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Development

Heart Machine ends development on Hyper Light Breaker mere months after it entered early access

by admin October 9, 2025

Heart Machine has ended development on Hyper Light Breaker and is laying off a number of staff as a result.

The roguelike released into early access at the start of the year but has been met by a mixed reaction. It followed the successful Hyper Light Drifter and studio follow-up Solar Ash.

Heart Machine confirmed the news to Game Developer, but has not confirmed how many employees have been laid off.

Hyper Light Breaker | Double Down Update TrailerWatch on YouTube

“As we wrap up our work on Hyper Light Breaker, we’ve had to make the difficult decision to part ways with a number of talented team members. This was not our ideal path, but rather the only one available given the circumstances,” reads a statement from the studio.

“While this path will include a conclusion on the project, it reflects broader forces beyond our control, including shifts in funding, corporate consolidation and the uncertain environment many small studios like us are navigating today.”

The studio previously laid off staff in November last year, but stated at the time “a strong and timely launch will rekindle opportunities for those affected as we look to evolve and grow [Hyper Light Breaker] throughout Early Access”. It seems the game’s poor reception has not allowed the studio to follow through.

“Hyper Light Breaker is really, really punishing,” said Christian Donlan on Hyper Light Breaker for Eurogamer. “It’s punishing in a way that I understand, because it’s probably balanced for multiplayer and because this is probably a small team who can’t endlessly feed new stuff into the procedural maw, and so they need players to take their time with what’s there. But it makes for an uninviting introduction if you’re a fan of the series and you love these games for their lonely beauty.”

Heart Machine’s next game is still on the way – that’s the cyberpunk-themed metroidvania Possessor(s). It’s due out next month on PS5 and PC.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Inside the astonishing development of 1999’s The Wheel of Time FPS: ‘The fact that we shipped anything at all is kind of a miracle’

by admin October 4, 2025

Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of The Wheel of Time. No, not the beloved series of fantasy novels penned by Robert Jordan, or the less beloved but still pretty good TV show cancelled by Amazon, or the recently announced and preposterously ambitious RPG. I am of course referring to the other Wheel of Time, the first-person spell-slinger developed by Legend Entertainment and released in 1999.

The Wheel of Time was praised by critics when it launched, partly due to its association with the popular series of fantasy novels, but equally due to its decent singleplayer campaign and innovative multiplayer mode. Despite this, it sold poorly, fading quickly amid the torrent of first-person shooters that rushed across shelves in the late nineties.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

But if The Wheel of Time has slipped from your memory, it’ll stick like a Heron-marked blade in a Trolloc’s chest once you hear the tale of how it was made. Even in the notoriously difficult world of game development, where projects shift and change more often than the dreamscapes of Tel’aran’rhiod, the story of The Wheel of Time is a wild ride.

Indeed, the reason it exists at all is largely down to the determination of one man. Glen Dahlgren is a game developer and, in more recent years, novelist, whose other projects include Unreal 2: The Awakening and Star Trek: Online. But The Wheel of Time remains his favourite, despite the fact that guiding it from conception to birth seems, from the outside, like a five-year long ordeal. “The fact that we shipped anything at all is kind of a miracle,” Dahlgren tells me halfway through our chat. “My old boss at Legend used to say every game you ship is a miracle, and I didn’t really understand that until this game.”

New Spring

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The story of The Wheel of Time’s creation is convoluted to say the least, and Dahlgren gives his own intricate account of it on his website that’s well worth reading. But it starts with a concept that Dahlgren dreamed up after Legend released the 1994 adventure game Death Gate, one which had nothing to do with The Wheel of Time.

His idea was for a fantasy, multiplayer FPS that combined the fast-paced action of Doom with the move/counter-move play of Magic: The Gathering, along with roleplaying elements from the boardgame WizWar. The result would have been a four-way mixture of combat and espionage, straddling the line between a fantasy MMO and something vaguely reminiscent of the Half-Life mod Science and Industry.

Players would control networks of spies from their own customisable fortresses, and engage in complex, reactive spell-based combat. “I’m choosing to do something to you, and you can do something about that if you want … and the more powerful it is, the slower it’s going to be,” Dahlgren says. “I love the idea that it was a strategic choice, not a tactical choice … the interplay of those offensive and defensive artifacts [was] really fun.”

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The idea stretched far beyond Legend’s experience making low-budget adventure games, seemingly doomed to obscurity following Legend’s acquisition by the publishing giant Random House, which wanted to exploit Legend’s particular talents for its own suite of books licenses. Unsatisfied with the licenses offered to him by the publisher, Dahlgren made a curious gambit. He suggested that Legend make a game based on The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan—an author who had no existing relationship with Random House.

“I really wanted to play with that world,” Dahlgren says. More than that, he wanted to ensure the videogame rights for The Wheel of Time ended up in safe hands. “I wanted to save him from Byron Preiss, because that was the other organisation that was after his license, and they made horrible games,” Dahlgren says.

Dahlgren was happy to abandon his multiplayer concept and continue making adventure games provided the stories excited him. Since Dahlgren’s idea gave Random House an excuse to approach Robert Jordan and possibly convince him to sign a book deal with them, the publisher agreed.

The Great Hunt

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Reenergised, Dahlgren wrote a design doc for an adventure game set in The Wheel of Time—one that took place in a 3D world, featured real-time puzzles, and included an inventive real-time with pause combat system that let players select blade techniques (known as sword-forms) from a list. Dahlgren sent this to Jordan, elaborating upon the design while waiting for Jordan to reply.

Jordan did reply, but it was less than enthusiastic. Desperate to salvage the idea, Dahlgren flew out to meet Jordan along with Legend’s then-president Bob Bates. Together, they had what Dahlgren believed was a jovial, productive meeting. “He showed us around his house. There were weapons in places, which was really cool. I got to ask him where he likes to work, and he said he does his thinking all over the house,” he says.

Dahlgren returned to work feeling confident the project was saved. Then he received what he calls “The Fax of Doom”. This reiterated all of Jordan’s original concerns in even more definitive fashion, seemingly putting an end to the whole project.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

According to Dahlgren, Jordan’s doubts centred around a general reservation about the marketability of adventure games. “He understood the limitations of the genre,” Dahlgren says. “The genre itself was not doing very well. It was on its way out, and he didn’t want a game that didn’t have a chance to be big.”

But there was a lifeline. During the meeting at Jordan’s house, Dahlgren had wheeled out an alternative game concept that he’d cobbled together on the flight to meet the author, one that took place in a parallel dimension to The Wheel of Time. “One of the ways I convinced Jordan that I can make this game is ‘I’m not going to stomp on his storyline. I’m not going to kill his main character,'” he says.

Jordan expressed interest in this concept, but there wasn’t much else to it. In a mixture of inspiration and desperation, Dahlgren retrofitted his idea for the Doom/Magic/Wizwar FPS onto this concept, with players assuming the roles of various Wheel of Time factions which attempt to steal the magical seals which keep The Dark One (the story’s godlike villain) at bay.

The Gathering Storm

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Dahlgren drew up a design document and an accompanying experience document, and sent them off to Jordan, who approved it. Random House, however, did not, and as part of a growing ambivalence toward gaming in general, pulled its financial support for Legend (while keeping its stake in the company).

Now, Dahlgren had the go ahead from Jordan, but no publisher to fund the game he had just received the nod to make. On top of that, Dahlgren also had no technology to make the game. To solve this problem, he hired an eclectic team of artists, architects and character designers to create detailed concept art and went pitching.

Eventually, the team secured the interest of Epic Games. Mark Rein, Epic’s Vice President, was receptive, and following a meeting with Rein and Tim Sweeney, Dahlgren received a copy of Unreal engine and its level editor to mock up a prototype. Dahlgren produced this himself, then showed them to Epic.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

According to Dahlgren, these prototypes are what convinced Tim Sweeney of the potential of licensing Unreal Engine to third-party developers. It also provided Dahlgren with the opportunity to do something he’d wanted from the start—to shift Legend from being a developer of niche adventure games to a creator of blockbuster first-person shooters.

“What I wanted to be was a version of Raven [Software],” he says. “We would be that for Epic. We would be the one to come in and say ‘Listen, we can make something different than what you’re making, something that has a different soul … even though it’s using your technology.'” This is also why Dahlgren didn’t do what seems so obvious today—make a Wheel of Time CRPG. “Everybody asked me ‘Why don’t you just do an RPG?'” he says. “That’s not what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was a first-person shooter.”

Among all this, Legend also wrangled a new publisher—GT Interactive. Finally, everything was in place to begin making the game Dahlgren had dreamed of. There was just one small problem. The deal Legend signed didn’t come anywhere near to footing the bill for the game Dahlgren had envisioned.

The Dragon Reborn

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Undeterred, Legend set about building a prototype of its magical multiplayer espionage game for GT Interactive. Through developing this prototype, Dahlgren and The Wheel of Time team realised two things. First, the grand, complex multiplayer experience they had envisioned needed drastically reducing in scope. Second, the prototype itself made for a surprisingly engaging singleplayer adventure.

With this new perspective, and after struggling repeatedly to meet its development milestones for the original vision, Legend opted to redesign The Wheel of Time. This new design stripped out all the espionage and persistent, MMO-like elements from the multiplayer, narrowing the scope to just the customisable citadels and the counter-based magical combat. This multiplayer would be accompanied by a more traditional linear FPS campaign, one with its own Wheel of Time story.

For this new story, Dahlgren abandoned the parallel universe concept and made The Wheel of Time a prequel to Jordan’s novels, allowing for a story that better fit the new structure while upholding Dahlgren’s assurance to Jordan that he wouldn’t mess with the main narrative of the books (years later, Jordan would write his own Wheel of Time prequel—New Spring). The story would revolve around the four playable factions in the multiplayer—The Aes Sedai, the Children of the Light, the Forsaken, and the dark forces within the abandoned city of Shadar Logoth.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The story would also take players through environments based upon the four citadels in the multiplayer, like Shadar Logoth and the White Tower, allowing Legend to build the singleplayer using the multiplayer’s assets. “Choosing those four factions is what drove most of the environments out of the gate, because I needed their home bases,” Dahlgren says. The central plot came to Dahlgren on a flight to Italy to visit his then-girlfriend. “I couldn’t write it down because I had no piece of paper, I had no pen. So I had to sit there for, I think it was four hours, and just to repeat it over and over.”

Making some of these environments fun to play in proved a significant challenge. In the books, Shadar Logoth is an abandoned, cursed city, with no corporeal enemies to fight. So Legend had to come up with threats and obstacles that felt appropriate for the setting, like a strange mist that attacks the player, and dark tendrils that writhe out and block your path. Dahlgren believes these environments at least partly inspired the look of Shadar Logoth in the recent Wheel of Time TV series. “I think that the TV show guys absolutely played our game,” he says.”

Building the White Tower, meanwhile, was all about trying to provide a sense of scale and detail that evoked the high fantasy setting of the novels. “I want[ed] to bring a piece of fantasy fine art to life,” Dahlgren says. “I don’t think anything in the game was the kind of scale that you would see nowadays … [but] they’re architecturally beautiful. The textures are amazing.”

Lord of Chaos

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

By this point, Dahlgren had been working on the project for around four years. With a year to go until launch, Legend had only just put together a team capable of making it. It was at this point Dahlgren was called into a meeting with Legend co-founder Mike Verdu and producer Mark Poesch, who told Dahlgren they planned to cut the singleplayer entirely. “‘We are gonna trash this down to the bare bones'”, Dahlgren recalls. “‘We need to release something, it’s gonna be a multiplayer game, and that’s all it’s gonna be'”.

Dahlgren, desperate to save the story, begged for a chance to revise the scope one more time, and see what he could trim from the whole package to rescue the single-player. Verdu consented, and Mike went back and began cutting yet more spokes off The Wheel of Time.

Levels and ideas were cut. The multiplayer was slimmed from teams to four players working as individuals, and the interactive NPCs Dahlgren had intended to convey the narrative were replaced by straightforward cutscenes. “That became the game that we shipped,” Dahlgren says.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Even when The Wheel of Time was done, it wasn’t. Dahlgren wasn’t present for the game’s official launch date, as he was getting married in Italy. Yet when he returned from honeymoon, he discovered the game hadn’t shipped after all, while in his absence Legend had put together a demo that Dahlgren says “made no sense”.

“It had no story structure. It had nothing. So I had to just dive in and try to get that demo back on track,” Dahlgren says. “I’m like ‘this is what happens when I leave'”.

A Memory of Light

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The Wheel of Time released on November 9, 1999. Critically it was well received, scoring 90% in PC Gamer US. Commercially, though, it was a flop. Dahlgren puts this down to several factors, such as the marketing. “GT was going under, and they only had so much marketing money to throw at it, and they threw it at Unreal Tournament,” Dahlgren says. “I don’t even know if we were placed on the right section of the Best Buy shelves at the time, which sucks.”

But he also believes that the counter-based spell system inspired by Magic: The Gathering demanded too much learning from players at the time. “It might have been one of the things that made the game less accessible than I would have liked,” he says. “There were so many ter’angreal (the magical items players used to cast spells) that it became hard to mentally map what you needed to do to react to the right thing.”

Nonetheless, The Wheel of Time proved influential in other ways. As it was developed concurrently with Unreal, certain tech and design ideas fed into both Epic’s debut shooter and the engine which supported it. “We made our own particle system. They didn’t have a particle system at the time. We worked to create AI that they had never seen before,” Dahlgren says.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Even Unreal’s level design appears to have been influenced by Legend’s work on The Wheel of Time. “They were standard levels [for] the time,” he says. “Rather than a full on place that you could explore. As soon as we showed them some of the stuff that we had produced as concept sheets, Tim said ‘I can’t believe this is my engine.’ Then, suddenly, in Unreal you see a lot of half timber buildings. So I think we absolutely influenced them.”

And while it wasn’t a smash hit, The Wheel of Time’s multiplayer did find a core community of players who appreciated its ambition, even in its stripped-down form. “Once the muscle memory was there, people loved it. They loved the idea of bouncing back attacks against each other, or putting on a fire shield before you walk through a bunch of landmines somebody had placed.” Dahlgren says. “I never played my games after they were done, but this one I played forever because it was so fun.”

The Wheel of Time also sowed the seeds for Dahlgren’s emerging career as a fantasy novelist. His first novel, The Child of Chaos, derived from an alternative, Wheel-of-Time-less story concept he used in a pitch to Activision while searching for a new publisher for the game, as Activision wasn’t interested in the Wheel of Time licence. His most recent novel, The Realm of Gods, won numerous awards, including the Dante Rossetti Grand Prize for young adult fiction.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

And what did Jordan himself think of Legend’s game? In the latter stages of development Dahlgren reconvened with Jordan to show him what Legend had spent so many years working on. As Dahlgren guided Jordan through the game’s opening section, he was nervous.

“As we were walking around, he didn’t say anything,” Dahlgren says. “And then he said. ‘Yes, this is beautiful.'”

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Baldur’s Gate 3 custom campaign mod Path to Menzoberranzan breaks silence with update on development re-think and character reveal tease

by admin October 4, 2025

The modders behind a Baldur’s Gate 3 custom campaign dubbed Path to Menzoberranzan have put out their first progress update in a few months, having gone silent just after getting their first build working around June. The reason for that quiet spell, according to the group, has been a “wild” summer in which they’ve had to revamp their development pipeline to better fit the scale they’re aiming for with the mod.

They’ve also teased full reveals of three characters who’ll be playing roles in what the Path to Menzoberranzan team have thus far pitched as a custom adventure through some returning locations from previous games in the series to the Drow city that serves as the mod’s namesake.

“It’s been a while since our last progress update, but rest assured that we’ve been working hard behind the scenes,” Path to Menzoberranzan community manager Andrew Simone wrote in this latest announcement on the mod’s Discord server. “We promise the silence has been for a very good reason.”

“The past few months have been wild: what started as a rebuild of one area of Baldur’s Gate II has grown into a full-scale campaign,” he explained. “That leap has meant re-thinking a lot of our processes, from how we collaborate to how we build content. Our summer was spent tightening up our production pipeline so we can deliver something truly special!”

Simone went to on the add that the mod’s team “is kicking back into high gear, more so than ever before”, before teasing full reveals of “some unique individuals” including “a Drow cleric of Eilistraee, a swashbuckling human, a man resembling Frankenstein’s monster, and more!”

There’s no mention of the demo which the modders looked close to releasing around the time of their June update, with a Q and A section of the mod’s Discord that was last updated in June reading: “The team is working towards the first playable demo. At this time, the timeline for this demo is under review.” So, it’d seem the need for these few months of rejigging has led the group to move away from their original plan of aiming to release said demo around 2025’s midpoint.

Those sorts of changes or delays understandably always lead to folks wondering whether the project’s in danger of fizzling out, given how many ambitious mods have suffered that fate. Though, it’s worth noting that there have also been plenty of big mods which’ve still delivered despite certain elements taking longer than originally expected. While it’s a mod that’s been in development much longer than Path to Menzoberranzan, Fallout: London developers Team FOLON have only just released their first DLC, announced all the way back in December 2024. Some extra work on future save compatibility was acknowledged as part of the reason why that ended up being the time it took.

This latest Path to Menzoberranzan update concluded with an announcement that the modders are recruiting for six roles across their technical, user experience and design departments. These gigs are for a systems programmer, an integration programmer, a UX designer, a systems UX lead, an emotional UX lead, and game designer. If you’re interested, more details can be found via the recruiting channel of the mod’s Discord server.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Ubisoft and Tencent form new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, to lead development for the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six franchises

by admin October 4, 2025

The breakout game development business co-owned by Tencent and Ubisoft finally has a name: Vantage Studios. Eurogamer understands from a source that it’s starting operations today, and will be responsible for new games across many of Ubisoft’s biggest IPs, such as Far Cry, Rainbow Six Siege, and Assassin’s Creed.

Vantage Studios is composed of 2,300 employees across multiple Ubisoft game development teams, including those from Montreal Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Sofia, and Barcelona. The studio will be run by the duo of Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot.

Vantage Studios operate under a less centralised model compared to Ubisoft proper, with each development team having more ownership over its own respective project. This in theory would allow developers to be more fluid, and pivot according to industry changes and player expectations, per Eurogamer sources.

Check out Eurogamer’s video review of Assassin’s Creed Shadows here.Watch on YouTube

The formation of Vantage Studios comes as the climax of a tumultuous period for Ubisoft, which reportedly was considering this new venture with Tencent in January of this year following years of lacking performance. This new venture, which would bring many of Ubisoft’s biggest IPs under a new roof, was officially announced in March with Tencent taking a €1.16bn stake in the new business entity.

As for Tencent’s involvement, the Chinese company will have a 25 percent stake in Vantage Studios, and will act in an advisory role to the subsidiary’s leadership team. However, Guillemot and Derennes will retain control over both creative and business decisions. Ubisoft hopes this will allow its teams to have a better degree of creative freedom, per a source familiar with the subject.

How other studios, most notably Massive Entertainment, will operate going forward currently remains unlear. Eurogamer understands the publisher wants its devs to operate in a more decentralised way, with developers taking more ownership of the titles they’re working on – the company employs approximately 20,000 staff at the time of writing (per its site), and how the other ~17,000 staff will fit into this new vision remains to be seen.

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Over half of Japanese game companies are using AI in development, states report from Tokyo Games Show organiser

by admin September 29, 2025

Over half of Japanese game companies are using AI in development, according to the country’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA) that runs the Tokyo Games Show.

The claim is based on responses from 54 Japanese game companies in a preview of the 2025 CESA Video Game Industry Report (as reported by The Nikkei). The survey sample is taken from CESA’s member companies, which include the likes of Capcom, Konami, FromSoftware, Square Enix and Sega, as well as smaller indie studios.

The report preview stated 51 percent of companies are using AI, with the most common use being generating visual assets and character images, as well as story and text generation, followed by programming support. Further, 32 percent of companies are using AI to develop their own game engines.

The report will be released in full in early December, so specifically cited uses of AI remain under wraps.

However, some Japanese companies have been open about their use of AI.

Back in 2024, Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu stated the company would be “aggressive in applying AI”, with developers admitting they “dabbled” with AI for the ill-fated shooter Foamstars.

Meanwhile Automaton reported in 2023 on Professor Layton studio Level-5 using AI tool Stable Diffusion, while earlier this year Capcom was experimenting with generative AI too. Sega also has an in-house AI team.

Nintendo, notably absent from the CESA member list, has taken a stance against AI. Last year, Shigeru Miyamoto stated the company would “rather go in a different direction” as part of its pursuit of originality.

Ahead of the Tokyo Game Show, AI was a common theme at Gamescom, seen by some indie studios as an invaluable tool.

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September 29, 2025 0 comments

Monster Hunter Wilds - a player yells in despair with their arms out, kneeling on the ground.

Gaming Gear

Over half of Japanese game companies are using AI in development according to a new survey, including Level-5 and Capcom

by admin September 27, 2025

As reported by Automaton, a survey conducted by the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA) during June and July found that 51% of Japanese game companies are using AI in some capacity. The survey responses came from CESA member companies, which include the likes of Capcom, Level-5, Square Enix, Sega, and many more spanning major developers and indies alike.

The respondents reported using AI for generating visual game assets, story and text generation, and programming assistance. Additionally, 32% of CESA member companies also reported that they are using AI to help develop in-house game engines.

There’s been a lot of high-level discussion and grand statements about generative AI’s potential use in gaming, but it’s surprising just how much of a foothold it already has, at least in Japan. Some CESA members have been open about using AI, as Automaton points out, including Level-5 and Capcom. For instance, Level-5 is using it pretty extensively in everything from visual upscaling to character creation to code generation.

The potential uses for generative AI in gaming vary drastically, though, just like opinions on it. Using AI to speed up repetitive coding or animation tasks is one frequently cited use case, but the idea of using it to “replace” human artists has proven incredibly controversial.

That controversy is probably why some game companies aren’t embracing the tech yet. For instance, Nintendo has said it’s steering clear of generative AI for the time being, citing copyright concerns⁠—an admirable bit of internal consistency from the fiercely litigious company. Other major players have spoken up about adopting this technology responsibly and protecting the human element in game development, like Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke.

Vincke laid out his view on AI in an interview with IGN last year, explaining, “So my stance on AI is really straightforward. It is a tool that we use to help us do things faster. We have so much work that we’re happy to take assistance from anything. I don’t think it’ll ever replace [the] creative side of things.” He went on to state that his team had recently hired 15 new concept artists to solve a bottleneck, rather than using AI.

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September 27, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Cardano Marks 8 Years: The Blockchain Is Still Heating Up With Activity And Development

by admin September 24, 2025

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

During a period of notable celebration and excitement in the broader Cardano community, the major blockchain is showcasing robust momentum and development. With the blockchain sector heating up, Cardano’s on-chain activity and investor engagement are persistently growing.

8 Years Later, Cardano Continues To Thrive

In a significant development, the Cardano blockchain is marking its 8th anniversary of existence, and the network continues to thrive. Despite being around for almost a decade, the network is showing signs of continued energy and expansion.

Based on research, the network has evolved over time into a thriving ecosystem of decentralized apps, smart contracts, and an increasingly engaged community. As it commemorates this milestone, Cardano keeps pushing the envelope in terms of adoption, governance, and scalability.

Fresh developments in the blockchain’s performance indicate that it is still in its infancy and has a long way to go. According to Dave, the network has been relentless in its 8 years of existence, with peer-reviewed innovation, building a platform defined by its unparalleled reliability and security.

Cardano’s progress has been impressive, going from a visionary whitepaper to a vibrant global ecosystem. Furthermore, Dave highlighted that the foundation is more solid than ever, expressing his confidence in the blockchain witnessing its best year in the near term.

Presently, the blockchain is experiencing an explosive surge in activity, with the number of transactions conducted on mainnet skyrocketing to record levels. This massive growth in transaction count, which highlights increasing adoption and utility, was reported by TapTools on the social media platform X.

Data shared by TapTools shows that the overall number of transactions executed on the mainnet has surpassed 114 million. Interestingly, these massive transfers have a success rate of 0.73 TPS (Transactions Per Second).

Cardano transactions count over time | Source: Chart from TapTools on X

Such a huge transaction count marks the heightened engagement across DeFi, staking, and real-world applications building on the blockchain. With developer trust in the platform and consumer demand growing rapidly, the development could position the network as a major player in the next wave of blockchain expansion.

A Climb In Global Sentiment Hierarchy

According to a report from Mintern, Cardano has climbed up the global charts in community sentiment. This move up reinforces its standing as one of the blockchain ecosystems that receives the most active support and attention.

After moving up the ranks, potentially due to its heightened engagement, the network is now positioned at the 7th spot in global community sentiment. In addition, ADA has one of the most robust and upbeat communities among the Top 10 cryptocurrencies. Thus, the blockchain is showing its ability to stay relevant in a landscape that is becoming highly competitive.

At the time of writing, ADA was trading at $0.81, demonstrating a more than 7% decline in the past week. CoinMarketCap data shows that its trading volume has also fallen by over 26% in the past day, indicating growing bearish investor action.

ADA trading at $0.81 on the 1D chart | Source: ADAUSDT on Tradingview.com

Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Ripple CLO Breaks Silence on Crypto ETFs, Hails Important Development

by admin September 19, 2025

Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty has hailed an important development for crypto ETFs.

The Ripple CLO was reacting to a tweet by the National Cryptocurrency Association that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved new rules that make it easier for stock exchanges to list crypto ETFs.

Exchanges like the Nasdaq and NYSE can now follow one set of standards instead of filing each ETF separately, which implies that crypto may now be accessed through familiar investment tools.

Alderoty highlighted this as an important development. According to the Ripple CLO, new listing standards bring crypto ETFs further into mainstream markets, adding that regulatory clarity is not just good policy; it builds confidence for Americans.

This comes in wake of the launch of the first XRP spot ETF in the U.S., with the Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC) also receiving approval from the SEC.

Crypto ETFs launch

Yesterday, digital asset manager Rex Osprey announced that XRPR and DOJE, the first ETF offering exposure to spot XRP and Dogecoin in the U.S., have launched.

XRPR got off to a hot start, trading $37.7 million on day one, which edges out IVES for the biggest day-one volume of any 2025 launch, according to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas. Rex XRP ETF reported $24 million in volume within 90 minutes, which is 5x more than any of the XRP futures ETFs saw on day one.

According to Balchunas, this increased demand might be a good sign for the onslaught of 33 Act ETFs coming soon.

In positive news, the SEC has approved generic listing standards that will clear way for spot crypto ETFs to launch under the ’33 Act, as long as they have futures on Coinbase, which currently includes about 12-15 coins.

Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), a spot crypto basket that includes XRP, is scheduled to begin trading under the new ticker, Grayscale CoinDesk Crypto 5 ETF, with Balchunas adding that things are moving fast.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Sei Development Foundation Bring Jamie Finn Onboard To Boost Rwa Adoption

Crypto Trends

Sei Development Foundation Onboards Jamie Finn to Drive RWA Growth

by admin September 13, 2025

The Sei Development Foundation has appointed Jamie Finn, Co-Founder of Securitize, as a strategic advisor to boost real-world asset (RWA) adoption. Announced on September 12, the U.S.-based non-profit aims to leverage Finn’s extensive expertise in finance, blockchain, and digital assets to expand institutional use cases on the Sei network.

According to Sei’s official X account, Finn previously helped Securitize scale to over $4 billion in tokenized assets, including BlackRock’s BUIDL, the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury fund. Now, he will guide Sei in building secure and scalable infrastructure for RWAs.

Jamie Finn, Co-founder of Securitize, is serving as Strategic Advisor to @Sei_FND.

At Securitize, Jamie helped scale the leading tokenization platform to $4B+ in assets, including BlackRock’s BUIDL — the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury fund.

Now, he’s helping shape Sei into the… pic.twitter.com/1YmBISn1vy

— Sei (@SeiNetwork) September 12, 2025

“Sei is positioned to be the definitive chain where you can build the best institutional products and use them confidently in the world of DeFi,” Finn stated.

Driving Institutional Adoption of Tokenized Assets

The announcement further explained that Finn brings over 25 years of experience in technology and finance. He has taken on leadership positions at major companies such as AT&T, Telefonica, and Ericsson.

While at Securitize, he was involved in a big part of transforming the company into a registered broker-dealer, transfer agent, and alternative trading system, raising the standard for digital asset infrastructure.

Commenting on the partnership, Finn said, “The next evolution of blockchain is about unlocking meaningful connectivity between traditional finance and the on-chain economy.” He emphasized Sei’s strong performance and developer-first approach as key factors in supporting institutional-grade RWA strategies.

Justin Barlow, Executive Director of the Sei Development Foundation, praised Finn’s rare blend of institutional credibility and technical insight. “His guidance will be instrumental in shaping go-to-market strategies and accelerating the adoption of tokenized assets onchain,” Barlow added.

Meanwhile, on September 10, Sei announced on X an integration with Chainlink Data Streams as its main oracle solution. The upgrade allows for lightning-fast, low-latency market data.

Chainlink Data Streams are live on Sei.

As the preferred oracle infrastructure of the Sei ecosystem, the @chainlink data standard provides real-time data for US equities, US GDP, and 300+ assets, powering institutional-grade markets at scale.

Markets Move Faster on Sei. ($/acc) pic.twitter.com/eFkllRvmpD

— Sei (@SeiNetwork) September 10, 2025

Notably, Sei’s native token has seen a positive response, rising by 3.97% in the last 24 hours to reach a trading price of $0.333481, according to CoinMarketCap.

The strategic hiring and the integration with Chainlink show Sei’s ambition to establish itself as a key player in the RWA and institutional DeFi.

Also Read: Polygon Teams Up with Cypher Capital to Expand POL Access

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September 13, 2025 0 comments

Esports

How much impact will AI have on development? | Opinion

by admin September 12, 2025

The question of whether, where, and how to use generative AI in game development is one of the most controversial issues of recent years.

Engaging with the topic has the feeling of pressing your hands against a stove you already know to be scalding hot. There’s no position you can take that won’t attract the ire of those who consider AI to be an ethnically and morally bankrupt scam, those who are burning with FOMO terror of being left behind by a genuine technical revolution, or both of the above.

Lewis Packwood, of this parish, noted after Gamescom that the use of AI in various aspects of development is already widespread across the industry, albeit often kept quiet to avoid a furious consumer backlash. As he pointed out, however – and Bryant Francis at Game Developer explored in more depth this week – the question of whether AI actually speeds up development, and to what extent, remains up in the air.

The morality of AI and the immense amount of stolen work on which it is trained is both a personal question for each individual, and a much larger question for courts and legislators. The practical question of whether it even works as claimed, though, is an important one for those running businesses, especially those feeling those FOMO pangs keeping them awake at night.

In an environment where many studios really don’t want to risk their use of AI becoming public knowledge, however, there’s a stark lack of comparative case studies or emerging best practices – an information blackout in which, I fear, some snake oil salesmen are gleefully setting up shop.

The problem AI purports to assist with is, after all, a truly existential issue for many studios. Lots of companies are struggling with development cycles that are growing out of control – an immense problem given that the industry’s business model generally means you don’t make any money until you launch (Early Access models aside). That’s a hell of a tough thing to handle financially if your development cycles are growing past the five-year mark (and in some cases heading towards the decade line).

Seven years on from the formation of The Initiative, the Perfect Dark reboot was cancelled and the studio closed after the game became stuck in development hell

Finding any way to wrangle those timeframes back under control is a key focus for a lot of studio heads. It’s only natural for them to be receptive to a technology promising to massively boost productivity across the board for everything a studio does – code, art, animation, sound, you name it, AI companies claim they can speed it up.

The problem is that while it’s clear that AI can be very useful in limited, narrow use cases, as a tool supervised by a human expert, those cases are a long way from the ideal being sold by the AI companies themselves, of autonomous agent tools delivering gigantic productivity boosts.

Consider the programming side of things. Code is arguably the ideal field for generative AI, since while it’s a very highly skilled and knowledge-driven industry, many of the tasks involved are inherently repetitive. Much of a coder’s time is spent either repeating patterns from their own prior work or seeking out solutions to problems other people have already tackled before them.

It’s not reliable enough to be let loose to do things on its own

It’s unsurprising that generative AI, which is essentially a huge pattern matching system that figures out what’s likely to come next based on what it sees before, has many genuine uses here.

A skilled programmer who’s already expert in their field can absolutely use AI judiciously to speed up their output, essentially treating it as a glorified autocomplete that’s just smart enough to be able to save a lot of repetition and boilerplate typing, as well as generating reasonably good function documentation, among other things.

This is how most skilled developers are using AI today. It’s not reliable enough to be let loose to do things on its own, but it can save time and let you iterate faster (especially in the prototype phase, in which some bugs or inefficiencies aren’t a total showstopper), as long as a skilled coder carefully supervises its output.

That’s clearly a useful thing. But it’s on an entirely different planet from the promises being made by AI companies to try to convince studios to make AI central to their workflows. Agentic AI being given free rein over entire codebases and completing tasks that used to need a human in the loop does not seem like a realistic paradigm for game development (or, honestly, for any kind of development beyond hobbyist projects, which are the only field in which this kind of “vibe coding” has any actual value).

So, while skilled coders might increase their productivity by a moderate amount (how much is debatable; some recent research suggests that while coders feel their output increasing, their measurable productivity gains are actually negative due to the amount of time spent squabbling with the AI’s weirder and less helpful impulses), the actual bottleneck many studios face remains in place – they still need to hire skilled, experienced coders, who are always expensive and often not easy to find.

The same essentially holds true for artwork and any other field. Generative AI might find some uses in terms of prototyping, and speed up that part of the process, which is where most studios seem to be experimenting with it now – churning out rough, AI-generated assets for prototypes and placeholders.

11-Bit Studios recently came under fire for placeholder AI-generated text in The Alters

This isn’t nothing, since a lot of projects sit in a development hell loop of endless prototyping for years, and being able to jazz up the quality of your demos and prototypes can help a lot in seeking funding or partnerships. However, the consensus seems to be that the assets produced by AI just aren’t consistent enough or of a high enough quality to be included in shipped games.

Again, hobbyists (“vibe artists”, I guess?) are making things a bit more confusing. They turn out individual pieces of high-quality-looking art, which is enough to convince non-experts that AI is capable of replacing actual 2D and 3D artists.

But for a studio trying to ship a high-quality game, it’s just not acceptable if your character’s number of fingers or teeth fluctuates wildly from image to image, if a generated animation oops-forgets the existence of arm bones for a couple of frames in a walk cycle, or if your generated 3D model collapses into a mess as soon as you try to apply level-of-detail calculations to its weird, janky mesh.

As with the code situation, the productivity benefits here are really debatable, not least because of the impact of trying to turn your artists into emergency fixers for broken AI-generated art instead of, well, actual artists. That’s understandably a task they’re far less motivated and interested in than they are in actually making things by themselves.

Studios still need to hire and pay skilled artists, because fixing broken assets is hard

Generative AI doesn’t fix labour shortages here either – studios still need to hire and pay skilled artists, because fixing broken assets is hard, and often harder than making the asset from scratch.

The problem that studios want to fix is simple – the skills required to make modern games are extremely valuable, and it’s hard to hire for these roles.

Skills shortages have been part and parcel of the industry for at least as long as I’ve been around; initiatives to try to solve skills gaps in the UK games industry were one of the first topics I wrote about when I started working on a trade paper all the way back in 2001. Even after the thousands of layoffs across the industry in recent years, skills shortages are still being felt keenly in many areas, often due to mismatches between the skills and locations of those on the job market, and the needs and locations of the companies hiring.

That’s what makes the GenAI pitch so appealing to studios. It glibly promises to solve the skills problem at last, and non-experts can even see it working on a small scale – autocompleting a code template, or turning out an impressive looking bit of concept art.

Combine that with the expansive yet dubious promises of companies whose entire existence is predicated on showing enough growth to attract fresh billions in funding, with little consideration to customer satisfaction in the medium or long term, and it’s enough to convince many people.

Failure to understand how poorly this technology scales to larger, more complex problems requiring high levels of consistency and understanding will, I fear, prove fatal for some early adopters – sinking some projects, and possibly even some studios.

AI will be more limited and of lower impact than its evangelists wish to claim

Consumer backlash is the lesser of the risk factors in these cases, because if you’re determined to believe in the alleged miracles AI is promising (just one more data centre bro, I swear, just one more petabyte of stolen intellectual property, we’ll get working agents for sure bro), there’s a good chance you’ll be very deep into the rabbit hole before it becomes clear that you need to bring in expensive, hard-to-hire experts to fix the mess that’s been made of your codebase and asset catalogue.

The genie isn’t going back into the bottle, and AI is going to find a place in development – but it will be more limited and of lower impact than its evangelists wish to claim, and some studios are going to have to learn that the very, very hard way.

After decades of wrestling with skill shortages, I can sympathise with those who don’t want to look this gift horse in the mouth – but they’d do well to remember that there’s another saying about things that seem too good to be true, and how those generally turn out.

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September 12, 2025 0 comments