Mobile game insiders predict the biggest trends of 2019

Technologies, Business

Article | August 3, 2022

Movie producers often find themselves negotiating with talent and crew members, and/or their production union representatives, over pay and benefits. But a group of 108 producers flipped the script Thursday in announcing they were looking to form a union of their own.Higher minimum pay and health benefits were cited as the two major reasons. While the group, called the Producers Union, boasts some heavy hitters such as Chris Moore (Manchester by the Sea) and Rebecca Green (It Follows), they made it clear that the traditional image of a Hollywood producer is misleading. Many are just getting by, project to project, looking for a breakout hit to up their quote. According to a survey released this year, 41% of producers made less than $25,000 in the pre-pandemic boom times of 2019. The Producers Union has developed a constitution with provisions for dues and diversity initiatives, with the aim of eventually negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with distributors and other film financiers. Previous efforts by producers to unionize have been thwarted by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board, according to Variety, as the NLRB saw them as supervisors and employers – which creates a high barrier to organizing.

Technologies, Virtualization

Article | August 2, 2022

Do you get headaches or feel nauseous while using VR headsets? About 20% of people do. Even if VR headsets don’t cause you physical discomfort, you might feel that your virtual worlds seem flat..That’s because they are flat. VR headsets using close-to-eye displays rely on lenses. While a lot of cool technology goes into them, they really work a lot like television or computer screens. Advancements like eye-tracking and autofocus try to fix these problems. But, they’ll never work. At least not according to Doug Magyari. Magyari and Immy, his company based in Troy, Michigan, believe that they have the solution: VR headsets that don’t use lenses.

Technologies, Virtualization

Article | July 27, 2022

As we all start to come out of the pandemic and its effects, we see distributed workflows being the normal standard of operations more and more. Distributed workflows go hand in hand with cloud production where we are not dependent on a physical rack room of gear. Due to the chip shortages, we are definitely seeing in the audio industry an acceleration in software designed solutions. More and more solutions are going to depend on common computing infrastructure in order to handle the ever increasing demand of products that just simply cannot be manufactured. This change is only going to strengthen the move to the cloud and the distributed workflow in audio and video production. Working with cloud-based production brings so much more flexibility to the table. Flexibility in design, flexibility in costs, and flexibility in staffing. With the distributed workflow model, we simplify so many of our logistics for an event. We will see more opportunities where we can use our best talent for the position multiple times a week instead of wasting a day or two traveling to a site. The bigger part of all of this change is the higher quality of life our employees can enjoy. We made this change to a distributed workflow almost 5 years ago and it has resulted in happier employees along with more productivity. The pandemic accelerated the process to the masses. Cloud workflows along with distributed workers where possible are here to stay.

Article | June 18, 2020

For online gamers, in-game purchases made to buy special swords, guns, or other add-ons to play their adventure, warfare, and other games are one-time, non-transferable investments that lock them into their pretend worlds. That's something companies like Polyient Games want to change by registering those purchases using blockchain and transforming the previously one-way transactions into liquid assets which are transferable for cash.