One of the most difficult tasks in the increasingly high-fidelity world of gaming is making realistic-looking people — especially faces. Epic today showed off a new character creation tool in Unreal Engine that lets you make a near-infinite variety of near-photorealistic digital people with far less effort than it might have taken before. MetaHuman Creator […]
Mobile Premier League (MPL) has raised $95 million in a new financing round, just five months after it secured $90 million as the two-and-a-half-year-old Bangalore-based esports and gaming platform looks to grow in international markets. The new $95 million round, a Series D, was led by Composite Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures and gave the […]
Latitude, a startup building games with “infinite storylines” generated by artificial intelligence, is announcing that it has raised $3.3 million in seed funding. The idea of an AI-generated story might make you think of hilariously nonsensical experiments like “Sunspring,” but Latitude’s first title, AI Dungeon, is an impressively open-ended (and coherent) text adventure game where […]
Every sport has its practice drills and exercises to help players hone skills between games. Why would esports be any different? Gwoop, a startup out of Minnesota, wants to be the place where gamers go to train between matches. They’re building up a collection of free browser-based training tools meant to help you measure and […]
Google rethinks its gaming strategy, Microsoft rolls out its quantum computing platform and UiPath is now valued at $35 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for February 1, 2021. The big story: Google shutters internal game studios When Google announced its Stadia cloud platform, it also said it was forming Stadia Games and Entertainment, an […]
Plex, the media software maker that’s expanded into streaming in recent years, is adding to its service once again with today’s launch of game streaming. Unlike other game streaming efforts from companies like Microsoft or Google, the new “Plex Arcade” isn’t focused on top gaming titles and new releases, but rather on retro games. At […]
‘We are definitely fearful of Apple’s ability to completely disrupt/affect the growth of a game’ Lucas Matney @lucasmtny / 16 hours Many VCs historically avoided placing bets on hit-driven mobile gaming content in favor of clearer platform opportunities, but as more success stories pop up, the economics overturned conventional wisdom with new business models. As […]
Also: Who is really mispricing companies? So it turns out that Roblox is worth $29.5 billion. That’s the lesson the market learned this week when the gaming platform company announced that it had raised $520 million in an epic Series H. For a company valued at just $4 billion last February when it raised $150 […]
This has been quite a week. Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened: Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats. A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective. Bianca Smith will […]
Epic today announced the acquisition of Rad Game Tools, maker of game development tools for many years. They’ve stayed largely behind the scenes, but many gamers will recognize the colorful Bink Video logo, which has appeared in the openings of many a title over the years. “Our work with Epic goes back decades, and joining […]