EA employees brace for the worst under Saudi ownership: ‘Hard to feel good about being bought out by a regime that’s very much at odds with progressive society’

Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Electronic Arts, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, officially closed earlier this month. With that deal done, a new Game Developer report has found that an awful lot of employees are expecting much more stringent control over what kinds of games they are and are not allowed to make….

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Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith launches a new studio and it literally has the word ‘Immersive’ in the name

Former Arkane Austin studio director Harvey Smith, known for his work on games including Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Dishonored, has joined with executive producer Ben Horne to launch a new studio called Black Pony Immersive. The new operation features “an elite development team” built around personnel from Arkane, Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition,…

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Kioxia Exceria Pro G2 NVMe SSD review

I vehemently dislike reviewing laptops. I know that’s a weird sentence to start an SSD review off with, but humor me for a second. Basically, the configuration you get is never correct. You go “oh hi X manufacturer, this laptop looks great, can you send me a sample for review?” and they go “yeah, sure,…

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Copilot was bamboozled into revealing how to hack itself, security researchers claim: ‘Copilot wasn’t breached; it was played’

There’s something really grating about Copilot’s cheery demeanour. It’s so eager to please, so happy to help, that I simply don’t respect it. However, even I feel sorry for the AI tool after learning that security researchers managed to hoodwink it into revealing details of how to hack itself—all by keeping the AI talking long…

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Take-Two’s former AI guy is, in a twist, skeptical about AI now: ‘The guy should be selling you the gold if he’s actually got the gold’

Take-Two Interactive, the publisher who oversees studios like Rockstar and Gearbox, had an AI guy. ‘Had’ being the operative word, seeing as he, and a decent chunk of its then-AI team, were laid off around a year after he took on the role. Dicken was previously a data scientist at Zynga, before becoming its director…

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Keychron K8 Ultra 8K review

Keychron has carved out a wonderful niche in the now admittedly overcrowded mechanical keyboard space for offering fantastic all-round keyboards with all the features and robustness you could want for a surprisingly affordable price, given what’s on offer. The new K8 Ultra 8K might feel like I’m parroting a lot of the same thoughts as…

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