Amazon's latest Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite are back down to their lowest prices since Black Friday. The newest Kindle Paperwhite is now $85, instead of the usual $130, while the latest standard Kindle is $60, instead of the usual list price of $90.
Both scored well in our in-depth reviews (95 and 91 respectively), which isn't a huge surprise as Kindle is arguably the posterchild for e-readers. If you were already prepared to part with $90 for the standard Kindle, this deep discount means it's a no-brainer to go for the Paperwhite instead, which comes with waterproofing and Bluetooth Audible support. That said, if those features don't mean that much to you, $60 for the standard Kindle is not to be sneezed at, although it will mean less storage (4GB instead of 8GB) -- but then again, how many books can you really be reading at once?
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Fish cages in Lake Victoria Homa Bay, Kenya.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
Alphabet's moonshot factory is turning its attention back toward the ocean. But whereas Project Foghorn looked to turn seawater into a carbon-neutral fuel, the newly-announced Tidal has a broader mission to protect the sea and its aquatic inhabitants. "This is a critical issue," Neil Davé, general manager for Tidal said in a blog post. "Humanity is pushing the ocean past its breaking point, but we can't protect what we don't understand." The team, which operates under the company's "X" lab for now, is starting with a camera system that can help fish farmers monitor and, hopefully, better understand every living creature inside their pens.
Why start here? Well, as Davé explains: "Fish have a low carbon footprint relative to other sources of animal protein and they play a critical role in feeding 3 billion people today, so helping fish farmers could prove critical both for humanity and for the health of the ocean." Tidal's solution is underwater cameras that, paired with some computer vision, are able to detect subtle and not-so-subtle fish behaviours like eating. That level of information, Davé explained, can help farmers make smarter and more environmentally-friendly decisions, "like how much food to put in the pens, which we hope can help reduce both costs and pollution."
According to the Financial Times, Tidal is working with farms based in Europe and Asia to track fish species including salmon and yellowtail. Otherwise, we know little about the company's testing and how close the technology is to being a polished and market-ready product.
In a blog post, Davé stressed that fish famers is "just one area" that the team is focused on. "As we validate our technology and learn more about the ocean environment, we plan to apply what we've learned to other fields and problems, with the help of ocean health experts and other organizations eager to find new solutions to protect and preserve this precious resource," he said. Tidal is the third X project that we know is still in active development, after The Everyday Robotic Project, a push to create machines that can operate autonomously in" unstructured human environments," and FSOC, a system that uses light to transmit data.
Many X projects including Waymo (self-driving cars), Wing (delivery drones), Loon, (internet balloons) and Verily (health) have become standalone Alphabet subsidiaries. Chronicle (cybersecurity) followed this path too, but was eventually folded back into Google, and X graduate Makani (energy kites) has effectively been abandoned. The moonshot factory has also produced a few spin-outs such as Dandelion (geothermal heating) and Malta (salt-based energy storage). No doubt the Alphabet division is working on other highly-experimental ways to save the planet or change the world with a combination of science and technology.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
If there can be only one thing taken from my time at Riot Games' vast, lavishly fitted LA campus, it's that the mega-developer is desperately keen to prove they know what they're doing. Riot's pitch for Valorant, its upcoming tactical shooter seemingly named after a kind of industrial carpet cleaning fluid, is one based almost entirely on competence: the game will have the best infrastructure, the best attention to detail, the most committed, communicative ongoing support, and the most rigorously balanced gameplay of anything like it - even if it comes at the cost, seemingly, of character and heart and anything else like it. I've played about four hours and moment-to-moment it really is brilliant, right across the board. Exacting, oddly approachable, tense. The potential is there for Valorant to be the pinnacle of tactical shooters - but it also feels a bit back-to-front. This is a game that exists purely to excel, like the child of two parents who only agreed to conceive so their kid could ace its homework. A game that's very good at doing what other games have already done, but better.
Perhaps that impression is just a result of the way in which Riot has chosen to introduce Valorant. At times it's felt almost comically self-conscious, the developer obsessively anticipating every gripe and grizzle before it comes about. Recall the initial teaser reveal, amidst Riot's multitude of ten-year anniversary celebrations, where lead producer Anna Donlon talked at length about "Project A"'s ambition to eliminate such essential woes as "peeker's advantage", and bless the world with 128-tick servers. Sexy! Dedicated servers are old news, it seems. The schtick of schmucks. Such is the world of games, in this time of subreddit megathreads and so many direct lines from community to creator, that one of the largest developers on earth announces a massive new game by correcting their audience's complaint-jargon before they've even used it.
From the moment you equip your knife to move faster, you know Valorant will feel incredibly familiar to Counter-Strike fans.
Still, Valorant is impressive, and as weird as it is to lead with the technical firefighting stuff, so is that. If you buy it, Riot's promises are hugely encouraging. In opening presentations at the studio, developers cited twelve games as inspiration, ranging from the obvious, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Crossfire and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (curiously, and perhaps cheekily: no mention of Overwatch), and the game itself feels like a surgical piecing together of the best of them. Each game's minor gripe or community grumble extracted and eliminated before it ever came about. To describe it in brief, imagine Counter-Strike in a just slightly more colourful world, with better attention to the little touches, from a nice little ping system to slightly more playfulness in the maps, with things like fixed teleporters allowing for baiting and flanking. Above all though, its standout addition is the highly strategic abilities, each tied to your characters ("Agents") that sit between the rigid grounding of Rainbow Six Siege's Operators and the more cartoonish skills of Overwatch.
The abilities themselves are quite Overwatch though, as much as Riot wants to avoid saying the name. The main difference is the intention: with Valorant the aim is to be a "tactical shooter first", with everything else in service of that. That means all the Agents still deal damage primarily through shooting (disappointingly, with real-world guns, which lead designer Trevor Romleski told me was in order to preserve a sense of inherent, "intuitively satisfying" feel and recognisability), and Agents' abilities are always in service of that, whether it's through zoning, or scouting, or debuffing, or just bluntly walling off entrances. Even the Agents that feel especially out-of-this-world or Overwatch-y, such as the Hanzo-like Sova (renamed from Hunter mid-way through my time there), who can fire off a scouting pulse arrow and a larger ultimate that can pass through walls, still rely on gunplay first - and the same guns as everyone else.
Combining abilities ostensibly for one purpose - like that green wall - with position and tactical play like this will be essential for the more advanced players.
Those guns are also at the centre of the in-game "economy", which is very similar in concept to Counter-Strike again, or indeed the gold-based shopping of League of Legends. Games are played in a first-to-twelve format, which takes a good half an hour, or longer if it's a close one. Matches are attack versus defence, with one team trying to plant a bomb and the other trying to prevent them. The maps, of which there'll be four at launch, Riot says, will have a mix of two or three points to attack and defend. You win a round by either killing all five of the enemy team members or successfully planting a bomb and seeing it through to detonation - or defusing it once planted, if you're on defence. And you play the game in chunks, so you'll be defending for several rounds then attacking for several and, coming back to the economy, it's between these individual rounds where you have a chance to buy weapons, armour and - crucially - more charges of your abilities. That economy is intended to be "team-based", so the better your team does in a round the more money you have to spend before the next one, on those bigger and better guns and the like. In a nice touch that you'd hope would encourage teamwork, you can also ping a weapon from the menu and another teammate can buy it for you with a single click, helping the wealth trickle down from that one ringer on the squad.
As an aside on modes themselves, it's just this one at launch but Romleski did say the team was "interested in exploring" other, faster or more casual modes, and that the core one's length may change slightly if the community deems it necessary. Anna Donlon also added it's "definitely" on the team's list. "The team has been very focused on the competitive part... The questions we've been kind of debating amongst ourselves is: would you hold that back to wait to establish the more casual mode or would you put competitive mode out for the audience we think it's for, start building that audience and start building a community - and then also at the same time be working on something that could be maybe a little bit more broad reaching or something that you would just want to play to decompress? ... Do we wait to launch the game so we have that? I think the answer is probably no. Do we prioritise that work? I think the answer there is probably yes."
Maps are crisp and readable, but that's at the expense of them looking a little flat.
Back to the economy, and successfully gaming it will be what sets the top players apart from the merely skilled. I'd expect deep strategies and metas and all that malarkey to appear pretty fast around what you spend your first bits of cash on and who buys what for the rest of the team. The other side of that, of course, is that I expect the ubiquitous lone wolf players will probably refuse to share. Playing in the cocoon of Riot's in-house "PC Bang", on teams of five who speak the same language - and are happy to even use the game's built-in voice chat in the first place - it would be easy to say that Valorant feels wonderfully tactical, with cooperation and character synergy baked in. The reality is that while, yes, the Agents' abilities synergise quite beautifully at times, I'm sure that's also down to having the right people to play with. The ringer on our team was Riot's David "Phreak" Turley, for instance - a well-known professional League of Legends commentator who mains the support role when he plays. In other words: an unusually supportive, communicative environment off the bat.
Without a squad of chatty friends or some particularly good luck with online matchmaking, it's very easy to anticipate an issue with toxic communication coming from such an incredibly tense, competitive game with both text and voice chat. As much as it might seem like a laboured point, this is something that many see as inseparable from League of Legends, and that Riot has already had to work enormously hard at combating. It's arguably failed to really fix the issue, ten years on, and that's despite League only featuring text chat in-game. Voice chat's issues, most notably with the exclusionary effect it has on female players in particular, have been well documented. When I asked about this, game director Joe Ziegler promised to draw from Riot's "centralised efforts" at battling the issue and apply some "specific salves around certain features," but wouldn't go into more detail during our chat. You can read more of his thoughts in our full interview with Ziegler and Valorant's lead producer, Anna Donlon, but a suggestion would be to axe the voice and text chat altogether and go with Apex Legends' nuanced ping system (something League of Legends itself made good early strides with). It's also worth noting Riot's already promised to improve on the pings they have. As Romleski put it, the implementation I saw was "not the grand vision" of the ping system: "we want to make sure players are comfortable if they don't use voice or they don't [feel confident in] calling out all the right information at the correct times." Fingers crossed.
This is one of the zones where you'll need to plant or defuse a bomb. Riot placed huge emphasis on its work with verticality, sightlines, cover, map-knowledge and more, and they're all evident here.
Toxicity notwithstanding, Valorant's intense competitiveness is also one of its greatest strengths. If you do get a good team, or just a good group of pals to play it with, I found there was a remarkable thrill to most of the rounds I played, especially so when we swept ahead to lengthy leads before almost throwing matches at the final round, or clawed matches back from the brink. Games frequently built to a natural climax of tension, and some higher-level plays - last-gasp, "clutch" one-versus-three kills or team-wide strategies coming together - can be incredibly satisfying. The game feels built to surface those particularly vivid, Rainbow Six Siege-style moments in particular, when there's one player left and somehow they pull it off, turning things around with nothing but spit and hope and a little John McClane gumption.
It's hard to pin down a single, quantifiable thing that brings that sort of heightened tension about, but Riot would argue it's all in the basics. To go right back to their initial pitch, this is a game built on competency first, and apparently what that means is a tangible difference to all the little things. The art team emphasised their creation of a "clean zone", for instance, where anything within the playable height range of the maps was slightly more muted and stripped back, whilst the areas above (roofs, skylines, and the like) was allowed to pop. Other elements are illustrated in accordance with a "readability hierarchy", where Agents stand out above the playable space, which stands out above the visible parts of your gun, which is above the non-playable stuff altogether. Cover, on the maps themselves, is allocated with great precision, forming a curated spaghetti of "long lanes" of clear sniper paths and intentionally obstructed sightlines. All characters have equal-sized hitboxes. There's tagging, and specific walls you can shoot through, and on and on and on it goes with a seemingly infinite string of minutiae that Riot has thought about (and talked about) at exhaustive length.
This balcony, and its longer sightlines to and from the room you're trying to attack ahead, is a key spot for snipers.
Above all of that, though, is a technical effort that on paper sounds quite remarkable. As we all know by now, Riot boldly claims to have eliminated peekers' advantage, something that I'd expect no-one but the most ardent of CS:GO nerds to have heard of or cared about until now, but makes a demonstrable difference to how long-term players will play the game. In most shooters like Valorant, you can briefly pop out from behind a wall to "peek" at what's going on and quickly dart back with the shimmy of a button, and do so with no risk of getting picked off, because the delay between you performing the peek and the enemy seeing you is too high. You're back behind the wall before it's humanly possible to react and shoot. It's become a time-old part of playing tactical shooters at a decent level, but in Valorant it no longer flies. Riot seems to have tackled this entirely by cracking open one of those League of Legends coffers, that I imagine they have lying around the place, and simply throwing vast amounts of money at the problem.
To get briefly technical, as I understand it Riot claims to have struck a deal with internet service providers that will route internet traffic directly from you to Riot's servers, via service called Riot Direct, which it says means an average of 35ms ping for at least 70 percent of players at launch. I can feel the eyes glazing over, don't worry, so in basic terms: much less lag, regardless of where you are. At the top end of the scale, competitive players and streamers that have been known to move across the continent of North America to get physically closer to servers, so that their ping is low enough for high-level play, can breathe a sigh of relief. For myself and most others, it's just another quiet reassurance.
As well as the peeker-busting 128-tick servers and promise of super-stable ping for (almost) everyone, Riot's also built Valorant to be playable on a huge amount of machines. David Strailey, who works at Riot in the netcode and software engineering side of things for Valorant, said that a $120, ten-year-old laptop with an i3-370M CPU (which equates to 88 percent of current League of Legends players) would be able to play Valorant at 30 frames-per-second, while 66 percent of LoL players could play it at 60. Slides were used to show off some apparently remarkable strides to improving the accuracy of hit registration. Riot even showed footage supporting a promise to upscale players with low FPS and lag, through some special server magic, so that even if they jittered about and jumped all over the place on their own screen their movement would appear entirely smooth on yours.
Wind all that back into the important stuff - the gameplay - and it raises interesting questions around where true originality and fun really comes from. Sometimes players coming up with clever ways to work around things that are technically problems or imbalances can actually lead to the most interesting gameplay. To go back to peekers once again, in Romleski's words: "Let's say we're playing against somebody who's peeking, you might 'jiggle peek' yourself as like a counter-way to deal with it, and I think it's good that players are being ingenuitive and trying to come up with ways to deal with it." The difference in Valorant, he says, is that Riot wants to build the "tools" for breaking sightlines and using space to your advantage into the game intentionally, so you can "find your own way to break that puzzle of some people holding that position," rather than relying on server delay to do it for them.
Riot has finally revealed its first major non-League of Legends game: Valorant. The company’s new game is a major departure from its MOBA past, and doesn’t even draw on similar strategy games like Legends of Runeterra or Teamfight Tactics. To help give you a better idea of what Riot’s new game is all about, we’re going to answer every question you might have about Valorant.
Wasn’t this game called Project A?
Yes, it was. Riot announced Valorant as Project A during its League of Legends 10-year anniversary stream in October. All we knew about the game then was that it was a “character-based tactical shooter.” Now we know a whole lot more, including the fact that its real name is Valorant.
What kind of game is Valorant?
Valorant is a free-to-play team-based tactical shooter with a five-on-five setup. Each match has 25 total rounds; the first team to win 13 rounds wins the match. At the start of each match, players pick characters called Agents. Agents have special abilities like dashing quickly, creating pools of smoke, building walls, or even calling down airstrikes.
The game’s closest comparison is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with a little bit of Rainbow Six Siege mixed in.
Image: Riot Games
What is the main game mode in Valorant?
The main mode is just like Counter-Strike’s Defuse game mode. There are two teams, one attacking and one defending. The attacking team has a bomb (called the Spike) that they need to plant on one of several different sites. If the attacking team plants the Spike and protects it until it explodes, they win. The defending team has to stop them by waiting out the clock each round. Each player has one life per round, so if one team’s members are all eliminated, that counts as a win for their opponents.
What is Valorant’s setting?
Valorant takes place in our world, albeit a near-future version of it. A cataclysmic event occurs sometime in our future, reshaping the world and its governments. Alongside its geopolitical effects, the event also gives certain hypernatural powers to special individuals. This is how Agents first got their abilities, and how the in-game organization Valorant came to be.
Will there be a story?
Valorant will have story elements, and they’ll be told within and outside the game through media like animated shorts. The events of these shorts will also be reflected in-game via dialogue, changes in the Agents’ look, or environmental elements.
Is Valorant free?
Yes, Valorant will be free-to-play.
When can I play Valorant?
Riot is planning on hosting a closed beta, but there’s no word on when that will be. The good news is that the game is scheduled to launch in summer 2020, so even if you don’t get into the beta, it won’t be long until you can jump in.
Is Valorant a competitive game?
Everything about Valorant is designed with competition in mind. In the version we saw, there was a Casual mode and a Ranked mode, but either way, the game is all about competition.
If this is a tactical shooter, why are there different characters?
While most tactical shooters like Counter-Strike don’t have characters, it isn’t unheard of. Rainbow Six Siege fits within the genre and also features characters, but Valorant’sgameplay is much quicker than that of Siege. As in both Counter-Strike and Siege, players die very quickly in Valorant — so you’ll have to be careful at all times.
Can I change my character during a match?
Nope. Unlike in Overwatch, you won’t be able to switch your character at any point in a match of Valorant. This means that if you pick an Agent that’s especially good on defense, you’ll need to remember that you might be putting your team at a disadvantage on offense.
Image: Riot Games
What are the character abilities like?
Abilities in Valorant cover a wide range of effects. Some are simple, like the ability to create smoke screens to obscure certain small areas from view or temporarily blind other players.
Other Agents have powers that let them do things like heal or even revive allies, but those are difficult to use because of how fast everyone in Valorant dies. Some Agents can make walls appear out of thin air, scout out enemy positions with a special arrow, or perform a short-range dash in a specific direction.
Will there be new characters added to the game?
Yes, the release of new Agents is definitely part of Riot’s plan. But the studio isn’t committing to a schedule until it sees how Valorant’s initial cast lands with players.
How do you get guns and abilities in Valorant?
Guns have to be bought at the beginning of each round in Valorant, unless you survive the previous round, in which case your loadout will carry over. The game’s guns should be familiar to anyone who has played a modern military game. There are assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and light machine guns. Most of the weapons in the game, especially the rifles, are capable of one-shot kills with a well-placed headshot.
Abilities also need to be purchased before rounds as single-use items, but they’ll carry over if you die before getting a chance to use one.
Do I have to use abilities, or can I just shoot?
You can absolutely be successful in Valorant without ever using an ability, but you can’t be great. In order to reach the game’s highest level, you’ll need to master both gunplay and ability use. You can get away with just shooting for a while, though, since it’s still the game’s most important mechanic.
Image: Riot Games
Can I only use abilities if I’m not very good at shooting?
No. You might still find that you’re somewhat useful to your team, but you won’t be doing much good overall if you can’t win a gunfight. There are Agents with easier skills to master, but there aren’t any characters that will make the shooting easier.
Will there be balance updates? How often will they be released?
Riot has proven itself as one of the most adept developers in the world when it comes to balance, thanks to a decade of successful patches to League of Legends, and it’s bringing that same philosophy to Valorant. While the studio isn’t ready to commit to a specific schedule for patches just yet, one developer mentioned League’s current one-patch-every-two-weeks cycle as a possible model for Valorant — though he said that the patches would likely come down to how often the game needs them.
What are Valorant’s maps like?
Valorant’s maps are similar to what tactical shooter fans know from Counter-Strike. There are bomb sites, spawns for both teams, and points of interest spread throughout that make for great callouts. The settings for the various maps are related to the game’s story, with locations all around the world.
Each of the two Valorant maps we’ve played so far has had unique twists. For instance, one of them has three bomb sites, while another has no middle area and instead has two one-way teleporters that make a loud noise every time someone passes through them.
While they probably aren’t the only two maps in the game, it’s unclear exactly how many there will be.
Image: Riot Games
Will there be new maps added to Valorant?
There will be new maps, but Riot doesn’t have definitive time frames for updates. One Rioter mentioned something like a new map every six months to a year, but that was just a vague idea and not a guarantee.
Are there any skins in the game?
Valorant currently has gun skins, which change the way the game’s weapons look. There are no character skins in the game, nor are there specific plans to add them. The development team said that they’re a possibility in the future, but for now, the focus is on gun skins.
Are there loot boxes?
Valorant will not have loot boxes. Players will be able to directly purchase the skins they want from the store. The skins themselves are each for specific, individual weapons, though there are skin packs that bundle a few weapon skins together based on their theme.
Is there a Valorant battle pass?
Yes. Riot didn’t give many details about it, but there is a battle pass-like system in Valorant that gives players new cosmetic rewards the more they play. It’s unclear if there will be a new pass every season, like many other games have used, or how often the rewards will be refreshed.
What are Valorant’s PC hardware specs?
According to a sheet provided to Polygon by Riot, Valorant will run at the lowest possible specs at 30 frames per second on an Intel Core i3-370M CPU with an Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU. Or put more simply, for the less tech-minded: You can play it on a fairly old laptop.
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses coronavirus’ impact on Apple and the evolving educational demands of US jobs.
Tim Cook admits he and President Trump have differences, but the CEO who succeeded founder Steve Jobs at Apple emphasized that they agree on how to address some of the country's biggest challenges.
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"I care a lot about creating jobs, and I think the president does, as well," Cook said in an interview with FOX Business' Susan Li in Alabama, where he was helping launch an initiative with Birmingham City Schools to train underserved communities in digital coding. "I care a lot about training the workforce for the future, and I think the administration is really focused on this, as well. I think one of the U.S.'s major challenges is to solve this issue."
Their goals intersect in other areas, too: The Trump administration recently worked with Apple to bring its first retail store to India, something it was unable to do previously because the country had demanded that the iPhone maker take on an Indian partner first.
"We didn't want to do that. We want to maintain control over our brand," Cook said. "The administration worked on this with the Indian government, and that change has been made, so we are very, very positive about entering in online this year and retail next year."
Back in the U.S., Cook said, he's keenly aware that the rapidly evolving tech industry is disrupting the workforce even as it creates opportunities.
The country has to "make sure education is preparing people for the disruption and the creation," he said. "If we do that, we can flourish in this environment, but if we don't, we leave a lot of people behind, and that should be unacceptable for all of us."
Both job creation and education should be nonpartisan, he added.
"We're very focused on policy, not politics," Cook said.
In a Saturday press conference, Trump twice referenced Cook's comments in his first-ever Fox interview about China making progress fighting the coronavirus.
"If you read, Tim Cook of Apple said that they're now in full operation again in China," the president said.
The Birmingham program that Cook was helping to launch is part of the Community Education Initiative, an extension of Apple's ConnectED education program, started in 2014. The initiative is active in cities from Austin to Houston, Boise, Columbus, Chicago and Nashville.
In Birmingham, it's known as Education Farm, or Ed Farm, an Apple spokesperson told FOX Business.
"As our society continues to evolve and advance, more and more job opportunities of the future will require digital skills, and helping our communities prepare for that is our priority," Ed Farm Program Director Chris McCauley said in a Thursday statement. "We are thrilled at this initiative’s potential as it continues to move forward."
During his visit, Cook participated in a coding demo on an iPad for students and educators and planned to stop by a fourth-grade classroom using iPads.
Apple has pledged $100 million to its ConnectED program to bring innovative digital learning techniques to 114 underserved schools, where every student is equipped with an iPad, every teacher is equipped with a Mac computer and iPad, and every classroom is equipped with an Apple TV, according to the company.
"It’s heartwarming to see students take to products and accelerate their learning cycles," Cook told Li. "You saw these kids down here -- they’re already doing podcasts and other kinds of things that bring out communication skills and a whole variety of other skills."
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, Apple made some major moves that are telling of its increasingly compliant behavior in China where it has seen escalating competition, but investors are showing dissatisfaction with how it is approaching hot-button issues in the country.
Virus game gone
Plague Inc., a simulation game where a player’s goal is to infect the entire world with a deadly virus, was removed from the China iOS App Store this week. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus in late January, Chinese users had flocked to download the eight-year-old game, potentially seeking an alternative way to understand the epidemic.
Data from market research firm App Annie shows that the title remained the most downloaded app in China from late January through most of February, up from No. 28 at the beginning of the year.
Ndemic Creations, the U.K. studio behind the game, said in a statement that the “situation” — the removal of Plague Inc. from the Apple App Store — “is completely out of our control.” The Chinese government provided an opaque reason for the takedown, saying the game “includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China,” which is the country’s internet watchdog.
The incident has gotten plenty of attention in and outside of China. Some speculate that Apple has caved to pressure from Beijing, which could find Plague Inc.’s gameplay troubling. One sticking point is that its tutorial by default picks China as the starting country, although in the main game a user can begin anywhere in the world. The Information reported in 2018 that Plague Inc. actually applied for official permission to distribute in China but was turned down on account of its “socially inappropriate” content.
Others including Niko Partners games analyst Daniel Ahmad suggested that the Chinese authority might have taken issue with a December version update that allowed players to create “fake news,” which could mislead them in seeking advice in the midst of the health crisis.
Ahmad also suggested that the ban might have been linked to the ongoing crackdown of unlicensed mobile games in China. Notably, the Plague Inc. ban coincided with Apple’s announcement this week that would require all games in its Chinese app store to obtain government approval in the form of an ISBN number beginning in July. Few details have come to light about what this new regulatory process entails. Nor do developers know whether currently published games without official approval will be removed.
Plague Inc, the popular simulation game where the goal is to infect everyone in the world with a deadly virus, has been removed from the iOS app store in China.
Apple investors are not sitting well with the firm’s app takedowns in China. 40% of its shareholders cast support for a proposal that would force Apple to uphold human rights commitment and be more transparent on how it responds to Beijing’s requests to censor apps.
Apple’s Delay
The gaming permit requirement is not new, though. In fact, Apple is just closing a regulatory loophole that had existed for years. Back in 2016, the Chinese government stipulated that video games — both PC and mobile — must apply for an ISBN number before entering circulation China. Within months, alternative Android stores operated by domestic tech giants swiftly moved to weed out illegal games. The official Google Play store is unavailable in China.
But Apple has managed to keep unlicensed titles in stock in the world’s largest gaming market, where content is strictly monitored. The American behemoth has many incentives to do so. Despite iPhone’s eroding share in China (to be fair, all Chinese phone makers but Huawei have recently suffered declining market share), iOS apps in China, especially games, remain an important revenue source for Apple.
So it’s in Apple’s best interest to clear hurdles for apps publishing in the country. Where there is a will, there is a way. Prior to 2016, publishing a game in China was relatively hassle-free. Following the regulatory change that year, Apple began asking games for proof of government license — but it didn’t go all out to enforce the policy. Local media reported that developers could get by with fabricated ISBN numbers or circumvent the rule by publishing in an overseas iOS App Store first and switching to China later.
This questionable practice did not go unnoticed. In August 2018, a Chinese state media lambasted Apple for its lousy oversight over App Store approvals.
Stepping up inspection on games will likely have little impact on China’s gaming titans who enjoy the financial and operational resources to secure the much-needed permit. Rather, their challenge is devising content that aligns with Beijing’s ideological guidelines, exemplified by Tencent’s patriotic makeover of PUBG.
Those that will be worst hit will most likely be small-time, independent studios, as well as firms that create “sockpuppet games” (马甲包), a practice whereby a developer exploits app stores’ loopholes to publish a troop of clones with similar gameplay and mask their appearance with altered names, logos and characters. Doing so can often help the publisher gain more traffic and revenue, but these sockpuppets will have a low chance of passing the authority’s strict scrutiny, which, as a Chinese gaming blog speculates, will potentially put an end to the surreptitious practice.
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