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People Can Fly is developing a second AAA game for Square Enix...could it be Outriders 2?

Polish game developer People Can Fly is very busy. The company has expanded to multiple territories and is working on three big new games, one of which is another title for Square Enix.

The studio's recent Q3 2021 financial report confirms two new games are in currently in production for a slated 2024 release: Project Gemini, a new game for Square Enix, and Project Dagger, an RPG action game for Take-Two Interactive. PCF is also working on another new IP that it plans to self-fund and self-publish.

NetEase has funded Nagoshi Studio, a new game development team lead by former Yakuza director Toshihiro Nagoshi.

After 32 years at SEGA, Toshihiro Nagoshi joined up with Chinese games juggernaut NetEase to form a new studio. Like Kojima Productions did with Konami, the new Nagoshi Studio has poached former SEGA and Yakuza developers over to the team.

NetEase's substantial revenues affords Nagoshi more freedom to chase new ideas. NetEase's earnings dwarf those of Nagoshi's previous home; The Chinese games-maker has generated $9.7 billion in from Q1-Q3, which is nearly 4x as much money as SEGA generated throughout the whole FY21 period.

Online-only shooter Outriders may have taken 5 years to develop and ship onto the market.

People Can Fly's recent Q3 2021 financials indicate Outriders may have taken as long as 5 years to make, which isn't unusual for AAA loot-and-shoot video games.

The report confirms People Can Fly signed the multi-year publishing agreement with Square Enix in 2016:

Outriders' post-launch content may extend through 2023 with two big expansions.

Outriders' first major expansion, Worldslayer, is due out in 2022. But it may not be the only expansion People Can Fly has planned for the game.

Worldslayer is expected to propel the online-only looter shooter to new heights. Forbes' Paul Tassi guesses Worldslayer could be Outriders' own version of Reaper of Souls, complete with a new usable class, new zones, and more.

A 24-year-old Canberra, Australia-born cryptocurrency fraudster, has explained why he stole $123 million from investors in a tell-all interview before going to prison for 7 years.

Stefan Qin sat down for a tell-all interview with EST Media to discuss his motives behind stealing $123 million from investors and what the money was spent on. Qin explains that after dropping out of the University of New South Wales in 2016 and moving to China, he began getting into cryptocurrency, where he worked at a crypto exchange. Qin created software and formed his own company Virgill Sigma Fund, which then received millions in funding from investors.

Qin goes on to explain his motivation for scamming investors, citing bullying and harassment that started in school and eventuated into "extreme depression and suicidal tendencies" by the time he entered high school, combined with the pressure of the "Asian community to be as successful as possible at all costs", and the pain he felt from his girlfriend cheating on him whom he was in love, led him to the mindset of deliberately misleading investors.

One of NASA's satellites orbiting Mars captured a stunning view of a Martian crater that serves as more than just a spectacle.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is equipped with a giant camera called the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) that is capable of photographing the surface of Mars in fantastic detail. The above image was snapped by HiRISE on 27 October 2021 and of the crater called Airy-0 (zero). While the image is certainly a spectacle, it also showcases the exact point of zero longitude on Mars.

Notably, the larger crater that the Airy-0 (zero) sits within, dubbed the Airy Crater, originally defined the zero longitude point on Mars, but as higher resolution imaging became available to researchers, the Airy-0 (zero) was selected as a smaller point was required. The University of Arizona writes that "everything is still defined to keep zero longitude centered on this crater", and that longitude can also be measured "using radio tracking of landers such as InSight".

On January 23, a selection of cryptocurrency-based YouTube accounts was hacked, and videos were posted in an attempt to scam audiences.

Cointelegraph has reported that the following YouTube accounts were a victim of a hack; BitBoy Crypto, Altcoin Buzz, Box Mining, Floyd Mayweather, Ivan on Tech. Each of the hacked accounts had a video posted without the creator's permission that instructed viewers to send "USDT/USDC/BNB/ETH" to a wallet address that was in the description of the video in return for a new cryptocurrency called "OWCY".

Michael Gu, the creator behind the YouTube channel "Boxmining" spoke to Cointelegraph and said that it "seems like YouTube might be responsible" as he performed an internal virus sweep on his system that yielded zero results. Additionally, Gu posted on Twitter and said that he has two-factor authentication enabled, leading him to believe YouTube is responsible for the hack.

Since its all-time high of $69,000 in November last year, Bitcoin's price has been on a slow downtrend, with the cryptocurrency now dipping below the $35,000 mark.

The last week in the cryptocurrency market was a bloodbath of red sell candles with only a few select projects managing to make some increases in price. Decrypt reports that at the time of writing its post, Bitcoin was up 1.64% in the last 24 hours, and now as of 12:01 am Monday, January 24, Bitcoin's price is down 0.20% with 30.96% less trading volume. Notably, the cryptocurrency briefly dipped below the $35,000 support on Friday night, with orders being filled at $34,420.

Over a week, Bitcoin and Ethereum have decreased in price by 18.38% and 27.44%, respectively. Compared to all-time highs made back in November of last year, both of the digital assets' prices are significantly down, with some traders and holders pointing towards the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, inflation, and the COVID-19 Omicron variant contributing to the overall downtrend.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched off the surface of Earth on December 25, 2021, and since then, it has been closing in on its destination at the second Lagrange point.

During its journey, Webb has completed the majority of its complicated deployment work that has unfolded the observatory out from a narrow configuration that fit inside of an Ariane 5 rocket to an extremely expensive and powerful space telescope that will be used to attempt to answer some of the biggest questions about the universe.

Webb is now nearing the end of its nearly one million-mile journey to Lagrange point 2, and as NASA explains in a recent blog post, the observatory will perform a correctional burn that will put it into orbit around the Sun. NASA writes that the Webb team have selected Monday, January 24 at 2 pm to fire Webb's thrusters, and to mark the milestone moment in Webb's overall deployment, NASA will be hosting a broadcast and news conference.

NASA has taken to its blog to showcase a spiral galaxy that features a sea of glistening stars blanketed across the galaxy's "face".

NASA explains that the above spiral galaxy is called NGC 3318 and is located approximately 115 million light-years away from Earth within the constellation Vela. The space agency gives a history lesson on the naming of the constellation Vela, writing that Vela was originally part of a much larger constellation previously called Argo Navis, after the fabled ship in Greek mythology built by gods and the hero Jason to take himself and his Argonauts to Colchis to steal the Golden Fleece.

Due to its immense size and nature Argos Navis, it proved to be "impractically large", and was split into three separate parts referred to as Carina (central line of the hull), Puppis (poop deck), and Vela (sail) - each named after a part of the Argo ship. The renaming of the constellation certainly kept its nautical theme, and as NASA points out, the outer edges of the above galaxy "almost resemble a ship's sails billowing in a gentle breeze."

Last week NASA outlined its plan for removing the unwanted debris detected during a failed transfer of a Mars sample to the bit carousel.

Now, the space agency has given an update regarding its recovery process, announcing it has recently claimed two successes. Deputy Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rick Welch writes on the NASA Mars website that the upper two pebbles located in the bit carousel that are believed to have prevented the transfer of the sample have been successfully ejected, and that "most - if not all" of the cored Mars rock from Sample Tube 261.

As with most steps that are taken by Mars rovers they are documented not only for engineers and researchers back on Earth, but for public viewing as well. One of Perseverance's many cameras captured before and after images of the carousel performing rotational tests which caused the rock fragments to be ejected out. Lastly, Perseverance's Mastcam-Z instrument captured a video of the contents within Sample Tube 261 being released onto the surface of Mars.

Saturn's moon Mimas has whacked with an asteroid that has left an 80-mile wide crater to dominate its surface.

The crater has given Mimas a similar look to the iconic planet-destroying weapon called "Death Star" seen throughout the Star Wars franchise. While Mimas certainly isn't a planet-destroying weapon created by Star Wars villains, it has shown signs of having an engine beneath its surface, which has surprised researchers as it was believed the moon was just a frozen chunk of ice and rock.

Planetary scientists published a new study in the journal Icarus that explored the relationship between tidal heating, a process caused by gravity when a moon or planet orbits another celestial body, and Mimas' wobble. Mimas' orbit is very eccentric and only takes 22 hours and 36 minutes to complete one orbit of Saturn. Researchers proposed that tidal heating may have caused the interior of Mimas to heat up, causing ice to melt and form an ocean deep beneath the surface. This ocean could then cause the wobble in Mimas' orbit.

Valve is helping out developers with more funding to research open-source Radeon Linux GPU drivers for the Steam Deck handheld, with more testing of Mesa commits + Radeon GPU drivers.

Charlie Turner, programming consultant for Igalia, created a merge request on FreeDesktop's Mesa site for more dEQP runners. The agency itself "specializes in the growth of innovative projects and solutions" with the new request asking Valve to help with AMD Radeon GPU Linux drive testing, and since the Steam Deck is powered by an AMD RDNA 2-based GPU it makes sense for Valve to commit more resources to Radeon Linux GPU drivers.

"This series proposes to add more dEQP bare-metal runners, sponsored by Valve. For now the runners are conditioned on a selection of users (similar to how freedreno's restricted traces work), since there are not enough machines to hit the runtime targets required for inclusion in the automatic pre-merge pipelines. There's nothing secret about the test loads, the restriction is purely practical for now and any interested user may request access to the runner. A follow-up series will add trace testing runners to the CI, using a similar approach to the above".

NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card is reportedly right around the corner, with the suped-up card packing the GA102 GPU -- the flagship GPU and the fastest gaming GPU that NVIDIA has ever created -- alongside 24GB of ultra-fast GDDR6X memory.

The new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti continues on the GPU dominance that NVIDIA built with its current flagship RTX 3090, offering the same but also changed 24GB of GDDR6X memory. We still have the same 24GB of GDDR6X but it is both faster -- clocked at 21Gbps -- and has a much wider 384-bit memory bus that for the first time ever, has a GeForce GPU pushing over 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

NVIDIA is using the GA102 GPU with 84 SM units that provide a huge 10,752 CUDA cores -- up from the 82 SM units and 10496 CUDA cores on the RTX 3090 -- but there's also next-gen RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM (streaming multi-processor units). The GA102 GPU inside runs at a base GPU clock of 1560MHz, while boost GPU clocks hit 1860MHz. The TDP has been massively increased at 100W

Battlefield 2042 is an absolute mess, where it garnered literally less than 30 minutes of playtime before I stopped playing it and went back to Warzone and more specifically, Rebirth Resurgence... thinking of that, I don't think I even refunded it. Sigh.

Now we have Battlefield insider Tom Henderson tweeting that EA is reported "very disappointed" in how Battlefield 2042 has performed and that the company is "looking at all the options" when it comes to the future of the game. Henderson says that "this is including looking at Free to Play in some capacity".

But I really, really don't see how making a shit game free, in any capacity, will help. I think admitting the game is a mess, opening the game up to the community to mod into something actually playable... admitting your total faults to the community and maybe turning Battlefield 2042 into something that doesn't resemble a digital pile of dog shit.

Steam has amassed a new concurrent user record as PC gaming surges through 2022.

Today Valve's platform is full steam ahead: Steam has now hit a new all-time high of 29,201,174 lifetime concurrent users, up from the previous 28.7 million mark set earlier this month. That's two new records set in the beginning of 2022 alone and the numbers could inflate more as new releases start popping up.

It's worth noting these are users, not people who are in-game. The numbers for actual in-game users is at 8.5 million, so roughly 30% of the people who are logged in are actually playing games.

After 21 years of waiting, D2's mythical Act 6 could finally be released.

Popular Diablo 2 streamer and speedrunner MrLlamaSC may have accidentally outed plans for a new Act 6 in Diablo 2 Resurrected.

"You want standard of heroes to do something? Well when Act 6...," MrLlama said, quickly realizing what he said on a Twitch live stream and deflecting with: "Yeah...that'd be great if they gave us some sort of way to use it."

KeyBanc senior analyst Michael Turits predicts strong revenue growth for both Xbox and Activision-Blizzard by 2023.

Microsoft's $68.7 billion buyout of Activision-Blizzard is expected to close in FY23. By that time, analysts predict both companies will make substantial revenue growth. Keybanc's Michael Turits expects Activision-Blizzard to break the $10 billion revenue mark for the first time in history with a 13-year CAGR growth rate of 6.43%, possibly driven by cost-saving synergies within Microsoft's games division. Activision's last financials show $8.5 billion estimated revenues for calendar 2021.

Xbox gaming is likewise expected to jump to $16.9 billion, representing a 10% increase over the last reported FY21 period. Microsoft's games segment delivered a record $15.37 billion in FY21 driven by hardware and software synergy surges across game and console sales and subscriptions.

Multiple law firms are investigating Microsoft's proposed $68.7 billion buyout of Activision-Blizzard for possible violations of securities laws.

Seven law firms have announced formal investigations into Microsoft's massive Activision-Blizzard acquisition proposal. The investigations are centered around three main points:

The law firms are questioning the Activision-Blizzard board's exact motivations to sell. The Wall Street Journal reports that Activision's ongoing controversy and sexual discrimination lawsuits were a major factor behind the acquisition agreement.

Contrary to Bloomberg reports, Sony has issued a statement that it had no plans to end PS4 production in 2021.

Initial reports suggested the PS4 was retired at the end of 2021, and brought back to help offset stalled PS5 production due to semiconductor shortages. "There was no plan to end the production of PS4 at the end of last year," Sony said in a public statement to Japanese publication Netorabo.

The full statement is below: