Microsoft intends to launch a new app store with games for smartphones based on Android and iOS. This will happen next year if regulators approve a deal to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. As Xbox head Phil Spencer said at the Game Developers Conference, this will allow Xbox and content to be offered both from Microsoft itself and from partners at any devices.

“We want to be able to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third party partners on any screen anyone wants to play.‘ Spencer explained. He clarified that at the moment this cannot be done on mobile devices, but the company wants to “build a world” in which “such devices will be open.”

Apparently, we are talking about new rules by which Apple and Google should allow the use of third-party app stores on their mobile platforms.

As for the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, this is opposed by Sony. If the deal does go through, it would allow Xbox developers to increase competition on the “biggest platform people play on,” smartphones, of course. After all, Microsoft plans to fill the lack of mobile games with Activision Blizzard projects.

Spencer has not yet announced the launch date of the store, so it remains to be seen.

A user named keijiro introduced a very interesting concept – the ChatGPT deep learning model in the Unity editor for creating games. With this system, the generation of game scenes and environments has become easier, since you only need to set a text query. The project is called AICommand.

At the same time, the author honestly admits that this is only a concept, not a finished product, the whole system does not always correctly understand requests, which will lead to errors in the game. However, in general, this is a rather curious tool that can potentially improve the work of game designers.

The author notes that Unity version 2022.2 or newer is required to work, no other requirements are given. The project itself is available on GitHub.

Note that earlier another generative one has already been able to replace musicians, creating music based on images.

The Retroid project introduced the Pocket Flip foldable game console. The novelty technically repeats the well-known portable game console Retroid Pocket 3+, but at the same time it is made in a folding case.

Pocket Flip received a touch screen with a diagonal of 4.7 inches and a resolution of 1334 x 750 pixels, an SoC with two Arm Cortex-A75 and six Cortex-A55 cores at 2.0 GHz, an Arm Mali-G52 GPU and 4 GB of RAM.

Built-in flash memory – 128 GB. The operating system is Android 11, supplemented by emulators of various gaming systems – Dreamcast, PSP, Nintendo 64, Playstation 2, Wii and GameCube. So the console is compatible with a wide variety of classic games.

The battery capacity was 5000 mAh, there are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters, USB-C, a standard headphone jack, and a Mini-HDMI video output. The weight of the console is 270 grams, dimensions – 139 x 82 x 25.4 mm.

Pre-sales start on March 21, the price is from 150 to 165 dollars. Deliveries of new items – from April 10.