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Loot box laws reportedly keep Diablo Immortal out of 2 countries - Polygon

Posted: 31 May 2022 02:49 PM PDT

Diablo Immortal, Blizzard Entertainment's free-to-play Diablo game, is set to launch on Windows PC and mobile Wednesday. But it'll reportedly stay offline in two European countries: Belgium and the Netherlands.

That's because of those countries' strict loot box laws, according to a report from GamesIndustry.biz and Dutch website Tweakers. A Blizzard support worker also reportedly told a Reddit user that it's due to gambling restrictions. Previously, Blizzard has simply removed loot box systems from the Belgian releases of its games, like Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm. Representatives have said that move is meant to comply with the Belgian Gaming Commission's rules. But instead choosing not to bring Diablo Immortal to Belgium and the Netherlands might be a hint about how enmeshed those systems are in this game.

Blizzard has not responded to Polygon's request for comment.

Blizzard showed some of Diablo Immortal's cosmetic and customization options for the mobile game in March. It said Diablo Immortal's new Class Change system would help support this, with plans "to roll out a new cosmetic set for all classes each month," each of which match the Battle Pass theme. Battle passes are a staple of free-to-play games, wherein players must purchase the pass to unlock rewards for playing.

Blizzard has said, however, that all of Diablo Immortal's customizable gear will be available to earn through play rather than only through purchases.

Like Belgium, the Netherlands has also previously ruled against loot boxes in games, specifically in FIFA 21's Ultimate Team mode. But that ruling was overturned in 2022, in a court case that decided card packs were not considered gambling under Dutch law.

Diablo Immortal, first announced at BlizzCon 2018, was developed by Blizzard and NetEase. The game was delayed to 2022 in August 2021 following feedback from the game's alpha testing periods.

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Updated Surface Laptop Go leaks in retailer ad, promises big GPU performance boost - Ars Technica

Posted: 31 May 2022 09:58 AM PDT

Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go.
Jeff Dunn

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn't been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.

Intel's 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go's hardware isn't very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we've seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.

Though it's almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop's i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain't, but, especially at the screen's native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.

Our main complaints about the original Laptop Go were mostly about the base model, which included just 4GB of RAM and 64GB of slow eMMC storage—not nearly enough, even for a budget system. The versions with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB or 256GB NVMe SSD all felt much better to use. We don't know what the base configuration of the updated Laptop Go will look like, but the retail listing suggests that it will still top out at 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (though the current Laptop Go's SSD is user-replaceable, with a little effort).

We don't know when the new Laptop Go will be available, if this leak is accurate, though a leaked retail listing suggests that we could see the refresh sooner rather than later. Using an older CPU and reusing most components from the older Laptop Go will hopefully help keep costs down and reduce supply chain-related issues, though.

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