Fallout 4 was easily one of the most anticipated releases of 2015, if not of the last few years. Sales and player numbers rolling out over the following week have already confirmed that reality, with Bethesda reporting over 12 million copies shipped between all three platforms, and more than 400,000 people playing concurrently on Steam, breaking the record previously set by Grand Theft Auto V. One impressive metric of success has come from an unexpected source: popular adult content website Pornhub.
According to data shared with VentureBeat, traffic dropped to 10 percent lower than normal starting around 5 a.m. on launch day, November 10, and remained below average until 3 p.m., when Pornhub’s traffic throbbed back to normal, healthy levels, and stayed that way for an impressive three hours, until 6 p.m. Traffic shot up again at 11 p.m., presumably as gamers sought relief after a hard first day in the wasteland. Correlation is not the same as causation, of course, but Pornhub’s own analysts attributed the drop to Fallout 4, and they should know the normal range of traffic better than anyone else.
“We can’t say we’re too surprised with what happened to our traffic during peak gaming hours,” Pornhub VP Corey Price told GamesBeat. “Based on the data, it looks like a huge surge of people decided to indulge in some wasteland wandering by taking the day off of work and school to play, while the rest of the world had to wade through what we assume were the longest hours of work ever in anticipation of some alone time with their consoles.”
Pornhub is among the top 100 most popular websites on the Internet, according to Amazon-owned analytics firm Alexa Internet, so a 10-percent drop is nothing to sneeze at. Pornhub, for its part, doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings about the loss.
“As huge fans of the game, we can’t say we blame anyone for swapping Pornhub time for some Pip-Boy surfing instead,” said Price. “We would have done the same.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.