Latest News - Page 2093

Venrock, the Rockefeller family's venture capital arm, have announced a strategic partnership with CoinFund, a three year old crypto investment group. Venrock partner, David Pakman went on fortune.com's 'Balancing the Ledger' and spoke to Robert Hackett and Jen Wieczner about the partnership.

A very congenial Pakman seemed incredibly fond of the crypto space, not something we thought we would hear from any old money families so soon. Pakman said he finds it too convenient that platforms such as Google and Mailchimp are blanket banning the crypto space rather than taking the time to find out who the bad actors are. He also went onto say that he has no problem with the current crypto exchanges acting as gatekeepers and using pay to play tactics as he believes that decentralised exchanges will disrupt this soon enough.

After the friendly and crypto-positive banter Pakman goes onto say that: "Venture capital itself is effectively a gatekeeper industry and I'd actually like to see that undone."

Recently we have been hearing about titles coming to the Nintendo Switch, big staple titles such as Super Smash Bros or even the speculation towards Spyro Reignited Trilogy coming to the Nintendo Switch suggests that 2018 will be a big year for Nintendo. Now the GameStop CEO says 2018 could be bigger than we expected.

Michael Mauler, GameStop CEO was asked via Express about the future of games coming to Nintendo's console, he replied with "I think this year when we look at the slate of titles, many of which haven't been announced yet, this year also looks very, very strong. So I think, at least, for 2018, we'll continue to see the strong software slate drive additional install base on the hardware.... We don't have really visibility for 2019 yet, but for 2018 it should play out that way."

If Mauler is correct and there is a bunch of unannounced Switch games that are due for release this year this could suggest that sometime soon we will be hearing another announcement for a triple-A title coming to the Switch. There is hopes that this could be a Pokemon title for the Switch but the recent listing for Spyro Reignited Trilogy seems more likely to be the case.

In February this year $170 million worth of a cryptocurrency called Nano (formerly known as RaiBlocks) seemingly vanished on an Italian cryptocurrency exchange called BitGrail.

BitGrail says that they were the victim of theft, and the hacker took advantage of malfunctions in the software made available by the Nano team and, therefore, are not responsible for the disappearance of Nano. Yet, Nano is singing a different tune and claim on their blog: "From our own preliminary investigation, no double spending was detected on the ledger and we have no reason to believe the loss was due to an issue in the Nano protocol. The problems appear to be related to BitGrail's software."

BitGrail is currently suspended and hasn't put out any communication on their website since mid-March and yet the Nano team are forging ahead although they are in for some trouble now that a class action lawsuit has been filed against them. Silver Miller, an American law firm that proclaims they are 'the leading cryptocurrency investor law firm in the country' state on their website:

One of my favourite privacy coins has managed to stay the hand of ASIC miners- for now. In March, the Chinese company Bitmain announced they were releasing an Antminer X3, which was specifically developed to mine Monero.

Fearing mass use of the kind of ASIC offered by Bitmain would make the network more centralized by forcing small-time miners using home PCs and other devices out, creator Riccardo Spagni said: "I will do everything in my power to help the community prevent the proliferation of centralisation-inducing ASICs on the Monero network."

And he did just that. The hashrate and difficulty has dropped dramatically over the past 48 hours. Unlike the BCH/BTC split, a new coin has not been created, this has purely been a fork to avoid ASIC miners bleeding the network. In true Spgagni style he tweeted out the fork had been successful.

NAB 2018 - The demand for high speed external storage has been growing exponentially and Western Digital is stepping up to the plate with three new professional grade products to enable real-time 4K and 8K workflows.

The new products are part of their G-Technology G-DRIVE and G-SPEED Shuttle product families.

All three products utilize the power of Thunderbolt 3, have transfer rates up to 2800MB/s, and make use of Western Digital's new G-Technology Pro SSDs to offer an ultra-fast, reliable solution. All three products will ship with a 5-year limited warranty.

Intel is fighting in a new battlefield where sleeping dragon AMD has erupted and awoken with their EPYC range of server CPUs, with Chipzilla's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon CPUs being teased and leaked by Power Stamp Alliance.

The new Ice Lake Xeon processors are set to release sometime later this year or in early 2019, with a new LGA 4189 socket and SKUs that will offer a huge 230W TDP, up from the max 205W offerings with both Skylake and Cascade Lake Xeon CPUs. Why the higher TDP? We should expect next-gen Xeon CPUs with even more cores and higher clock counts, all driving up the power consumption.

Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon CPUs will reportedly rock 8-channel DDR4 support, with Cascade Lake already supporting 2933MHz DDR4, we should expect the same or higher-end DDR4 support from Ice Lake. Cascade Lake supports 768GB of DDR4, so with the additional slots (16 x DDR4 in 8-channel mode) will drive memory support on Ice Lake through to a huge 1TB.

AMD is forging ahead with its next-next-gen Zen CPU architecture, with lead Zen architect Mike Clark confirming that AMD is now working on the "Zen 5" CPU microarchitecture.

The news comes directly from a one-year-later video from AMD about their Ryzen CPU, right before the new Ryzen 2000 series processors launch on April 19. AMD hosted a panel with the top brass behind Ryzen, with people from both their CPU engineering and marketing departments.

VideoCardz reports that "manufacturers often skip 4 due to its meaning in Chinese culture. It's an unlucky number because it's homophonous to the word 'death'. Something that AMD surely does not want to be associated with Zen architecture". Interesting.

Thanks to PUBG and Fortnite, the battle royale craze is a billion-dollar rage in the games industry right now and everyone wants in--especially the Lawbreakers devs at Boss Key Productions.

Earlier today Boss Key, the studio founded by Unreal Tournament alum Cliffy B, made a surprise announcement of their new free-to-play battle royale game Radical Heights. The game in question is a massive mish-mash of 1980's tropes and nostalgia, incorporating a look that retro/vaporwave listeners will recognize right away: neon colors, embarrassing clothing and outfits, and outrageous carnage. Oh and arcades, too--don't forget those. In sooth Radical Heights looks like something on an Intergalactic Cable episode of Rick and Morty rather than anything I'd expect to actually see released on the games market (for both good and bad).

Radical Heights will launch in early access tomorrow, which also coincides with the huge new Retribution event in Overwatch (probably bad timing there). The game will of course be free-to-play, which was Lawbreakers' original plan, and has no publisher attached to the game this time.

For those that don't already know the beloved main character from CD Projekt RED's The Witcher series is coming to Soulcalibur VI, producer Motohiro Okubo commented on the success of The Witcher titles saying that they are "the best game featuring a Middle Age-style world."

Marcin Momot, the Community Coordinator at CDPR detailed how the idea of bringing Geralt to Soulcalibur was brought to light. Momot explains that he "always thought Geralt would be an awesome addition to Soulcalibur's fighter roster."

CD Projekt RED employees have also explained that they are working very hard to make sure that Geralt is ejected straight from The Witcher series and injected straight into the Soulcalibur universe while keeping the same feel and move-set.

Endnight Games, the developers behind the long-standing early access title 'The Forest' have finally announced the official release date title for the full release game debuting to PC.

At the moment The Forest is sitting on version 0.73 which will then be changed to version 1.0 when the game fully releases on the 30th of April. The price point for the game will also be increased, currently the early access version of the game is $14.99 but this will change to $19.99 at the end of the month.

For players that do not know anything about The Forest, the title is a survival-horror that requires resource gathering, building structures, enduring the environment and also zombie, and other monster slaying.

It appears that in the latest client update for Steam, Valve has provided support for the official Nintendo Switch Pro controller through Steam Link. A Redditor put it to the test and has confirmed its usability.

According to ShrewdHunter, as of the update on the 23rd of March Valve has added support for the Nintendo Switch Pro controller through Steam Link. ShrewdHunter explains that the controller works perfectly fine but currently doesn't have the 'rumble' feature.

ShrewdHunter also checked if the Joy Con controllers were supported through Steam Link but unfortunately this didn't work, Steam Link did recognize the controllers though as the screen displayed 'Joy Con L.' Check out the below image to see ShrewdHunters pairing.

In a recent article shared by Market Watch, Rockstars Grand Theft Auto V has been deemed the pinnacle of a financially successful media, thats right folks a video game is the most successful media title of all time.

Since the release of GTA V, the controversial title has sold more than 90 million units, which equates to a massive $6 billion in sales. This number supersedes any movie, album, book or any other video game to date.

Huge titles such as "Star Wars" or "Avatar" have been crushed by GTA V's sales, Take-Two Interactive would be very happy with themselves when their closest competitor on the video game market is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 at only 26.5 million units.

Far Cry 5 has just been released and in order to rain on gamers' parades, we have a new video from 'Crowbcat' on YouTube that shows just how impressive the physics were... in Far Cry 2. Not 5. Two.

The video shows an awesome fire effects comparison that has Far Cry 2 sitting in a far better position, with grass and trees burning when the fire spreads, versus Far Cry 5 where it doesn't get affected. Boo.

Far Cry 5's tall grass however, is bendable, but in Far Cry 2 most of the bushes could be bent over. Environmental destruction in Far Cry 5 is limited, while in Far Cry 2 you could destroy lights and while it might sound like a small thing, Far Cry 2 is 10 years old.

If there was a teeny tiny Ryzen 2000-capable motherboard that wins best all-round looks, it would go to the ASUS ROG STRIX X470-I Mini-ITX, which looks awesome.

The upcoming ASUS ROG STRIX X470-I Mini-ITX is a powerhouse motherboard offering a hidden M.2 slot, two DDR4 DIMM slots, and a built-in Wi-Fi adapter.

ASUS includes the usual full-length PCIe x16 slot, so you can power your new AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with a Radeon RX Vega 64 (yeah, probably not), or a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Facebook is standing on a dumpster fire of trouble right now, with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg at the center of it all. All of this drama was kicked off with the Cambridge Analytica news, and has truly snowballed since.

It has been reported that Facebook deleted Zuckerberg's messages from users' inboxes, which is insane, considering Facebook users are the only ones that have the ability to delete messages from their inboxes. Facebook has obviously got super admin powers to delete peasants' messages, or in this case, messages sent by Facebook execs.

In the midst of the world finding this out, Facebook not-so-surprisingly said they are planning to launch a new "unsend" features in the coming months. TechCrunch talked to three sources that wanted to remain anonymous "out of fear of angering Zuckerberg or burning bridges with the company" that the messages send by Zuckerberg to both former employees and non-employees were deleted.

Battlegrounds received a new game mode in the last few days, with developer PUBG Corp teasing the new deathmatch-style War Mode in the test servers.

War Mode sees squads of people landing on a small zone on the map with a bunch of weapons as they land, with teh sole purpose of this mode is killing everyone, and that's it. PUBG gamers will need to rack up points before other squads of enemies do, through killing, knocking someone down, or reviving a team mate.

Twitch streamers, YouTubers and the dev team are the only ones that can create custom PUBG games, which is where War Mode is an exclusive. War Mode itself is still in "a very early stage of development", so it's in early testing for now.

Fortnite on iOS has been a huge deal for both Epic Games and Apple, with the mobile version of the Battle Royale hit making a huge $15 million in its first three weeks on the App Store.

This means that Fortnite on iOS is now making more money than the likes of mobile champions like Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, and Pokemon Go. Fortnite has made $6.4 million in the last week, crushing Candy Crush Saga and its $5.8 million haul for the week.

Epic Games had an invite-only system on Fortnite at first, but earlier this week it was taken away which saw daily revenue drive from $600,000 to a huge $1.8 million according to Sensor Tower. Their data also has Fortnite being downloaded around 11 million times on iOS alone.

To celebrate the release of 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle' on home video, we have fifteen Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment.

The game has evolved. Four teenagers in detention discover an old video game console with a game they've never heard of. When they decide to play, they are immediately sucked into the jungle world of Jumanji in the bodies of their avatars (Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan). They'll have to complete the adventure of their lives filled with fun, thrills and danger or be stuck in the game forever!

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles, correctly answer the following question and send your postal address to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on April 11.

The seventh expansion for World of Warcraft has just had its trailer released by Blizzard, the trailer details features the expansion will contain as well as the release date.

The new expansion will be raising the max level cap from a current 110 to 120, it will also be new continents such as Kul Tiras and Zandalar. Battle for Azeroth will also be adding more dungeons/raids, warfronts and three new races for both the Alliance and the Horde.

CEO and Co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment commented on the new expansion and said: "In Battle for Azeroth, the stakes for the Alliance and the Horde are incredibly high, and a player's faction will have a more meaningful impact on their experience than in any World of Warcraft expansion to date. Whether they're journeying to unexplored lands to recruit allies or fighting to secure war resources, players will redefine what it truly means to be 'For the Horde' or 'For the Alliance' when the expansion arrives this August."

It has been revealed by a post of Nintendos official Japanese website that Super Mario Odyssey will be receiving more costumes, and for the benefit of players these costumes will be arriving completely free.

Back in February Nintendo did the same thing with the release of Luigi's Balloon World, this time players will be able to enjoy additional costumes that are themed 'Satellite view' and 'Baseball', images can be found below.

There is no official release date for these costumes but from this announcement on Nintendo's website we should be hearing about this sometime soon. I have provided a Google translate of the website into english here.