During the latest GamesBeat Live session, Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat, sat down with Berkley Egenes, chief marketing and growth officer at Xsolla, to dig into the latest Xsolla news. They spoke about the company’s newly launched Parental Controls solution which is now certified with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) and GDPR-K and designed to keep gaming safe for young players while ensuring regulatory compliance. They also explored the latest in Xsolla’s Web Shop solutions, which have powered the successful launch of over 400 web shops. Finally, they touched on the recent expansion of payment methods in Cambodia and Indonesia.
Addressing compliance and safety challenges
Direct-to-consumer strategies like web shops are becoming more common – and so are compliance and safety challenges. Breaking free of traditional platforms brings huge opportunities, but also requires developers to handle the complexity of regulatory demands. Younger players are especially vulnerable to the temptation of easy microtransactions and excessive spending, Egenes says. To address these challenges, Xsolla partnered with PRIVO last year to develop a robust suite of Parental Control tools.
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“As a parent myself, it’s a super important initiative that we all need to address together within the industry as developers shift to become more direct-to-consumer focused,” he explains. “These compliance standards don’t just help parents manage that gaming experience and ensure that the developers provide a great experience, but meet those global standards and requirements that are needed in every country, in every region, that they want to distribute and sell in, and ultimately offer a great user experience and great gameplay.”
New Xsolla Parental Controls tools include age gating to protect minors from unauthorized transactions; guardian consent and real-time notifications and approval; a comprehensive transaction history; and spending limits. These tools are seamlessly integrated into the Payments dashboard, so developers can easily manage their compliance standards along with the rest of their web shop tools and services.
The new features will be demonstrated at upcoming game conferences to showcase all the ways these features solve key challenges – especially those that are often overlooked during the course of game development. That includes the need to ensure you have compliance measures in place for all player age groups, even if your game is specifically targeted toward adults, because younger players are undoubtedly playing your game too.
Xsolla Web Shop continues to gain traction
“We’ve been doing Web Shops for over three years, and we continuously upgrade our solution, our offering because of what we hear from our developer partners,” Egenes says. “Listening, getting into the room, with a lot of whiteboard conversations, we’ve designed a solution that meets the needs of any developer, no matter how big or small, wherever they’re located, to provide that quick setup and fully customized web shop.”
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With Instant Web Shop, developers can quickly set up their online one-stop-shop for players, including features like personalization, promotions to enhance user engagement and revenue, and deep linking.
With LiveOps tools, developers can dig into A/B testing, and launch player favorites like featured offers, first-purchase offers, secret-shop promotions, coupons, promo codes and both time-limited and number-limited offers to help user engagement boom, facilitate the transition of players from the game to the web and back again, all with the goal of maximizing revenue streams. To cut costs without cutting quality, the low-code Xsolla Backend is an accessible, scalable way to build multi-player, cross-platform games faster and for less.
“Many of our partners have generated significant profits for their game that they’ll be able to reinvest into the game, additional patch updates or part two of their game, but then also able to apply that to the rest of their business for their mobile games,” he adds. “We’re seeing folks like our partners over at Tilting Point say that over 50% of their business comes from their Warhammer web shop.”
Xsolla is also seeing conversion rates skyrocket for customers offering these seamless player experiences. Because it’s so easy to log in and make repeat purchases, players are motivated to keep coming back for more. It’s easy for developers to keep store offerings fresh, and in return, players keep buying.
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Opening up the Southeast Asia market
To help developers expand their reach around the world, Xsolla has turned its attention to the Southeast Asia market, including Cambodia and Indonesia, adding nearly 60 new payment methods to the 700-plus already in its roster.
“Some people may call it an emerging market. We call it an important market for us in engagement from the player perspective,” Egenes says. “We’re having more developers coming to us saying they want to engage and have players purchase their games from those countries, but be able to pay in their method of choice — covering over 90% of the payments market in each country we operate in.”
In Cambodia, the company has introduced eight new payment methods, such as internet banking options and digital wallets, covering up to 90% of the payments market and enabling game developers to reach nearly 2 million gamers in Cambodia.
In Indonesia, approximately 80% of consumers are unbanked or underbanked, and alternative payment methods (APMs) are the most preferred option. By integrating these APMs, such as e-wallets, bank transfers, cards and cash, as well as popular payment platforms, Xsolla covers up to 90% of the market.
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“If you simplify the transaction process, then it removes the barriers, decreases cart abandonment and allows developers to reach more of those players and drive continuous growth in many of these vibrant markets around the world,” Egenes says.
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It’s the end of an era for one of the App Store’s earliest success stories. Foursquare is shutting down its signature city guide app in order to “focus our efforts on building an even better experience in Swarm,” the company said in . The app will shut down December 15, while the web version will stay online until “early 2025.”
The shutdown is a notable reversal of a strategy the company announced a decade ago when it, controversially, opted its famed “check-in” service into a separate app. That app became known as Swarm while the Foursquare-branded app became a “” full of user-generated reviews and local recommendations.
Now, Foursquare says its future is, once again, the check-in. “We’re also introducing exciting new features and capabilities into Swarm throughout the year (👀 some of which may look familiar to you) in order to unlock new use cases that may better support your needs,” the company said, adding that additional updates are expected “early next year.”
It’s not clear why the company is changing its strategy to elevate Swarm over its namesake app. The company more than 100 employees earlier this year in an effort to “streamline” operations. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is currently co-chair of the company’s board of directors, said in a post that the company is “doing fine,” though he expressed disappointment with the news. “I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news,” he wrote.
T-minus 7 days until TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 officially kicks off! One of the year’s biggest tech events is ready to dominate the Bay Area’s thriving tech landscape for almost the entire week.
Get ready for one of the biggest tech gatherings, taking place October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Tech experts from every corner of the globe will come together to engage with the latest innovations, learn trends, and connect through unparalleled networking.
Why you can’t miss Disrupt 2024
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Witness the high-stakes startup showdown that is a highlight of Disrupt. Twenty handpicked startups, chosen from thousands, will pitch to a panel of leading VC judges, competing for a $100,000 equity-free prize and the iconic Disrupt Cup.
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Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court.
Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery alleging that an AI image generator was used to create promotional art for the We, Robot event that was meant to resemble stills from the 2017 sci-fi film. According to Alcon, which also owns the copyright to Blade Runner 2049, WBD and Tesla sent a request to use imagery from the film on the afternoon of October 10th just hours before the We, Robot demo took place on the Warner Bros. lot in California.
Though WBD owns some licensing rights for Blade Runner 2049, because the event would be live-streamed internationally, clearance for the images had to come from Alcon directly. And when Alcon’s legal and licensing departments were made aware of the situation, they sent back a firm refusal to the interested parties “so that there would be no mistakes in the conduct of the event.”
“Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account,” Alcon’s suit explains. “Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
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Despite Alcon’s refusal, however, Tesla allegedly decided to feed shots from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to create “a lightly stylized fake screen still screen”which was displayed prominently during the We, Robot presentation. During the event, Musk mentioned the Blade Runner franchise by name while describing sci-fi depictions of the future, and the livestream cut to an image depicting a man wearing a duster jacket and standing in front of a ruinous, apocalyptic cityscape.
An image from Tesla’s We, Robot event.Tesla
Along with the larger copyright infringement, Alcon also says it was never made privy to any of the agreements between Tesla and WBD that would have been necessary before the We, Robot event. Along with giving Tesla the ability to use Warner Bros.’ lot and equipment, Alcon believes that agreement also included a promotional element that “allowed or possibly even required Tesla expressly to affiliate the Cybercab with one or more motion pictures” from the studio’s catalog.
Alcon’s suit doesn’t specify exactly how much money the company is seeking in damages, but it states clearly that it believes Musk, Tesla, and WBD all “understood the unauthorized nature of the image and the improper purpose behind it and encouraged or otherwise lent their support to the improper endeavor.”
Midjourney’s AI image creator is adding major new editing options to its platform, as announced by CEO David Holz on Discord. You’ll be able to edit an uploaded image using generative AI, as you could only do with images that AI has created until now. Notably, this will be a web-based tool, expanding Midjourney’s Discord-centered and exclusive features.
While AI editing tools for images have been around for a bit, they are almost always restricted to images created with the same AI model doing the editing. Midjourney is taking the leap into allowing you to edit an image you want to edit rather than having the model make the initial creation.
That’s technically impressive since it means the model must understand more about an image that it didn’t design from scratch. However, it may also be risky since other models may have held back from providing it as an option due to concern over people using it to mess with pictures of real people without their permission or to employ the AI for less-than-benevolent purposes.
Once the image is uploaded, you can edit it in several ways. You can zoom in or out, adjust the angle, and otherwise play with the image without needing Discord and with just a single command. You can also use a digital brush for inpainting, allowing for more precise modifications. The most notable new element is the Retexture feature, which lets you precisely alter colors and other details while keeping the image’s shapes and objects intact.
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Midjourney Edits the Future
Questions about the ethics of the creation and editing of AI images have led to heated debates, lawsuits, and other arguments. That makes Midjourney’s decisions important for how its rivals and regulators figure out rules to set up internally and for the industry. Midjourney has agreed to embed metadata in AI-generated images so that they can always be identified, though not the more comprehensive C2PA standard as of yet. These are issues that Midjourney is well aware of.
“Because these new features are so powerful we’re going to restrict the deployment of them to a subset of the current community and increase our human moderation over the outputs (there’s also new more advanced AI moderators which we feel will do a great job),” Holz wrote. “Honestly, we’re not sure how to precisely restrict deployment of this feature, so we want to put a survey out there and get your opinions. We’ll use these results to calculate what percentage of the userbase we’ll reach with different restrictions and try to balance accessibility vs volume.”
For the average user, the ability to easily manipulate images with AI could make using Midjourney more appealing and make photo editing a lot easier. And as AI image makers become more common Midjourney wants to be more accessible. That’s why the company decided to abandon Discord as its only outlet, though it’s still a major center for the company’s creations. Midjourney likely doesn’t want to be left out simply because some don’t want to sign up for Discord.
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Meta has said it’s going to utilize facial recognition technology in a bid to crack down on celebrity scam ads that plague its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The move comes three years after Meta removed facial recognition smarts from Facebook following a backlash against the technology. Meta will be hoping that the implementation of the system, and the reason for bringing it in, will be better received by its online communities this time around.
“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites, where they are asked to share personal information or send money,” Meta explained in a post announcing the move to reintroduce facial recognition technology.
Meta already has a system in place for detecting scam ads involving celebrities, but it’s now aiming to make it more robust. Moving forward, if it suspects an ad to be a potential scam and it contains the image of a public figure at risk of celeb-bait, it will deploy facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If it confirms a match and concludes that the ad is a scam, Meta will block it.
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In a bid to steer clear of the same kind of criticisms that prompted Meta to ditch a form of facial recognition technology three years ago that involved automatic photo-tagging of Facebook users, the company said it will delete any facial data generated from ads for the one-time comparison, regardless of whether its system finds a match, adding that it won’t use the data for any other purpose.
The company said that early testing with a small group of celebrities and public figures shows promising results. Next, it will enroll a wider pool of celebrities that have been used in celeb-bait scams. Those selected will be notified, and they can opt out of the system at any time.
Meta said it’s also testing facial recognition technology as a way for people to verify their identity and regain access to Facebook and Instagram accounts if they forget their password, lose their device, or are tricked into giving their password to a scammer.
At the current time, owners of compromised accounts need to verify their identity to regain access by uploading an official ID or an official certificate that shows their name.
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But Meta said it’s now testing “video selfies” as a way for people to verify their identity and regain access to their account.
“The user will upload a video selfie and we’ll use facial recognition technology to compare the selfie to the profile pictures on the account they’re trying to access,” the company explained, adding that the system is “similar to identity verification tools you might already use to unlock your phone or access other apps.”
Uploaded video selfies will be encrypted and stored securely and will never appear on any Meta platform. The video will also be deleted immediately by Meta once it’s been used to verify a user’s identity.
“Video selfie verification expands on the options for people to regain account access, only takes a minute to complete and is the easiest way for people to verify their identity,” Meta said. “While we know hackers will keep trying to exploit account recovery tools, this verification method will ultimately be harder for hackers to abuse than traditional document-based identity verification.”
Google continues to work on making Gemini the ultimate AI-powered assistant for mobile devices. Lately, the service has been gaining features that were previously only available on the classic Google Assistant. New findings suggest that Gemini may soon receive the ability to manage calls and messages on locked devices.
Both Gemini and Google Assistant are capable of making calls and sending text messages via voice commands. However, currently, only Google Assistant can do so on phones with the screen locked. A new Gemini option that enables such actions from the lock screen could soon change that.
You could then make calls and send messages with Gemini from locked devices
Gemini is already capable of offering responses to requests via voice commands with the screen locked, but the call and message management function is still missing. That is one of the features that keeps Google Assistant “alive.” However, Android Authority has enabled a switch to trigger calls and messages from Gemini on locked devices in the latest Google app beta (v15.42.30.28.arm64).
You can access the switch from the same section where you grant Gemini permission to perform other actions while the screen is locked. Still, the feature will require you to unlock the device under certain conditions. “Gemini will still ask you to unlock when a response contains personal content, such as your Gmail messages, from apps you use,” the option says.
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New minimalist floating overlay and extension categories
The source has identified a few additional potential changes for Gemini. First, it seems that Google wants to make the assistant’s floating overlay much more minimalistic. To achieve this, they are significantly reducing the size of the floating overlay, a move that makes sense as it allows for a larger percentage of the background UI to remain visible. The floating overlay will expand according to the number of words your prompt contains.
Minimalist floating overlay
Additionally, Google is rearranging the Gemini extensions into different categories. Initially, the few Gemini extensions available made it possible to have them all in one list, in no apparent order. However, as the service is receiving more and more extensions, it is more convenient to include an organizational system. This will help you find current and future extensions more easily. There are categories like “communication,” “device control,” “travel,” “media,” and “productivity.”
There are no details on when Google might push these new features to Gemini. It’s even possible that we will never see some of the spotted changes implemented.
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