An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: At CES in Las Vegas today, Lego has unveiled its new Smart Play platform, aimed at taking its distinctly analog plastic blocks and figures into a new world of tech-powered interactive play -- but crucially one without any reliance on screens. Smart Play revolves around Lego's patented sensor- and tech-packed brick. It's the same size as a standard 2 x 4 Lego brick, but it is capable of connecting to compatible Smart Minifigures and Smart Tags and interacting with them in real time. By pairing these components, kids big and small can create context-appropriate sounds and light effects as they play with the Danish company's toys. [...] Lego is claiming this Smart Play platform developed in house by the company's Creative Play Lab team in collaboration with Capgemini's Cambridge Consultants "features more than 20 patented world-firsts within its technology." The heart of the system is the Smart Brick's custom-made chip, measuring smaller than a standard Lego stud. Other elements crammed into the eight-stud brick are an LED light array, accelerometers, light sensors, and sound sensor, and even a miniature speaker. The internal battery will supposedly work even after years of inactivity, and to avoid any need for cable access to the Smart Brick once it's built into a beloved creation, Lego has also added wireless charging. Indeed, Lego has made a charging pad that will power up several Smart Bricks simultaneously. That all-important brain chip is a 4.1-millimeter custom mixed-signal ASIC chip running a bespoke Play Engine, which interprets motion, orientation, and magnetic fields. A copper coil assembly enables the brick's tag recognition, while a proprietary "Brick-to-Brick position system" uses these coils to sense distance, direction, and orientation between multiple Smart Bricks. Moreover, Lego claims this use of multiple Smart Bricks creates a "self-organizing network" that requires no setup, no app, no central hub, nor external controllers -- and so no screens. A Bluetooth-based "BrickNet" protocol shares the data between the Smart Bricks. Sounds are handled by a tiny analog synthesizer putting out real-time audio (thus minimizing memory load) via the brick's miniature speaker, which uses the brick's internal air spaces to amplify sound. As a result, the audio effects are apparently immediate and can be used to enhance play with real-time sound. Lego insists there are no prerecorded clips of lightsabers or other pieces of audio being used as a cheat. Just like the Smart Minifigs, the 2 x 2 studless tile tags trigger sounds, lights, or behaviors tied to where they are placed or how they are played with. They communicate with other components through near-field magnetic connections. Each tile has a unique digital ID, which is read by the brain brick, while the minifigures -- outwardly identical to standard minifigs -- carry their unique digital ID on an internal chip.

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Michal Kicinski, who co-founded both CD Projekt and the DRM-free digital games store GOG back in 2008, has acquired 100% ownership of GOG from CD Projekt, bringing the platform full circle to one of its original creators. GOG was already operating as part of CD Projekt through its Sp.z.o.o. subsidiary, but Kicinski now takes complete control of the company. The platform will continue operating independently and maintain its commitment to DRM-free gaming. "The mission stays the same: Make Games Live Forever," GOG said in its announcement. CD Projekt's joint CEO Michal Nowakowski said the parent company's focus on its development roadmap and franchise expansion made this the right time for the move. GOG has signed a distribution agreement ensuring all upcoming CD Projekt Red titles will release on the platform. Kicinski, describing himself as a "mature gamer" who plays classics, said he's personally involved in developing several retro-spirited games slated for GOG in 2026.

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Asus has been showcasing its new 5K 27-inch ROG Strix 27 Pro gaming monitor running at 5,120 x 2,880 resolution and up to 180Hz, but even Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at this demanding pixel count. In testing conducted by Asus, the RTX 5090D -- a Chinese-exclusive variant with weaker AI performance -- achieved just 51 frames per second in a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at ultra ray traced settings. The test system ran an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D processor, had DLSS set to balanced, and kept frame generation disabled. The same configuration running at 4K managed 77 fps, around 50% higher. The underlying math is simple: 5K resolution requires rendering 78% more pixels than 4K. That 218 PPI pixel density delivers impressive sharpness up close, but Asus chose an IPS panel over OLED technology to reach it, trading away deeper black levels and faster response times. Asus appears to be positioning the monitor as a dual-mode display -- 5K for productivity and video, 1440p at up to 330Hz for gaming. Early Chinese listings have it priced at the equivalent of $800, roughly what you'd pay for a larger 4K OLED panel.

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Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty and co-founder of Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment, died at 55 in a single-car accident in Los Angeles. According to NBC Los Angeles, "The single-car crash was reported at about 12:45 p.m. on the scenic road north of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. The southbound car veered off the road, hit a concrete barrier and a passenger was ejected, the California Highway Patrol said. The driver was trapped in the ensuing car fire, the CHP said. The driver died at the scene and the passenger died at a hospital, authorities told NBC4 Investigates." IGN reports: Zampella was an incredibly talented game developer who changed the industry with Call of Duty, a franchise he co-created with Jason West in 2003 at Infinity Ward, the studio he co-founded with West, after previously serving as the lead designer for EA's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Zampella was at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against Activision that alleged that the publisher owed Zampella and the Infinity Ward team millions of dollars in unpaid Call of Duty royalties. The bitter professional divorce led to Zampella and West taking a substantial number of the Infinity Ward team with them to EA, where they co-founded Respawn Entertainment, a studio that has produced nothing but critically acclaimed hits: Titanfall, Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Respawn's success under Zampella led to him getting promoted twice, eventually overseeing the Battlefield franchise within his role as Group General Manager at EA.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0 module, and virtualization-based memory integrity protection. Riot Games, best known for titles like Valorant and League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. There's already a long list of checks that systems need to clear before they'll be allowed to play Riot's games online, and now the studio is announcing a new one: a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on "certain players" following Riot's discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections. In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) "on some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors." One feature of the IOMMU is to protect system memory from direct access during boot by external hardware devices, which otherwise might manipulate the contents of your PC's memory in ways that could enable cheating. The patch for these security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-11901, CVE-202514302, CVE-2025-14303, and CVE-2025-14304) fixes a problem where this pre-boot direct memory access (DMA) protection could be disabled even if it was marked as enabled in the BIOS, creating a small window during the boot process where DMA devices could gain access to RAM. The relative obscurity and complexity of this hardware exploit means that Vanguard isn't going to be enforcing these BIOS requirements on every single player of its games. For now, it will just apply to "restricted" players of Valorant whose systems, for one reason or another, are "too similar to cheaters who get around security features in order to become undetectable to Vanguard." But Riot says it's considering rolling the BIOS requirement out to all players in Valorant's highest competitive ranking tiers (Ascendant, Immortal, and Radiant), where there's more to be gained from working around the anti-cheat software. And Riot anti-cheat analyst Mohamed Al-Sharifi says the same restrictions could be turned on for League of Legends, though they aren't currently. If users are blocked from playing by Vanguard, they'll need to download and install the latest BIOS update for their motherboard before they'll be allowed to launch the game. Riot's new anti-cheat change could create problems for older PCs if the new anti-cheat change is expanded, notes Ars. The update relies on a BIOS patch to fix a UEFI flaw, and many older motherboards, especially Intel 300-series and AMD AM4 boards, may never receive that update. If Riot flags a system and the manufacturer doesn't provide a patched BIOS, players could be locked out of games despite having otherwise capable hardware.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix on Wednesday said it will add a soccer simulation title to its gaming portfolio, as the streaming giant looks to leverage the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament to deepen its video game push. The soccer title will be developed and published by Delphi Interactive, which is also helping create a premium James Bond game called "007 First Light," and in association with the sport's governing body, FIFA. Netflix said the game will launch in time for the world's most-watched sporting event, scheduled to start June next year in the U.S.

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A veteran games journalist claims Half-Life 3 is real and still planned as a Spring 2026 launch title tied to Valve's next Steam Machine push. Ars Technica reports: On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that "everybody I've talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine." Straw -- who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources -- said this Half-Life 3 information is "not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven't gotten me information before. ... These aren't like random, one-off people." And those sources are "still adamant that the game is coming in the spring," Straw added, noting that he was "specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3." [...] Timing specifics aside, Straw said his sources have him convinced that the long wait for Half-Life 3 is coming to an end in the near future. "The game's real," he said. "At the end of the day, the game is real. There's no denying it. It's just a 'when' and not an 'if' at this point."

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The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony. The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer.

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