Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
The new year may have just begun but already there is major news to announce for the Forza world: Forza Motorsport 6 is coming!
Today, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios officially announced Forza Motorsport 6, which is in development and will be arriving exclusively on Xbox One. The news came alongside the announcement of the worldwide debut of the all-new Ford GT, which will serve as the cover car for Forza Motorsport 6. In addition, Ford’s performance vehicle line-up will appear in Forza Motorsport 6. This includes the GT, Shelby GT350 Mustang, and the F-150 Raptor, debuted by Ford earlier today at the auto show. As First in Forza vehicles, Forza fans will have the opportunity to drive these cars when they debut in Forza 6.
“Just as Ford has pushed the boundaries of car technology in GT, Forza Motorsport 6 will embrace that spirit of innovation as our most technically advanced racing simulation to date, offering a fun and realistic automotive experience for both car lovers and gamers,” said Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 Studios. “We’re excited to unveil gameplay at E3 in June.”
The announcement of Forza Motorsport 6 kicks off 2015 and the ten-year anniversary of the Forza Motorsport series. This year promises to be the busiest and biggest in Forza history and we’ll have much more to say about Forza 6 and more of our exciting plans in the future. Stay tuned to www.forzamotorsport.net and the official Forza Hub app on Xbox One for all the latest news!
The question of monetising video content on Youtube is one of those subjects that’s been debated back and forth for years now. There are some who say that it isn’t fair for people to make money off playing games that weren’t made by the content creator themselves, but there’s a lot of proof that such videos can be fantastic advertising for video games of all sorts.
Game companies are mostly in favour of it, although there are a lot of different approaches and guidelines for how people can monetise content based off their properties. Some like Nintendo have opted to claim the revenue themselves unless you’re part of their content program, while others (mainly indie studios) have expressly given creators permission to monetise videos based on their game. Others haven’t put across anything concrete.
Now Microsoft Studios have made public a set of guidelines for content creators, and they seem pretty sensible. They favour the content creators but take steps to help Microsoft protect their intellectual properties.
Firstly the policy forbids reverse engineering of games, meaning assets cannot be extracted and therefore you can only use the game to do what they programmed it to be feasible to do within it. Secondly you cannot one of their games to create a video that contains any number of offensive types of content including but not limited to: pornographic content, lewd or obscene content, discriminatory (on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation), anything that promotes violence, drug use etc. and many other objectionable forms of content.
They are also forbidding the use of their logos in your own logos (no using the Xbox X to replace the letter), and stress that anything created should not be attempting to appear official or can be mistaken for official content at all. There’s also a little bit of text that needs to be included somewhere with the video, either in the description or as part of the video itself, somewhere where “anyone who sees your Item will easily find [it].”
The video itself cannot be part of a subscription or pay-for-play website or part of an app that carries a fee. It can’t even appear on the same page as such items, even if they’re unrelated to the things being sold.
These rules apply for most of the properties owned by Microsoft, although not for Mojang’s Minecraft which already has its own guidelines set out, and some like Forza have some slight differences thanks to licenses for other content included.
If you want to read over the new policy in full, click the link here.
Australian retailer EB Games will remove The Elder Scrolls Online from its bricks and mortar shelves on January 13, a Kotaku AU source claims. If the report is true then it serves as fresh evidence that Bethesda intends to scrap the MMO’s monthly subscription fees in favour of a free-to-play model.
Both boxed copies of the game, as well as pre-paid subscription cards, will reportedly be discontinued.
The development follows news late last year that players can no longer purchase six-month subscriptions to the MMO, which was met with mixed reviews when it launched last year. While a moderator on an official French TESO forum claimed the six-month blocks were discontinued due to lack of demand (ie, customers prefer to buy shorter blocks), evidence is certainly mounting that a change is imminent.
We will keep you upto date on this story, as we’ve not reviewed the game since release, however if Free to Play does happen, we’ll have another look at the game which we were underwhelmed by during the betas
Evolve has gone gold today, getting its certification. Not that this is any surprise given that we know it’s coming out this February, but it is important for one other reason and that reason is charity.
Back in January Turtle Rock announced that they were taking a “No Shave ‘Til Ship” pledge. Basically this meant that until the game passed its certification the bearded members of staff would not shave their beards and the other non-bearded staff wouldn’t be cutting their hair. For every inch of hair grown and cut at the end of the end of the time period, the studio would donate $50 to charity Child’s Play. The final total was 227.5 inches which meant a respectable $11,375 would be donated and with published 2K agreeing to match that donation a massive $22,750 has been donated to charity today as a result. Wow.
Turtle Rock are now turning their attention the the upcoming Open Beta, which is only open to Xbox One owners although there will be a small “closed technical test” for PC players from January 16th. Conditions to be included aren’t known but there’s been some rumours around that having been in the Alpha test will increase your chances of getting in.
The Kinect was in a way Microsoft’s answer to the Wii’s motion controls, a feature that captured the imagination of the gaming public back then in a way that not many saw coming. Now Microsoft have confirmed that the original version of the Kinect will stop being sold next year.
The Kinect is being taken off the shelves due to the introduction of the v2 Kinect released in October. The models saw updates to body tracking, greater depth fidelity, the addition of 1080p video and many other updates over the v1 Kinect. It also added updates and allowed for the creation and publication of Kinect-enabled apps for the Windows Store from outside developers.
“We know that your proven track record doing great things with the original technology will only get better with v2—the improvements in quality from the original Kinect for Windows sensor to the v2 device are truly immense,” Microsoft said in a statement. “And so, we’re cheered by the prospect of seeing all the amazing solutions you’ll create with this the new and improved Kinect for Windows.”
Microsoft will do its best to fulfill orders from customers who still need large numbers of the older model but have stopped producing new stock, which means once the stockpile is gone there will be no more sold.
The Kinect for Windows v2 model is available for $200 from Microsoft.
