Month: September 2024

The game of the moment? The medieval city builder, Manor Lords, of course. The game burst into early access over the weekend and has so far sold over one million copies on Steam. Moreover, it reached a high point for strategy games at over 170,000 players playing at once. With figures like that, for a game in early access, I’ve come to expect reports of performance issues. Yet there have been surprisingly few. Of those, the developer says, most ending up in a system crash are the result of outdated drivers.

“99% crashes so far are old drivers. And when people say ‘I updated the drivers’, I check logs and see old drivers,” the Manor Lords official account says on X.

All three GPU manufacturers have released driver packages with optimisations for Manor Lords:

• Nvidia GeForce Game Ready driver version 552.22, available to download since April 16
• AMD Radeon Adrenalin version 24.4.1, released on April 25
• Intel Arc driver version 31.0.101.5445, released on April 24

Nvidia, AMD, nor Intel list any specific performance increases in Manor…

Over the past few years of listening to gaming executives talk about the industry during earnings reports, I’ve found Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick to be one of the more circumspect bosses in the business. He’s been relaxed about the rise of Xbox Game Pass, noting whenever he’s asked about it that subscriptions are still a small part of the business, and he didn’t declare NFTs to be the future of commerce five minutes after finding out about them. It’s a low bar, but it’s mildly refreshing to hear a tech exec respond to buzzwords with something other than a golden retriever’s unconditional enthusiasm. So it went on Monday when Zelnick was asked during an investors call what he thought of advances in AI tech, at least at the start of his response.

“You know I’m the first person to be skeptical of other people’s hype,” said Zelnick. “And I would like to note that AI stands for ‘artificial intelligence’ and there is no such thing as artificial intelligence.”

The CEO thinks some of the hopes and fears AI has inspired are overblown, reasoning, for instance, that the handheld calculator didn’t stop kids from learning math, so writing bots like ChatGPT won’t mean the end of …