So you don’t think these patents are going after any aspect of Palworld that players would recognize as a defining feature of a Pokémon game?

I mean, there's like a mechanic where you throw the spheres, right? And this is a very obvious, in your face system [that’s very much like Pokémon]. But I think that it will be a lot more technical than this. Nintendo would have dug through every single action inside the game, they would have probably reverse engineered it, and just find ways to sue these guys. 

You can bet your life that Nintendo hates this company, and they couldn't find an angle with the character designs. This is why they are not mentioned in their press release. So they come with these technical peculiarities. So I personally believe, if you act like this, you can sue like 90 percent of the game developers in the world. I'm sure there's like thousands of games that have a confirmation screen when you go from sleep mode to resuming the game right, but if you basically trigger the wrath of Nintendo, they will come after you.

The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility. 

Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project’s GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project “will not be updated anymore.”

Eli Collins, a vice president of product management at Google DeepMind, first demoed generative AI video tools for the company’s board of directors back in 2022. Despite the model’s slow speed, pricey cost to operate, and sometimes off-kilter outputs, he says it was an eye-opening moment for them to see fresh video clips generated from a random prompt.

Now, just a few years later, Google has announced plans for a tool inside of the YouTube app that will allow anyone to generate AI video clips, using the company’s Veo model, and directly post them as part of YouTube Shorts. “Looking forward to 2025, we're going to let users create stand-alone video clips and shorts,” says Sarah Ali, a senior director of product management at YouTube. “They're going to be able to generate six-second videos from an open text prompt.” Ali says the update could help creators hunting for footage to fill out a video or trying to envision something fantastical. She is adamant that the Veo AI tool is not meant to replace creativity, but augment it.

Snapchat is reserving the right to put its users’ faces in ads, according to terms of service related to its “My Selfie” tool (formerly “AI Selfies”), which allows users and their friends to create AI-generated images trained on their selfies. 

Users have the option to opt out of this by toggling off a “feature” in the app called “See My Selfie in Ads,” but according to 404 Media’s testing this feature is on by default.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills Tuesday to crack down on the use of artificial intelligence to create false images or videos in political ads ahead of the 2024 election. 

A new law, set to take effect immediately, makes it illegal to create and publish deepfakes related to elections 120 days before Election Day and 60 days thereafter. It also allows courts to stop distribution of the materials and impose civil penalties. 

“Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy, and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation -– especially in today’s fraught political climate,” Newsom said in a statement. “These measures will help to combat the harmful use of deepfakes in political ads and other content, one of several areas in which the state is being proactive to foster transparent and trustworthy AI.”

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.

Former Bungie chief legal officer Don McGowan credits Sony’s discipline for pushing Bungie to focus on new player acquisition and running Destiny 2 like a business, shedding light on behind-the-scenes changes at the studio.

Destiny 2 has seen a whirlwind of changes recently, and according to former Bungie chief legal officer Don McGowan, much of that is thanks to Sony’s influence. 

In a new post on LinkedIn, McGowan didn’t hold back his thoughts, saying that Sony has pushed Bungie to make much-needed adjustments to how it handles its flagship game, Destiny 2.

Getting your game noticed is a tricky business when you have to punch through the noise of the more than 10,000 new Steam games releasing each year. Young Horses, the developer of Bugsnax and Octodad, have found itself in an even trickier spot: Thanks to Google, people are expecting a Bugsnax sequel that doesn't exist.

"We are not working on a Bugsnax sequel right now and I need AI bs to stop telling kids we are based on a wiki ideas fanfic," Young Horses co-founder and president Philip Tibitoski tweeted earlier today. It turns out, through the wonders of algorithmic search result curation, Google's featured snippets have been informing people that Bugsnax 2 will be releasing in October 2024, despite the fact that neither Young Horses or any other developer are making it.

“You can buy a gaming PC for 120,000 yen.” Japanese people have been seeing an increasing number of advertisements worded this way in the past few days. But what else costs 120,000 yen? A PlayStation 5 Pro, as recently revealed by Sony. 

The announcement of the PS5 Pro’s steep price tag has caused significant dissatisfaction both in the US and Europe, where the console will set gamers back $700 and €800 respectively. But much like European gamers, Japanese players are faced with paying even more for the console than people in the US. The 119,980-yen price point is equivalent to over $840, based on recent conversion rates.  

To make matters worse, Sony recently hiked the price of standard PS5 console models in Japan. On September 2, the suggested retail price jumped from 66,980 yen (about $463) to 79,980 yen (about $552). Apart from severe backlash across social media, this decision caused the console to sell out all over the country in the days leading up to the price increase and even gave the Xbox a boost in sales.

In a week when Xbox fans were hoping to hear a response from Microsoft to the PS5 Pro, the software giant is making a third round of gaming layoffs instead. 650 employees at Microsoft’s gaming business are being laid off, part of continued cuts at Xbox after Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft cut 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox jobs earlier this year and then shuttered four studios it acquired as part of its $7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition in May. Thankfully, Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks was eventually saved from Microsoft’s shutdown after Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds and The Callisto Protocol, acquired the Japanese studio from Microsoft instead.

The entire staff of Annapurna Interactive, the video-game publishing division of Megan Ellison’s Annapurna studio, resigned this month following a dispute with its owner, according to people familiar with the situation.

Annapurna Interactive President Nathan Gary and his team had been negotiating with Ellison, the daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, to spin off the video-game division as an independent entity, said the people, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to share the information with the press. When Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, Gary and other executives resigned and were followed by around two dozen other staffers.

Ex-Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering does not believe recent layoffs across the games industry have been a result of corporate greed. Instead, workers who have lost their jobs should "drive an Uber" or "go to the beach for a year" until employment settles.

Deering was a guest on games writer Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console, where the pair discussed games industry layoffs.

"I don't think it's fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed," said Deering. "I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle and I didn't want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in Electronics."