Microsoft is following Sony's move and offering Cyberpunk 2077 refunds to anyone who has purchased the game digitally. It is not however pulling the game from the Microsoft Store. The Verge reports: "We know the developers at CD Projekt Red have worked hard to ship Cyberpunk in extremely challenging circumstances," explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "However, we also realize that some players have been unhappy with the current experience on older consoles. To date, we have granted refunds to the vast majority of customers who have requested one. To ensure that every player is able to get the experience they expect on Xbox, we will be expanding our existing refund policy to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally from the Microsoft Store, until further notice."

If you're interested in a Microsoft Store refund, you can follow the steps on Microsoft's support page.

Rebellion is in the air at Polish video game publisher CD Projekt after the company's highly anticipated, and thrice-delayed, latest title was released to scathing reviews about glitches. Bloomberg News reports: Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch, according to two people who were present. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered on posters all around its Warsaw office, is "We are rebels." Developers asked blunt questions about the company's reputation, the game's unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to the game's Dec. 10 release. The meeting took place before Sony's shocking announcement that it was pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer full refunds to any customer who requests one. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt's directors said they had come to an arrangement with Sony but didn't offer specifics. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that "following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend digital distribution" of the game.

Sony is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and offering full refunds for anyone who bought the game from the digital storefront, the company said on Thursday. The Verge reports: If you want to start a refund, Sony says to visit this site and sign into your PlayStation account to submit a request. The game has already been removed from the PlayStation Store for a few Verge staffers on their PS5s, and the game doesn't come up in a search for "Cyberpunk 2077" on the web version of the store.

Players have found that Cyberpunk 2077, which has only been out for a week, has been riddled with bugs. The game looks good on PS5, but in my few hours with the game, I've run into a few complete crashes to the PS5's home screen and a number of distracting visual glitches. On PS4, the game fares a lot worse -- Eurogamer reported poor performance, low framerate, and texture pop-in. Further reading: 'Cyberpunk 2077' Players Are Fixing Parts of the Game Before CD Projekt

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GameStop employees across the country were caught by surprise on Saturday when the video-game chain suddenly announced new shipments of the highly coveted PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, sending customers flocking to stores. Workers at the U.S. retailer, speaking to Bloomberg and posting on social media, said they had received little notice for the restock and that the crowds were both chaotic and a risk to their health. The latest generation devices from Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been in short supply since their release last month, leaving gamers everywhere eager for the latest restock. On Saturday afternoon, GameStop told customers that new inventory was arriving, but that it would only be available to pre-order in stores, not online, where scalpers have dominated digital queues. However, employees found out less than an hour before the public, according to GameStop staffers, which left them unprepared for the rush of customers.

One GameStop manager on the East Coast shared an email from the company, sent just a few minutes before the public announcement, saying that their store would have about 15 new consoles available for pre-order. Minutes after the announcement, the manager said, the store had a crowd of about 40 people, violating social-distancing requirements and overwhelming their clerks. GameStop said its last-minute notification to customers was meant to ensure that individuals, not resellers, were able to purchase the consoles. "We realize that in some situations our approach of notifying customers of this opportunity may have caused unintended reactions from both our associates and customers," GameStop said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

The rush occurred as GameStop is facing widespread staffing shortages as the retailer has asked stores across the country to cut hours, the manager said. GameStop, which has been struggling in recent years amid the widespread adoption of digital games, reported a disappointing third quarter last week, sending the stock falling as much as 22%. The retailer has shuttered almost 700 stores this year and will close more locations through 2022 while it continues to cut costs, although it expects to see a sales bump this quarter thanks to the new consoles. On Reddit, GameStop employees are sharing similar complaints, telling stories of big lines and unruly crowds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The board of directors for British developer Codemasters has reached a purchase agreement with Electronic Arts which would sell the company to the mega-publisher for an estimated $1.2 billion (or just under $8 a share) in early 2021. The deal would put Codemasters' popular racing-game franchises -- including DiRT/DiRT Rally, Grid, F1, and Project CARS (which Codemasters acquired in 2019) -- under the same umbrella as EA's Need for Speed, Burnout, and mobile-focused Real Racing. That's not quite a monopoly in the genre -- thanks in large part to console exclusives like Microsoft's Forza Motorsport and Sony's Gran Turismo -- but it's as close as you're likely to find for any major genre in gaming.

More than that, the acquisition reflects a continuing trend toward consolidation among the game industry's biggest publishers. The acquisition would also likely make Codemaster's current and future titles part of the EA Play subscription service and, by extension, part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Aside from its modern racing sims, Codemasters boasts a legacy catalog going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, with titles like Micro Machines and the Dizzy platform-adventure series that were especially popular in the UK. "The combination of Codemasters and Electronic Arts will enable the development and delivery of a market-leading portfolio of creative and exciting racing games and content to more platforms and more players around the world," the companies said in a joint statement.

"Electronic Arts and Codemasters have a shared ambition to lead the video game racing category," Codemasters Chairman Gerhard Florin added. "The Board of Codemasters firmly believes the company would benefit from EA's knowledge, resources and extensive global scale -- both overall and specifically within the racing sector. We feel this union would provide an exciting and prosperous future for Codemasters, allowing our teams to create, launch and service bigger and better games to an extremely passionate audience."

The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads."

Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

Republican senator Thom Tillis has introduced a proposal to turn unauthorized commercial streaming of copyrighted material into a felony offense with a possible prison sentence. It's currently being included in a must-pass spending bill. Kotaku reports: Currently, such violations, no matter how severe, are considered misdemeanors rather than felonies, because the law regards streaming as a public performance. With Twitch currently in the crosshairs of the music industry, such a change would turn up the heat on streamers and Twitch even higher -- perhaps to an untenable degree. Other platforms, like YouTube, would almost certainly suffer as well. According to [Politico offshoot Protocol], House and Senate Judiciary Committees have agreed to package the streaming felony proposal with other controversial provisions that include the CASE act, which would establish a new court-like entity within the U.S. Copyright Office to resolve copyright disputes, and the Trademark Modernization Act, which would give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office more flexibility to crack down on illegitimate claims from foreign countries.

It's not difficult to see why Tillis would push a proposal that benefits big companies in the entertainment industry to the detriment of regular people; The American Prospect points out that in the past couple years, Tillis' campaign committee and leadership received donations totaling out to well over $100,000 from PACs with ties to the Motion Picture Association, Sony Pictures, Universal Music Group, Comcast & NBC Universal, The Internet and Television Association, Salem Media Group, and Warner Music, among many others.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times : For years, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has been the first call for government agencies and companies around the world who have been hacked by the most sophisticated attackers, or fear they might be. Now it looks like the hackers -- in this case, evidence points to Russia's intelligence agencies -- may be exacting their revenge. FireEye revealed on Tuesday that its own systems were pierced by what it called "a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities." The company said hackers used "novel techniques" to make off with its own tool kit, which could be useful in mounting new attacks around the world.

It was a stunning theft, akin to bank robbers who, having cleaned out local vaults, then turned around and stole the F.B.I.'s investigative tools. In fact, FireEye said on Tuesday, moments after the stock market closed, that it had called in the F.B.I. The $3.5 billion company, which partly makes a living by identifying the culprits in some of the world's boldest breaches -- its clients have included Sony and Equifax -- declined to say explicitly who was responsible. But its description, and the fact that the F.B.I. has turned the case over to its Russia specialists, left little doubt who the lead suspects were and that they were after what the company calls "Red Team tools." These are essentially digital tools that replicate the most sophisticated hacking tools in the world. FireEye uses the tools — with the permission of a client company or government agency -- to look for vulnerabilities in their systems. Most of the tools are based in a digital vault that FireEye closely guards.

The hack raises the possibility that Russian intelligence agencies saw an advantage in mounting the attack while American attention -- including FireEye's -- was focused on securing the presidential election system. At a moment that the nation's public and private intelligence systems were seeking out breaches of voter registration systems or voting machines, it may have a been a good time for those Russian agencies, which were involved in the 2016 election breaches, to turn their sights on other targets. The hack was the biggest known theft of cybersecurity tools since those of the National Security Agency were purloined in 2016 by a still-unidentified group that calls itself theShadowBrokers. [...] The N.S.A.'s tools were most likely more useful than FireEye's since the U.S. government builds purpose-made digital weapons. FireEye's Red Team tools are essentially built from malware that the company has seen used in a wide range of attacks. Still, the advantage of using stolen weapons is that nation-states can hide their own tracks when they launch attacks.

According to a Sony patent spotted by T3, the console maker may be working on a new PlayStation 5 with two graphics card. From the report: The patent describes a "scalable game console" where "a second GPU [is] communicatively coupled to the first GPU" and that the system is for "home console and cloud gaming" usage. To us here at T3 that suggests a next-gen PlayStation console, most likely a new PS5 Pro flagship, supercharged with two graphics cards instead of just one. These would both come in the APU (accelerated processing unit) format that the PlayStation 5's system-on-a-chip (SoC) do, with two custom made AMD APUs working together to deliver enhanced gaming performance and cloud streaming.

The official Sony patent notes that, "plural SoCs may be used to provide a 'high-end' version of the console with greater processing and storage capability," while "the 'high end' system can also contain more memory such as random-access memory (RAM) and other features and may also be used for a cloud-optimized version using the same game console chip with more performance." And, with the PlayStation 5 console only marginally weaker on paper than the Xbox Series X (the PS5 delivers 10.28 teraflops compared to the Xbox Series X's 12 teraflops), a new PS5 Pro console that comes with two APUs rather than one, improving local gaming performance as well as cloud gaming, would be no doubt the Xbox Series X as king of the next-gen consoles death blow.

The cloud gaming part of the patent is particularly interesting, too, as it seems to suggest that this technology could not just find itself in a new flagship PS5 Pro console, but also in more streamlined cloud-based hardware, too. An upgraded PS5 Digital Edition seems a smart bet, as too the much-rumored PSP 5G. [...] Will we see a PS5 Pro anytime soon? Here at T3 we think absolutely not -- we imagine we'll get at least two straight years of PS5 before we see anything at all. As for a cloud-based next-gen PSP 5G, though...

Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 888 at its Snapdragon Tech Summit, offering a first look at its next-generation flagship smartphone processor. The 888 will power the next wave of 2021 Android flagships from companies like Samsung, OnePlus, LG, Sony, and more. From a report: In a first for the company's top-of-the-line 8-series chipsets, the Snapdragon 888 is making a big improvement for 5G: it'll finally offer a fully integrated 5G modem, unlike last year's Snapdragon 865 (which required that manufacturers include a separate modem chip inside the cramped interior of a modern smartphone).

The Snapdragon 888 will feature Qualcomm's X60 modem, announced earlier this year, which jumps to a 5nm process for better power efficiency and improvements for 5G carrier aggregation across the mmWave and sub-6GHz bands of the spectrum. Between the new 5nm architecture and the power efficiency gains from an integrated modem, the new chip looks to offer some substantial battery improvements when it comes to 5G. In addition to the 5G improvements, Qualcomm also teased several other advances coming to the Snapdragon 888, including the company's sixth-gen AI Engine (running on a "redesigned" Qualcomm Hexagon processor), which promises a big jump in performance and power efficiency for AI tasks.

This year Amazon followed up its cylindrical Echo (and its hockey puck-shaped Echo Dot) with a cloth-wrapped sphere-shaped Echo device. And Fast Company reports that one significant change was to the light pipe, "that glowing ring on top of the Echo that signals it's talking or thinking.

"For the fourth generation, that light pipe has been moved to the bottom of the device, to reflect off tables or countertops, and provide a more ambient lighting experience that blends into one's environment — with a catch." Once you hit the privacy button on your Echo, deafening it from hearing your speech, the ring glows a DEFCON 2 red until you unmute it. (Note: Google uses an orange to convey mute for its Assistant, as does Sony's new PS5 controller that has a mic built in.) It's not just overt; it's borderline warlike, adding a Red October glow to your space. Echos have always glowed red when muted. Now your environment does, too.

When I mention this design decision, which seems to punish consumers who prefer privacy, Miriam Daniel, vice president of Echo and Alexa devices at Amazon, acknowledges, but brushes off, the criticism. "[Red] makes for a strong [statement]. There's always a tradeoff. Is it too bright? Annoying? Too in your face?" she muses. But she argues that the greater benefit is that "it gives people a sense of comfort knowing the mic isn't working."
The article notes that in 2019, Amazon announced it had already sold 100 million Alexa-powered devices.

Apple and Microsoft are working on adding support for the Xbox Series X controller to Apple devices, according to an Apple Support page spotted by a Reddit user. MacRumors reports: The support page states that Apple devices only support the Xbox Wireless Controller with Bluetooth, Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2, Xbox Adaptive Controller, PlayStation DualShock 4 Wireless Controller, and various other MFi Bluetooth controllers. However, small print on the page states: "Microsoft and Apple are working together to bring compatibility for the Xbox Series X controller to customers in a future update." There is no mention of the Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense Controller or the Amazon Luna Controller on the Apple Support page, but MacRumors has spotted code mentioning the controllers in the iOS and iPadOS 14.3 betas.

Sales of Sony and Microsoft's new gaming consoles fell short of their predecessors during their first week in Japan, suggesting persistent supply bottlenecks will hamper the debut of two of this holiday season's most hotly anticipated gadgets. From a report: Sony sold 118,085 PlayStation 5 consoles from its debut on Nov. 12 to Nov. 15, roughly a third of the PS4's performance over launch weekend, Famitsu estimated. Microsoft tallied 20,534 units of its Xbox Series X and S during the six days from its start on Nov. 10, also shy of the 23,562 that the Xbox One managed during its first few days, the research house said. The estimates provided a first glimpse at sales of the new Xbox and PlayStation, two devices that should dominate wishlists this Christmas. Japan was among the first markets globally to get the consoles and is considered a key battleground between two companies vying to establish a lead in next-generation gaming and drive longer-term growth. Factory and logistical disruptions during the pandemic have hurt manufacturers' ability to keep up. The outcome is likely more reflective of the available supply than demand for the consoles, as both companies saw their machines sell out on day one, said Serkan Toto, an industry consultant in Tokyo.

Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. 'Deepfakes' are cute tricks -- but they could change pop for ever. From a report: "It's Christmas time! It's hot tub time!" sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice -- that rich tone once described as "all legato and regrets" -- is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by "research and deployment company" OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they've done what are known as "deepfakes" of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Celine Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you'll get an approximation out the other end.

"As a piece of engineering, it's really impressive," says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. (OpenAI declined to be interviewed.) "They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music -- a dictionary if you like -- at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in. The algorithm can then rearrange these fragments, based on the stimulus you input. So, give it some Ella Fitzgerald for example, and it will find and piece together the relevant bits of the 'dictionary' to create something in her musical space." Admirable as the technical achievement is, there's something horrifying about some of the samples, particularly those of artists who have long since died -- sad ghosts lost in the machine, mumbling banal cliches. "The screams of the damned" reads one comment below that Sinatra sample; "SOUNDS FUCKING DEMONIC" reads another. We're down in the Uncanny Valley. Deepfake music is set to have wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry as more companies apply algorithms to music. Google's Magenta Project -- billed as "exploring machine learning as a tool in the creative process" -- has developed several open source APIs that allow composition using entirely new, machine-generated sounds, or human-AI co-creations. Numerous startups, such as Amper Music, produce custom, AI-generated music for media content, complete with global copyright. Even Spotify is dabbling; its AI research group is led by Francois Pachet, former head of Sony Music's computer science lab.

Sony confirmed today that the existing PS4 will soon let you access your other PlayStation consoles remotely, including the PS5: "We're updating PS4's Remote Play feature. Now, in addition to being able to access your PS4 from a PC or a mobile device, your PS4 can access other consoles via Remote Play too, right on your TV. This includes the ability to connect to your PS5 and stream a PS5 game to your PS4 so you can play it there." The Verge reports: VGC and Eurogamer reported today that a "PS5 Remote Play" app has already popped up on the PS4, offering up to a 1080p stream from your new console to your existing one. Perhaps you'll hook up your PS4 to the bedroom TV -- or the living room if you keep your primary console in the den? You don't necessarily need a PS4 to stream a PS5 to another room of your house, though, since the PS Remote Play app is getting updated on other platforms as well. The Windows version not only adds PS5 support at 1080p but also HDR. Sony's PS Remote Play apps for Android and iOS have been updated for the PS5, and we'd be surprised if the Mac version wasn't ready as well.

tlhIngan writes: Many years ago, Kojima Productions produced P.T., a "playable teaser" (rumored meaning to P.T.) for a now-cancelled Silent Hill survival-horror reboot. This was a popular teaser but when Kojima and Konami parted ways, it was swiftly removed from the Sony PlayStation Store. People who downloaded the trailer could still re-download it for a period but that was swiftly removed, leading to PS4s preloaded with the game spiking in price. Since the PS5 offers backwards compatibility, reviewers did test the PS5 playing back P.T. to find it still worked. However, this was short lived, as Sony removed the trailer from working in backwards compatible mode, as well as removing the ability to transfer the game to the PS5. Sony's response to the removal was "it was a publisher decision" to remove it from the backwards compatibility list.

Sony says its PlayStation 5 can load virtual worlds far faster than ever before, thanks to one of the fastest solid-state drives ever made -- but it's also not a particularly big drive. Sony has confirmed to The Verge that you won't be able to expand that blazing-fast SSD storage on day one. From a report: While the PS5 features a dedicated internal slot that can theoretically fit standard stick-shaped M.2 SSDs and an easy way to access it, the slot will apparently be disabled out of the box. "[T]his is reserved for a future update," Sony tells The Verge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Earlier this week, Japanese publication Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported that Sony will supply Apple with OLED microdisplays for its widely rumored AR/VR glasses, as spotted by Mac Otakara. The report has since been corroborated by display industry analyst Ross Young, who said multiple sources have informed him that Apple is indeed planning to use Sony's microdisplay technology for its head-mounted accessory. According to FRAMOS, a supplier of embedded vision technologies, Sony's OLED microdisplays are small, cutting-edge displays with an ultra-fast response rate, ultra-high contrast, a wide color gamut for precise color reproduction, high luminance, low reflectance, and other benefits that would be ideal for Apple's glasses. Sony's microdisplays also have integrated drivers for a thin and light design, and power-saving modes are available for longer battery life.

Young said the glasses will use a 0.5-inch display with a 1,280x960 resolution, and these specs appear to correspond with Sony's ECX337A component. According to Sony's website, this microdisplay in particular has a max brightness of 1,000 nits, an ultra-high contrast of 100,000:1, and an ultra-fast response rate of 0.01 ms or less. The high contrast provided by Sony's microdisplays allows an additional information layer to appear seamlessly, and not as an overlay. "This information is simply added to the background for a 'real AR' experience," according to FRAMOS. According to the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Apple plans to release its AR/VR glasses in 2021, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo does not expect a release until 2022 at the earliest. Young also believes that the glasses will be introduced in the first half of 2022.

A peripheral company selling custom PS5 faceplates has been forced to cancel all its orders and pull the products from sale, following reported legal action from Sony. From a report: PlateStation5.com had already been forced to rebrand to CustomizeMyPlates.com following a complaint from Sony earlier this week, but now the seller claims that subsequent threats to go to court over the custom faceplates have forced it to stop selling the product entirely. "Before we launched, we did our due diligence and were of the opinion, that because Sony only had pending patents on the faceplates there would be no problem," CustomizeMyPlates told VGC via e-mail. "But after only a day of our website being live, Sony's lawyers asked us to change our name (at the time PlateStation5), due to trademark infringements. We thought this switch would be enough to keep everyone happy, and honestly were hoping so since we were already underway with our product development. "But then Sony's lawyers told us it was their opinion, Sony's intellectual property extended to the faceplates, and that if we continued to sell and distribute them in any country, we would end up in court." It added: "This all came to light yesterday and we are now cancelling and refunding all faceplate orders worldwide... we are extremely disappointed about this but we have no other option."

According to Nikkei, Sony is close to acquiring U.S. anime-streaming service Crunchyroll for more than $957 million. From the report: Sony has its own popular anime, titles like "Demon Slayer" and "Kimetsu no Yaiba," but has been licensing it to streaming services. Sony's Aniplex, the studio behind "Kimetsu no Yaiba," has a variety of content, including movies and music, that is mainly distributed by overseas companies. If the acquisition is realized, global competition for content among companies like Netflix and Hulu will intensify.

Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 and has its headquarters in San Francisco. In 2018, AT&T, the U.S. telecommunications giant, became its parent company. Sony recently obtained the exclusive right to negotiate for Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has 70 million free members and 3 million paying subscribers in more than 200 countries and regions, including the U.S and Europe. Crunchyroll would also give Sony more than 1,000 titles that it can use to vary its offerings.