Gaming

Apple’s Design Awards winners highlight indies and startups

With its list of Apple Design Awards winners, Apple is celebrating indie apps and startups over bigger tech firms — including those offering AI chatbots. At a time when its App Store model has been called into question by legislators and regulators alike, Apple’s annual list of what it considers the best and most technically […]

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Fitbit’s new kid smartwatch is a little Wiimote, a little Tamagotchi

In 2018, Fitbit launched Ace, a wearable tracker for kids. On Wednesday, it’s adding Ace LTE to the line, a device aimed at the same demographic that borrows heavily from its smartwatch, Versa. The Google-owned wearable firm is targeting the 7+ crowd with this one, focusing on gaming with Wii-style motion control, along with location

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Apple’s Design Awards nominees highlight indies and startups, largely ignore AI (except for Arc)

With its list of Apple Design Awards finalists, Apple is celebrating indie apps and startups over bigger tech firms — including those offering AI chatbots. At a time when its App Store model has been called into question by legislators and regulators alike, Apple’s annual list of what it considers the best and most technically

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Garena is quietly making India-themed games even as Free Fire’s relaunch remains doubtful

Game studio Garena found itself in the middle of a geopolitical struggle when the Indian government banned its hit game, Free Fire, over national security concerns. Now more than two years later, Free Fire is still banned, but the publisher, a division of Singapore gaming giant Sea, has found another route to the market: TechCrunch

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Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed

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10 years in the making, retro game emulator Delta is now No. 1 on the iOS charts

Video game emulator Delta’s decade-long struggle against the iOS App Store began with a school-issued TI-84 calculator. When Riley Testut was a sophomore in high school, he showed his friends how to load illicit software onto their bulky graphing calculators. Such behavior was generally discouraged at school, but he wasn’t plotting to cheat on a

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