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An open-world racing game from a studio formed by ex-Forza Horizon developers was due to be published by Amazon, but that is no longer the case. As reported first by The Game Business, UK-based Maverick Games is now in "active dialogue" with prospective new publishing partners for its currently untitled debut game, which remains in development. Maverick was founded in 2022 by Mike Brown, who served as the Horizon series creative director during his stint at Playground Games, and was able to tempt a number of other ex-Playground veterans to join the new studio. Little was publicly known about the game Amazon picked up, but shortly after Maverick was established Brown told GamesIndustry.Biz that his ambition was to make a game that was AAA, premium and eventually released with the intention of "winning all the awards." "As part of our strategic evolution to focus on projects that leverage Amazons unique strengths and scale, including the recent re-launch of Luna and our Tomb Raider franchise partnership with Crystal Dynamics, we have decided to release Maverick Games from their publishing agreement with Amazon Game Studios," an Amazon Game Studios representative said in a statement to The Game Business. "We have tremendous respect for the Maverick Games team and the compelling narrative-led driving experience theyre creating," the companty said. "This decision allows Maverick Games the flexibility to find a publishing partner whose strategic priorities are better aligned with bringing their game to market. Were proud of what we accomplished together during our partnership and wish them every success in the future." Amazons push into gaming has yielded mixed results. It seemingly remains committed to developing its Luna streaming service, but as a publisher and developer things haven't been smooth. 2020s free-to-play multiplayer shooter Crucible vanished so quickly that most people have probably forgotten that it ever existed. The MMO New World has proved more of a hit, but Amazon is still winding down support for the game next year. The future of the companys Lord of the Rings MMO is unclear, but The Game Business reports that last years cuts to its MMO division also affected the team working on that game. Earlier this week, it was announced that the Amazon Games-published co-op dungeon crawler King of Meat will shut down on April 9, less than a year after its October 2025 launch. The company does still have a pair of Tomb Raider games on its release slate, one of which is a reimagining of the original series entry from 1996. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/amazon-abandons-open-world-racing-game-by-former-forza-horizon-devs-170234100.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
With its ProArt lineup, ASUS has commendably addressed a glaring hole in the PC market by targeting video editors and other creative pros. Its latest model even uses a popular camera marque in its name: the ProArt GoPro Edition PX13. Its a true co-branding exercise, with GoPro-like styling, a dedicated GoPro hotkey, mil-spec durability for extreme outdoor users and 12 months of GoPros Cloud Plus Premium. It has a lot going for it on the inside, too. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor offers 16 Zen 5 cores with integrated Radeon 8060S Graphics (40 cores) and AMD Ryzen AI with up to 50 NPU TOPS. It packs a relatively small but pixel-dense 13-inch 2,880 x 1,800 OLED convertible 360 touch display, 1TB of storage and an impressive 128GB of unified memory. The rub, as you might expect with all that RAM, is the price. The ProArt GoPro Edition PX13 costs $3,000, while a version with the same processor but half the memory is $2,800. Thats high-end MacBook Pro money, and while the ProArt is a good PC creator machine, it falls short of its Apple counterpart in terms of performance and usability. Design In place of the ProArt P13s smooth lines, the ProArt GoPro Edition comes with a ribbed metal back thats designed to look like the front of a GoPro Hero 13. It also has GoPro-like ridges on the hinge and plastic above the keyboard, along with GoPro and ProArt branding. The rugged design may appeal to the extreme sports crowd, but Id prefer something a bit sleeker. The laptop is relatively light at 3.06 pounds, but the dedicated 200W power brick adds an extra pound of weight. Despite the small size, it offers MIL-STD 810H military-grade durability, so it can handle hot and humid conditions while surviving 500Hz vibrations and multiple four-inch drops while running. To help keep the laptop safe outside, ASUS includes a protective padded sleeve with a braided pouch to tuck a selfie stick or another accessory. Steve Dent for Engadget The 2,880 x 1,800 OLED touchscreen is nice but not super bright, with up to 400 nits of brightness or 500 nits in HDR mode. Thats the usual tradeoff for OLED compared to super bright MiniLED displays. However, it has deep blacks and very high color accuracy of Delta < 1 with 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage, along with Dolby Vision support, so its great for photo and video work or entertainment. The ProArt is a 360-degree convertible model and ships with an ASUS Pen and Pen charger. That makes it a good option for graphic artists who want to tent the screen or fold it around to use in tablet mode for sketching or painting. The ASUS Pen works well, and though its not as accurate as Wacom or other dedicated pen devices, it has nice haptic feedback when you perform actions in the app. The ProArt GoPro Editions keyboard is excellent, with a nice amount of travel for typing or gaming. The touchpad is also one of the better ones Ive used on a PC thanks to the quality tactile feel. The top left of the touchpad contains ASUSs control dial designed for jogging video footage or adjusting colors, but its a bit fussy and gimmicky. For ports, you get HDMI, 3.5mm audio, USB-A 3.2 and two USB-C 4.0 with power delivery that allow up to 130 watts of charging. The laptop weirdly comes with a microSD slot to load GoPro footage straight from the camera, but it would be better to have a regular SD port and microSD adapter. As for wireless and audio, it offers Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Dolby Atmos support. Performance Steve Dent for Engadget Built on TSMCs 4nm line, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is AMDs most powerful APU designed to blend performance and low power consumption. Its married to a Radeon 8060S GPU with 40 compute units (equivalent to an NVIDIA RTX 4060, AMD says) that makes it ideal for creative chores, AI processing and gaming. This unit also comes with 128GB of unified LPDDR5X RAM thats soldered directly to the motherboard, shared between the CPU and GPU. Given todays RAM prices, that amount of memory no doubt contributes to the ProArt GoPro Editions high price. AMD finally got its act together for video encoding and decoding. The Ryzen AI Max+s GPU supports most 8- and 10-bit MP4 codecs, including H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1. That means you can play back nearly all MP4 or Quicktime camera video files in real time, including the 8K H.265 files recorded by a GoPro Hero 13. At the same time, the large number of cores and threads (16 and 32) helps the ProArt GoPro Edition render certain VFX and do color adjustments quickly. The 1TB of NVMe SSD storage is limited to PCIe 4.0, but its relatively speedy with 6.55 GB/s read and 5.86 GB/s write speeds easily fast enough for 8K video playback. All of that made video work a breeze in DaVinci Resolve 20, Adobe Premiere Pro or GoPros Player that can be activated by a special hotkey on the ASUS laptop. Actions like color correction work in real time as well, and 4K H.264 exports can also be performed quickly. That said, some functions like OpenFX and stabilization would work better with a more powerful discrete GPU. Also, unlike my MacBook Pro, the ProArt GoPro Editions fans need to engage frequently under intense workloads, creating a lot of noise and killing the battery quickly if the unit isnt plugged in. Steve Dent for Engadget For other apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom Classic, the ASUS ProArt is ideal. Its very responsive and the touch display and pen support fine masking or drawing work, something you cant do on a MacBook Pro. The ProArt also handles synthetic benchmarks well for a PC with an integrated GPU. The single/multi Geekbench 6 CPU score of 2,219/19,088 shows the benefit of 16 processor cores. The 93,108 Geekbench 6 GPU mark isnt that far behind Acers NVIDIA RTX 5070-equipped Predator Titan 14 AI. Geekbench AI scores were also up there with the best laptops. However, Hadbrake video encoding was slower than several MacBook M4 laptops Ive tested. For gaming, it had some of the higher laptop scores Ive seen on several 3DMark tests (Wildlife Extreme and Port Royal Ray Tracing). It also did pretty darn well on Cyberpunk 2077, hitting 82 fps at 1080p and 60 fps at 1440p in Ultra mode. Considering the machines small size, those framerates are really good. However, the laptop is held back gaming-wise by the OLED display that tops out at 500 nits and just 60Hz. A big benefit of the 128GB of fast unified memory is that you can run AI models locally for improved privacy. While the ProArt GoPro Edition normally allocates 64GB of memory to the CPU and splits the rest between the CPU and iGPU, you can dedicate up to 96GB of memory to the GPU for extra large AI applications via the MyASUS app. Another plus of this APU is the battery life. The ProArt GoPro Edition lasted a solid 11:31 hours on the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery rundown test, besting all rivals with similar performance. That tells me that AMD is narrowing the performance-per-watt gap with Apples silicon to improve gaming and content creation for PCs on battery power alone. Wrap-up Steve Dent for Engadget ASUS is one of the few PC manufacturers trying to compete with Apple in the creator market, and with the ProArt GoPro Edition laptop, it has largely succeeded. This model offers excellent performance and battery life, a huge amount of memory, a very nice OLED HDR display, a nice range of ports and an excellent keyboard and trackpad. It easily handled my typical video and photo editing chores, even on battery power alone, and the included GoPro features like the Storyblocks cloud storage are a nice option for action cam users. The convertible configuration and touchscreen with pen option are also useful to artists and photo editors. However, this laptop is not cheap at $3,000, which is the same price as a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro. The latter offers superior battery life, better overall performance on apps like DaVinci Resolve and a far better macOS user experience than the hot mess that is currently Windows 11. However, if you want a Windows PC with a touchscreen, I think the ASUS ProArt GoPro Edition laptop is the best creator model you can get right now.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/asus-proart-gopro-edition-px13-review-an-incredible-if-pricy-windows-creator-laptop-170016800.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Amazon is offering a new way for Alexa+ users to customize the AI assistant's communication style. The company has introduced three personalities for Alexa+, so the assistant can adopt an attitude that is Brief, Chill or Sweet. The Brief style will be exactly that: no small talk and no extra conversation. Chill is easygoing and seems to be inspired by caricatures of the surfer/stoner type, while the Sweet mode is almost aggressively perky and chipper. In the audio sample provided, when a user asks "Alexa, how's it going?" the Chill voice responds, "Lifes treating me well all systems are Zen and the digital universe is spinning in harmony." In contrast, the Sweet one replies, "Absolutely fantastic! Im radiating pure joy and ready to make your day incredibly amazing!"The three new personality styles will set alongside the standard Alexa.AmazonAmazon explained that the three personality styles are based on five metrics: expressiveness, emotional openness, formality, directness and humor. The company may release additional options with different combinations of those sliding scale traits in the future.For now, users can swap the assistant's vibe from the Alexa app or with the spoken command, "Alexa, change your personality style." Both approaches can also be used to swap back to the classic Alexa voice. All three personalities are available now for all Alexa+ customers.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-introduces-three-personality-styles-for-alexa-140000602.html?src=rss
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