Freecash will actually pay money out to users but not for watching videos. This misleading marketing coincides with the app's rising popularity. I first encountered the Freecash app after clicking on a sponsored TikTok video with dubious claims. The advertisement didn't promote this app by name, rather it showed a young woman expressing her excitement about seemingly getting hired by TikTok at $35 an hour to watch videos on her "For You" page. When I tapped the link to "order now," it sent me to a website with TikTok and Freecash logos, featuring a download link for the Freecash app.

Niantic's Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide Niantic is giving its cute AR cartoon companions a voice that will let them guide you around in the real world and point out interesting facts. The feature is being demo'd first in Snap Spectacles. Imagine you're walking your dog. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, "Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?"

An investigation by the UK advertising watchdog has found a number of shocking ads in mobile gaming apps that depict women as sexual objects, use pornographic tropes, and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios involving "violent and coercive control". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) used avatars, which mimic the browsing behaviour of different gender and age groups, to monitor ads served when mobile games are open and identify breaches of the UK code. While most of the thousands of promotions served to the avatars complied with UK rules, the watchdog identified and banned eight that featured "shocking" content that portrayed women in a harmful way. Two ads promoting an artificial intelligence chatbot app, Linky: Chat With Characters AI, began with a woman dressed in a manga T-shirt, a short skirt and large bunny ears dancing in a bedroom with text reading: "Tell me which bf [boyfriend] I should break up with." The ad moved on to animated content featuring text conversations with three manga-style young men.

As blind and low-vision (BLV) players engage more deeply with games, accessibility features have become essential. While some research has explored tools and strategies to enhance game accessibility, the specific experiences of these players with mobile games remain underexamined. This study addresses this gap by investigating how BLV users experience mobile games with varying accessibility levels. Through interviews with 32 experienced BLV mobile players, we explore their perceptions, challenges, and strategies for engaging with mobile games. Our findings reveal that BLV players turn to mobile games to alleviate boredom, achieve a sense of accomplishment, and build social connections, but face barriers depending on the game's accessibility level. We also compare mobile games to other forms of gaming, highlighting the relative advantages of mobile games, such as the inherent accessibility of smartphones. This study contributes to understanding BLV mobile gaming experiences and provides insights for enhancing accessible mobile game design.

Procedural content generation uses algorithmic techniques to create large amounts of new content for games at much lower production costs. In newer approaches, procedural content generation utilizes machine learning. However, these methods usually require expensive collection of large amounts of data, as well as the development and training of fairly complex learning models, which can be both extremely time-consuming and expensive. The core of our research is to explore whether we can lower the barrier to the use of personalized procedural content generation through a more practical and generalizable approach with large language models. Matching game content with player preferences benefits both players, who enjoy the game more, and developers, who increasingly depend on players enjoying the game before being able to monetize it. Therefore, this paper presents a novel approach to achieving personalization by using large language models to propose levels based on the gameplay data continuously collected from individual players. We compared the levels generated using our approach with levels generated with more traditional procedural generation techniques. Our easily reproducible method has proven viable in a production setting and outperformed levels generated by traditional methods in the probability that a player will not quit the game mid-level.

Over the weekend, the Guardian published a trio of stories about video game addiction. One was about the 850 people referred to an NHS treatment clinic in the last three years (of whom 227 were under 18). Another was on developers' use of tactics from the gambling industry to keep people spending on games. The third was by the director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, calling for industry regulation to better protect young people. These stories concern a problem that is certainly real, especially so for people affected by compulsive gaming behaviour, whose stories are no less affecting than those of gambling addicts.

Niantic, which is perhaps most known for developing Pokémon Go, is working on an augmented reality version of Monster Hunter for Android and iOS devices. The company has teamed up with Capcom to create what it calls a "real-world hunting action RPG" entitled Monster Hunter Now. Similar to Pokemon Go and Niantic's other titles, including the now-defunct Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, players will have to walk around with their phones to find monsters to battle. They can also team up with friends and strangers and use the materials they gather to craft weapons and armor. We have opened an official Twitter account for Real-world hunting action RPG "Monster Hunter Now" from Niantic and Capcom which announced today!

Gaming is on the rise across the world, but it's mobile gaming that's having a real moment. Thanks to the Covid-19 video game boom and the near-ubiquity of smartphones, more and more people are playing mobile. And as of a few weeks ago, that count of millions of mobile gamers includes me. I am hooked on Merge Mansion. If you spend any amount of time online, you've probably heard of Merge Mansion--the internet is swathed in ads for it.

The UK video games market hit a new record of £7.16bn last year as the pandemic continued to fuel an unprecedented boom in home entertainment, with gamers rushing to stock up on new consoles and virtual reality kit even as overall sales of games fell. Lockdown conditions have made gaming one of the biggest pandemic winners with the value of the UK market now a third higher than in 2019 before the coronavirus crisis hit and worth more than the music and video streaming markets combined. The amount spent by gaming fans – on everything from new consoles, software and mobile games to themed events, toys and magazines – rose 1.9% year on year beating expectations that the market would slide following the gaming gold rush at the height of the pandemic in 2020. The overall market rose despite a 6.3% fall in the sale of video game software to £4.28bn, with the most popular titles including Electronic Arts' Fifa 22, Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Vanguard and Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto V. "The important story here is how much of the lockdown related boost seen in 2020 has been successfully retained during 2021's'year of correction'," said Steven Bailey, a senior analyst at Omdia. The attractiveness of the gaming market – which is worth almost £1.8bn annually more than 2019 – has sparked a wave of consolidation with US and Chinese gaming companies splashing out more than £2bn on British video games makers over the last two years.

While companies are not required to hold earnings calls, it's rare for a major tech or gaming company to cancel its call ahead of an acquisition when "the ink is still wet" on the deal, according to Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the New York University Stern School of Business. For example, Glu Mobile held earnings calls throughout 2020, ahead of its completed acquisition by Electronic Arts last April. However, last December, Slack canceled its earnings call after announcing Salesforce would acquire it. In 2016, Yahoo skipped its earnings call ahead of being bought by Verizon, in the midst of dealing with fallout from its data breach. Activision Blizzard is currently facing multiple lawsuits from employees, California's state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, shareholders and investigations from federal regulators over how management handled allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and other corporate workplace issues.