Xbox Insiders will be the first to check out the new Xbox Game Pass Standard tier. The plan costs just $1 per month for testers, who can also provide feedback, starting today.
Xbox has also clarified its plans for Game Pass Standard, the new tier for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service, and which games will be available for it. In an Xbox Wire post published Tuesday, Xbox Game Pass senior community lead Megan Spurr noted that day-one titles will still only come to the Game Pass Ultimate and PC plans. The Standard tier will only have access to the regular Game Pass catalog. That’s not nothing, but it does mean that if day-one games stay on the service, they might be available on Standard until “up to 12 months later or more.”
Standard is being marketed toward users who want the multiplayer included with the Core plan at $10 per month, but also want a much larger catalog with “hundreds” of games and discounts for $15 per month when it launches. Otherwise, there’s a PC Game Pass plan for $12 per month that comes with access to PC games (including day-one titles) and EA Play, and the Ultimate plan, which is now priced at $20 per month and comes with everything, and is the only tier with cloud gaming.
“We created a new membership option in the Game Pass family to give players more choice in how they discover and play games and provide different prices and plans so players can find what works best for them,” Spurr wrote.
Xbox announced changes to its Game Pass program in July, and that they would go into effect on July 10 for new subscribers. Beyond the new tier structure, it revealed price hikes were coming to all the existing plans, with Ultimate going from $17 to $20 per month. While many saw the price hikes coming eventually, there was a lot of backlash. We’ll have to see if the subscription service remains a good deal when it publicly launches.
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.