any video game -- meaning, one that recognizes a broadcast (on Mixer, Twitch, or any other service) and then gives out goodies inside the same video game as a reward. Some video games already include official and deep integration with Twitch and Mixer, but these rely largely on audience-driven votes, like in the digital card game Superfight and the battle royale game Darwin Project.

Over the weekend, Windows Central received a purported internal Microsoft presentation from earlier in the year detailing plans for mouse-and-keyboard support for the Xbox One. Microsoft has been teasing the support for years now, but it's finally becoming a reality soon. The Verge reports: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft and Razer presented their plans at the annual Xfest event for developers earlier this year. Razer is planning to allow game developers to tap into its API to bring Chroma lighting effects to games. If all goes according to plan, Xbox One users will start to make use of this later this year with Microsoft's fall update for the Xbox.

Xbox gamers will welcome the addition of keyboard and mouse support, but some will question the impact on multiplayer games. Microsoft is allowing developers to detect whether a keyboard or mouse is present on an Xbox One, and games could potentially only match keyboard and mouse users with similarly equipped players. Balancing games will be down to developers, and Microsoft is offering up all the tools required to ensure games can implement the support in a variety of ways.