Have you been burned before by Windows on Arm? Are you worried whether the apps you need will actually run on Copilot PCs? But after playing around with one myself, I'm fairly optimistic that those days are over, as Qualcomm executives promised. After receiving a Surface Pro (2024) 11th Edition from Microsoft for review, I spent a good chunk of my first day just downloading various applications and seeing if they'd run--and if they did, how well. First, this is indeed a productivity tablet, and Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a good job making sure most common productivity application work without hassle. Second, Copilot PCs are not gaming PCs, and there's a good chance your favorite games won't even run.

Cloud gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. A client in cloud gaming sends its movement to the game server on the Internet, which renders and transmits the resulting video back. In order to provide a good gaming experience, a latency below 80 ms is required. This means that video rendering, encoding, transmission, decoding, and display have to finish within that time frame, which is especially challenging to achieve due to server overload, network congestion, and losses. In this paper, we propose a new method for recovering lost or corrupted video frames in cloud gaming. Unlike traditional video frame recovery, our approach uses game states to significantly enhance recovery accuracy and utilizes partially decoded frames to recover lost portions. We develop a holistic system that consists of (i) efficiently extracting game states, (ii) modifying H.264 video decoder to generate a mask to indicate which portions of video frames need recovery, and (iii) designing a novel neural network to recover either complete or partial video frames. Our approach is extensively evaluated using iPhone 12 and laptop implementations, and we demonstrate the utility of game states in the game video recovery and the effectiveness of our overall design.

The EU has approved Microsoft's $69bn (£55bn) acquisition of the Call of Duty creator Activision Blizzard, in a move that puts Brussels at loggerheads with its UK counterpart over the gaming mega-deal. The EU accepted Microsoft's concessions on cloud gaming, the same problem that led the Competition and Markets Authority to block the transaction last month. The proposed deal would bring together Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox console, with the video game developer behind titles including World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Candy Crush Saga and Overwatch. The move by the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, will revive Microsoft's hopes for the deal as it prepares to appeal against the CMA's decision. The Federal Trade Commission in the US has also come out against the takeover and is suing to block it.

Wow." Phone calls with law professors about regulatory actions don't normally start with unprompted expressions of amazement, but regulatory actions don't normally come like this. Anne Witt, professor of law and member of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, had been expecting to have a very different conversation when we spoke last Wednesday. But then, just minutes before we were due to talk, the UK's competition regulator blocked Microsoft's attempted $68.7bn acquisition of megadeveloper Activision Blizzard, the sprawling corporation behind games including Candy Crush Saga, World of Warcraft, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and, most importantly, Call of Duty. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is just one of a number of international regulators which was investigating the proposed acquisition. In the US, the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) had already sued to block the takeover in December, with the case due in court later this year. The European Union is investigating, and has given itself a deadline of 22 May to make a decision, while Australia has paused its own investigation while it engages with overseas regulators. One of those regulators had already given the deal a pass. In March, the Japan Fair Trade Commission ruled that it was "unlikely to result in substantially restraining competition", and approved it to go ahead. Japan's justification for allowing the merger was also behind Witt's expectation it would be approved. "For 30 years or so, competition agencies, very much influenced by the US school, have taken the view that'vertical mergers' are rarely dangerous," she explained, once the shock had worn off. "If you have a'horizontal merger' – if Microsoft had bought up a competitor – it is very evident that that will have a direct effect on competition, because it eliminates one player in the market.

British antitrust regulators on Wednesday blocked Microsoft's $69bn purchase of video game maker Activision Blizzard, thwarting the biggest tech deal in history over worries that it would stifle competition for popular titles like Call of Duty in the fast-growing cloud gaming market. The Competition and Markets Authority said in its final report that "the only effective remedy" to the substantial loss of competition "is to prohibit the Merger." The companies have pledged to appeal. The all-cash deal announced 15 months ago faced stiff opposition from rival Sony, which makes the PlayStation gaming system, and also was being scrutinised by regulators in the United States and Europe over fears that it would give Microsoft and its Xbox console control of hit franchises like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. The UK watchdog's decision "came as a surprise to most people" and heightens global uncertainty over the deal, said Liam Deane, a game industry analyst for research firm Omdia.

The UK's competition regulator has blocked Microsoft's attempted takeover of Activision Blizzard, the developer behind hit video games such as Call of Duty, in what would have been the largest acquisition in gaming history. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) prevented the $68.7bn (£55bn) cash purchase because of concerns it would squash the cloud gaming market. The tie-up would have created a gaming behemoth, merging Activision's plethora of "AAA" titles, which also include World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Candy Crush Saga and Overwatch, with Microsoft's burgeoning stable of first-party developers, its Xbox consoles and its control of PC gaming. The block follows the CMA's decision in October last year to prevent Meta acquiring the animated gif search engine Giphy. Anne Witt, a law professor and member of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, described the Activision decision as "huge news".

In July, the CMA launched its own inquiry into Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard to determine if the merger could meaningfully reduce healthy competition in the U.K. gaming market. After completing the first phase of its investigation Thursday, the CMA concluded that the deal could result in a "substantial lessening of competition" for game consoles, subscription services and cloud gaming after reviewing over a thousand internal documents from Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. In particular, the CMA said that Microsoft's current assets combined with Activision Blizzard's could block out future competitors as the gaming industry as a whole moves on from digital storefronts to cloud gaming and subscription services.

The UK's competition regulator has raised concerns about Microsoft's $68.7bn deal to buy the Call of Duty publisher, Activision Blizzard, and given the two companies five days to offer solutions. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warned that the Xbox owner's proposed takeover of the company behind popular titles including World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, which would be the biggest ever gaming industry merger, "could substantially lessen competition in gaming consoles, multi-game subscription services, and cloud gaming services". The CMA added: "Microsoft already has a leading gaming console (Xbox), a leading cloud platform (Azure), and the leading PC operating system (Windows OS), all of which could be important to its success in cloud gaming." The two companies now have five working days to submit proposals to address its concerns, and if suitable suggestions are not submitted, the deal will be referred for a phase 2 investigation, allowing an independent panel of experts to examine the risks in greater detail. "We are concerned that Microsoft could use its control over popular games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft post-merger to harm rivals, including recent and future rivals in multi-game subscription services and cloud gaming," said Sorcha O'Carroll, the CMA's senior director of mergers.

Microsoft's war chest is a dynamo. With revenues that rival the GDP of a small nation, it's got enough cash on hand to buy whatever it wants. When it does, it just acquires another money-making machine. Video game company Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft announced yesterday it was buying for a staggering $68.7 billion--more than the $26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2016, almost 10 times the $7.5 billion it paid for Bethesda's parent ZeniMax Media last year. Microsoft now owns Call of Duty and Halo; it owns The Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft.

Samsung is revealing a new lineup of smart TVs at CES 2022 today, including features as exotic as radio-wave powered remote controls and support for NFTs -- and they also happen to be the first Samsung sets in a while to let you play triple-A video games from the cloud instead of just your Xbox, PlayStation or PC. After an vague tease in October, Samsung is now confirming that "select" 2022 models will explicitly offer access to Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google Stadia, and the Utomik cloud gaming service as part of a new "Samsung Gaming Hub," a user interface which Samsung's intending to expand to additional services as well. Intriguingly, the company says that your HDMI-connected video game consoles will be part of it as well -- complete with passthrough controller inputs. That means you might be able to play cloud games and console games with the same controller, instead of having to maintain separate controllers or pair back and forth, with both PlayStation and Xbox controllers supported at launch. It's also promising "AI Gaming technology" that will create curated game recommendations on your TV's home screen, which... okay, sure.