Korean pop girl group Blackpink won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Metaverse Performance in PUBG Mobile. The category had over 320 million votes, according to MTV, and the group’s virtual concert, Blackpink: The Virtual, garnered the most votes.
MTV introduced Best Metaverse Performance as a new category to the VMAs last month to honor the virtual concerts that were held in video games in recent years, especially as a result of live in-person concerts getting postponed or canceled altogether due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, an MTV spokesperson told ITK (via The Hill) that the network moved to include the category in the awards after seeing an increase in artists interacting with fans through gaming — an achievement Fortnite can take the most credit for thanks to the Astronomical concert by Travis Scott in 2020 — not to mention as an attempt to draw in younger audiences.
“We saw the opportunity to highlight and honor some of the best, most impactful executions of this — and celebrate artists who have found creative ways to use these spaces — which led to the addition of Best Metaverse Category this year,” the spokesperson said.
Five other artists and groups were nominated for this Best Metaverse Performance, including Blackpink’s fellow K-pop group BTS for their performance in Minecraft (which streamed on YouTube), Ariana Grande for her Rift Tour concert in Fortnite, Twenty One Pilots for their concert in Roblox, Charlie XCX for also hosting a concert in Roblox, and Justin Bieber for his performance on Wave, a virtual reality platform that hosts immersive interactive concerts by popular artists.
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.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.