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WD Is Going Nuts This Prime Day, 14TB Hard Drive Is Now Selling for Just $0.01 per GB
Game Reviews

WD Is Going Nuts This Prime Day, 14TB Hard Drive Is Now Selling for Just $0.01 per GB

by admin October 7, 2025


Storing large amounts of data offline comes down to a fundamental choice between two technologies. SSDs offer blazing speed but come with premium price tags that can hurt your wallet, while traditional HDDs sacrifice some performance in exchange for massive storage capacity at a fraction of the cost.

If you’re willing to trade a bit of speed for significantly more space, Western Digital’s 14TB external hard drive is currently hitting an all-time low on Amazon during Prime Big Deal Days at $169, down from its usual $279 price (40% off). To put this in perspective, a comparable 14TB SSD would set you back between $1,500 and $2,000, and you’d gain speed but nothing else. For most users backing up photos or documents, that speed difference doesn’t justify paying ten times more.

See at Amazon

Best in Class HDD

The sheer capacity of 14TB transforms how you think about digital storage: This isn’t a drive where you constantly delete old files to make room for new ones. With 14TB, you can store approximately 3.5 million high-resolution photos at 4 megabytes each, or around 3,000 hours of Full HD video or massive game libraries that would choke smaller drives.

The USB 3.0 interface moves data at rates of up to 5 gigabits per second on paper, which translates to real-world speeds of around 100-120 megabytes per second depending on your hardware and file type. That’s not quite as quick as current modern SSD speeds of 500+ MB/s but it’s quicker than enough for your average backup and archival workloads. Moving a 50GB folder takes around 7-8 minutes compared to under a minute for an SSD, but it’s a good trade-off given how much money you’re shelling out.

Plug-and-play functionality is a matter of plugging in the drive by USB and it is registered instantly on Windows and Mac platforms, no driver installs, and no formatting required. The pre-formatted Windows format of the drive is NTFS but Mac owners are able to reformat it to exFAT or even APFS, in minutes for guaranteed compatibility.

The unit is actually powered externally by an AC adapter instead of tapping off of the USB bus for current. The external powering is what grants the drive its ability to work at full capacity and isn’t held back by USB bus current limits, and it helps to remove drives off of laptop batteries during long transfers. The adapter, though, must itself be plugged into a wall outlet, so it’s a genuine desktop solution and not a transportable package stuffed into a briefcase.

The form factor is suitable for a semi-permanent/permanent installation for a home office/studio setup. You can sit it right next to your computer as a specialty backup drive, set automatic backups by Time Machine for Mac or by File History for Windows and leave it quietly accumulating copies of your irreplaceable data.

At $169 for its Prime Big Deal Days sale, this Western Digital 14TB HDD offers unmatched value per terabyte. That’s around $12 per terabyte, which is dazzling for a major-brand drive by a company known for reliability like Western Digital.

See at Amazon



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October 7, 2025 0 comments
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Roborock Q10 S5pluss
Game Reviews

Amazon Hits Roborock Hard, The Latest 10,000Pa Robot Vacuum with Mop Is Now Selling for Pennies

by admin October 6, 2025


Cleaning your floors shouldn’t feel like a never-ending chore, especially when pet hair seems to multiply overnight and daily messes keep piling up. The good news? The Roborock Q10 S5+ just became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in robot vacuums during Prime Big Deal Days, and that’s impressive enough to catch your attention.

This newly released powerhouse combines serious suction, advanced mopping and a self-emptying station into one complete package, and right now it’s dropped to an all-time low of $299 on Amazon, down from its usual $399 price tag. When a robot vacuum climbs to the top of the sales charts with those kinds of numbers, you know something special is happening.

See at Amazon

The Q10 S5+ addresses the fundamental frustration of robotic cleaning: constant maintenance. Its self-emptying station holds a massive 2.7-liter dust bag that handles up to 70 days of debris before you need to think about it. For households with shedding pets or high foot traffic, this means you can essentially forget about your vacuum for more than two months while it quietly does its job. The station automatically pulls dirt and hair from the robot after each cleaning session so you’re not emptying tiny dustbins every other day like with basic models.

Powerful Performance That Handles Real-World Messes

The suction power here is worth a mention because numbers count when you’re working with ground-in dirt. At 10,000 Pa, the HyperForce suction power creates enough pressure for it to remove embedded pet hair from carpet fibers, lift crumbs out of hardwood crevices and deal with the type of debris that lesser robots just bulldoze around. That’s about double what you’ll get on starter versions.

But a vacuum on its own won’t cure the tangling problem plaguing the majority of robot vacs, especially homes with long hair or fluffy pets. Roborock created a dual anti-tangle solution comprising a JawScrapers Comb main brush with a special side brush designed specifically to fight hair wrap. The structure of the comb separates and directs hair dynamically into the suction stream instead of wrapping it round the roller, so you’ll have a lot less time spent cutting out bunched-up grime from the brush bar.

The VibraRise 2.0 cleaning system provides a dual-zone sonic vibration technology that cleans floors 3,000 times a minute. This isn’t the languid wet pad sliding you witness on less advanced models. The active scrubbing action indeed addresses dried-on spills and tacky areas, and the system automatically lifts the mop pad 0-8mm when it recognizes carpet using ultrasonic sensors. That same recognition initiates automatic suction boost on the carpets for further cleaning while safeguarding them against moisture damage.

The navigation tech distinguishes advanced robots from simple bump-and-go ones, and the Roborock Q10 S5+ makes full home 360-degree mapping a breeze with its PreciSense LiDAR scanning tech. The tech provides precise floor plans and multi-level mapping, so a two-storey home, for instance, will have both floor plans remembered by the robot, which then changes cleaning strategy to suite both areas. ReactiveTech obstacle avoidance with structured light detection detects chair legs, toys, and cables, amongst others and cleverly navigates a path around them without getting stuck or requiring rescue.

Make sure you don’t miss that deal before it runs out of stock (which is a matter of time).

See at Amazon



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October 6, 2025 0 comments
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Meta Quest 3s 128
Game Reviews

Amazon Hits Meta Hard, the Quest 3S VR Bundle Just Got Suddenly a Lot Cheaper

by admin October 6, 2025


Virtual reality is slowly carving out its place in the tech world, but let’s be honest: it’s still a niche market. If you’re curious about VR and mixed reality, dropping $4,000 on an Apple Vision Pro that has limited content and unclear use cases doesn’t make much sense. Your better bet is going with the company that’s been all-in on VR from the beginning: Meta.

The Quest 3S represents the most affordable entry point into Meta’s VR ecosystem, and for Prime Big Deal Day, Amazon is offering an exclusive Cardboard Hero Bundle at $299: This package includes the headset plus the Handiwork Helmet, Handiwork Armor, and 1,000 shiny rocks for Gorilla Tag, adding $45 worth of in-game content to sweeten the deal + three months of Meta Horizon Plus at no cost.

See at Amazon

Mixed Reality That Actually Makes Sense

The Quest 3S bridges the gap between pure virtual reality and the real world through mixed reality capabilities. This means you can blend digital objects into your actual environment, playing games where virtual characters interact with your furniture or working on multiple virtual screens while still seeing your room. The headset uses passthrough cameras to show you your surroundings in high-definition resolution, which makes the experience feel natural rather than disorienting. You can dial up the immersion and go full VR when you want complete escapism, or keep your environment visible when you need to stay aware of your surroundings.

Meta also fitted the Quest 3S with the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform which provides twice the Quest 2’s graphics performance. This means less stuttering in highly demanding games and sharper in-game detail that enhances the realism of virtual worlds. Better processing power also allows smoother operation of experiences that would stutter or lag in older headsets for a better immersion even in long gaming sessions or highly detailed virtual worlds.

The home theater-like effect in itself is worth thepurchase for some users. You get to make whatever room is available your own in-home cinema by darkening your space and watching content on a giant and colorful virtual screen. You’re essentially getting a 100-inch TV that only exists in your headset. You plug in your USB-C headphones for the 3D-like sounds, or use your regular 3.5mm headphones with your USB-C adapter (available separately) and this is perfect for watching movies.

Physical activities feel comfortable due to the wireless freedom and compact nature: Virtual exercises put your heart rate up with no cables limiting your mobility, and full-body games make your whole living room your playground. Touch Plus Controllers deliver realistic feedback and precise pinch and tilt for games involving fine motor controls and hand tracking enables you to move menus and interact with content with your hands alone.

Meta included strong parental controls within the system so that you could control screen time, see daily use, and assign permissions for your household members. You could also initiate multiple user profiles and sharing accounts for content, so it is simple for all household members to have their own customized experience. Accounts for users who are 10 years and older are turned on and special safety recommendations are on hand online.

Your membership entitles you to three months of Meta Horizon Plus at no cost which entitles you to immediate access to a seasonal game library, monthly content drops, and special experiences. You get to test the library in VR for free without additional purchases right away, subject only to eligibility and auto-renewing terms.
At just $299 for the special bundle, the Quest 3S is an affordable portal to VR and mixed reality at just a tiny fraction of the price of competition in headsets.

See at Amazon



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October 6, 2025 0 comments
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Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev
Game Updates

Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev

by admin October 4, 2025


Even the most fervent Super Earth bootlicker wouldn’t deny that Helldivers 2 has been suffering some technical problems, especially after the performance-sapping Into the Unjust update. Developers Arrowhead say a patch is coming, and in the meantime, have shared the first in a series of techy blog posts burrowing into the engineering side of how the co-op bugshooter comes together. Entry number one doesn’t deal with framerates, though: instead it explains the game’s longer-running issue with its increasingly gargantuan, 150GB-ish install size.

Earlier this year, players had already discovered the most immediate cause of Helldivers 2’s swelling: its installation is stuffed with duplicate files, spanning weapon models to tree and rock textures. This had not only ballooned the install size over time, as successive updates added more and more assets, but left PC players with the unanswered question of why their SSDs were filled with photocopied rocket launchers. Especially as the PS5 and Xbox versions, weighing in around a third of the size, exhibited no such duplication.

As the post (credited to deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong) now explains, including multiple file copies was Arrowhead’s solution to the slow loading times of creaking old hard drives. A lingering inconvenience to some PCs, but not the exclusively SSD-equipped consoles.

“The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time,” Armstrong writes. “An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to “seek” or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.

“Imagine a large game level with various objects – trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”

I know the feeling – I recently flooded my flat with spare scissors, having tired of never remembering where I put our sole original pair. Hard drives might have more reliable memories than me but when it comes to Helldivers 2, Arrowhead evidently don’t consider the time they would spend searching for individual, non-duplicate files to constitute an acceptable loading speed.

The post also considers alternate solutions, including removing or repacking certain duplicates – which would make HDD loading slower, but potentially cut the file size – or split off 4K textures as an optional download, something Armstrong says is not “natively” supported by the game’s engine but could still be made possible.

It’s tempting to mutter “Or everyone could just be sensible and get an SSD.” I’d probably be muttering it myself, had almost every facet of gaming PC building and ownership not become so miserably expensive in the past few years, in turn making cheap mech drives genuinely harder to upgrade from on tight budgets. Hopefully Arrowhead can find a fix that works for everyone.



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October 4, 2025 0 comments
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LEGO Just Released the 2025 City Advent Calendar, Selling for Pennies on Amazon at Launch
Game Reviews

LEGO City Advent Calendar Is Hard to Spot on Amazon, but It’s Selling for Just Pennies Until Midnight

by admin October 2, 2025


December feels forever away but here’s the thing: LEGO drops its Advent calendars in September for a reason. And if you’ve ever waited until November, you already know the truth: by then, the deals are gone, the stock’s low and you’re stuck paying full price. But right now, the LEGO City Advent Calendar 2025 (the most loved one in the lineup) is hiding on Amazon at an all-time low of just $25, down from $34.99, and it’s available for everyone, Prime or not, until tomorrow night.

See LEGO City Advent Calendar 2025 at Amazon

A Holiday Countdown That Feels Like Magic

This isn’t just a calendar: It’s 24 bursts of joy, one door per day. Your kid (or you?) gets to open a fresh surprise every morning—mini builds, fun accessories, and adorable mini-figures—all the way through to Christmas. And what about the mini-figs: Santa and Mrs. Claus are on the job, along with laugh-out-loud hilarious characters of Santa in a reindeer costume, Mrs. Claus as a polar bear, and even Mrs. Claus as a walking Christmas tree.

The great part? It’s made for kids 5 and up and each little build has simple instructions tucked just behind the door. No frustration, no confusing instructions – just the happy “aha!” moment when they click the pieces into place. And the pièce de résistance: the calendar flips open into a big playmat. One minute it’s a countdown, the next it’s a winter wonderland holiday party scene where all the figures come to life. Kids can mix and match their other LEGO City sets, build wacky scenarios and play for hours.

Parents, pay attention: how many times can you receive a gift that provides something new each day? That keeps the anticipation going, promotes patience and sparks creativity without the use of a screen? This calendar does all of the above – and it’s only $25 today at Amazon. That’s close to a ten-dollar discount, and it doesn’t often go this low except for Prime Day or Black Friday.

See LEGO City Advent Calendar 2025 at Amazon



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October 2, 2025 0 comments
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Seagateps4
Game Updates

Seagate 2TB Hard Drive for PlayStation Returns to Nearly Free Per TB Pricing as Amazon Blows Out Remaining Stock

by admin September 28, 2025


As much as we all like to joke that “the PS5 has no games,” that’s simply not true. Mine has plenty of PS4 games on it! Ba-dum-tiss. Anyway, there are some awesome PlayStation 5 exclusives. The amazing and cute platformer Astro Bot won Game of the Year last year. Ghost of Yōtei is dropping in under a week. Plus people are still sleeping on 2021’s incredible third-person shooter roguelike Returnal. And then yes of course there really are a bunch of good PS4 games to check if you missed them last generation. A lot of them have great-looking updates too like everything going on with The Last of Us remakes and remasters. Point is there are lots of good games to play, but do you have enough storage space for all of them?

Expand you PS5 storage with the help of Seagate’s officially-licensed game drive for PlayStation consoles. This external hard drive connect to your system over USB 3.2 and will  let you boost your capacity to store games by a full 2TB. Right now, Amazon has the drive discounted down from $90 to just $80. A $10 savings may not sound like much, but that’s already halfway to getting you Hollow Knight: Silksong.

See at Amazon

The PS5 base model only comes with 800GB of internal space (1TB on the Slim), and some of that isn’t even usable to you as it’s got all the system stuff on it that makes the console work. Really you’re working with roughly. The base model really has about 667GB while the Slim has a bout 842.2GB for you to work with, saving your games. This Seagate drive will more than triple your ability to store your game data. nor more deleting and redownloading.

One Small Caveat

There is a catch though. You can’t actually play you games off this external drive. The PS5 requires much faster read/write speeds than this supports. You might be thinking, “Okay, then what the heck is the point?” Well, this drive is still helpful because you can move you games from it to your internal drive when you want to play them. This is a much, much faster process than redownloading a game over the internet. Think of it like the digital version of taking your disc off the shelf and popping it into your console. The good news is you can play your PS4 games directly off of it.

Unlike the internal SSDs available to expand your PS5 storage, this drive requires no tools to install as it just connects over USB. That makes it totally portable so you can bring it over to a friend’s house and fire it up on their PS5 if you wish. Have your whole gaming library on the go.

See at Amazon



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September 28, 2025 0 comments
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Plasma (Ramon Salinero/Unsplash)
NFT Gaming

BTC News: Hard Fork Chatter Disputed

by admin September 27, 2025



Debates over Bitcoin’s future are nothing new, but this week the discussion took on a sharper edge. One of Bitcoin’s long-serving developers was at the center of a storm about immutability, censorship and what it means to “save” the protocol.

The controversy escalated on Sept. 25, following an article published by The Rage claiming to reveal that Luke Dashjr, maintainer of the Bitcoin Knots software, advocates a hard fork that would install a trusted multisig committee with power to retroactively alter the blockchain, review transactions and remove illicit content.

A blockchain hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the blockchain software, requiring all participants to upgrade to the new protocol because the new and old versions are incompatible.

The piece cited purported leaked text messages in which Dashjr allegedly warned: “Either Bitcoin dies or we have to trust someone.”

The story spread across X, drawing hundreds of thousands of views and intensifying a long-running philosophical rift: should Bitcoin remain a neutral settlement layer, or should developers actively filter what counts as legitimate use of the network?

Dashjr rejected the claims outright. “The truth is I have not proposed a hardfork or anything of the sort, and these bad actors are just grasping at straws to slander me and try to undermine my efforts to save Bitcoin again,” he wrote.

The Rage responded with a meme to the effect of demanding to know who sent the leaked messages that its story shared.

Dashjr repeated his position multiple times over the following 24 hours. “Nope, nothing changed. Nobody is calling for a hard fork still.” he posted. In another reply, he underlined: “There is no hard fork.”

The Knots vs. Core Divide

Behind the dispute lies a deeper divide between Dashjr’s Bitcoin Knots project and the broader Bitcoin Core software used by most of the network.

Knots enforces tighter transaction policies, including blocking non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions and Runes tokens. Dashjr and his supporters argue such measures protect Bitcoin’s monetary integrity and safeguard it from regulatory risks. Core developers have historically taken a more permissive approach, tolerating non-standard data as long as it does not break consensus.

The alleged hard fork proposal cut to the heart of that tension. For Dashjr’s critics, it seemed to confirm fears that his vision requires compromising Bitcoin’s principle of immutability. For his defenders, the leak was an opportunistic smear designed to derail the case for stronger spam filters.

Among his defenders was Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards, a Bitcoin Ordinals project, so one which most would assume embodies everyting to which Dashjr is opposed.

“Not a Luke fan but this is a hit piece and fake news. He is not proposing this,” Wertheimer posted on X, referring to the supposed hard fork plan.

“I’m (obviously) not on Luke’s side but…this is just a sloppy low quality propaganda piece,” he wrote.

Wertheimer concluded that what Dasjhr’s leaked messages were a hypothetical discussion about using zero-knowledge proofs to allowing Knots nodes to avoid downloading “spam.”

“This is, as always, a nothing burger,” he concluded. “It’s pretty obvious to me that this proposal never gets implemented, and even if it did, it does not censor the network and does not split the network, and remains fully compatible with core.”

It’s worth noting that over the past 24 hours, BTC$109,485.29 slipped 2.2% to trade at around $109,000, a drop of over 5.5% in the last week.

While there’s no direct evidence linking this dip to the controversy over Dashjr’s alleged plans, the timing is hardly helpful. In crypto markets, uncertainty alone can amplify downward pressure and rumors of protocol upheaval tend to stoke exactly that.



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September 27, 2025 0 comments
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Mikayla matthews with newborn doing stiletto challenge
Esports

Woman yawns so hard she breaks her own neck in “freak accident”

by admin September 27, 2025



A 36-year-old mother of two is going viral after she yawned so strongly that she ended up breaking her own neck, sending her to the hospital.

We’ve all had a big yawn or two that left us scared we might dislocate our jaw, but one woman from the United Kingdom seriously injured herself from yawning.

Hayley Black, a mother of two, said the incident happened back in 2016 nearly a decade ago — but after regaling her followers with the harrowing tale in a now-private video on TikTok in 2025, it’s once again shocking viewers across the net.

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The injury took place when Hayley was caring for her then-newborn baby, Amelia, who was yawning while waiting for a feed at 5 AM. Yawns are contagious, so when baby Amelia yawned, so did her mom.

Hayley described the ensuing sensation as an “electric shock” that went through half her body, causing her to jump in surprise.

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“My arm got stuck in the air and I was having these electric spark sensations,” she explained. “It was like having a seizure down half of my body. I knew instantly something was dreadfully wrong.”

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Hayley was transported to a hospital by ambulance — a drive that she described as “excruciatingly painful,” with emergency service workers putting her head in “blocks” to stabilize her neck.

Kennedy News / TikTok: hayleys_editHayley was sent to the hospital, where she underwent scans that left doctors confused.

However, scans didn’t show anything wrong, leaving both Hayley and her doctors puzzled.

“I was screaming in pain all night and I had the gas and air. I was trying to hit myself in the head to try to knock myself out because I was in so much pain,” she said.

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“Nobody was listening to me, and I was like, ‘Something is seriously wrong.’ The nurses were getting frustrated with me and said, ‘There’s nothing on the scans, you’re okay.’”

Woman paralyzed after breaking neck from strong yawn

Hayley’s ongoing pain prompted doctors to do more tests — and finally, a surgeon discovered that she was completely paralyzed on the right side of her body.

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According to Hayley, the C6 and C7 sections of her spine at the base of her neck “shot forward” when she yawned in what medical professionals called a “freak accident.”

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She underwent surgery to correct the issue. Doctors described the procedure as “risky,” telling her mother that she had a “50/50” chance of survival due to her low oxygen levels.

Kennedy News / TikTok: hayleys_editAlthough Hayley’s surgery went well, she still fears yawning to this day.

Luckily, she made it out to the other side alive and well, although she still struggles with severe nerve pain and fibromyalgia to this day.

“The one thing I have taken from it is to be grateful for the small,” she said. “Being chronically ill now because of it means I am so grateful for the good days, for the small moments, for being able to walk and for being here with my children and husband.”

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This is far from the first freak accident to take social media by storm. In 2021, popular YouTuber WhistlinDiesel revealed that he survived after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a .50 caliber bullet.

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September 27, 2025 0 comments
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Luke Dashjr Reportedly Mulls Bitcoin Hard Fork
Crypto Trends

Luke Dashjr Reportedly Mulls Bitcoin Hard Fork

by admin September 26, 2025


  • Major concerns 
  • History of Bitcoin forks 

Bitcoin Core contributor Luke Dashir is reportedly considering a Bitcoin hard fork in the near future. 

The controversial developer is a loud opponent of increasing the size of  OP_RETURN, arguing that there is no place for non-monetary data on the leading blockchain. Hence, there is no need for optimization. 

He maintains the Bitcoin Knots client, which is an alternative implementation of Bitcoin nodes. 

Initially, Knots came up with filters that specifically block transactions with non-monetary data. 

However, all nodes are required to store data within the same blocks, and the filters implemented by Knots can apply only to unconfirmed transactions. 

Dashir has now acknowledged that merely policing the memoool is not sufficient. 

According to the report, he has proposed setting up a committee that would retroactively alter data on the leading blockchain. However, this would require launching a Bitcoin hard fork. 

Major concerns 

The hard fork would inevitably raise such major concerns as censorship, given that it could potentially lead to all “unfavorable” data being removed. Furthermore, node operators could potentially face criminal liability if they refuse to comply with the committee’s requests. 

The report claims that the messages were verified, but Dashjr is denying the allegations. 

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Blockstream CEO Adam Back claims that the allegations are “far worse” than he could have imagined. 

According to BitMEX Research, this appears to be an “attack” on the cryptocurrency’s key censorship resistance characteristics. 

History of Bitcoin forks 

When it comes to blockchains, hard forks are used for implementing major protocol changes. 

Since its launch, the Bitcoin network has seen multiple hard forks, including Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Cash (the most successful one by far), and Bitcoin Gold. 



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September 26, 2025 0 comments
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"It was really hard to publish on Xbox. It was our job to make it easier" - inside Xbox's increasingly vital indie publishing operation
Game Updates

“It was really hard to publish on Xbox. It was our job to make it easier” – inside Xbox’s increasingly vital indie publishing operation

by admin September 22, 2025


My first major memory of Indie Games on Xbox platforms is a pleasant one, and it’s precisely the sort of memory I feel most appropriate for the medium. This was a tiny self-published affair – nary a publisher in sight, what I assume was a solo developer, and an extremely limited scope. I’m not talking about Hollow Knight, or Balatro, or Braid, or Limbo or what have you. I’m talking about Curling 2010.

Curling 2010 was exactly what it sounds like: a very simple indie recreation of the sport of curling. It was a drunken discovery, and in my circle of friends was almost exclusively played competitively when very liquored. To me, Curling stood alongside Mount your Friends as the absolute poster children of Xbox Live Indie Games, a rather brilliant little service that allowed pretty much anyone to develop Xbox 360 games using Microsoft’s XNA framework. Games would get peer reviewed and then could go live for a few bucks.


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This service was surprisingly simple, shockingly democratised, and was the first signal of how serious Xbox was about allowing independent developers access to its platform; they let one person indulge their interest in Curling and put their game on Xbox 360.

While Xbox Live’s Community Indie games service never left the Xbox 360 and Microsoft never quite embraced such chaotic openness again, that system’s founding spirit was later channeled into Xbox One’s ID@Xbox program, which continues to this day. In 2025, ID@Xbox has seldom seemed more important to Xbox’s fortunes. The platform holder finds itself in choppy waters: first-party studio layoffs, second-party game cancellations, botched rescue deals and boycott calls fuelled by the actions of Xbox’s parent company. But you know what part of the Xbox ecosystem has been consistently rather good? ID@Xbox.

A glance around Xbox’s Gamescom stand last month serves as quite firm confirmation of that fact. The longest line was, of course, for Silksong. Even before the show opened to the public, I watched media and influencers denigrate themselves dashing to that queue, which ran for over an hour. On the other side of the stand, games like Super Meat Boy 3D and There are No Ghosts at the Grand dominated as partner titles. Some might uncharitably suggest that this stand is more representative of a particularly quiet year for Xbox’s first party games – but the truth is, Xbox shows have featured booths like this for a long time; each appearance a demonstration of an indie and third party relations setup firing on all cylinders.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a big deal, and got the full-on “chosen one” treatment from Xbox, but not all indie games are as fortunate. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Team Cherry

“Some years there’s more indie games, some years there’s a few less – but every year it’s a discussion,” ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla tells me in the midst of the bustle and noise of the Xbox stand. We chat in a small aisle of the booth just adjacent to an indie-focused section where an early-morning queue is beginning to snake. The breadth of third-party titles on the booth, from late Japanese ports to all-new indies and hotly anticipated sequels, is meant to send a message.

“It is just really a recognition by Xbox of the absolute crucial need for diversity in our portfolio,” Charla adds.

Case in point: There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, the quirky debut title of Bristol-based developer Friday Sundae. Distinctly British, it took pride of place at Xbox’s Summer Games Fest and Gamescom presences.

“We never in our wildest dreams thought that we would be there,” shares Anil Glendinning, creative director at Friday Sundae on No Ghosts at the Grand. “And if we did, we thought it’d be in some tiny little booth hidden at the back of a distant hall, where nobody gets to see us! We did not ever in a million years expect to be right there, as part of Xbox, right there, hall 7 – and to have people waiting, like, an hour to play our game.

“Not as big as the queues for Hollow Knight, of course,” Glendinning laughs, “But it was extraordinary, and surreal, and a real item off the bucket list. As an indie dev, you couldn’t hope for a better start for introducing the game directly to gamers.”

The section towards the back-right of Xbox’s stand where No Ghosts at the Grand made its debut serves as a perfect example of the breadth of the relationships Xbox is trying to foster outside of its first-party ecosystem. Alongside No Ghosts there was Silksong, the indie that is so massive it no longer quite fits the term in the same way. Then there’s Invincible VS, which has a more traditional publishing arrangement but via the smaller-scale Skybound Games. PowerWash Simulator 2 is a sequel to a smash hit published by one of gaming’s biggest multinationals – but this time developer Futurlab is going it alone. Chinese developer Pawprint Studio showcased its Pokémon-alike Aniimo, and just off to the side were some of the fruits of Xbox’s development outreach efforts in Japan with a few late-but-welcome ports from Square Enix.

Watch on YouTube

The point is, the stand paints a picture of a direction of travel for Xbox even as other aspects of their business appear much less certain. From smaller truly independent studios to start-ups with a little external investment and support, the word tends to be pretty universal, too: those who have had the opportunity to ply Xbox’s resources have found it invaluable.

“We’re an indie studio and small publisher so getting this level of support during key marketing milestones is huge for us,” says Mike Willette, executive producer on Invincible VS at new startup studio Quarter Up. “Having that kind of reach – especially during such a big-scale event – meant that fans around the world could connect with the Invincible VS. It was a big moment for the game and the reaction has been amazing to see.”

The enthusiastic attitude towards Xbox’s support raises a question, of course: how exactly Xbox decides which games are the chosen ones and which are less lucky. Even the most passing of glances at Steam’s statistics tells us there are now more games than ever – and the process of discovery is thereby ever more complicated. That’s true for the media, as we try to dig out cool games for readers – but it’s also obviously true for publishers, and consumers themselves. Charla says Xbox’s approach hasn’t changed in over a decade, however.

“We find them everywhere,” Charla says. “We find them by spending time in the Indie Arena [at Gamescom]. We find them by people sending us direct messages on BlueSky… We find them from people all around Microsoft being like, hey, have you seen this game? And we find them from having friends who make games who say – hey, you need to see my friend’s game. And from people just emailing us!”

In the end, Charla’s team works with hundreds of partners each year, reviewing what’s next in the world of indie or indie-adjacent gaming. This is a team that isn’t just looking for the next Hollow Knight, either – the hunt is on for all sorts of titles, in large part to ensure the breadth of releases on Game Pass. And while the idea of Game Pass as a universally ‘good thing’ remains in dispute, with some developers going as far as to call it unsustainable and damaging, Charla is bullish on the service – and its successes with indie developers.

Securing a deal to get a game on Game Pass can be a huge financial safety blanket for indide developers. | Image credit: Adobe Stock, Microsoft

“The majority of partners who’ve had a game in Game Pass want to bring their future titles to the service,” Charla notes. “As a result, we’ve signed deals with more than 150 partners to expand the catalogue. We continue to engage with hundreds of partners each year to review upcoming titles.”

“Last year, we worked with over 50 teams to sign their first Game Pass deal. This year marks our largest investment in Game Pass to date, and we remain focused on delivering the most exciting and diverse catalogue in gaming.”

The pathway of gradually ending up intertwined with Xbox and landing a Game Pass deal matches up to that described by Friday Sundae for No Ghosts at the Grand. In that case, the studio had put together a demo and had been showing it off to various potential partners, which included a submission to the Xbox team via a developer-focused website and form entry. It was, by Glendinning’s own admission, a “strange demo” – which tempered expectations.

“We didn’t expect to hear back,” Glendinning admits of that early No Ghosts at the Grand demo. “We went through those channels and then promptly forgot all about it. And in fact, when we got an email back… we thought it was spam! We weren’t completely sure it was real. But it was – it was someone within the Xbox team saying, yeah, we like your demo, we played it, we think it’s interesting, and we’d like to jump on a call. Since then, it’s been a blur.”

That whirlwind of Xbox’s involvement has been described to me variously by developers as useful from a nuts-and-bolts development perspective – in terms of gathering feedback and enjoying technological support – but also as a confidence-booster for the small teams involved. The attention of a much bigger partner can be useful or scary – but it can also be validating.

Image credit: Friday Sundae

“We had to show Xbox progress during key milestones, i.e. demo the game for their partnerships team at critical moments to inspire confidence that we belonged on their support roster,” says Mike Willette of Invincible VS. “It was a good exercise for our dev team as well as something that helped us constantly elevate our own bar.”

“I just remember that Xbox was so curious about our creative process,” says Friday Sundae’s Glendinning. “They wanted to know where we wanted to take it, where our creativity was coming from, our vision for the game. Everything that we said to them, they came back with this enthusiasm. We’d keep sending – another email, some more screenshots, more videos, more content. Time after time, we were getting encouragement, support, and the thumbs up to keep on going.

“Having that kind of support was a huge confidence boost, y’know? We weren’t sure what we were making or whether anyone would be interested, or really like it. Hearing people within the Xbox team being excited, being encouraging, wanting to see more – that was a real shot in the arm of confidence for us. It really spurred the team forward to think: hey, you know what? We might actually have something here.”

There was another, secondary benefit, of course. “The biggest thing for us was getting access to those dev kits,” Glendinning notes. “It’s still hugely important for us knowing that we have Xbox there, having our backs if we run into any issues or problems. But the truth is, it’s actually been smooth sailing so far.”

A smooth journey for indie developers is something that is clearly a focus for Charla and his team. When asked about his team’s journey over the years – aside from the games themselves – the ID@Xbox boss instantly zeroes in on the technical changes that team has managed to institute across the Xbox platform, making adjustments that in many cases benefit everyone, indie or triple-A alike.

Indie games have a strong history on Xbox, as evidenced by this absolute classic, Mount Your Friends. | Image credit: Stegersaurus Software Inc

“It was really hard to publish on Xbox. It was our job to make it easier,” Charla says. “So when we first started ID@Xbox, we had a lot of asks.

“We had a lot of asks that were really indie specific, and we would go into these meetings with all these engineers – and we didn’t know anybody, right? These are business people. And we show up like, ‘Errr… ahh… we’re from ID’ – but as soon as we said that it was like ‘Oh, you’re the Indie guys! What do you need?!’ That level of support internally at Microsoft for independent developers has been off the charts forever from day one, and it continues today.

“Y’know, if we can save 12 hours on a game… hey, that’s great for everybody. It’s great for big publishers, but for an indie or maybe a solo dev – 12 hours is like a day and a half of work that you can use to theoretically materially make the game a day and a half better. There’s a lot of former developers on the team, and we really take that kind of thing to heart.”

Over the years, the focus has been on trying to make the act of getting games onto Xbox easier. But Charla now sees a new challenge. With an explosion in the sheer number of games, plus an ever-growing number of games in Xbox’s subscription service, it’s now about making sure games don’t get lost in the flood. His team is looking to make similar optimisations in this area as they once did to the process of onboarding developers in the first place.

“What if we put that discovery question on its head?” Charla asks. “How do we as a game platform help developers to discover their audience? So if you’re making a game of a certain quality… there’s an audience for that out in the world. Whether that audience’s total addressable market is 30 million or 3 million, or 300,000, or 30,000… How do we as Microsoft help you get in front of that total addressable audience?

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“We want to show that audience your box art. Now, whether or not they click on the box, whether or not to buy the game, that’s a little dependent on the developer – on the box art, on the game, etc. But I think our job is to think about Discovery in a new way, which is, how do we ensure developers can discover their audiences?”

Some of this brings us full-circle. When I speak to Charla and the developers featured here, it’s either during or off the back of an Xbox Gamescom presence that has been all about connecting directly with players in-person. At Gamescom, from the perspective of these developers, Xbox’s support was invaluable.

“Having the opportunity to showcase Invincible VS on a global stage – especially in Europe – was huge,” says Mike Willette. “It was our first time seeing international fans interact with the game in-person, and that was incredibly rewarding. Seeing people’s reactions, watching them get a feel for the mechanics and feeling the excitement build up on the show floor – there’s really nothing like experiencing that.”

The challenge, then, appears to be taking that sort of energy and that discovery available in person at physical events and finding ways to deliver that on digital storefronts and the like. Charla’s vision – that discovery is a two-way street, as much about games finding audiences as it is about audiences finding games – is clearly a key lynchpin. As with ID@Xbox driving storefront and development backend changes that helped all, though, it’s clear that Xbox’s indie support will be key to this. Then there is the broader position in which Xbox finds itself, much of it undesirable – making this bright spot one whose continued luminescence is vital. Charla, at least, appears to believe he has the support and buy-in needed to do that.

“I remember one year, we had a bunch of games ready but we just weren’t showing them at this particular internal review. And a very senior executive, halfway through the review, looks at me and is like ‘where are the indie games?’,” the ID@Xbox boss recalls.

“I was like, ‘oh, don’t worry, they’re coming – next review! You know, the trailers tend to come along a little later for indies…’ But, it was cool for that question to be asked. It was a real moment where I reflected on it later and was just like – okay, I’m working in the right place.”



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