Category: Gamespot

YouTube will introduce a monthly subscription service that will let you to watch as many videos as you want without ever encountering an ad, the Google subsidiary said in an email sent to YouTube partners today.

Google did not say how much the ads-free YouTube subscription will cost or when it will be released, but sources tell Bloomberg that we’ll see it this year.

According to the letter, the decision to introduce the premium service is based on the success of the YouTube Music Key Beta, which allows users to pay $10 a month for access to Google Play’s library and ad-free music videos on YouTube.

Google said that it’s seen “tremendous engagement,” with over 2 million installations in less than a month.

“We’re excited to build on this momentum by taking another big step in favor of choice: offering fans an ads-free version of YouTube for a monthly fee,” Google said. “By creating a new paid offering, we’ll generate a new source of revenue that will supplement your fast growing advertising revenue.”

According to the letter sent to YouTube partners, YouTube will pay partners 55 percent of the total net revenues YouTube determines is attributable to the monthly views or watchtime of their content.

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BioShock creator Ken Levine has revealed that his next game, which has not yet even been announced, will run on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. He confirmed the detail this week on Twitter.

This is not all that surprising, given that Levine’s previous games–BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite–all ran on iterations of Epic’s technology. The new project, however, is his first using Unreal Engine 4, the latest version of the popular toolset.

Other upcoming games that use Unreal Engine 4–which is now available free to anyone–include Microsoft’s new Xbox One Gears of War, Dead Island 2, and Cliff Bleszinski’s Bluestreak, among others.

After Irrational Games closed in February 2013, Levine–and a small number of others–remained on-board to work on a “smaller, more entrepreneurial” project for Take-Two. Meanwhile, the BioShock series is now being developed by 2K Games in California. While no new entries in the series have been announced, management says the franchise still has lots of room to grow commercially and creatively.

In January, Levine offered more details about his new project and studio, both of which do not have names yet. The game is sci-fi-, targeting PC, won’t be revealed at E3, and isn’t anything like a Telltale Games title. Check out this post for a roundup of everything Levine said about the game.

What do you hope to see Levine make next? Let us know in the comments below!

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Warner Bros. is already making a Minecraft movie, but that’s not the only video game feature film the Harry Potter film giant has in the works. The company has acquired the film rights to Scott Cawthon’s popular horror game Five Nights at Freddy’s, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie doesn’t yet have a director, cast, or script, but some high-profile Hollywood names have come aboard to produce it. Roy Lee (The Departed, The LEGO Movie) and Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg of KatzSmith Productions (the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel) are signed on as producers.

“We’re looking forward to working with Scott to make an insane, terrifying, and weirdly adorable movie,” Grahame-Smith said.

Cawthon added: “The story really lends itself to being a movie and it taps into a largely unexplored niche of horror that a lot of people will be able to relate to.”

Five Nights at Freddy’s is legitimately terrifying. In the game, players must survive in a scary version of Chuck E. Cheese’s that’s full of animatronic monsters. Check out the video above to see it in action.

What do you think? Could Five Nights at Freddy’s work as a movie? Let us know in the comments below!

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Bastion, the vivid hand-painted RPG that drew rapturous reviews when it first shipped in July 2011, is now available on PlayStation 4.

Upon its initial release on PC and Xbox 360, critics were near unanimous in their praise for the title, with Gamespot’s Bastion review describing it as a “wonderfully crafted adventure that presents a fun and focused challenge you can customize in all sorts of ways.”

The game costs $15 in North America, while UK and Europe prices have yet to be listed.

Bastion was the breakthrough debut for its California based developer, Supergiant Games, and went on to sell more than 3 million copies. The studio’s next title, Transistor, shipped in May last year and has accrued more than 600,000 sales.

“It was always difficult to describe Bastion while the game was in development,” Supergiant creative director, Greg Kasavin, explained in a new post on the PlayStation Blog.

“We designed the game in an organic way, little by little, listening to what it needed most and building whatever that was next, until we felt that we were done.”

A plan to port the game to PlayStation Vita was announced in December, though that project has yet to be completed.

“The Vita version of Bastion is still in development,” Kasavin told fans on the PlayStation Blog’s comments section.

“We don’t have a release date for it at this time. We expect for it to be cross-buy enabled with the PS4 version.”

Barcelona studio BlitWorks was assigned the task of developing the PlayStation 4 port.

Disclaimer: Greg Kasavin is a former GameSpot employee. He has no personal ties to anyone involved in the publication of this article.

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[UPDATE] ForzaTech is the name of the in-house Forza game engine. More details are coming at E3.

“We can confirm that Microsoft has filed a trademark application for ForzaTech, which is Turn 10 Studios’ proprietary graphics and simulation engine for Forza,” a Microsoft representative told GameSpot. “We’ll have more to share at E3.”

The original story is below.

Microsoft has filed a new trademark application for something called “Forzatech,” though the company’s intentions for it are not immediately clear.

The Xbox company filed for the trademark with the United States Patent & Trademark Office on April 2. It is listed as “game software,” and unfortunately, no further description is provided.

Given that Forza is featured in the name, it’s quite likely that “Forzatech” is related to Microsoft’s major racing franchise. The name, however, doesn’t sound like something would call a game itself, but possibly a related service or technology.

Microsoft already holds trademarks for other non-game Forza products, one of which is Forza Hub, the name of the free Xbox app that collects news and information about the racing series. The company has also trademarked “Drivatar,” which is an artificial intelligence technology featured in recent Forza titles.

The next Forza game is the upcoming Forza Motorsport 6 for Xbox One, though it’s unclear if Forzatech is in any way tied to that title.

We’ve contacted Microsoft asking for more information about the Forzatech trademark.

Do you know what Forzatech is? Drop us a line via the email address below to discuss.

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PlayStation 4 racing game Driveclub‘s online mode–a major draw for the title–is currently unavailable and will remain that way for a good portion of today, April 7. The downtime, which spans up to eight total hours, is the result of Evolution deploying “major updates” to the racer’s servers.

This downtime, if it spans the full eight hours, will run through about 7 PM BST / 2 PM EDT / 11 AM PDT. Driveclub’s offline mode can still be played during the maintenance period.

“Apologies for any inconvenience this causes and thank you for your patience while we continue working to improve the game,” developer Evolution said.

Evolution has been making regular server upgrades to Driveclub since the game’s troubled release in October 2014 in an effort to improve the overall experience and to prepare for the launch of the free PlayStation Plus edition. The studio said previously that, while this free version is not canceled, the developer won’t release it until it’s confident the servers will hold up.

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