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Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie

Hip-hop artist Saweetie is performing exclusively in Roblox for the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII pregame on February 10, the National Football League announced today.
The virtual concert will take place at 7:00 pm ET in Warner Music Group’s Rhythm City, a new destination on Roblox that was announced earlier this week. Rhythm City is set to launch on February 4 and offers mini-games and social roleplaying experiences like becoming a musician and owning a house and car.
The NFL claims that Saweetie will give a “family-friendly,” fully motion-captured performance and sing her hit songs like “Tap-In.” The concert will re-air every hour until Sunday, February 12.
Fans that virtually attend the Saweetie Super Bowl Concert can also get digital items on the Roblox marketplace or win items by finishing challenges. The digital collection includes wearable hairstyles, hats, boots, headphones and sweatsuits, which are based on Saweetie’s merchandise and her album looks.
“I’m really excited to bring this iconic moment to the metaverse and share my music with a whole new audience in such a unique way! As an artist, innovator, and football fan, to be able to perform during Super Bowl LVII weekend in this new world – Rhythm City on Roblox – is something I never imagined that I would be involved in. I am very grateful and happy about this opportunity,” Saweetie said in a statement.
Image Credits: Roblox/NFL
The NFL is also launching Super NFL Tycoon within Roblox. The metaverse experience allows users to pretend they’re NFL team owners, draft a team and build a stadium. Super NFL Tycoon will launch on February 4 to coincide with the virtual Super Bowl concert. Users can move between Super NFL Tycoon and Rhythm City through a designated portal.
Interestingly, the experience — which is presented by the global financial technology platform Intuit — is also an attempt to teach younger users “important financial concepts in a fun and engaging manner,” said Lara Balazs, Intuit’s chief marketing officer and general manager of Strategic Partner Group. So, while users fantasize about owning an NFL team, they can also learn how to manage cash flow, payroll, taxes and customer acquisition (because that’s supposed to be fun somehow).
The concert, Super NFL Tycoon and Rhythm City are also developed in partnership with Gamefam, a gaming company across metaverse platforms.
“Bringing a cultural moment like the Super Bowl to the metaverse with such innovative partners marks a shift in how brands are coming together to create the next generation of metaverse gaming experiences,” said Ricardo Briceno, chief business officer of Gamefam.
This is the second year in a row that NFL and Roblox are offering the NFL Tycoon experience. For the 2022 Super Bowl, Roblox users could attend an interactive event called “Destruction House,” inspired by the Super Bowl LVI commercial. Also, in 2021, Roblox launched a virtual NFL storefront, giving users NFL-themed digital items to dress up their Roblox avatars.
The NFL’s foray into the metaverse highlights how the league tries to cater to a younger demographic.
“Working with Roblox has enabled us to create interactive shared experiences and with the virtual concert and Super NFL Tycoon, we will unlock deeper fan engagement,” said Ed Kiang, VP of Video Gaming at the NFL.
Roblox reported that its third quarter saw the fastest year-over-year growth in daily active users that range from 17 to 24 years old, which saw an increase of 41%. Roblox’s daily active users that are older than 13 years old grew by 34% year-over-year and accounted for 54% of all daily active users.
The streaming rights deal with Amazon has proven to attract a younger audience for the NFL. Amazon reported that Thursday Night Football (TNF) on Prime Video delivered an audience eight years younger than last year’s average TNF audience. The NFL also recently struck a deal with YouTube for the Sunday Ticket.
Super Bowl LVII will take place Sunday, February 12, with the Kansas City Chiefs playing the Philadelphia Eagles.
In September, Apple Music announced it is the official sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

Apple Music becomes the official sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show

Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie

Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay

Netflix is bringing the Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales game to its platform with new gameplay based on the content from Season 4 of the show. Users will be able to play as new characters features in Season 4 in this no-ads game as the company continues its push toward gaming.
Users have to solve puzzles in this game to beat enemies like Demogorgons and other supernatural monsters. In the process, they can collect up to 50 versions of characters from the show. The company describes the game’s graphics as “nostalgic 1980s Saturday morning cartoon art style.”

Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales was first released in 2021 and it was removed from the App Store and Play Store in August after Netflix acquired the game’s publisher for $72 million. At that time, the streaming service announced that it is working on revamping the game and moving it to Netflix exclusively.
Users can download the updated game starting today using this link. This release of the title joins other Stranger Things games like Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game.
The game also builds on Netflix’s efforts to let fans engage with the show in various ways. Earlier this year, the streaming company partnered with Reddit for Stranger Things-based customized avatars and teamed up with Spotify for personalized playlists.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the company’s VP for gaming Mike Verdu said that Netflix is exploring avenues to get into cloud gaming. He added that the streaming giant is also opening its second gaming studio in California after establishing its first studio in Helsinki in August. The company also launched game handles that can be used across exclusive titles in September.
While the company is putting a lot of effort into making gaming a success, it hasn’t seen stellar results. According to a report from Apptopia published in August, Netflix games were only averaging 1.7 million daily users. During its Q3 2022 earnings, the company announced that it now has 223 million subscribers.
Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay

Google gets into the Halloween spirit with a ghostly multiplayer interactive Doodle

If you want to take a break from work or the never-ending news cycle, Google is here to give you an escape. The search giant has launched a new Halloween-themed playable Doodle that opens up to a Snake-like game that you can play with your friends or random players from around the world.
The goal of the game is to collect as many wandering spirit flames as you can in two minutes and return them to their homebase. After time’s up, the team that has collected the most spirit flames wins. Here’s the catch: opponents can intercept spirits from one another as they bring them back to homebase. Ghosts that collect the most spirit flames will also unlock special powers, such as speed boosts and night vision.
You can host a game and invite up to seven friends to play with you via a custom invitation link or choose to play with randomized players. Google says the team that developed the Doodle built several systems to enable this multiplayer gaming, all running on the Google Cloud Platform. The team utilized Open Match, which is an open source matchmaking framework co-founded by Google Cloud and Unity.
Google often uses its Doodles to commemorate historical dates and figures, but sometimes uses the feature to add a bit of fun when it comes to holidays. The new multiplayer Doodle is the sequel to Google’s “Great Ghoul Duel Doodle” from 2018. The 2022 version includes new characters, game maps, special power-ups and more.
Google gets into the Halloween spirit with a ghostly multiplayer interactive Doodle by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Google gets into the Halloween spirit with a ghostly multiplayer interactive Doodle

The Mario movie trailer is as cursed as we hoped

Nintendo shared the first trailer for the anticipated “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” an animated adventure featuring some deeply meme-worthy casting. With Chris Pratt as Mario and Jack Black as Bowser, fans were excited to see just how unhinged this film would be. More than 600,000 viewers tuned into the premiere on Nintendo of America’s YouTube Channel, and the trailer was concurrently streamed at New York Comic Con.
Though the trailer was a bit short, it didn’t disappoint. We finally got to hear Chris Pratt’s voice come out of Mario’s animated form, and it was delightfully bizarre. Plus, Keegan-Michael Key is already killing it as Toad, admonishing Mario for mistaking him for a mushroom. Toad with an attitude? Hell yeah.

The trailer opens with Bowser back on his bullshit, trying to steal our stars like we’re playing “Mario Party.” The Koopa Troopas — who are quite literally troops, true to their name — follow Bowser to a snowy castle, where he demands that they open the gates. Some penguins try to throw snowballs at him to defend their domain, but their efforts are futile.
So far, Black seems to have seriously committed to his role as the terrifying Mario villain.
“Do you have any idea how long it took me to learn how to breathe fire?” Black deadpanned in a pre-recorded video, which played alongside the trailer. “I had to learn from Gene Simmons of Kiss!”
To quote our own Greg Kumparak, “Bowser looks terrifying! Mario is Chris Pratt.”
He is right. We are introduced to Mario as he plops out of a warp pipe into a mushroom-filled fantasy land, but he lands unceremoniously alone in the field. So far, Chris Pratt’s Mario seems more like Andy Dwyer than Star-Lord, and we love that for him.
“It’s been a life-long dream of mine to become Mario,” Pratt said before the trailer aired. He recalls spending hours of his life stomping Koopas in the original Mario arcade game at his local laundromat.
We didn’t get to see other performances from the star-studded cast, including Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi and former TechCrunch Disrupt speaker Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong. Perhaps we will see them in trailer two!
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is slated to premiere on April 7, 2023.

Nintendo announced that Chris Pratt will play Mario on the big screen

The Mario movie trailer is as cursed as we hoped by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
The Mario movie trailer is as cursed as we hoped

Daily Crunch: Adobe snaps up Figma in proposed $20B deal that has some scratching their heads

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Happy Thursday! Has everyone recovered from Zoom going down this morning? Don’t worry, Zoom is back up, but if anything, we hope it helped you have a quieter day…for a while at least.  — Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
One rival at a time: The digital design world got a treat today when Adobe announced it was buying Figma, one of its biggest rivals, in a $20 billion deal that has both investors and Figma enthusiasts pondering what will change and if those changes will be bad, Ingrid reports. Meanwhile, Alex gives his take on the deal over in TechCrunch+ land.
“The Merge” is here: Talk of “The Merge” has been with us for weeks, and today it is finally here. If you don’t follow cryptocurrency, this means that Ethereum, one of crypto’s most popular blockchains, has now switched to proof-of-stake consensus, which also means it will now consume a lot less electricity, Romain writes. And for TC+, Jacquelyn tells us why it matters that Lido, Coinbase, Kraken and Binance have a majority stake of ETH.
There’s a fix for that: Apple is clearing a path for easy iPhone 14 integration with a setup fix. Ivan has more.
Startups and VC
Today, Haje has been running around at Micromobility America. They insist on using the MMA acronym, so he’s expecting a fist to the face any moment, but so far the only risk of injury has been from neck-breaking micromobility in the form of electric rollerblades. It’s probably a coincidence that Kav announced it is spooling up a 3D printing factory for bike helmets on the same day.
Looks like mobility is everywhere these days — Matt notes that mobility startups are filling the void in a Detroit auto show that’s a shell of its former self.
The TechCrunch team has been extraordinarily busy. There’s a wall of news on the TechCrunch homepage; here’s a few of the ones that caught our eye this fine Thursday:
Like private equity, but with pocket change: Anita reports that Allocations just raised at a beefy $150 million valuation in its mission to help private equity funds lure smaller investors.
You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s invest across multiple channels: U.K.-based fintech Lightyear is extending its stock-trading offering to include a wide selection of stocks and traded funds (ETF), Paul reports.
From the shirt off your back to the shiz in your bag: Reusable packaging startup Olive creates a new model to keep clothes out of landfills, Christine reports.
We’re sure more money will fix this: VCs look the other way as they give $205 million more to Verkada, whose tech (and lax security) has been abused repeatedly, Connie reports.
To Infinity and beyond: Morpheus Space’s satellite thrusters are propelled forward with a $28 million Series A, reports Stefanie.
Pitch Deck Teardown: Helu.io’s $9.8M Series A deck
Image Credits: Helu (opens in a new window)
Helping small- and medium-sized enterprises with their controlling, reporting and budgeting may not sound exciting, but Austrian fintech startup Helu.io’s storytelling skills excited investors enough to raise a $9.8 million Series A in July.
With the exception of some details regarding unit economics and revenue, Helu shared its entire winning pitch deck with us. As these slides suggest, its founders took a straightforward approach:
Problem: “The CFO’s pain is Excel.”
Solution: “Good-bye Excel sheets.”

Pitch Deck Teardown: Helu.io’s $9.8M Series A deck

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!)
Big Tech Inc.
Whenever Call of Duty is mentioned, we can’t help but recall Rashida Jones’s character in “The Office” giving the game a shout-out. In today’s case, Jordan was there as Activision unveiled what the game’s next generation will look like.
We won’t be undone: Amanda got “BeReal” with TikTok’s newest feature, which will have you experiencing a bit of déjà vu.
“The Merge,” take two: We know you enjoyed Romain’s coverage of “The Merge”; now Rita reports on how this has affected cryptocurrency miners.
Two giants make an even bigger giant: Want to know what happens to customer data when Salesforce and Snowflake partner? Ron can tell you.
All eyes on gaming: While Activision was over there unveiling the new Modern Warfare game, the company’s proposed tie-up with Microsoft is getting a deeper look from the United Kingdom’s antitrust investigators, Natasha L reports.
Back in the hot seat: Taylor watched the latest Senate Homeland Security Committee meeting featuring executives from Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter so you don’t have to. Spoiler, they  dodge questions about social media and national security.
Daily Crunch: Adobe snaps up Figma in proposed $20B deal that has some scratching their heads by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Daily Crunch: Adobe snaps up Figma in proposed $20B deal that has some scratching their heads