microsoft Planeando lanzar el próximo lote de “Obligaciones“videojuego a su servicio de suscripción, en un alejamiento de su práctica de larga data de vender únicamente el título de forma independiente, dijo el viernes una fuente familiarizada con el asunto.
Se espera que este paso se anuncie en la conferencia anual de la compañía. caja x El espectáculo está previsto para el 9 de junio, dijo la fuente, que pidió el anonimato porque los planes son privados.
Microsoft no respondió de inmediato a la solicitud de comentarios de Reuters. El Wall Street Journal informó por primera vez la noticia el viernes.
Microsoft adquirió Call of Duty mediante su compra Ventisca de Activision Con un acuerdo de 69.000 millones de dólares, se cerró a finales del año pasado.
El videojuego de disparos en primera persona se encuentra entre los juegos de entretenimiento más exitosos y ha generado más de 30 mil millones de dólares en ingresos a lo largo de su vida.
Activision lleva mucho tiempo lanzando nuevas versiones del juego a alrededor de 70 dólares cada una al año en los últimos años.
Este desarrollo se produce pocos días después de que la presidenta de Xbox, Sarah Bond, anunciara en una conferencia que la compañía planea lanzar todos los juegos propios de Xbox en Game Pass el día del lanzamiento.
Microsoft ejecuta un servicio de suscripción llamado Juego de arcadeque brinda acceso a juegos de Xbox y otros desarrolladores mediante una tarifa.
La compañía con sede en Redmond, Washington, ha intentado desarrollar agresivamente servicios de suscripción de juegos al estilo Netflix en los últimos años como parte de sus esfuerzos por romper el dominio de las consolas PlayStation fabricadas por su rival japonés. empresa sony.
Microsoft dijo en febrero que tenía Game Pass 34 millones de suscriptoresfrente a los 25 millones reportados en 2022.
Los analistas dijeron que el lanzamiento de “Call of Duty”, una franquicia con una base de fans grande y leal, ayudaría a atraer a más personas a Game Pass, pero podría afectar las ventas generales generadas por el título.
“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III“, que se lanzó en noviembre de 2023, es el segundo juego más vendido en lo que va de año. Viene después de “Helldivers II” de Sony, según el rastreador de la industria Circana.
Apple today held its earnings call for the second fiscal quarter of 2024 (first calendar quarter), with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri providing us with some details on Apple’s performance, Vision Pro sales, services growth, AI plans, and other topics.
We’ve highlighted the most interesting takeaways from today’s earnings call.
Next Week’s Announcements
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple is prepping for “an exciting product announcement” that the company thinks “customers will love.”
Generative AI
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple is making “significant investments” in AI, and that it has some “very exciting things” to share with customers “soon.”
Cook also said that he believes Apple has “advantages that will differentiate” the company, including Apple’s hardware and software integration, Apple silicon with Neural Engine, and focus on privacy.
There’s a “big opportunity” for generative AI across all of Apple’s devices, and Cook said he is “extremely optimistic” about future consumer demand.
Digital Markets Act
Cook said that it’s too early to determine the security risks and privacy implications of the changes that it has made to the app ecosystem in Europe. Apple is focused on complying while mitigating impacts to user privacy and security.
Vision Pro
Leading enterprise companies have been investing in Vision Pro, and Apple is seeing it used for things like aircraft engine maintenance, real-time collaboration for racing, and immersive kitchen design. Cook said that Apple “couldn’t be more excited about the spatial computing opportunity in enterprise.”
Services
Apple’s services segment set a new all-time revenue record of $23.9 billion, up 14 percent from $20.9 billion in the year-ago quarter. Transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts and subscriptions showing double digit growth.
Apple has more than 1 billion paid subscriptions, more than double the number from four years ago.
Mac Sales
With the launch of new M3 MacBook Air models in March, Mac revenue saw growth, reaching $7.5 billion. Mac sales were at $7.17 billion in the year-ago quarter, for four percent growth.
iPad Sales
iPad revenue continued to drop with no new iPads released in 2024 as of yet. iPad revenue was at $5.6 billion, down 17 percent from $6.7 billion a year ago. iPad sales should see some improvement next quarter as Apple next week is planning to unveil new iPad Air and iPad Pro models.
Wearables
Wearables, Home and Accessories came in at $7.9 billion, down 10 percent compared to last year. Last year, Apple had launched the USB-C version of AirPods Pro, and there was a “difficult compare” this year.
June Quarter
Maestri said that Apple expects June quarter revenue to grow low single digits year-over-year, but Services is expected to grow double digits, as is iPad revenue.
Being cut off or having to hang up on important work calls when on the move could be a thing of the past thanks to a new Google Meet feature.
The video conferencing service has announced a new tool that will allow users to transfer between a call on a mobile device to a laptop (or vice versa) with just a click.
The new “Switch here” function should prove incredibly useful for those on the move, for example if you are heading into the office, but are running late for a call, so have to start it on your phone, before switching to your PC or laptop when you get to your desk.
Switch here
“In today’s world, getting our work done can happen from many locations, across many devices,” the company noted in a Google Workspace Updates blog announcing the news. “Beginning today, you can smoothly transfer between devices while on a Google Meet call without hanging up and rejoining.”
The Switch here option will be displayed when joining a meeting on a laptop or PC, allowing users to switch the call from a mobile device without losing or disrupting the conversation.
(Image credit: Google)
Once transferred, a notification will appear on the first device noting, “Call switched to another device”, meaning there’s no need to manually rejoin or even hang up on the initial call.
Google Meet promises “seamless” switching between devices, but in real life this may depend on network strength and the actual computing capabilities of your devices, but we’re keen to try it out.
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The function will be available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts, across Google Meet on Android and iOS mobile devices. It is rolling out now, with no admin action required.
The launch is the latest tweak to Google Meet as the company looks to make it more engaging and interactive for users. Recently, the platfom announced it would bringing its “Companion Mode” second screen tool to the Meet app for Android and iOS devices, offering a quick way to participate in meetings without opening a laptop, and giving more flexibility to the way users work and meet.
Today is Earth Day, and it’s as good a time as any to think about the way we use technology and how we can use it better and more sustainably given the myriad challenges it represents to our environment.
Major computer manufacturers like Acer, Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and many others have all started moving towards more sustainable products, and not just in their use of better packing materials that reduce new material use by increasing the amount of post-consumer material in their construction.
Even the computers themselves are starting to use post-consumer materials and manufacturers are expanding opportunities for upgrading the devices to keep them current longer, thereby reducing e-waste around the world.
But one area hasn’t seen nearly enough attention: processors, specifically their power usage.
A computer’s CPU is the brains of the whole operation, so naturally, it needs a good bit of power to operate at higher levels of performance. This is even more true of dedicated GPU chips in laptops or the best graphics cards used in desktop systems.
And while better power efficiency in laptops is going to be a bigger plus in terms of battery life, desktops have seemingly gone in the complete opposite direction, with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia configured systems drawing a lot of power to run hardware that often exceeds what users need, all so they can be called the ‘fastest’ or ‘most powerful’. It’s not a sustainable approach.
We need to start emphasizing efficiency over power
There will be circumstances when a lot of power for a component is necessary to do important work, and I’m not saying that every graphics card needs to have its power consumption halved as a basic rule.
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But for consumers who are barely tapping into the performance that an Nvidia RTX 4080 Super brings to the table, much less what an Nvidia RTX 4090 or AMD RX 7900 XTX offers, you have to ask if this kind of performance is worth the cost in terms of carbon emissions.
And of course, this is only in terms of useful work, like video editing or gaming, and not for something like cryptocurrency mining, which has at best a marginal social utility, and whose cost in terms of energy usage in the aggregate far outstrips any practical benefit cryptocurrency has in the real world (unless you’re really into criminal activity or need to launder some money).
Regular old processors aren’t immune either, with the current generation of Intel processors soaking up an extraordinary amount of energy (at least in bursts) relative to competitors like AMD and especially Apple.
What you get for that energy draw is some incredible performance numbers, but for 97-98% of users, this kind of performance is absolutely unnecessary, even if users are using the appropriate processor for their needs.
The performance arms race needs to change
Ultimately, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are locked in an arms race for making the fastest and most powerful processors and graphics cards, and it shows no signs of stopping. Meanwhile, Apple’s move to its own M-series silicon has been a major win, both for the company and for consumers.
Apple’s chips are based on Arm‘s big.LITTLE architecture, which is incredibly energy efficient from the ground up, originally having been intended for mobile devices. But now that the architecture is sophisticated enough to be used in laptops and even desktops, the energy efficiency remains while Apple has scored major performance gains over both AMD and Intel and kept energy use down.
If we are going to maintain a livable planet in the future, we must go on an energy diet. Seeing the difference between what Apple’s done and what AMD, Intel, and Nvidia aren’t doing puts to bed any excuse those three latter chipmakers have for not refocusing on efficiency going forward.
As hard as it may be to hear or accept, these three chipmakers must acknowledge that we don’t have a performance problem, we have a sustainability problem. They should turn away from squeezing even more performance out of their hardware that we don’t need, and give us the efficiency that is desperately needed, especially when these marginal increases in power are coming at far too high a cost.
Some power users and enthusiasts might not like seeing decreasing power usage while maintaining roughly the same level of performance gen-on-gen, or slightly better performance but far less than with previous generations, but it’s what needs to be done, and the sooner everyone acknowledges this and adapts, the better.
With Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile now on the radar of many mobile gaming fans, it’s a good time to note that the game is fully playable with a controller, taking away the need to rely on iffy touch controls. That’s why this current deal on the Amazon Luna controller as part of Amazon’s Spring Sale is particularly eye-catching.
At $49.99 ($10 out from its record-low price), players can save 20 bucks on a quality gamepad that’s usually much pricier at $69.99. What’s more, players who would like a phone clip to go along with the controller are in luck; a bundle containing the Amazon Luna controller and a phone clip is available for $64.98 (was $82.98).
Thankfully, UK folks aren’t being left out here. The controller by itself is down to £49.99 (was £59.99). And it’s just £62.98 (was £72.98) if you opt to purchase it with the phone clip included.
Not in the US or the UK? Scroll down for the best deals in your region. And if you’re after more deals this month, check out our full Amazon Spring Sale hub.
Today’s best Amazon Luna controller deals
We are now firmly in the territory of mobile games providing near-console quality experiences, and in many cases, awkward touch controls just don’t pass muster anymore. That’s why having a controller for games like Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile can be so valuable, as you’re able to play much more precisely without the risk of fumbling your fingers on an input you didn’t mean to touch.
The Amazon Luna controller is one such device that can be used on both iOS and Android devices. However, it also works on PC, Mac, and Fire TV devices, making it an exceptionally versatile gamepad that can be used for much more than just the Amazon Luna game streaming service. And at this discounted price, we say it’s well worth a look.
More Amazon Luna controller deals
Looking for more Amazon Luna controller deals? You’ll find all the lowest prices from around the web right here, with offers available in your region.
Scroll down for more Amazon Spring sale deals in the US and UK.
Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile finally launched globally today on iOS and Android, after spending the last couple of years in various beta versions and soft launches.
The game features two main Battle Royale maps, Verdansk and Rebirth Island, as well as cross-progression for players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and the PC/console version of Call of Duty: Warzone.
Level up your weapons and XP no matter where you are. Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile supports shared progression with the console and PC versions of Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare III. Simply log in using your Activision ID, and most content acquired in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone is seamlessly transferred and becomes continuously available between your games.
For gamers playing on iPhone 15 Pro models and iPads with an M1 chip or later, the game includes a “Peak Graphics” mode that runs in 2K with improved textures, lighting, draw distance, ambient occlusion, and resolution caching.
Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile requires iOS 16/iPadOS 16 or later, and has been available to pre-order on the App Store since November 2022, back when Activision was originally targeting a May 2023 release. More than 50 million players have pre-registered for the game already, according to MacRumors sister site TouchArcade.
Apple’s iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models concurrently, which is why we sometimes get rumored feature leaks so far ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different, and already we have some idea of what to expect from Apple’s 2025 smartphone lineup. If you plan to skip…
Apple is widely expected to release new iPad Air and OLED iPad Pro models in the next few weeks. According to new rumors coming out of Asia, the company will announce its new iPads on Tuesday, March 26. Chinese leaker Instant Digital on Weibo this morning 日发布%23″>claimed that the date will see some sort of announcement from Apple related to new iPads, but stopped short of calling it an…
Apple’s new iPad Pro models with OLED displays will likely begin shipping to customers in April, according to information shared today by Ross Young, CEO of display industry research firm Display Supply Chain Consultants. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman also said the new iPad Pro models might not ship until “deeper” into April in his Power On newsletter on Sunday:I’ve repeatedly said that new…
The next-generation iPad Air is now reportedly shipping to the United States and other countries in preparation for launch. The rumor comes from the leaker known as “Instant Digital,” who claims that manufacturers in China are now shipping the 2024 iPad Air in two sizes to overseas locations. “Everything is ready” for launch, the Weibo user says. The sixth-generation iPad Air is rumored…
iOS 17.4.1 and iPadOS 17.4.1 should be released within the next few days, with a build number of 21E235, according to a source with a proven track record. MacRumors previously reported that Apple was internally testing iOS 17.4.1. As a minor update for the iPhone, it will likely address software bugs and/or security vulnerabilities. It is unclear if the update will include any other changes. …
Since Apple unveiled macOS Sonoma 14.4 on March 7, the transition to the latest software update has not been entirely smooth for everyone, and a number of issues have been reported by users that significantly impact their daily workflow. This article lists the most prominent challenges users have faced since updating to macOS Sonoma 14.4, and offers potential solutions where available. USB…
Apple suppliers will begin production of two new fourth-generation AirPods models in May, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Based on this production timeframe, he expects the headphones to be released in September or October. Gurman expects both fourth-generation AirPods models to feature a new design with better fit, improved sound quality, and an updated charging case with a USB-C…
One day after a bill that could lead to of TikTok in the United States passed the House of Representatives, the company is doubling down on its strategy of urging users to call lawmakers. The app began pushing new in-app messages to users asking them to “tell your Senator how important TikTok is to you” and to “ask them to vote not on the TikTok ban.”
The new alerts are the second such message TikTok has pushed to users about the bill. Prior to the House vote, the company to call their representatives in the House. The step may have backfired as lawmakers accused the company of trying to “interfere” with the legislative process as Congressional offices were reportedly overwhelmed with calls, many of which came from somewhat confused teenagers.
The latest notifications are even more direct. “The House of Representatives just voted to ban TikTok, which impacts 170 million Americans just like you,” it says. “Now, if the Senate votes, the future of creativity and communities you love on TikTok could be shut down.” Like the previous alerts, users can choose to “call now,” and the app will find phone numbers if a zip code is provided.
Screenshot via TikTok
TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the message underscores just how big a threat the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” is to the company. If passed, TikTok would have about six months to sell itself or face a ban in the US. Though there have been several previous attempts to ban the app or force a sale, no measure has received as much bipartisan support so quickly. If passed by the Senate, President Joe Biden has said he would sign it into law.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew has directly to users, telling them to “protect your constitutional rights” and promising that the company would “do all we can including exercising our legal rights to protect this amazing platform.”
In January 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved lecanemab — an antibody medication that decreases β-amyloid protein build-up in the brain — as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Pivotal evidence came from a large, randomized trial of people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, which afflicts around 32 million people worldwide. By the end of that 18-month study1, patients in the placebo group scored on average 1.66 points worse than their performance at baseline on a standard dementia test, which assesses cognitive and functional changes over time through interviews with a patient and their caregiver. The mean score of treated participants, by comparison, worsened by 1.21 points — a 27% slowing of cognitive decline.
But is this improvement meaningful for patients and their families?
Nature Index 2024 Health sciences
There are two major categories of drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other progressive conditions: symptomatic drugs, which treat the symptoms, and disease-modifying drugs, which target the root cause. Donepezil and rivastigmine, for example, are symptomatic drugs that boost the activity of chemicals in the brain to compensate for declines in cognitive and memory function caused by Alzheimer’s disease, but they cannot stop its progression. Lecanemab, developed jointly by Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai and American biotechnology firm Biogen, targets the underlying issue of amyloid build-up in the brain, and in doing so, could fundamentally change the course of the disease.
An important feature of disease-modifying drugs is that their benefits are cumulative. Studies of patients with multiple sclerosis, for example, have shown the benefits of starting disease-modifying drugs earlier in the course of the disease compared with later, including improved mortality rates and reduced disability in the long term. Being able to quantify how long a disease-modifying drug can delay or halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease could change how researchers understand — and communicate — its benefits.
In studies of potential disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, there has always been a tension between being able to produce a treatment effect and being able to measure it, says Suzanne Hendrix, statistician and founder of the clinical trials consulting firm Pentara in Salt Lake City, Utah. Clinical trials generally enrol early-stage patients — those with mild cognitive impairment and evidence of brain amyloid — because amyloid-targeting therapies have the best chance of working if given well before the disease takes hold. But in the early stages, patients deteriorate so gradually that it can be difficult to perceive the impact of a disease-modifying drug using standardized tests.
At a scientific meeting in 2009, Hendrix recalls being pulled aside by an executive at Eisai, who told her: “Nobody’s measuring this disease right. Until we measure the most progressive aspects of disease, we’re not going to be able to see treatment effects.”
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Cummings, J. L., Goldman, D. P., Simmons-Stern, N. R., Ponton, E. Alzheimers Dement.18, 469–477 (2022)
Hendrix and other researchers are exploring time-based metrics as a new approach. Savings of time, measured as prolonged quality of life after 18 months of treatment, for example, is “much easier to talk about” than point differences on cognitive and functional scales, says Lars Rau Raket, a statistician at the Copenhagen, Denmark, branch of US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. For early-stage Alzheimer’s patients, says Racket, “it’s about how much you can extend the time in the ‘good parts’ — in the milder stages of disease”.
Straight line to time
To come up with a time-based approach, Hendrix and her colleagues pooled parts of several rating scales from standard dementia tests to develop a new tool called that picks up on subtle changes that occur in early Alzheimer’s. By zeroing in on where changes are more pronounced in these early stages, such as a diminished ability to juggle tasks or to recall past events, the team could track the progression of several key features of the disease.
To measure the effectiveness of disease-modifying treatments on these key features as units of time, the researchers used clinical outcomes from placebo and treated participants in a phase II trial of another amyloid-lowering therapy, donanemab. They calculated that over the 76-week duration of the trial, overall disease progression was delayed by 5.2 months.
In a paper published last year2, when he was working for Danish firm Novo Nordisk, in a lab just outside Copenhagen, Raket took a similar approach to calculating treatment effects in terms of time. But their methods differed in some ways. Whereas Hendrix’s work focused on calculating time savings across multiple outcomes, Raket used multiple models to calculate time savings for each outcome measure.
The idea of time-based models seems to be gaining traction. They were used as exploratory measures in a phase III trial of donanemab, conducted by Eli Lilly and Company, and published in JAMA last year3. Eisai also showed a time-based analysis in a 2022 presentation of its phase III lecanemab data at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting in San Francisco. In those analyses, participants treated with lecanemab took 25.5 months to reach the same degree of worsening on a common dementia test as the placebo group did at 18 months — a time saving of 7.5 months.
Raket says he has been approached by several people in the pharmaceutical industry and academia, and some are working with him to apply the concept to their research. At the 2023 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Amsterdam, Raket and his collaborators in the United States, Canada and Europe compared time-based models with conventional statistical approaches for progressive diseases, and analysed how delays in disease progression calculated with time-based methods translate to treatment differences on standard cognitive tests. “I haven’t experienced this kind of interest in my work before,” he says. Raket predicts that an increasing number of trials in the neurodegeneration space will be reporting time-savings estimates in the years to come.
Broad impacts
Beyond Alzheimer’s disease, time-saved models could be applied to other progressive conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Cancer and cardiovascular disease studies, which tend to focus on events — delaying relapse or death, or cutting the risk of heart attacks, for instance — are less suited to models that track progression. If, however, heart disease were conceptualized as a gradual worsening of blood pressure or cholesterol over time, and treatment could be shown to slow the rate of deterioration, the time-saved approach could be used to measure the treatment benefit, says Hendrix.
One benefit of time-based methods is that they could help make clinical trials less prone to being skewed by outliers, says Geert Molenberghs, a biostatistician at KU Leuven and Hasselt University, both in Belgium, who collaborates with Hendrix. For example, a small subset of people with early Alzheimer’s disease deteriorate unusually quickly. If these rapid decliners are in the treated group, they could potentially mask a drug benefit, says Molenberghs. The details become “very technical”, he says, but with time-based approaches, these rare individuals “are less influential. They have less capacity to overturn the statistics.”
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Cummings, J. L., Goldman, D. P., Simmons-Stern, N. R., Ponton, E. Alzheimers Dement.18, 469–477 (2022)
Time-based metrics could impact broader conversations with health economists and policymakers. “The idea that you could take somebody who’s already in their senior years and keep them functional and not needing 24/7 care — that’s incredibly valuable information for making estimates about the true burden or cost of the disease to caregivers and society,” says John Harrison, chief science officer at Scottish Brain Sciences, a research institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. “It’s a very neat communications tool which feeds into estimates of progression, cost, strategy and, one hopes, legislation and planning.”
There are open questions that might need to be addressed before time-saved models are more widely applied in clinical trials. One is that, although time progresses linearly, not all points on that line are equally meaningful. For example, the anti-amyloid mechanism might only be beneficial in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, says Ron Petersen, a neurologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “By the time the person progresses to, say, moderate dementia, modifying amyloid probably isn’t going to make any difference.”
Hendrix is hopeful that the time-saved idea can be further developed and applied to clinical trials in the future, because it could make a big difference in tracking not only how effective new disease-modifying drugs are, but also in helping Alzheimer’s patients and their families to better understand the progression of the disease and how they can plan for it.
Ultimately, as more studies “start focusing on how much time we’ve saved people, all of the effects that we see will be more relevant” to people’s daily lives, Hendrix says.