Month: May 2021

Enlarge / One of Waymo's sensor-studded Jaguar I-Paces observes a pedestrian crossing the road in front of it. (credit: Waymo)

The day when robotaxis roam the streets of San Francisco looking for fare-paying customers is getting closer. This week, Reuters reported that both Waymo and Cruise have applied to California's Department of Motor Vehicles for permits to deploy driverless vehicles. The permit on its own isn't sufficient to begin operating a commercial robotaxi service, but it is an important milestone on the way to achieving that.

For several months now, Waymo has operated a fully driverless commercial taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. But as Ars alum Tim Lee wrote recently, "Suburban Phoenix is a terrible place to run a taxi service."

A sun-blessed suburb in the Southwest, designed with the car in mind as the primary mode of transport, is as close to easy mode for an autonomous vehicle as it's possible to get, outside the confines of private test tracks or a gigantic retirement village. That in turn means that the Phoenix suburbs have limited value when it comes to teaching an autonomous vehicle how to cope with the big bad world. And since having a car is virtually a prerequisite for living in a suburb like Chandler, the people who live there don't need to use taxis often.

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  This is a familiar text crawl. [credit: BioWare / EA ]

Roughly 60 hours ago, EA and BioWare dumped all 103GB of the upcoming Mass Effect Legendary Edition into my inbox. Then, they told me the embargo would lift today. I proceeded to chug a concentrated energy drink cocktail of Bawls, Red Bull, and lukewarm coffee grounds while taping my eyelids open so I could bring you a full review of all three touched-up Mass Effect games. Every romance option, every side quest, every unnecessarily rude conversation-wheel option: Sure, let's shotgun the whole thing like an M-11 Wraith in ME3.

...or, uh, maybe not.

Clearly, that was not enough turnaround time for a "full" review. And a full review is arguably unnecessary anyway, since you don't need us to tell you that the source games in question are very, very good. Yet EA is otherwise letting us run wild with MELE coverage starting right now, ahead of the remastered trilogy's retail launch tomorrow. So I've found enough time to go through Ars-caliber tests of the package's technical makeup, putting everything through the paces on multiple PCs and Xbox consoles.

Monopoly control is a hot topic in the games industry these days. Lawsuits against Apple, Valve, and Sony all take slightly different tacks in arguing that these companies exercise unfair monopoly control over their platforms' market for downloadable games.

Each suit also argues that this monopoly control leads to higher game prices for consumers. Platform holders charge higher commission fees than they would in a truly competitive environment, the arguments go, and those higher-than-normal publishing costs are passed on to consumers via higher-priced games.

There's something intuitively appealing to the idea of game publishers trying to attract more market share by "passing on the savings" of lower storefront commissions by lowering the asking price for their games. In practice, though, prices for the same title tend to remain consistent across platforms, regardless of the competing platform holders' specific revenue cuts.