Welcome back to yet another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! Today’s headlines feature a couple of pieces of gadget news, and yes, both of them are a little bit odd. But we’ll start with the one that’s a bit closer to our immediate interests here at MOP.
Microsoft’s latest layoffs appear to have killed a new Age of Empires game, or at least that’s what some sleuthing done by Twitter user Idle Sloth suggests. According to gathered information fromLinkedIn and ResetEra, one of the first-party studios that was caught in Microsoft’s recent firings was World’s Edge, the studio behind the Age of Empires franchise, which was evidently working on a new project before it was cancelled. There hasn’t been official confirmation that this was a new entry in the RTS series as of this writing, but the dots most certainly line up.
Facebook has unveiled new virtual reality glasses and, by all accounts, they appear to be less about gaming and more about general use. Despite having hand tracking, powerful specs, a significantly slimmer form factor, and some integration of AI (shocking, we know), the demonstration of the headset appears to be mostly about watching 360° videos and IMAX movies, though the company did say it will have the ability to connect to consoles as an alternate display option and be capable of playing 75 Quest games. Also, we say “generalist” but that assumes that person has $1,300 to spend on the things.
Finally, Sony filed a new controller patentfor a way to make gamepads capable of reading NFC information, which would basically let users tap a credit card or a cell phone on the controller to send data to a game console. This could be used to transfer account data over, but it also very likely would handle payment processing as well. As ever, we point out a patent is not a guarantee of a product, but then this one isn’t quite as bad as mid-game advertising.
