Two major unions have urged the European Commission (EC) to approve the proposed Microsoft Activision merger on the eve of a scheduled hearing on the matter. A week ago, Microsoft confirmed it has requested a hearing as a last-ditch effort to save the controversial deal.
Unions want regulators to consider the impact of Microsoft Activision merger on employees
Communication Workers of America (CWA) penned a letter to the EC arguing that the deal will have a positive impact on the labor market. CWA initially voiced concerns about the power Microsoft will have on the labor market but later managed to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the company should the acquisition go ahead.
Separately, Europe-based UNI Global Union urged EC to look beyond the impact the deal will have on consumers and consider employees as well. UNI claims that Microsoft will have a positive impact on a labor market rife with poor working conditions.
Regulators have shown little concern over the labor market thus far, understandably because their job is to look at market competition and impact on consumers rather than Activision Blizzard employees.
Critics also pointed out the poor optics considering Microsoft recently laid off 10,000 workers including Xbox employees.
Yet-to-collapse cryptocurrency, EMAX, has just gotten another celebrity in hot water. Short for EthereumMax, the bullshit scheme was promoted on Twitter by former NBA player Paul Pierce, except he rather forgot to say he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing so. As reported by The Verge, he U.S.…
More than six years following the most recent entry in the series, Firaxis has confirmed it’s working on a new Civilization game. The studio didn’t share many details about the new title, but it did say that Ed Beach is the creative director of the project. Beach has more than 15 years of experience working on the franchise, including, most recently, as lead designer of Civilization VI.
Firaxis parent company Take-Two Interactive shared the news this week in a press release announcing a handful of staffing changes at the studio (via Eurogamer). Studio head Steve Martin is leaving Firaxis after serving nearly 17 years as the company’s president, a position he inherited from Firaxis co-founder Jeff Briggs in 2006. Heather Hazen, previously the studio’s chief operating officer, is taking over the day-to-day operations of Firaxis.
“I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to carry on the studio’s storied legacy, beginning with the announcement that Firaxis is in development on the next iteration of the legendary Civilization franchise,” Hazen said. “I’m lucky to be working with some of the best developers in our industry, and we have plans to take the Civilization franchise to exciting new heights for our millions of players around the world.”
On Friday, Firaxis also announced the departure of Jake Solomon. After 23 years, the designer, who was one of the studio’s best-known employees thanks to his work on the XCOM franchise and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, is leaving to pursue new opportunities. "I loved designing tactical turn-based games, but it's time for other, smarter people to push that space forward,” Solomon said on Twitter. “My brain is on fire with a new dream. Time to go chase it."
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The rumors were true: Facebook parent company Meta is preparing to launch a Twitter Blue-like subscription called Meta Verified. On Sunday morning, Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news. He said the subscription service would give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection and direct access to customer support. "This feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services," Zuckerberg said, adding Meta would test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. Meta Verified will cost $15 USD per month when users subscribe through the company's apps on iOS and Android. On the web, where app store commissions don't apply, the service will cost $12 USD per month. The subscription will cover both Instagram and Facebook accounts.
12 bucks a month to be verified on Facebook... I wonder if people will keep that same Twitter Blue outrage energy 😅 pic.twitter.com/ZPJsIHBerO
Users will need need to meet certain eligibility requirements before they can sign up for Meta Verified. Specifically, the company told Engadget the subscription will only be available to users 18 years or older. Meta will also require that potential subscribers share a government-issued ID that matches the profile name and photo on their Facebook or Instagram account. Once you're verified, you can't change your profile name, username, date of birth or photo without going through the verification process again. Accounts that were verified before today's announcement due to their notability will remain verified.
Alongside perks like a blue badge and increased visibility in search, Meta will provide Verified subscribers with 100 free stars, a digital currency they can use to tip creators on Facebook. The subscription also comes with access to exclusive stickers for use in Stories and Reels. Rumors that Meta was preparing to trial a paid verification service started to swirl at the beginning of February when reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi discovered code referencing "paid blue badge" and "identity verification." On early Sunday morning, social media consultant and former Next Web reporter Matt Navarra found that Meta had published an Instagram support page detailing the subscription, only to later take it down before Zuckerberg's Instagram post.
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Some of us are destined to lead successful lives thanks to the circumstances of our birth. Some of us, like attorney Bruce Jackson, are destined to lead such lives in spite them. Raised in New York's Amsterdam housing projects and subjected to the daily brutalities of growing up a black man in America, Jackson's story is ultimately one of tempered success. Sure he went on to study at Georgetown Law before representing some of the biggest names in hip hop — LL Cool J, Heavy D, the Lost Boyz and Mr. Cheeks, SWV, Busta Rhymes — and working 15 years as Microsoft's associate general counsel. But at the end of the day, he is still a black man living in America, with all the baggage that comes with it.
In his autobiography, Never Far from Home(out now from Atria), Jackson recounts the challenges he has faced in life, of which there are no shortage: from being falsely accused of robbery at age 10 to witnessing the murder of his friend at 15 to spending a night in lockup as an adult for the crime of driving his own car; the shock of navigating Microsoft's lillywhite workforce following years spent in the entertainment industry, and the end of a loving marriage brought low by his demanding work. While Jackson's story is ultimately one of triumph, Never Far from Home reveals a hollowness, a betrayal, of the American Dream that people of Bill Gates' (and this writer's) complexion will likely never have to experience. In the excerpt below, Jackson recalls his decision to leave a Napster-ravaged music industry to the clammy embrace of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
In the late 1990s, the digital revolution pushed the music business into a state of flux. And here was Tony Dofat, sitting in my office, apoplectic, talking about how to stop Napster and other platforms from taking the legs out from under the traditional recording industry.
I shook my head. “If they’re already doing it, then it’s too late. Cat’s out of the bag. I don’t care if you start suing people, you’re never going back to the old model. It’s over.”
In fact, lawsuits, spearheaded by Metallica and others, the chosen mode of defense in those early days of the digital music onslaught, only served to embolden consumers and publicize their cause. Free music for everyone! won the day.
These were terrifying times for artists and industry executives alike. A decades-old business model had been built on the premise that recorded music was a salable commodity.
Artists would put out a record and then embark on a promotional tour to support that record. A significant portion of a musician’s income (and the income of the label that supported the artist) was derived from the sale of a physical product: recorded albums (or singles), either in vinyl, cassette, or compact disc. Suddenly, that model was flipped on its head... and still is. Artists earn a comparative pittance from downloads or streams, and most of their revenue is derived from touring, or from monetizing social media accounts whose numbers are bolstered by a song’s popularity. (Publicly, Spotify has stated that it pays artists between $.003 and $.005 per stream. Translation: 250 streams will result in revenue of approximately one dollar for the recording artist.)
Thus, the music itself has been turned primarily into a marketing tool used to entice listeners to the product: concert and festival tickets, and a social media advertising platform. It is a much tougher and leaner business model. Additionally, it is a model that changed the notion that record labels and producers needed only one decent track around which they could build an entire album. This happened all the time in the vinyl era: an artist came up with a hit single, an album was quickly assembled, often with filler that did not meet the standard established by the single. Streaming platforms changed all of that. Consumers today seek out only the individual songs they like, and do it for a fraction of what they used to spend on albums. Ten bucks a month gets you access to thousands of songs on Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music roughly the same amount a single album cost in the pre-streaming era. For consumers, it has been a landmark victory (except for the part about artists not being able to create art if they can’t feed themselves); for artists and record labels, it has been a catastrophic blow.
For everyone connected to the music business, it was a shock to the system. For me, it was provocation to consider what I wanted to do with the next phase of my career. In early 2000, I received a call from a corporate recruiter about a position with Microsoft, which was looking for an in-house counsel with a background in entertainment law — specifically, to work in the company’s burgeoning digital media division. The job would entail working with content providers and negotiating deals in which they would agree to make their content — music, movies, television shows, books — available to consumers via Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. In a sense, I would still be in the entertainment business; I would be spending a lot of time working with the same recording industry executives with whom I had built prior relationships.
But there were downsides, as well. For one thing, I was recently married, with a one-year-old baby and a stepson, living in a nice place in the New York City suburbs. I wasn’t eager to leave them—or my other daughters—three thousand miles behind while I moved to Microsoft’s headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. From an experience standpoint, though, it was almost too good an offer to turn down.
Deeply conflicted and at a crossroads in my career, I solicited advice from friends and colleagues, including, most notably, Clarence Avant. If I had to name one person who has been the most important mentor in my life, it would be Clarence, “the Black Godfather.” In an extraordinary life that now spans almost ninety years, Clarence has been among the most influential men in Black culture, music, politics, and civil rights. It’s no surprise that Netflix’s documentary on Clarence featured interviews with not just a who’s who of music and entertainment industry superstars, but also former US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
In the early 1990s, Clarence became chairman of the board of Motown Records. As lofty a title as that might be, it denotes only a fraction of the wisdom and power he wielded. When the offer came down from Microsoft, I consulted with Clarence. Would I be making a mistake, I wondered, by leaving the music business and walking away from a firm I had started? Clarence talked me through the pros and cons, but in the end, he offered a steely assessment, in a way that only Clarence could.
“Son, take your ass to Microsoft, and get some of that stock.”
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Russia has set a new date for when it will send a rescue ship to the International Space Station to retrieve the three astronauts whose Soyuz return craft was compromised in December. The country’s Roscosmos space agency told AFP on Saturday it is targeting a February 24th launch for MS-23, the uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft that is scheduled to bring back cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, from the International Space Station.
Roscosmos delayed the mission last Monday after Progress 82, a supply ship that had been docked with the ISS since last October, began leaking coolant over the weekend. Petelin, Prokopyev and Rubio flew to the space station in September, and they were supposed to return on the same Soyuz spacecraft that brought them there. In December, however, the spacecraft sprung a leak, due to an apparent meteoroid strike. One month later, Roscosmos announced it would send a second Soyuz craft to retrieve the three astronauts. The timing of the leaks lead to some speculation that a manufacturing issue was at fault for the Soyuz leak, not an errant space rock as Roscosmos had said. Earlier this week, the agency shared images (seen above) showing the location of the coolant leak and reported micrometeoroid strike.
NASA's Jeff Arend references the coolant leak on Progress MS-21, which occurred Saturday. Said no conclusions drawn about its cause. After the uncrewed vehicle undocks tonight it will rotate so astronauts can photograph the damage area before Progress enters Earth's atmosphere.
On Saturday, Roscosmos said it had carefully inspected the rescue ship to ensure it was undamaged and ready for flight. One day earlier, Progress 82 separated from the ISS. Per Space News, video broadcast during the undocking procedure failed to show any obvious signs of damage to the resupply craft. According to NASA, Progress 82 will initiate a deorbit burn at 10:15PM ET tonight. Provided Roscosmos doesn’t delay MS-23’s launch, the spacecraft will arrive at the ISS two days before Space X’s Crew-6 mission is scheduled to launch on February 26th. That flight will bring two NASA astronauts, a United Arab Emirates astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the space station.
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Valve is giving Steam Deck users with slow internet connections or bandwidth caps a new way to install games on their devices. The latest Steam and Steam Deck betas add local network game transfers, a feature that allows you to copy existing files from one PC to another over a local area network. Valve says the tool can reduce internet traffic and lessen the time it takes to install games and updates since you can use it to bypass the need to connect to a Steam content server over the internet.
Hello! We've just shipped a Beta update to Steam and Steam Deck that includes a new feature: Local Network Game Transfers.
This allows Steam users to install games directly from one PC to another over a local network, without having to download and install from the internet. pic.twitter.com/bv9xThZCoS
“Local Network Game Transfers are great for Steam Deck owners, multi-user Steam households, dorms, LAN parties, etc,” the company points out. “No more worries about bandwidth or data caps when all the files you need are already nearby.” Once you’ve installed the new software on your devices, Steam will first check if it can transfer a game installation or set of update files over your local network before contacting a public Steam content server. If at any point one of the devices involved in the transfer is disconnected from your local network, Steam will fall back to downloading any necessary files from the internet.
By default, the feature is set to only work between devices logged into the same Steam account, but you can also transfer files between friends on the same local area network. It’s also possible to transfer to any user on the same network, which is something you would do during a LAN tournament. Valve has published a FAQ with more information about local network game transfers, including details on some of the limitations of the feature, over on the Steam website.
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