| Game Developer’s Average Salary Down From 2012, According to Gamasutra Survey Posted: 22 Jul 2014 02:16 PM PDT  Results cover indie and salaried game developers
If you have been wondering whether or not becoming a game developer is a career path worth pursuing, you might want to take a look at what the average pay is like. Gamasutra has posted the results of its annual Game Developer Salary Survey, with some interesting statistics based on the response from 4,000 developers worldwide. The survey was conducted in May 2014 and covers game developers over various disciplines that include audio and design for 2013. According to Gamasutra's findings, the average yearly pay for a salaried game developer, across all disciplines in the U.S., was around $83,060 in 2013, which is down 2 percent from 2012. Meanwhile, Canadians were up 9 percent, with an average of $71,445 USD, whereas European developers remained flat at $46,232 USD. Breaking it down to the various jobs in the U.S. saw people in business and management earn an average salary of $101,572, audio professionals earned $95,682, programmers $93,251, producers $82,286, artists and animators $74,349, and quality assurance testers were paid an average of $54,833. The survey also covered the indie side of things, on a worldwide basis, which revealed that non-salaried, solo indie game developers earned an average of $11,812, which is down 49 percent from 2012. On the other hand, individual members that were part of an indie team averaged $50,833, which is up 161 percent. If you are interested in reading all the results from the survey, then you can view it over at Gamasutra (PDF). Follow Sean on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Intel Launches Business Class Solid State Drive Pro 2500 Series Posted: 22 Jul 2014 12:01 PM PDT  Affordable storage packed with advanced security features
Intel announced a new addition to its solid state drive (SSD) family, though it's not intended for home consumers. Instead, Intel's new SSD Pro 2500 Series is intended to bring security features and lower cost of ownership to businesses in need of the kind of "blazing fast" performance SSDs afford. They'll get that with SSD Pro 2500 family, which comes in capacities ranging from 120GB to 480GB. Performance teeters on the upper end of the spectrum with sequential read and write speeds rated at up to 540MB/s and 490MB/s, respectively. Random 4KB read performance checks in at up to 48,000 IOPS, while writes ramp up to 80,000 IOPS, Intel says. In addition to respectable performance metrics, Intel says the SSD Pro 2500 Series offers five low power modes for long battery life. The lower power states can reduce idel power consumption by more than 90 percent compared to a typical mobile hard disk drive. The drives also feature hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and come in both M.2 and 2.5-inch form factors, all backed by 5-year warranties. No word yet on price. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Newegg Daily Deals: Samsung 840 Evo 1TB SSD, Intel Core i5 4690K, and More! Posted: 22 Jul 2014 11:43 AM PDT |
| Bragging Rights: PC Gaming Market Maintains Sales Lead Over Consoles Posted: 22 Jul 2014 10:40 AM PDT  PC gaming hardware is a $21.5 billion market
At the end of the day, we realize it doesn't matter if you get your gaming fix on a PC, console, tablet, or whatever -- we'll fist bump any gamer, regardless of platform. That said, we're of course partial to PC gaming ourselves, and as it turns out, our platform of choice is still the dominant one. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the PC gaming hardware market is more than twice as large as the console gaming hardware market. JPR defines PC gaming hardware as personal computers, upgrades, and peripherals used for gaming. With that mind, the PC gaming hardware market stands at $21.5 billion, which is big enough to lap the console gaming hardware market, and then some. "We continue to see a shift in casual console customers moving to mobile. While this is also occurring in the lower end PC gaming world, more money is being directed to mid and high range PC builds and upgrades by gamers," says Ted Pollak, Senior Gaming Analyst at JPR. "Committed PC gamers are generally not interested in pure content consumption platforms. They are power users and pay thousands for the ability to play games at very high settings and then do business, video/photo editing, content creation and other tasks with maximum horsepower at their disposal in a desktop ergonomic environment." Moving beyond dollars and cents, the PC platform has an obvious power advantage. If you assemble a machine with an enthusiast grade CPU, high end GPU, SSD, and fast memory, it will "absolutely trounce the computing power and gaming capabilities of the newest console generation," Jon Peddie says. And he's right. While the newest consoles are still pushing pixels at 1080p, high end (and ultra expensive) PC platforms are pushing the envelope at 4K. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Asus's RT-AC87 is Industry’s First Wave 2 802.11ac Consumer Router Posted: 22 Jul 2014 10:15 AM PDT  Hello faster speeds and MU-MIMO
After teasing the industry with a preview earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Asus today officially launched its RT-AC87 dual-band wireless router. It's the first Wave 2 802.11ac router for consumers and it's powered by Quantenna's QSR1000 4x4 Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) chipset, which gives your home network a bit of future-proofing. What's special about MU-MIMO is that it allows for multiple streams to be beamed to multiple clients simultaneously, up to eight in theory though Quantenna's QSR1000 chipset supports 4 spatial streams. This is a boon for crowded networks, which pretty much applies to everyone these days -- think about a typical family of four, each with a PC, tablet, and smartphone, plus whatever other devices you have connected wirelessly. The rub is that you need compatible adapters to take advantage of the technology, but you have to start somewhere. Asus equipped the RT-AC87 with four external antennas and Universal Beamforming support for added range and signal reliability. The AC2400 designation translates into up to 1.73Gbps on the 5GHz band in 802.11ac mode and up to 600Mbps via 802.11n. The RT-AC87 will be available "shortly" for $270 MSRP. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| ARM Strengthens Bottom Line Through Licensing Expansion Posted: 22 Jul 2014 09:44 AM PDT  More than 1,100 companies license ARM technology
While AMD and Intel were watching from the sidelines as the market transitioned to mobile, ARM was busy "earning and burning, snapping necks and cashing checks," to borrow a line from Step Brothers. It's a bit more competitive today, though ARM was able to gain a foothold in the mobile market and continues to ride the momentum. As such, ARM said it added 41 licensed customers to its portfolio, bringing the total number of licenses signed to more than 1,100. ARM reported total revenue of $309.6 million in the second quarter of 2014, up 17 percent from the $264.3 million it collected in the same quarter a year ago, and up 9 percent year-on-year. That resulted in a profit of $86.7 million for the quarter, and $126.7 million for the first half of the year. "Our continued strong licensing performance reflects the intent of existing and new customers to base more of their future products on ARM technology. The 41 processor licenses signed in Q2 were driven by demand for ARM technology in smart mobile devices, consumer electronics, and embedded computing chips for the Internet of Things, and include further licenses for ARMv8-A and Mali processor technology," ARM CEO Simon Segars said in a statement. "This bodes well for growth in ARM's medium and long term royalty revenues." As more manufacturers jumped into mobile, ARM saw its licensing revenue jump 42 percent compared to last year. The company also shipped 2.7 billion ARM-based shipped in Q2, up 11 percent versus the same quarter a year ago. Shipment growth has been especially strong in enterprise networking and microcontroller markets, ARM said. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Sony's Walkman ZX1 Growing in Popularity Despite $700 Price Tag Posted: 22 Jul 2014 08:42 AM PDT  This isn't the Walkman you grew up with
Sony can be considered a pioneer in the portable music player business, and if you lived through the cassette tape era, then there's a good chance you owned a Walkman. Believe it or not, Sony continued to manufacture cassette-based Walkmans in several different markets all the way up through near the end of 2010. While nowhere near as popular as they were in the 1980s an 1990s, Sony's Walkman brand is seeing a bit of a resurgence courtesy of its NWZ-ZX1, a high-resolution audio player for consumers with deep pockets. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Sony's ZX1 is a premium gadget that, despite its heavy $700 price tag, is selling relatively well in Japan, which is not something that can be said about Sony's previous high-end electronics. It quickly sold out after making a debut in Japan and has since launched in Europe and other parts of Asia. No launch date has yet been set for the U.S. "The message for our designers and engineers was: please create a good product without worrying about the cost," said Kenji Nakada, Sony's sound product planner. Sony's ZX1 is a comparatively heavy device at 139 grams. It has 128GB of internal storage and plays 24-bit, 193kHz FLAC audio files. It also boasts a 4-inch touchscreen display with an 854x480 resolution, 5-band equalizer, dynamic normalizer, and more. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Nvidia Shield Tablet Revealed Posted: 22 Jul 2014 06:01 AM PDT 8-inch tablet, Wi-Fi Direct controller, and Tegra K1 After many rumors of a new Shield device, Nvidia has revealed its new Shield Tablet. Powered by Android, the 8-inch gaming tablet succeeds Nvidia's original Shield handheld gaming device, which is now dubbed the Shield Portable. 
Introducing the Nvidia Shield Tablet At the heart of the tablet is the company's new top-tier mobile SoC, the Nvidia Tegra K1. The quad-core ARM chip features 192 CUDA cores with a 2.3GHz max clock speed. K1 supports a variety of APIs and features which include OpenGL ES 3.1, AEP, OpenlGL 4.4, DX12, Tessellation, CUDA 6.0. Nvidia claims that the K1 can do all of this while consuming less than two watts of power. Play the video above to see an Nvidia rep give us a demo of the Shield Tablet. For the display, the Shield Tablet uses a 1900x1200-resolution IPS panel. In terms of content, Nvidia has created a new Shield hub which allows you to access your game library, purchase more games, or to launch other media apps. You'll also be able to stream PC games through the hub. The Shield tablet will support both Nvidia GameStream (local PC streaming) and Nvidia Grid (remote PC streaming). In addition, Nvidia has partnered up with Twitch to allow you to stream your Shield gameplay sessions to the social gaming site. 
Lots of users said they wanted a bigger screen on the Shield so Nvidia decided to detach the screen from the controller. Of course, all of this wouldn't sound the least bit appealing if you didn't have a controller to game with (because playing real games with tablet controllers is just…eww.). Luckily, the Shield Tablet is not only compatible with Bluetooth controllers, but Nvidia is also making a new Wi-Fi Direct controller for the device. The company claims that the Wi-Fi Direct has 2x lower latency than Bluetooth and offers more bandwidth. What will this extra bandwidth allow you to do? For starters, you'll be able to plug in a headphone into the controller. Secondly, you will be able to connect up to four Shield controllers to the tablet. This is ideal for when you plug the Shield Tablet into your HDTV via HDMI while in "Console Mode." While you could use the device as a console of sorts, it is first and foremost a tablet. If you're out and about watching movies, Nvidia says you should be able to expect 10 hours of battery life. Five to six hours is what the company claims you should be able to get out of the device when gaming. What's interesting about the device is that unlike the first Shield which used fans for active cooling, the Shield Tablet is passively cooled. To get away with this, Nvidia installed a thermal shield (pun not intended) to dissipate more heat. This adds about a millimeter of thickness to the device, but fortunately the Shield Tablet isn't unbearably thick to begin with. 
The new Shield controller features a touchpad at the bottom and is much lighter and more comfortable to hold compared to the original Shield. Other features of the device include two 5MP cameras (one on the front and one on the back), an included stylus, an SD card slot, and support for 4K output at 30FPS. In terms of pricing, the Shield Tablet will come in two flavors. The 16GB version will retail for $299, whereas the 32GB LTE version will retail for $399. Unfortunately the controller will be sold separately and will retail for $59. In addition, there will also be a $39 Shield Tablet cover which can also act as a stand. The Shield Tablet launches July 29th in the US and Canada, will release in Europe mid-August, and other regions in the fall. Expect a full review of the tablet soon after we get one in. Are you intrigued about the Shield Tablet? Let us know in the comments below! |
