With A Gamer Prince And Oil Billions Saudi Turns To ESports

onth Wearing headphones and anti-sweat finger sleeves, gamers from eight countries guided gun-toting avatars through a battle royale in the Saudi capital, as cheering onlookers watched the action on a b

Sony on Thursday introduced its PlayStation Stars loyalty program for PS5 and PS4 gamers. It'll be free to join, and players will be able to earn loyalty points by completing a variety of campaigns and activities. Players can choose from a catalog of options to redeem points, including PlayStation Network wallet funds and pkvgames select PlayStation Store products.

tions. Those paltry sales figures are partly due to the Google phone's limited availability, with the Pixel 5 sold in less than 10 countries as the tech giant has focused its smartphone investment on software rather than its own

Campaigns will include PlayStation's "Monthly Check-In" campaign, where you can earn points just for playing any game on your console. Other activities will require you to win tournaments or unlock trophies to earn points -- or even be the first player in your local time zone to make it to platinum for a blockbuster title (which indicates that a player has achieved 100% completion in that game).

"This is the last major market in the world, where you can see a free for all between Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance on one hand, and the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Netflix on the other," said Joe Ravitch, Raine's co-founder and partner.

phone. First introduced in 2016, the Pixel was a late-comer to the portable phone trend, arriving nearly a decade after Apple's iPhone and seven years after Samsung's Galaxy model, the two products that dominate today

There's still a long way to go, but it aims to end the disposal of toxic batteries at landfill sites and recover valuable elements that are in limited supply: copper, cobalt, nickel, manganese and the so-called metal of the decade, lithium.

"We recognise this has presented issues for the recycling industry as it scales up and adjusts to a role in product stewardship with its increased focus on transparency and accountability," he wrote in a report on the scheme's first six months of operation.

The scheme is focused on making it ultra-convenient for Australian consumers to recycle batteries and drastically reduce the estimated 90 per cent of batteries that wound up in landfill before the scheme began.

nalys. Maurice Klaehne of Counterpoint Research said that "Google certainly has the capability and resources to become a major smartphone player, but that is not Pixel's strategy," noting that growing Android remains Google's main

Digital collectibles are also on their way to the PS5 via the Stars program. Collectibles could be figurines of iconic characters -- think Solid Snake or Ratchet & Clank -- or they could be representations of famous Sony devices throughout history. 

orld." Gaming is also expected to be a major component of headline-grabbing development projects like the Red Sea megacity NEOM, with its planned 170-kilometre-long (105 miles) twin skyscrapers known as
Games developers, publishers and distributors were asked whether the deal would affect their bargaining power regarding the terms for selling console and PC games via Microsoft's Xbox and its cloud game streaming service Game Pass.

mming. "One of the most amazing things for me is at our recent event, at Gamers8, the amount of young Saudi players who came up to me and said, 'We always loved watching these things, but we never thought we would have it here,'" he

Korea. Much like with Formula One and professional golf, the world's biggest oil exporter has in recent years leveraged its immense wealth to assert itself on the eSports stage, hosting glitzy conferences and snapping up established tournament o

creen. The PUBG Mobile tournament was part of Gamers8, a summer festival spotlighting Saudi Arabia's emergence as a global eSports dynamo -- one that officials hope can compete with powerhouses like China and So

BRUSSELS, Oct 6 (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators are asking games developers whether Microsoft will be incentivised to block rivals' access to "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard's best-selling games, according to an EU document seen by Reuters.

"This growth is also leading to concerns about the impact of new energy systems on the long-term availability of resources and the economic and environmental impacts of the extraction and use of critical metals and other elements.

The PlayStation Stars program will launch later this year, though an exact time frame hasn't been provided yet. CNET reached out to PlayStation, but the gaming giant didn't immediately respond for comment.
Regulators also wanted to know if there would be sufficient alternative suppliers in the market following the deal and also in the event Microsoft decides to make Activision's games exclusively available on its Xbox, its Games Pass and its cloud game streaming services.