Ubisoft recently, and after a long period of reluctance, decided to add Steam achievements to some of its Assassin's Creed games it had launched on Steam. This comes shortly after Ubisoft launched Assassin's Creed Mirage to Steam with achievements already baked-in. Now, Assassin's Creed Unity, Black Flag, Revelations, and Syndicate all join AC Mirage in the Steam Achievements family. Putting the cherry on top of the achievement pie, any achievements already earned while playing the Steam versions of these Assassin's Creed games will retroactively apply to your Steam account.

The recently added Steam achievements are all pretty standard fare, with each game getting in the neighborhood of 50-60 achievements, except for AC Revelations, which only has 48 achievements. Where Ubisoft previously almost spitefully neglected its Steam audience, with many Assassin's Creed and other AAA games only coming to Steam long after their initial launch—largely without support for achievements and other advanced features—the game developer has seemingly realized the value of Steam as a platform.

It's no secret that Ubisoft hasn't had the best year, with the gaming giant having had to shut down multiple live-service and single-player games this year as a result of disappointing player counts and sales figures. Now, according to a series of rumors, Ubisoft is in talks with Chinese conglomerate Tencent with the intention of a buy-out. Curiously, though, Yves Guillemot, who currently sits as CEO of Ubisoft, wants to sell at least some of the Guillemot family's shares to Tencent, effectively giving Tencent a controlling stake in Ubisoft, but the Guillemot family wants to do so without losing control of the company it helped found.

According to Reuters, inside sources claim that the Guillemot family, who are the founding shareholders and currently have a controlling stake in Ubisoft, would like to maintain a controlling position in the company after whatever potential buyout deal is being discussed. Apparently, the Guillemot Family's desire for continued control has thus far been a sticking point for Tencent, who has as yet opted not increase its stake in the French game developer and publisher, instead holding out for a more favorable deal. Tencent already has around a 10% stake in Ubisoft, but the inside sources claim that Tencent wants greater control over the company before agreeing to a buyout of Guillemot shares.

Huawei has reportedly started shipping its Ascend 910C accelerator—the company's domestic alternative to NVIDIA's H100 accelerator for AI training and inference. As the report from China South Morning Post notes, Huawei is shipping samples of its accelerator to large NVIDIA customers. This includes companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, which have ordered massive amounts of NVIDIA accelerators. However, Huawei is on track to deliver 70,000 chips, potentially worth $2 billion. With NVIDIA working on a B20 accelerator SKU that complies with US government export regulations, the Huawei Ascend 910C accelerator could potentially outperform NVIDIA's B20 processor, per some analyst expectations.

If the Ascend 910C receives positive results from Chinese tech giants, it could be the start of Huawei's expansion into data center accelerators, once hindered by the company's ability to manufacture advanced chips. Now, with foundries like SMIC printing 7 nm designs and possibly 5 nm coming soon, Huawei will leverage this technology to satisfy the domestic demand for more AI processing power. Competing on a global scale, though, remains a challenge. Companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel have access to advanced nodes, which gives their AI accelerators more efficiency and performance.

Level Infinite has today revealed the official launch date for Tarisland, the eagerly anticipated free-to-play fantasy MMORPG. With over 3 million pre-registered players, adventurers worldwide can mark their calendars for June 21st, 2024, when they can immerse themselves in the enchanting realms of Tarisland on both mobile and PC platforms. Alongside the launch date, key details of Tarisland's formidable final boss, the Blight Dragon, has been revealed. Covered in impenetrable scales, with a wingspan nearing 200 meters, this beast is the first dragon hatched in the universe and an unstoppable force on the battlefield. Alongside this reveal, a captivating CG trailer has been released showcasing the game's epic scale and stunning visuals.

Developed by Locojoy, a passionate team of MMORPG fans-turned-developers, Tarisland promises to deliver a visually stunning and deeply engaging gaming experience. Players will embark on an epic journey through a vast, ever-expanding world brimming with rich storytelling, challenging dungeons and raids, and a diverse array of classes and specializations to explore.(Official trailer below)

The Chinese Government regulators overseeing the country's video game industry approved 105 new game titles since last week's curbs that prevent online games from rewarding daily gameplay. The scope of the curbs were so profound that they sent company stocks of the country's two leading game publishers, Tencent and NetEase, crashing down by approximately 16% and 24%, respectively, with tens of billions in investor value erased. China's domestic online gaming revenues were last assessed at around $42 billion a year.

The Press and Publications Administration (PPA), the overarching regulatory body behind all information and content creation and circulation in China, in its official WeChat account, commended the Game Working Committee of China Music and Digital Association, the body that approves publication of new games, for the successful implementation of the new curbs, and the approval of the 105 new games, stating that the approvals "send positive signals that support the prosperity and healthy development of the online game industry." At any given time, the Chinese regulators have a queue of games and their content additions (eg: DLCs) awaiting government approval. 105 is the highest number of monthly approvals passed by the government, and is hence seen as a move aimed at appeasing investors after last week's crash of game publisher stocks.

China, earlier today, brought into effect new online gaming and gambling regulations, which aim to curb down the time spent by gamers online, and remove all incentives to play daily, by regulating the way games reward gamers to play daily or often, causing them to spend more time and money online. The announcement sent shockwaves through the financial markets, causing investors to drain about $80 billion in value from two the leading online gaming stocks, Tencent and NetEase. The regulations essentially set spending limits for online games, by spelling out the exact ways in which game studios can monetize their online experiences and play reward systems. Tencent lost about 16% in share price, while that of NetEase crashed by 25%. Prosus, which owns a 26% stake in Tencent, slid by 14.2% in the markets. This is expected to have an effect on Western markets that open for trading in a bit.

Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon has made significant strides in the independent R&D of AI chips, launching the next-gen Ascend 910B. These chips are utilized not only in Huawei's public cloud infrastructure but also sold to other Chinese companies. This year, Baidu ordered over a thousand Ascend 910B chips from Huawei to build approximately 200 AI servers. Additionally, in August, Chinese company iFlytek, in partnership with Huawei, released the "Gemini Star Program," a hardware and software integrated device for exclusive enterprise LLMs, equipped with the Ascend 910B AI acceleration chip, according to TrendForce's research.

TrendForce conjectures that the next-generation Ascend 910B chip is likely manufactured using SMIC's N+2 process. However, the production faces two potential risks. Firstly, as Huawei recently focused on expanding its smartphone business, the N+2 process capacity at SMIC is almost entirely allocated to Huawei's smartphone products, potentially limiting future capacity for AI chips. Secondly, SMIC remains on the Entity List, possibly restricting access to advanced process equipment.

NVIDIA's most recent FY3Q24 financial reports reveal record-high revenue coming from its data center segment, driven by escalating demand for AI servers from major North American CSPs. However, TrendForce points out that recent US government sanctions targeting China have impacted NVIDIA's business in the region. Despite strong shipments of NVIDIA's high-end GPUs—and the rapid introduction of compliant products such as the H20, L20, and L2—Chinese cloud operators are still in the testing phase, making substantial revenue contributions to NVIDIA unlikely in Q4. Gradual shipments increases are expected from the first quarter of 2024.

The US ban continues to influence China's foundry market as Chinese CSPs' high-end AI server shipments potentially drop below 4% next year
TrendForce reports that North American CSPs like Microsoft, Google, and AWS will remain key drivers of high-end AI servers (including those with NVIDIA, AMD, or other high-end ASIC chips) from 2023 to 2024. Their estimated shipments are expected to be 24%, 18.6%, and 16.3%, respectively, for 2024. Chinese CSPs such as ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BBAT) are projected to have a combined shipment share of approximately 6.3% in 2023. However, this could decrease to less than 4% in 2024, considering the current and potential future impacts of the ban.

Tencent Games, the global leading video games platform, expects the market for cloud gaming and mobile devices to grow rapidly in the near future. Mobile and cloud gaming have experienced significant growth in the MENA region and Asia, and Tencent Games is strategically positioned to further bolster the burgeoning European market. In a strategic collaboration, Tencent Games has partnered with Logitech to introduce the Logitech G Cloud Handheld Console. This innovative handheld gaming device was officially launched in Europe in May 2023, marking an exciting milestone in the world of gaming. At IFA Berlin, Germany's largest consumer electronics trade show, Daniel Wu, General Manager of Tencent Games Innovation Lab says: "We are witnessing a growing preference for instant play. Handheld devices may very well emerge as the next significant gaming platform in the future. And we see great potential for cloud gaming."

Gameplay is witnessing continuous improvement. Players look for an ever more immersive gaming experience, with features such as 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution, smooth 60 Hz refresh rates, and cutting-edge Ray Tracing technology. As a result, requirements for game devices have increased significantly, and will continue to do so. Tencent Games expects that handheld devices will catch up to game development and will ultimately provide the best sound and graphics quality to player.

Techland CEO Pawel Marchewka stated earlier today: "Dear Gamers, I want to share some really exciting news that will mark the start of a new chapter of Techland's history. Techland has been a huge part of my life for more than 30 years now and it is something I truly cherish. Techland is our games, the amazing team behind them, and you, the people playing these games. You're the reason why we're making them. Whenever I think about the future of Techland, I want the best for our games, the team, and you. And while I am very proud of our achievements as an independent studio over all these years, I believe the best is yet to come.

We dream of turning Dying Light into the ultimate zombie game experience for players worldwide, providing you with multiple astonishing adventures and pushing the boundaries of solo and online modes to a totally new level. Our open world action-RPG in a fantasy setting is already shaping up to become something truly special, and the goal here is to make sure it will live up to the expectations for our first new IP in almost a decade. Can we make these dreams come true? Yes, we can. But what we realized is that the best, boldest dreams can only be achieved while working side-by-side with like-minded friends and strong partners, who share the same vision, passion, and have the willingness to back it up with their knowledge, experience, and capabilities.

NVIDIA could be adjusting its enterprise-grade GPU production strategies for the Chinese market, according to an article published by MyDriver—despite major sanctions placed on semiconductor imports, Team Green is doing plenty of business with tech firms operating in the region thanks to an uptick in AI-related activities. NVIDIA offers two market specific accelerator models that have been cut down to conform to rules and regulations—the more powerful and expensive (250K RMB/~$35K) H800 is an adaptation of the western H100 GPU, while the A800 is a legal market alternative to the older A100.

The report proposes that NVIDIA is considering plans to reduce factory output of the A800 (sold for 100K RMB/~$14K per unit), so clients will be semi-forced into purchasing the higher-end H800 model instead (if they require a significant number of GPUs). The A800 seems to be the more popular choice for the majority of companies at the moment, with the heavy hitters—Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Jitwei and ByteDance—flexing their spending muscles and splurging on mixed shipments of the two accelerators. By limiting supplies of the lesser A800, Team Green could be generating more profit by prioritizing the more expensive (and readily available) model.

TikTok developer ByteDance, and other major Chinese tech firms including Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are reported (by local media) to be snapping up lots of NVIDIA HPC GPUs, with even more orders placed this year. ByteDance is alleged to have spent enough on new products in 2023 to match the expenditure of the entire Chinese tech market on similar NVIDIA purchases for FY2022. According to news publication Jitwei, ByteDance has placed orders totaling $1 billion so far this year with Team Green—the report suggests that a mix of A100 and H800 GPU shipments have been sent to the company's mainland data centers.

The older Ampere-based A100 units were likely ordered prior to trade sanctions enforced on China post-August 2022, with further wiggle room allowed—meaning that shipments continued until September. The H800 GPU is a cut-down variant of 2022's flagship "Hopper" H100 model, designed specifically for the Chinese enterprise market—with reduced performance in order to meet export restriction standards. The H800 costs around $10,000 (average sale price per accelerator) according to Tom's Hardware, so it must offer some level of potency at that price. ByteDance has ordered roughly 100,000 units—with an unspecified split between H800 and A100 stock. Despite the development of competing HPC products within China, it seems that the nation's top-flight technology companies are heading directly to NVIDIA to acquire the best-of-the-best and highly mature AI processing hardware.

A set of reports published by Niko Partners has calculated that the games market in China generated $45.5 billion in revenue last year. Native games companies (including Tencent and NetEase) accounted for 47% of worldwide mobile games revenue, along with a 39% revenue share of international PC games sales. Domestic figures show that 66% of China's gaming revenue comes from mobile, 31% from PC and 3% from console titles. The company's analysts posit that China persists as the largest global games market, with upward trends pushing growth to a predicted $57 billion of revenue by the year 2027. The gaming population is expected to expand to around 730 million participants by then.

Lisa Hanson, CEO and founder of Niko Partners included her own observations of the region's dominance: "Chinese game companies are growing internationally, and they are making bold investments at higher rates than ever. PC games revenue generated overseas by Chinese owned companies rose by 22% in 2022 and is expected to grow by a 13.8% CAGR through 2027 - which is higher than the domestic growth rate by a significant margin... China's market can be tough for domestic and foreign companies, but the country remains the number one market globally for games revenue and the number of gamers, and cannot be ignored.

Ampere Computing today announced a new AmpereOne Family of processors with up to 192 single threaded Ampere cores - the highest core count in the industry. This is the first product from Ampere based on the company's new custom core, built from the ground up and leveraging the company's internal IP. CEO Renée James, who founded Ampere Computing to offer a modern alternative to the industry with processors designed specifically for both efficiency and performance in the Cloud, said there was a fundamental shift happening that required a new approach.

"Every few decades of compute there has emerged a driving application or use of performance that sets a new bar of what is required of performance," James said. "The current driving uses are AI and connected everything combined with our continued use and desire for streaming media. We cannot continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center. At Ampere, we design our products to maximize performance at a sustainable power, so we can continue to drive the future of the industry."

Powerful AI technologies are making a massive impact in 3D content creation and game development. Whether creating realistic characters that show emotion or turning simple texts into imagery, AI tools are becoming fundamental to developer workflows - and this is just the start. At NVIDIA GTC and the Game Developers Conference (GDC), learn how the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for creating and operating metaverse applications is expanding with new Connectors and generative AI services for game developers.

Part of the excitement around generative AI is because of its ability to capture the creator's intent. The technology learns the underlying patterns and structures of data, and uses that to generate new content, such as images, audio, code, text, 3D models and more. Announced today, the NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud services enable users to build, refine and operate custom large language models (LLMs) and generative AI trained with their proprietary data for their domain-specific tasks. And through NVIDIA Omniverse, developers can get their first taste of using generative AI technology to enhance game creation and accelerate development pipelines with the Omniverse Audio2Face app.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

The four major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) have made cuts to their server procurement quantities for this year because of economic headwinds and high inflation. Turning to server OEMs such as Dell and HPE, they are observed to have scaled back the production of server motherboards at their ODM partners. Given these developments, TrendForce now projects that global server shipments will grow by just 1.31% YoY to 14.43 million units for 2023. This latest figure is a downward correction from the earlier estimation. The revisions that server OEMs have made to their outlooks on shipments shows that the demand for end products has become much weaker than expected. They also highlight factors such as buyers of enterprise servers imposing a stricter control of their budgets and server OEMs' inventory corrections.

Today, Logitech G and Tencent Games announced a partnership to bring a cloud gaming handheld to market later this year that will combine Logitech G's expertise in hardware with Tencent Games' expertise in software services. The new device will support multiple cloud gaming services, and both companies are working with the Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA GeForce NOW teams, so gamers can play AAA games when they are away from their console or PC.

Logitech G and Tencent Games share a mutual vision of the future of gaming and are committed to ensuring the quality of experience comes together seamlessly to deliver on the exciting promise of gaming from the cloud. Cloud gaming utilizes data center servers to stream video games to consumers. There's no need to download or install PC or console games. Instead, games are rendered and played on remote servers, and users interact with them locally on their devices.

While the server industry transitions to the latest generation of processors based on the x86 platform, the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan CPUs entered mass production earlier this year and were shipped to certain customers, such as North American CSPs and telecommunication companies, at a low volume in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. These processors are expected to begin seeing widespread adoption in the server market in 3Q21. TrendForce believes that Ice Lake represents a step-up in computing performance from the previous generation due to its higher scalability and support for more memory channels. On the other hand, the new normal that emerged in the post-pandemic era is expected to drive clients in the server sector to partially migrate to the Ice Lake platform, whose share in the server market is expected to surpass 30% in 4Q21.

The demands of data center workloads and internet traffic are growing exponentially, and new solutions are needed to keep up with these demands while reducing the current and anticipated growth of power consumption. But the variety of workloads and applications being run today means the traditional one-size-fits all approach to computing is not the answer. The industry demands flexibility; design freedom to achieve the right level of compute for the right application.

As Moore's Law comes to an end, solution providers are seeking specialized processing. Enabling specialized processing has been a focal point since the inception of our Neoverse line of platforms, and we expect these latest additions to accelerate this trend.

Thanks to their flexible pricing schemes and diverse service offerings, CSPs have been a direct, major driver of enterprise demand for cloud services, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. As such, the rise of CSPs have in turn brought about a gradual shift in the prevailing business model of server supply chains from sales of traditional branded servers (that is, server OEMs) to ODM Direct sales instead. Incidentally, the global public cloud market operates as an oligopoly dominated by North American companies including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which collectively possess an above-50% share in this market. More specifically, GCP and AWS are the most aggressive in their data center build-outs. Each of these two companies is expected to increase its server procurement by 25-30% YoY this year, followed closely by Azure.

Enterprise demand for cloud services has been rising steady in the past two years owing to the rapidly changing global markets and uncertainties brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. TrendForce's investigations find that most enterprises have been prioritizing cloud service adoption across applications ranging from AI to other emerging technologies as cloud services have relatively flexible costs. Case in point, demand from clients in the hyperscale data center segment constituted more than 40% of total demand for servers in 4Q20, while this figure may potentially approach 45% for 2021. For 2021, TrendForce expects global server shipment to increase by more than 5% YoY and ODM Direct server shipment to increase by more than 15% YoY.

Tencent is set to win big after it was announced that Chinese game streaming companies Huya and DouYu would be merging, Tencent owns significant stakes in each company and will hold 68% of voting shares after the merger is complete. This merger will significantly reduce marketing costs and see a combined monthly active user base of over 300 million accounting for an over 50% market share making it the largest game streaming venture in the Chinese market. Tencent will also integrate its Penguin e-Sports game streaming platform into the new Huya service to further consolidate its offerings. The merger will help Tencent to gain control over the entire gaming ecosystem in China allowing the firm to generate large eSports revenue and reach a larger audience for game distribution.

Tencent is getting ready to roll out their new live streaming platform across the US as a direct competitor to Amazon's Twitch. The Tencent live streaming platform has been in testing since March, initially called Madcat, and now branded as Trovo Live. Trovo Live's interface closely resembles that of Twitch and has a large emphasis on mobile gaming which makes sense given that Tencent owns Fortnite and PUBG Mobile.

Tencent has recently plans on the Trovo Live website on its 30 million dollar program to entice creators to the site. Tencent dominates the Chinese game streaming market but has had trouble breaking into Western markets. The Trevo Live Partnership program is set to go live in July and aims to attract 500 influential streamers to the platform. Trovo Live has already attracted some streamers from Mizer and Twitch so it will be interesting to see if it succeeds.

This is likely not the piece of news any of us wanted to hear on the development of System Shock 3. As a sequel to one of the most well-considered gaming franchises of all time, however, development of such a game is bound to be rife with difficulties - especially for an indie studio such as OtherSide Entertainment, a sentiment the developers themselves took to Twitter). AS reports surfaced earlier this year that the entire team working on the project at OtherSide had been let go, health of the development (and confidence in its development) clearly wasn't soaring. Now, OtherSide has confirmed that development of System Shock 3 has ceased - and has passed the mantle to Chinese giant Tencent.

Tencent has thus acquired the rights for development of a sequel to the System Shock franchise - Nightdive Studios, holders of the IP that licensed it to OtherSide Entertainment, have already announced the change in carrier for the sequel hopes. OtherSide places their faith in Tencent's "deep capabilities and expertise as a leading video game company will bring the franchise to new heights". Whether or not that means starting from scratch is up in the air right now, but one thing is certain: the game will take even longer than expected to release. A blue screen of death for Shodan, pending a reboot.