Call of Duty’s development budget ballooned by $250 million between 2015 and 2020 to an eye-watering $700 million

Games are only ever getting more expensive to make. It’s a truth noted by game developers, called a “death sentence” by former publishing chairmen, and conveniently cited by studio executives as they explain why they need to lay off another 200 employees. Despite the universal agreement that game development costs are rising, we rarely see…

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Facebook and Instagram are ditching fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes system inspired by X: ‘Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased,’ Zuckerberg says

Mark Zuckerberg says social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are going to “get back to our roots” by removing fact checkers and replacing them with a “Community Notes” system modelled after the one used by Elon Musk’s X. Facebook has implemented a variety of “complex systems” over the years to address the spread of harmful…

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Path of Exile player casually posts mind-blowing collection of ultra-rare and out-of-print items, including a ring there’s only four copies of in the world

Someone decided to drop a live hand grenade in the Path of Exile subreddit yesterday when they posted a screenshot of one of the most incredible collections ever amassed in gaming. Somehow, some way, user Present-Plankton-734 has put together a complete set of every discontinued or altered item that’s ever been released in the game,…

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Call of Duty’s $28 Squid Game skins are the perfect crossover for our capitalist dystopia, and Activision knows exactly what it’s doing

It wasn’t long after the first series of Squid Game aired that we started to see its unsubtle anti-capitalist message twisted by the very types of people it attempted to skewer, and just as quickly came the takes mocking the executives, marketers and corporations for their lack of self-awareness. But as ever, the joke is…

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An Elden Ring player has promised to fight Messmer every day with a new weapon until FromSoftware releases Elden Ring: Nightreign

One Elden Ring player who goes by chickensandwich420 decided to start the monumental task of taking on Messmer from Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree every single day with a new weapon and without getting hit until Elden Ring: Nightreign releases (via TheGamer). “Originally, I was gonna do different FromSoft bosses from all games (since,…

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Corsair heard you like screens and PC cases so it made a new screen for your PC case that you can also use as a, er, screen

As epistemological endeavours go, the philosophical consideration of what, precisely, constitutes an actual PC monitor as opposed to a mere status screen is indeed a noble calling. Which presumably is why Corsair has cooked up this slightly silly new 14.5-inch display, the new Xeneon Edge—for the sheer intellectual giddiness of it all. Anyway, clocking in…

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