Video games composer Jeremy Soule, described as the John Williams of game music, has been accused of raping an independent developer.

Nathalie Lawhead, the indie dev behind Tetrageddon Games, says she was raped by Skyrim composer Jeremy Soule while working on a hellish ARG project. The following is based on Lawhead's story.

"On November 4 2008 I was contacted by a studio in Vancouver to design and build an ARG for their new IP. I talked about my experiences of working with this company before. For example, in this post."

"What I didn't share, when talking about my experiences, is that I was raped by Jeremy Soule while I was working there."

It turns out the rumors of Corsair buying custom gaming PC company ORIGIN PC were true, with Corsair officially announcing it has acquired ORIGIN PC in a statement on its website.

The acquisition of ORIGIN PC will see the custom PC maker integrate Corsair's iCUE software ecosystem into their family of PCs, offering up system-wide lighting synchronization and performance monitoring. Better yet, the new Corsair Hydro X Series custom cooling will be making their way into ORIGIN PC systems in the near future.

More details on the cooperation and integration of Corsair and ORIGIN PC products will be "announced in the near future" the company explained in its press release.

Telltale Games, the dev behind a slew of narrative-driven games such as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and the Game of Thrones series, is letting go of 25% of its workers--about 90 people across all divisions.

This new restructuring is effective immediately, and the reasoning behind the layoffs is so Telltale Games can become more competitive and launch "fewer, better games with a smaller team." The company said that the shake-up won't affect projects currently in development.

"The decision is designed to make the company, a leader in player-driven narrative games, more competitive as a developer and publisher of groundbreaking story-driven gaming experiences with an emphasis on high quality in the years ahead," the press release notes.

After months of negotiations, the monumental Sprint-T-Mobile merger has been cancelled.

According to latest reports from The Wall Street Journal, Sprint and T-Mobile won't be combining forces after all. Japan's SoftBank consortium, which serves as Sprint's parent company, has made good on past reports of calling off the deal. T-Mobile recently proposed new terms in a bid to keep the deal active

"Sprint and T-Mobile Calling Off Merger," The WSJ reports. "SoftBank To Buy Additional Shares of Sprint in Open Market."

Google has just announced it has acquired HTC's mobile division in a deal worth $1.1 billion, which was expected after HTC announced it would briefly halt trading on the Taiwan stock exchange ahead of "material information" that was coming today.

Google hardware boss, Rich Osterloh, said about the deal: "These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we've already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and we're excited to see what we can do together as one team. The deal also includes a non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property".

HTC made both the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphone for Google last year, with the Taiwanese smartphone maker being a silent contractor. Google marketed the smartphones as if they were their own, without mentioning HTC. But this new deal means Google can better compete, very directly, against Samsung, Apple, LG, Huawei, and others that are industry heavyweights.

HTC has made the upcoming Pixel 2 smartphone, but the larger Pixel XL 2 was manufactured by LG.

Intel has lost one of its best, with 20-year veteran François Piednoël leaving the company. Piednoël was involved in the development of some of Intel's biggest CPU architecture development, including Katmai, Conroe, Penryn, and Nehalem as well as SoCs in Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake.

Piednoël leaving Intel at this time is very strange, especially as AMD is back into the game in a very big way after nearly a decade out of the high-end enthusiast CPU market. AMD is preparing the launch of its new Ryzen ThreadRipper processors that will bring 16C/32T CPUs to the masses, and Intel loses one of its chief CPU engineers. He won't be joining AMD, that's for sure - as he tweeted out a reply to someone saying "going to AMD", he said: "NEVER!" with a follow up tweet asking "why "NEVER!" to which Piednoël replied: "Because my knowledge about Intel is too deep, I would get lawyers knocking on my door next day".

Intel seems to be finding more and more holes in its ship, is there something bigger going on that we can't see yet?

A factory of Samsung SDI, Samsung's affiliate division that manufactured batteries for the doomed Note7, has caught fire.

The factory in Tianjin, China, caught fire on Wednesday and according to Samsung's spokesperson, they experienced a "minor fire." The incident happened at a waste depository within the factory and had no influence on battery production.

According to the South China Morning Post, it took 19 fire engines and 110 firemen to get the "minor fire" under control.

Razer has confirmed to Polygon that the two stolen prototypes from CES 2017 were indeed Project Valerie prototypes as we had suspected they would be.

They also confirmed that they are offering a $25,000 reward to anyone who can provide information that would lead to the identification, arrest, and conviction of a criminal suspect.

According to a statement provided to Polygon:

This note is to confirm that two Razer Project Valerie laptop prototypes were stolen from the Razer booth at CES. The product was taken from the Razer press room at approximately 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 8, 2017. A $25,000 reward is being offered for original information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of a criminal suspect. Razer, in its sole discretion, will decide who is entitled to a reward and in what amount. Razer may pay only a portion of the maximum reward offered. The decision will be based primarily upon law enforcement's evaluation of the value of the information provided. When there are multiple claimants, the reward will be shared in amounts determined by Razer. Razer associates are not eligible for the reward. This reward offer is good for one year from the date it is first offered, unless extended by Razer. Information about the theft can be sent to [email protected]. Razer will not publicly disclose material that it receives or details about respondents, except to those persons with whom Razer is directly working to resolve this matter or as may be required by law.

So this just happened - Yahoo has rebranded itself to Altaba Inc., with its CEO Marissa Mayer stepping down effective immediately.

TechCrunch reports that Mayer "may be tapped for a role in Yahoo's integration at Verizon, but her position has yet to be announced". Yahoo has recently gone through some massive troubles, with 1 billion user accounts being compromised - which could lead to its deal with Verizon being troubled, but TC said that the "planned sale to Verizon is still moving forward".

They added: "some portions of the company will be left behind and renamed to Altaba Inc.", a very interesting - and all-of-the-sudden move.

CES 2017 - As this year's CES wraps up, some bad news came from the CEO of Razer, Min-Liang Tan. He posted on Facebook that two of their prototypes were stolen from their booth at CES 2017.

While it is extremely difficult to steal a prototype, if they were tearing down the booth it's entirely possible those prototypes could have been stolen. It wouldn't be the first time someone copied a Razer product.

At the show, Razer showed off two new prototypes, the Project Ariana and Project Valerie. Ariana is a projection system that is designed to make gaming more immersive by projecting lower resolution game content over the high-resolution TV or monitor. Project Valerie was the most ambitious project where Razer's engineers managed to squeeze three 4K G-Sync monitors into a single laptop, quite the engineering feat.