This week Microsoft's bringing Xbox Cloud Gaming to a variety of machines in a limited Beta. Information comes from Catherine Gluckstein, VP and Head of Product, Cloud Gaming at Microsoft, who announced this new limited beta release. According to Gluckstein, there'll be a limited beta in Chrome and Edge browsers, to start - so it'll roll with as wide a variety of devices as possible right from the get-go.
Google's generous unlimited storage offers were admittedly too good to last. Whether or not some people took advantage of that, it was only a matter of time before it became unsustainable, at least as a business. Late last year, Google announced a couple of changes to its formerly unlimited options for Workspace and Google Photos users. It is now announcing an extension of that deadline as a way to give administrators, businesses, and users more time to prepare for the inevitable.
Xbox Game Pass is getting an update today, but instead of adding games across the full spectrum of Game Pass services - PC, console, and cloud - today's update is focused entirely on Cloud Gaming. In fact, not only is Cloud Gaming the sole focus, but it's also only about backward compatible games, with Microsoft adding 16 titles from the OG Xbox and Xbox 360 to Game Pass Ultimate.
Much of today's technology has an obsession with things we can see, from photorealistic computer graphics, through increasingly sophisticated computer interfaces, to new virtual and augmented reality experiences. Our senses don't stop at our eyes, though, and sound is an equally important part of having an immersive and believable experience. With the focus on visuals, however, creating evolved audio experiences has been traditionally more difficult and more expensive, leaving would-be soundscape creators priced out even if they know what tools they should be looking for. That's the situation that startup Spatial is trying to address, with a suite of tools and services to make creating such soundscapes more accessible to hobbyists and professionals alike.
Dropbox has become pretty much a dumping ground for anything and everything that needs to be stored on the cloud. Last year, Dropbox realized that those included even passwords, often stored in plain text files. While the cloud service does have encryption, it's still an inefficient and risky way to store passwords you want to be synced to all devices. That's why it created its own password manager to add to the already congested market and now it is making that available to its free Basic users but with one very important limitation.
It's been a wild 24 hours or so for the developers behind Rust - Facepunch Studios - and the game's European playerbase. Yesterday, Facepunch Studios published a post to Twitter in which it said it was aware that a number of its EU servers were down, telling us that the datacenter those servers are hosted at was looking into the issue. It turns out this was more than a mere outage, as the servers were down because of a fire at that datacenter.
Adobe today revealed that a number of Creative Cloud apps are getting new photo and video tools. Individually, some of these updates seem rather minor, but taken a whole, it becomes clear that Adobe is shipping out a bunch of changes to Creative Cloud. The new features are going live in Premiere Pro, After Effects, Premiere Rush, Character Animator, Audition, and Adobe Stock, and there even some cross-app features going live as well.
Apple is making it easier for iCloud users to transfer their images and videos to Google Photos. The ability is made possible using a newly launched Apple service for iCloud users, one similar to the transfer option Facebook offers for shuttling content to a Google account. Images transferred to Google Photos will remain available in the user's iCloud account.
Google Recorder got a bump this week with a web interface for search. This means the Google Recorder system is an audio recording and playing interface with a cloud-based storage system. This makes it effectively the same as Google Photos. At the moment, the official Google Recorder app is only supposed to work on Google Pixel smartphones.
Although it is far from conceding defeat, some have considered the shuttering of Stadia's first-party game development studio as a moment of weakness. Naturally, its competitors in that still young market are taking the opportunity to show their strength. NVIDIA finally published its long list of GeForce NOW supported titles and Amazon Luna has gone invite-free on Fire TV devices. Microsoft's Project xCloud, now formally Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Cloud Gaming Streaming Service, is also stepping up with a few developments coming to subscribers soon.
When Google launched its Google Photos cloud storage, not to be confused with the app of the same name, it was hailed as the ultimate way to save space on your phone and preserve your digital memories almost forever. It came with a rather generous offer of nearly unlimited photo storage space, provided they uploaded only in High Quality. Nothing lasts forever, as they say, and it seems that Google is revising its earlier statements in favor of taking up more space towards a Google One subscription.
This afternoon Xbox services had a few outages and/or issues. This included what Microsoft marked as a "Major Outage" for items like "Account & Profile", "Store & Subscriptions", Multiplayer gaming, and Cloud gaming. Together those basically make up the biggest bits of the online space for Xbox players of multiplayer games - chances are you felt the impact of this set of issues.