Xbox One updates to improve Kinect, multiplayer features

A February update will beef up the Kinect's voice recognition, while another one in March will enhance the console's party and multiplayer features.

Xbox One users can expect two major updates to hit their consoles over the coming weeks.
Revealed by Xbox Corporate Vice President Marc Whitten in a blog on Wednesday, the first update will launch on February 11 with several fixes and features. Whitten promises improvements to the Kinect's voice recognition so it can better respond to your commands. Unspecified stability and product updates are also part of the package, as are behind-the-scenes enhancements for developers.
More specifically, Xbox One users will be able to view and manage their storage space, choose the order in which certain content loads, and monitor updates as they install. A battery power indicator will show you how much life is left on your controller. And you'll be able to use a USB keyboard with your console.
Scheduled for March 4, the second update is designed to prepare the Xbox One for the launch of "Titanfall," an online, multiplayer game. As such, the update will offer new features and improvements related to the console's party and multiplayer features.
In his blog, Whitten didn't address specific complaints from Xbox One owners, who have griped about installation issues, video playback bugs, and missing features. But he did indicate that more updates will be on the way.
"This post is the first of many announcements and sneak peeks at features in the system updates," Whitten said. "We've been carefully listening to your feedback and look forward to delivering many new features that will make Xbox One even better. We're just getting started and can't wait to share more information in the coming weeks."

Smartphone surprise success Flappy Bird earns $50K per day

The free smartphone game for iOS and Android that's sucking up all of your spare time is also earning an astounding $50,000 in daily ad revenue.

Flappy Bird, the newest and most savagely addicting smartphone game to have taken the mobile market by storm, is earning $50,000 in ad revenue each day, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen revealed Wednesday in an interview with The Verge.

While that's nothing compared with the insane $850,000 Candy Crush Saga -- the App Store's longtime leader in the top grossing charts -- earns UK developer King per day, it's certainly nothing to scoff at for a non-freemium game that was uploaded in May 2013, last updated in September, and remained virtually invisible for months. Flappy Bird relies on slightly distracting banner ads at the top and bottom of the screen to earn revenue. Nguyen disclosed that he has no intention of changing up that formula.
"Flappy Bird has reached a state where anything added to the game will ruin it somehow, so I'd like to leave it as is," he said. "I will think about a sequel but I'm not sure about the timeline." And changes to the game would indeed throw off its supremely simplistic design. After all, there's only one mechanic -- tap to fly -- and one uniform and randomly generated obstacle that you must fly through, and never touch or else you lose and must start over, an impulse that is alarmingly hard to deny.
It appears to be exactly that kind of design strategy -- a pixelated art style applied to universally known game mechanics that Nguyen's DotGears Studio has used before -- that has turned a simple, ad-based tapping game inspired by Super Mario Bros. into a phenomenon. "The reason Flappy Bird is so popular is that it happens to be something different from mobile games today, and is a really good game to compete against each other," Nguyen said. "People in the same classroom can play and compete easily because [Flappy Bird] is simple to learn, but you need skill to get a high score."
Other tidbits from Nguyen's rare interview: Flappy Bird has been download upwards of 50 million times and has earned 47,000 reviews on the App Store, many of which are hilarious five-star condemnations of the game's propensity to rip an addiction-fueled black hole in our collective conscious through which all our free time and pointless frustration seem to travel toward.
I've written here about Flappy Bird and its astoundingly genius -- and manipulative -- design, and it sounds like the app has no intention of slowing down its relentless grind to pop culture infamy. Since it secured the No. 1 spot on the App Store and Google Play Store late last month, numerous media outlets have flocked to explain our fascination with failure, mind-numbing difficulty, and titles that push us to the limits of friendly competition in the Facebook-fueled smartphone game score wars: "Why The Heck Is Everyone Playing Flappy Bird?"; "Everyone is playing Flappy Bird and no one knows why"; and "The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird."
It's not long before we'll have another taste of Nguyen's talents, as the developer said he'll be putting out his simple take on the jetpack endless runner, made popular by games like Jetpack Joyride. Maybe this time we'll all know what we're getting into by downloading a DotGears game. Then again, that's no indication that this will stop it from becoming another fire we can't stop fueling.