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World of Warcraft is getting player housing in December, ahead of Midnight expansion launch

by admin October 3, 2025

Blizzard has announced that player housing will be coming to World of Warcraft starting 2nd December, ahead of the Midnight expansion launch.

This initial rollout for housing will not be feature-complete, with the full suite of mechanics arriving when it enters the game proper at Midnight’s launch sometime in 2026. With the housing release in December, players will be able to buy a plot of land, establish a neighbourhood with other players, and begin designing your home with a selection of decor items.

Future updates to housing will include hundreds of decorations, including some furnishings that come from older achievements and content from prior expansions such as World of Warcraft: Legion Order Hall completion.

Here’s the full developer Q&A for World of Warcraft: Midnight, that came out alongside the alpha.Watch on YouTube

In addition, players will be able to level up their houses over time, which provides increased interior and exterior decor placement budget, fixture budget, and room placement budget. Neighbourhoods can be both private and public, allowing those from the same guild to build up an estate of sorts together within a variety of biomes.

Not only that, but neighbourhoods will be able to participate in endeavors. These are monthly neighbourhood events that provide exclusive decor to use on participants’ homes. As such, some level of community collaboration is intended for the housing system.

World of Warcraft: Midnight is the second part of a three-part trilogy, which started with The War Within last year. It’ll take players back to Silvermoon city, where the Blood Elves are having a rough time fending off void ne’er-do-wells. In addition players will be able to play as the Haranir as an allied race, a faction of note throughout The War Within’s narrative.

When Blizzard first announced housing it did so with a subtle jab at Final Fantasy 14, another popular MMO with its own housing system and housing-related problems. It’s worth noting that unlike Final Fantasy 14, housing isn’t limited in World of Warcraft, so players won’t be unable to get a house come December, which is good!

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Worried about Black Ops series fatigue? So is Treyarch, as senior developer admits back-to-back Call of Duty releases could impact player interest

by admin September 26, 2025

A senior developer from Call of Duty studio Treyarch has admitted worry over series fatigue, as Black Ops 7 arrives next month just one year after the last game.

Typically, Call of Duty games are released annually on a rotating basis, alternating between Modern Warfare and Black Ops. But this year, Black Ops 7 follows on from last year’s Black Ops 6 – though it’s not the first time, as two Modern Warfare games arrived back-to-back in 2022 and 2023.

“I think the honest answer is yes. I worry about that,” said senior director of production Yale Miller when asked by CharlieIntel (thanks Dexerto) about the games being viewed as too similar.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 | Zombies Gameplay Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube

“Obviously, there was a plan with the two MW games and then this. We’ll see what the franchise does in the future. We’re excited about the opportunities it gave us, but we’d all be dead lying if we said we weren’t worried about that.”

Though part of the same world, Black Ops 6 was set in the ’90s while this year’s game is set in 2035 for a near-future tone, which should provide an opportunity to differentiate.

“We’re absolutely going to bring it from a content perspective in our live seasons,” said Miller. “How can we have new gameplay experiences? More content, more maps, weeklies, with functional stuff like deeper weapon prestige experiences.”

At yesterday’s Xbox Tokyo Game Show Broadcast, two Black Ops 7 multiplayer maps were revealed inspired by Japan. Toshin is a Japanese metropolis with neon-lit streets and a cat cafe, while Den is a Japanese castle.

More multiplayer details were revealed earlier this week in a lengthy blog post, while a trailer for its zombie mode was released yesterday (see above).

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 promises to be the “most mind-bending” game in the series yet. Tyler Bahl, head of Activision Publishing Marketing previously stated the back-to-back releases also gives players “a bit more time to enjoy all the live seasons and provide players more of what they want across Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone before we turn the page to Black Ops 7.”

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Football Manager player numbers are through the roof thanks to subscription platforms like Game Pass and Netflix – series boss Miles Jacobson explains how

by admin September 20, 2025

“It was five, six years ago we celebrated two million players for the first time,” Miles Jacobson tells me, during our lengthy interview with the studio head at Football Manager developer Sports Interactive’s office earlier this summer. Checking that reference, it was indeed 2020 when the studio first announced that figure, with some pride. “And then we’ve really embraced the subscription platforms…”

Those platforms – Xbox Game Pass, PS Plus, Apple Arcade, Netflix and more – have had a marked effect on the series. From 2 million players in 2020, the series’ playerbase has skyrocketed. “As I sit here today,” Jacobson says, in the late summer, “and because I haven’t been on social media these numbers haven’t been [publicly] updated for a long time, so I’m glad you’re sitting down – as of when I last checked, we’re at 19.09 million players. Of which, 7.5 million have played for more than five hours. If you play a game for more than five hours, you tend to play for a lot longer.”

Of those, 2 million people played the game in the month of June alone, Jacobson goes on. “That’s for a game that has been out since November 2023.”

While going through the figures, Jacobson brings up a dashboard on the giant screen he has in his office. Total playtime: 1.7bn hours, for FM24 alone. Average playtime: 118.8 hours, “including all the people that have subscribed and played for an hour and then not come back.” Without those, that figure’s in the many hundreds.

And then the one that stood out the most to me: FM24, as of late this summer, actually had slightly more regular daily players than when it first came out. Two years after release, with no FM25 after that game’s shock cancellation and no additional, official updates or data patches to fill the gap, FM24 is effectively bigger than it’s ever been.

“We have nine times as many players; we have two and a half times the revenue,” Jacobson says, before adding quite understandably: “So we’re really happy with the partnerships.”

Those kinds of partnerships have been in the spotlight of late. Back in July, for instance, Arkane Studios founder Raphael Colantonio called Game Pass the “elephant in the room” of the conversation around Xbox parent company Microsoft’s large-scale layoffs. He referred to it then as an “unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidised by ‘infinite money’, but at some point reality has to hit.” He added, “I don’t think it can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.”

The sentiment has some backing – in a continued conversation on X with Michael Douse, director of publishing at Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian, who broadly echoed those points, Colantonio continued: “I’m fed up with all the bs they fed us at first like ‘don’t worry, it doesn’t impact the sales’, only to admit years later that it totally does.”

It all makes for interesting context for Football Manager’s huge success, something Jacobson attributes quite directly to subscriptions. FM is a relatively unique series of course, in that it’s annualised, has theoretically different audience to ‘core’ games, and is available on such a wide array of platforms, from PC and consoles to tablets and mobile. Nevertheless, Jacobson says there are specific things the studio has done to ensure its success on subscription services.

“We built a whole business model around it,” he says. “You can’t just turn around and do this – this was before we launched on the subscription platforms, we’d been talking about it. And we’d been working out what we were going to do for five years – it was a five-year journey before we went with the first experiment, and then we did another experiment, and then we did another experiment, and then we learned from those experiments, and that’s when the full strategy was put in place.”

Part of that strategy is in building up what Jacobson called a “long-term addressable audience”. In other words: those players who play the game for more than five hours. Essentially they become a kind of insurance against subscription revenue suddenly going away. “If the platforms decided they didn’t want us anymore, we would know that we have a lot more consumers to talk to,” Jacobson explains.

As for that revenue, the specifics of the deals these kinds of platforms make with publishers and developers are quite heavily guarded, but Jacobson could speak broadly to how that worked – how, for instance, does getting nine times more players in a game like Football Manager equate to 2.5 times the revenue, when the games don’t include any real in-game microtransactions for those extra players to spend on?

“Different platforms work in different ways,” he says. “Some of them work in a world of up-front fees and royalties. Some of them work in a way of royalties. Those royalties are different for different platforms, so some are based on eyeballs, some are based on playtimes… So what Epic does with their free weeks is very different to what Microsoft does with Game Pass, very different to what Apple Arcade does. Which is very different to what Amazon Prime Days do, which is very different to what Netflix does.”

An extra upside comes “if your sales don’t drop,” Jacobson adds, meaning a studio such as Sports Interactive gets the revenue from the royalties and revenue from sales of the games they would’ve always had. “We don’t see cannibalisation, which is an absolute key thing. But we work with a publisher that we’ve worked with for a long time, who happens to own us as well, who understands the nature of annual iterations.” The studio also has a five-year plan, Jacobson says, and publisher Sega its own 10-year plans, which factor in the timing for when certain deals might run out.

“We know when our deals are going to run out with these platforms,” Jacobson says. “If we can get a deal that makes sense for us, then we will do the deal that makes sense. If we don’t… we know how many customers have played for more than five hours, so we know what our target number is going to be to hit that year. So it actually helps us, being able to be in a – I can’t say fully ‘no-lose’ situation – but in most cases we’re in a no-lose situation.”

All that has left Jacobson almost unanimously positive about the services, at least in terms of how they’ve worked for Football Manager. “We’d love to stay with the partners, we work very, very well together, and it’s massively increased our audience – but I don’t control their businesses, and with any large business they can pivot, so we’ve protected ourselves from that, and that’s why it was so important to do that long-term plan first.”

As for that painfully protracted wave of layoffs, Jacobson put much of the industry’s difficulty down to games’ increasing competition for attention: “We are in the middle of a battle for eyeballs.”

“We are not just battling time for other games,” he adds. “We’re also battling for the time of people watching TV, people watching YouTube, music, videos – games are battling with streamers over eyeballs, because there’s only one set of eyeballs. It all ties into the same thing… you have games like ours that have huge playtime. You have games like Candy Crush or Clash Royale, but also games like Destiny that have huge, huge playtimes, and we’ve seen a lot more of those coming through.”

All of those games, he goes on, “are battling against everything else. Plus there are more games coming out now than there’ve ever been before. Literally thousands of games coming out each month. Not everything can survive. So the subscription platforms are part of it, but the whole market is part of it as well.”

Likewise, he adds, “you have to be realistic about the situation, which is: if there aren’t enough hours in the day for the games to be played, then there are games that aren’t going to be able to be made. That’s the reality, in my opinion, of what people have been going through the last few years… I think people probably realised there’s just too many games coming out, they can’t all be successful. And the budgets have gone up so much – budgets have gone up exponentially – so you have to sell a lot more than you had to sell five years ago to have a hit game. So it’s a perfect storm.”

That ultimately comes back to Jacobson and the team’s five- and ten-year plans – something which might insulate Football Manager as a series more than other games from the “infinite money” concerns raised above. “We’ve got my COO, we’ve got the comms team, we’ve got the finance team, we’ve got the BI team, and we’ve got the whole of Sega that we worked with to agree on that long-term plan,” Jacobson says. “And then I ruined it all by not releasing FM25.”

You can read much more from Jacobson on what happened to FM25 and what expect from FM26 in our big Football Manager interview with the Sports Interactive gaffer.

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September 20, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Video game TV adaptations boost player numbers 140% on average, says new report

by admin September 16, 2025

TV adaptations of video games drive an average player growth of almost 140%, according to new research by Ampere Analysis.

The UK analytics firm reported its findings on September 16, 2025, revealing that video game TV spin-offs deliver a more substantial boost to franchises than film adaptations.

Ampere’s Games Analytics title activity data showed that the average uplift in players following the release of a TV adaptation is 203%, compared to the 48% uplift seen with movie adaptations.

Amazon Prime’s Fallout and HBO’s The Last of Us are prime examples of the boost a TV spin-off can provide to a game franchise.

Ampere Analysis found that the release of the Fallout TV show in April 2024, which reached 100 million viewers worldwide in six months, boosted the franchise’s monthly active users by 490%, with 80% of the 14 million “activated players” playing the series for the first time.

According to the analytics firm, by contrast, Fallout 76’s June and December updates increased monthly active users by an average of 17%.

In May, Sensor Tower reported that daily active users were 225% higher for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 in the weeks following the show’s premiere, while Fallout Shelter saw a 77% rise.

Sales also saw a boost. Fallout 3 sales rose 125%, Fallout 4 saw a 410% increase, and in-app purchases for Fallout Shelter jumped 150%.

The second season of the Fallout TV show is due to release this December.

The Last of Us franchise has also benefited greatly from its TV adaptation, which debuted in January 2023 to 4.7 million viewers.

Ampere Analysis found that, across the HBO show’s two seasons, The Last of Us’ franchise engagement increased by an average of 150%.

“Media adaptations are superchargers for the player bases of gaming franchises”

Ricardo Parsons, Ampere Analysis

By comparison, the release of The Last of Us Part 2 remastered for PS5 in January 2024 and the addition of The Last of Us Part 1 to the PS Plus catalogue increased monthly users by 70% and 29%, respectively.

Ampere Analysis noted that “Sony kept The Last of Us franchise active through a strategy of remasters and wider availability, helping retain 20% of players 180 days after the game’s peak engagement.”

Sensor Tower’s report previously found that daily active users for The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2 rose 40% following the show’s season two premiere in April 2025.

The Last of Us TV show has been renewed for season three, but Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann has stepped down as co-showrunner to focus on other projects. He will, however, help “shepherd” the series.

Ampere Analysis’s research also found that shows with “modest popularity” also see a boost from TV spin-offs.

Netflix’s Devil May Cry series, which premiered in April 2025, boosted player numbers by 358% compared to the previous month, the findings show.

The analytics firm also noted that “perennially popular games” like Minecraft can also “grow” from media adaptations, with research finding that Minecraft’s monthly active users increased 30% with the release of A Minecraft Movie in April 2025, 54% of which were lapsed players.

“Media adaptations are superchargers for the player bases of gaming franchises,” said Ricardo Parsons, analyst at Ampere Analysis. “They attract new audiences at scale, from first-time players diving into Fallout’s wasteland to lapsed gamers returning to Minecraft.

“And unlike DLC or remasters, hit adaptations showcase these stories to a wider audience, extending their reach.

“With adaptations of Call of Duty, Life is Strange, and Dark Deception all announced recently, Ampere expects this trend to continue – creating win-wins for publishers seeking new players and studios hungry for ready-made fanbases.”

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September 16, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Hollow Knight: Silksong player melts its hardest bosses with an endless fountain of tools: ‘I think I unlocked easy mode’

by admin September 16, 2025

The Strongest Build in SILKSONG [SPOILER FREE] Architect Crest Silkshot Railgun Silksong Build – YouTube

Watch On

I’ll admit, I wasn’t as creative with my build in Hollow Knight: Silksong as I’d like to admit. I found one of the early weapon upgrades and kind of stuck with that for the next 30 hours.

It got the job done, but it was nowhere close to the power of YouTuber Syrobe’s “easy mode” build where you have an endless supply of powerful tools. Before I explain how it works though, you should know that it requires fairly late-game unlocks to put together. I’d wait until you’re several hours into Act 2 before attempting this.

The heart of the build is the Architect Crest which has the unique ability to repair your tools on the fly. Normally, you have to rest at a bench to do that, but this Crest gives you the option to forgo healing yourself to replenish your tools in the middle of combat.

Tools are extremely powerful in Silksong and no other Crest lets you spam them like this one. The only drawback is that you can’t equip any of Hornet’s high-damage skills with it, but the amount of tools you can fling out more than makes up for it.

You can pretty much equip any tools you want, but Syrobe recommends the Tacks, Silkshot, and the Voltvessels. He adds in the Pollip Pouch so every hit applies a poison DoT on enemies and Quick Sling to double the amount of tools you throw at a time.

Nothing in the game can survive you laying traps all over the place and shooting everything down with buckets of laser beams and silk bullets. Bosses run into them and get ripped apart while you sit back and watch. Watching Syrobe tear through waves of enemies in seconds looks like he has cheats on.

He has a separate, spoilery video where he melts the last two bosses in the game in under a minute. Both fights took me much longer because I spent most of them dodging around and hitting the boss with my little sword.

Acquiring all the stuff might take you a while. Syrobe goes into detail on where to track it all down, but here’s a quick list of what you need and where to get it:

Architect Crest – Buy the Architect’s Key and unlock a room in the Underworks
Quick Sling – Found behind a false ceiling in Bilewater
Pollip Pouch – Complete the Rite of the Pollip quest in the Wormways
Tacks – Complete the Roach Guts quest in Sinner’s Road
Silkshot – Bring the Ruined Tool from Bilewater to the top of Mount Fay
Voltvessels – Found in northeastern Memorium

“I think I unlocked easy mode, I don’t know what everyone else is doing,” Syrobe said after humiliating one of the final bosses with a room full of traps. Here he is casually watching a boss get shredded while I remember each and every attempt I made in my own playthrough where I—a fool—chased the boss around with my sword. If only I had known about the devastating power of tools.

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September 16, 2025 0 comments

Nikon ZR camera, no lens, under low key magenta lighting

Product Reviews

Nikon Zr review: cinema cameras just got a major new player

by admin September 11, 2025

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Nikon ZR: two-minute review

The new Nikon ZR is the first in a new line of Nikon / RED cinema cameras, and instantly makes Nikon a major new player in this space, capable of going to toe-to-toe with Sony, Canon, Blackmagic and Panasonic.

Nikon only acquired RED Digital Cameras 18 months ago, and it’s made fast work of producing the surprisingly polished and capable ZR, adorned with Z Cinema Camera and Nikon / RED branding, and available for a tantalizing price that significantly undercuts rivals.

It packs a bunch of Nikon Z6 III tech, including the same 24MP partially stacked full-frame sensor, 5-axis image stabilization, subject-detection tracking autofocus and more, into an extremely compact, weather-sealed cinema camera body.

Nikon ZR at BHPhoto for $2,196.95

We get 6K 60fps video with internal RAW recording, with any one of nine industry-favorite RED color profiles baked in – that’s the Nikon / RED amalgamation truly bearing fruit – plus 4K 120fps and Full HD 240fps slow-motion recording.

Handily, shutter angle can be set automatically to 180 degrees, so there’s no need to mess around with manual exposure settings, plus the shutter angle can be set to any position between five and 360 degrees manually, should you wish.

The Nikon ZR with new ME-D10 shotgun mic attached – the mic supports the camera’s 32-bit float audio capture skills (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

We don’t get open gate video recording as in some rivals like the Canon EOS C50, but the ZR has another trick up its sleeve: hold the camera vertically, and its UI automatically rotates, with the vertical orientation embedded in the video files and automatically detected in Nikon’s editing software, delivering full-resolution vertical video.

The ZR is the first camera of its kind with internal 32-bit float audio capture, plus what Nikon says is the best-quality internal mics yet – a triple mic combo with Ozo audio and a choice of five directional pickup patterns, including binaural.

Alongside the ZR, Nikon has launched the ME-D10 directional mic (you can see it slotted into the camera’s hotshoe in the image above), which is compatible with the camera’s 32-bit float capabilities.

This is also the smallest cinema camera I’ve used, yet it still squeezes in a large, brightest-in-class 4-inch vari-angle touchscreen. Naturally, there’s no viewfinder.

Nikon has put both its own and RED’s branding on the ZR, together with Z Cinema Camera (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Given its tiny size, there are compromises. We don’t get some of the pro connectivity found in other pricier compact cinema cameras – for example there’s only a micro HDMI port, not a full-size one. However, if you still feel the need to use an external monitor even with the large 4-inch built-in display, all you’ll need is a micro-to-full-size HMDI adaptor to get connected.

Sadly, the ZR lacks mounting points for video accessories and, with no grip, you’ll definitely want to rig it up with a grip or a cage for a better hold. That means forking out for ZR-dedicated gear – Nikon outsources to leading accessory maker SmallRig.

However, at just $2,199.95 / £2,199.99 (Australia pricing is TBC), no other cinema camera comes close to the ZR for video features – and this aggressive pricing will soften the blow of any additional outlay on accessories.

I can see the Nikon ZR as a go-to b-cam for many pros, especially those already shooting with a RED camera, for whom the color profile matching will make for a seamless workflow. That said, this is a capable video camera in its own right too.

The Nikon ZR is an incredibly capable and polished compact cinema camera with world-first features, and an exciting first step into the filmmaking space for Nikon. Should video lenses soon follow (most Z lenses are designed primarily for photography), along with a higher-end cinema camera with pro connectivity to sit above the ZR, then Nikon will truly find its footing in this space.

The compact body is the smallest in this class of cinema camera, with a fairly simple control layout (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Nikon ZR: price and release date

Costs $2,199.95 / £2,199.99 (Australia pricing TBC)
There will be various accessory bundles, TBC
Sales start in October

The Nikon ZR costs $2,199.95 / £2,199.99 (Australia pricing is TBC, but that coverts to roughly AU$4,500). At that price it significantly undercuts rivals – such a feature set is typically found in cameras that cost around 50% more, and more often in cameras closer to twice the price.

That said, there are no video accessories included, and you’ll want to fork out for some in order to enjoy the ZR’s handling and feature set to its full potential. These will likely include a grip and / or cage, plus Nikon’s new ME-D10 directional mic, which is compatible with the camera’s 32-bit float audio format.

Nikon doesn’t make its own accessories such as grips or rigs, relying on third parties such as SmallRig to supply those. At the time of writing I don’t have pricing for dedicated ZR accessories.

The Nikon ZR is due to go on sale in October 2025.

Today’s best Nikon ZR deals

The ZR is compact cinema camera for run-and-gun filmmaking – an ideal b-cam (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Nikon ZR: specs

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Video

6K up to 60fps, Raw internal

Photo

24MP full-frame

Lens mount

Nikon Z

Autofocus

Dual Pixel CMOS AF II

Screen

4-inch, 3.07m-dot, vari-angle

Viewfinder

N/A

Weight

19oz / 540g (body only)

Battery

EN-EL15 (same type as Nikon Z6 III / Z8)

Nikon ZR: Design

Smallest and lightest cinema camera of its kind; weather-resistant
Large 4-inch, 3.07m-dot touch LCD with brightest in-class display, no viewfinder
No mounting points for accessories
3x internal mics, Ozo audio with five directional pickup patterns

As far as I know, the Nikon ZR is the smallest and lightest camera of its kind, weighing just 19oz / 540g (body-only). It’s also weather-resistant, which is a rarity in the cinema camera world.

There are pros and cons resulting from the tiny dimensions. Drawbacks include enthusiast-level connectivity, like micro HMDI rather than full-size (though you only need an adaptor to remedy this), and the absence of a grip or mounting points for accessories. A camera like the Canon EOS C50 feels more high-end, given its pro-level connectivity.

It feels best to keep things simple with the ZR, making the most of its compact body and powerful features by minimizing the number of accessories in play. A grip is the one accessory I would absolutely look into buying, while if you want to rig up the ZR you’ll need a cage, which will in turn allow you to attach accessories such as lights and mics – Nikon has partnered with SmallRig to create grips and cages for the ZR (pricing TBC).

Image 1 of 4

(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Despite its tiny body, the ZR packs a large 4-inch touch display. As such, I don’t really see the need for attaching a bulky external 5-inch monitor. It certainly helps that the ZR’s 3.07m-dot display is wonderful bright and vivid – the brightest in its class, says Nikon. Mind you, I’ve only used the ZR in a studio; a truer test will be the bright outdoors.

Other cinema cameras, like the Sony FX3 and Canon EOS C50, only have 3-inch displays, while the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K has a mega 5-inch unit. In the case of the Sony and Canon models, I’d absolutely want to add a monitor to my setup.

The camera’s top plate is pretty simple: there’s a photo / video switch (though sadly the UI remains the same whichever setting you’re in, rather than there being dedicated menus for photo and video), record button with rocker, plus three buttons for accessing items such as display settings.

The rear is dominated by the large touch display, which when folded away reveals the Nikon / RED branding. Beside it are a joystick for controls such as autofocus point selection, a menu button (a quick press brings up the main menu and a long press brings up the quick menu, which is a nice touch) and a playback button.

Image 1 of 4

(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)(Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Battery life promises to be okay, given that the ZR uses the same EN-EL15 battery as the Nikon Z6 III and Nikon Z8. There are no vents or cooling fans, though, which would normally suggest that a camera of this type would be prone to overheating during long recording sessions.

I haven’t recorded clips any longer than a few minutes, but I’ll be sure to run the camera for longer during my in-depth testing. However, Nikon says the camera’s magnesium alloy body is a natural heat sink, and promises that long record times are possible, and based on my experience with previous Nikon cameras I have no reason to doubt it.

There’s exciting tech under the hood, too, namely a totally new Ozo audio setup, which comprises three mics. Together, these offer five directional pickup patterns, including front narrow (like a shotgun mic), front wide, rear and binaural 3D stereo.

Nikon says this Ozo system is the best internal mic setup of any camera, and it’s supported by a world-first: in-camera 32-bit float audio capture. Nikon’s new ME-D10 shotgun mic, released at the same time as the ZR, supports 32-bit float audio too.

Those are impressive audio features for any camera, let alone one at this price point, and I look forward to properly testing them out.

Nikon ZR: Performance

6K up to 60fps, 4K up to 120fps, Full HD up to 240fps
Internal RAW recording and RED color profiles (up to nine in-camera at any time)
Subject-detection autofocus and 5-axis image stabilization
24MP stills, partially stacked full-frame sensor

For the most part, the Nikon ZR has the same photo and video specs as the Z6 III (which we awarded five stars out of five in our in-depth review), which means a full-frame partially stacked 24MP sensor equipped with 5-axis image stabilization.

Add in decent subject-detection tracking autofocus and the ZR is a capable stills shooter, although while this is useful for on-set stills, the main focus of my testing is of course the ZR’s video chops.

There’s the partially stacked 24MP full-frame sensor and Nikon Z mount (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Like the Z6 III, the Nikon ZR shoots 6K up to 60fps, 4K up to 120fps and Full HD up to 240fps. There’s the option for shooting internal RAW with a 12-bit color depth, or keeping things simple and baking in the look at capture with 10-bit recording.

Given the array of creative styles and color profiles on board, which includes space for up to nine RED color profiles at any one time, you might just feel happy to skip shooting RAW, with its large file sizes and grading demands, and use one of the many baked-in color profiles instead to save editing time and space on your hard drives.

I shot a variety of video clips during a half-day session with a drummer in action inside a studio, including 6K RAW, a few of the RED profiles baked in, and 240fps slow-motion – see my sample video, above.

In this setting, the ZR delivered some superb-looking video. I’ll be expanding this first impressions review with more detail about its video and audio quality, once I’ve had an extended time with the ZR.

The ZR is a decent camera for photos too, with 24MP stills (Image credit: Tim Coleman)

Nikon ZR: also consider

(Image credit: Tim Coleman)

How I tested the Nikon ZR

I had just half a day with the ZR
I paired it with multiple Nikon Z lenses and tried out the new ME-D10 mic
No third-party accessories were available, so I used the camera handheld

I had the opportunity to shoot with the Nikon ZR for half a day ahead of its launch, using it for an indoor stage-lit shoot of a drummer in action.

Nikon supplied an array of Z-mount lenses for the shoot, of which I used a few primes and zooms. The new ME-D10 directional mic was also available on the day.

Nikon doesn’t make its own rigs or cinema camera accessories, relying on third parties such as SmallRig instead. None of these accessories were available to me, so I shot with the ZR entirely handheld, without a grip or rig.

During my limited test time I made sure to shoot in 6K RAW, 240fps slow motion, and to try out various color profiles, focusing on the RED looks.

I have plenty of experience using rival cinema cameras such as the Sony FX3, so I’m well equipped to make an informed initial assessment of the ZR. That said, cinema cameras need to prove themselves as tools their users can rely on shoot after shoot, so check back soon for my in-depth verdict after I’ve spent more time with the camera.

Nikon ZR: Price Comparison

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Team Cherry is “working to improve” Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Chinese translation following player complaints

by admin September 9, 2025

Team Cherry said it is “working to improve” the simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

While the highly anticipated sequel holds a Mostly Positive score on Steam, tens of thousands of Chinese players have left negative reviews, criticizing the Chinese localization for its lack of nuance and accuracy.

On X/Twitter, Team Cherry’s Matthew Griffin thanked players for their “feedback and support,” and said work on the translation would be ongoing “over the coming weeks.”

“To our Chinese speaking fans: We appreciate you letting us know about quality issues with the current Simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong,” Griffin wrote.

“We’ll be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks. Thanks for your feedback and support.”

So far, just 38% of players who have left a review of the simplified Chinese version of the Silksong have left a positive review. Overall, the game sits at a Mostly Positive rating.

Hollow Knight: Silksong reached over half a million concurrent players a day after its release on September 4, 2025.

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September 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

In rare show of hacking for joy, Blue Archive player fills the world with clones of their favourite character

by admin September 6, 2025

Late last month, players of Nexon’s tactical schoolgirl gacha fest Blue Archive were horrified to discover that their universe had undergone Koyukification. For context, Kurosaki Koyuki is one of Blue Archive’s recruitable characters, a twin-tailed pinkhead known for her immense natural code-breaking skills, her passion for gambling, and her mischievous persona.

On August 31st, Blue Archivists logged onto discover that Koyuki had multiplied like a virus. Cafes and arcades teemed with duplicates of the character. Her snaggle-toothed rictus filled the game’s recruitment banners. The very information page – once a source of guidance and solace to so many – had been edited to read “nihahaha”, in mimicry of the character’s giggle.

It was kind of like this scene from Being John Malkovich, if John Malkovich had been a freakazoid 15-year-old piker armed with a light machinegun. And also, the closing scenes from Matrix Revolutions (Koyuki’s in-game nickname is “White Rabbit”), if Neo and Agent Smith had decided to lay off the kung fu and sample the local parfait.

How to explain these nightmarish events? It was a hack, obviously. As reported by Automaton West, publishers Nexon took Blue Archive offline for a few hours that Sunday to expunge the excess Koyukis and carry out an investigation. Seemingly, this was the good kind of hack, carried out for the glee of it rather than to filch anybody’s credit card details. Or at least, that’s what they’re saying publicly.

According to Nexon’s subsequent notice to players, somebody managed to break into the game’s content delivery network and mess with the environment settings, which are managed separately from the game itself, redirecting them to an IP address in the Netherlands.

The hacker’s changes only “affected the client-side content display”, it seems. Nexon say that “players’ accounts, game data, and payment information were not affected, as they are operated in a separate database and always revalidated by the game server.”

You may find the idea of your online gameworld being suddenly suffused by goblin cryptanalysts amusing. Rest assured that Nexon do not. Aside from introducing new restrictions and countermeasures, they’ve reported the whole ordeal to the Korea Internet & Security Agency. They’ve also prepared a player compensation package of in-game McGuffins to say sorry for the emergency maintenance period. Thoughts and prayers, etc.

Is Blue Archive worth playing post-Koyukification? I can tell you nothing save that this trailer thoroughly weirded me out with its bright and breezy scenes of school life in which everybody present is packing enough firepower to clear out a Terminid nest.

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 portable music player on a white surface

Product Reviews

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 portable music player review: a brilliant step on the journey but not “the peak of performance and design” promised.

by admin September 6, 2025

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Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000: Two-minute review

The Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 is the brand’s newest flagship digital audio player, and it is priced accordingly. If you measure the worth of a product by how relatively heavy and remarkably shiny it is, though, you won’t be able to argue with the $3,999 asking price.

The SP4000 goes a distance towards justifying its cost in the way it’s specified to perform, too. Numerous technological highlights abound, none of them in any way ‘affordable’, and between the sheer heft of the physical item and the lengthy list of technologies Astell & Kern has brought to bear, the SP4000 seems about as purposeful as these things ever get.

And in action, it is an uncomplicated pleasure to listen to, fully befitting a place in the best MP3 players around. In every meaningful way, the SP4000 is an extremely accomplished device, able to combine brute muscularity with deft insight, rhythmic positivity with outright scale. No matter what you choose to listen to, the Astell & Kern seems to enjoy it just as much as you do – and it’s not about to sit in judgement on your choice of headphones either.

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Price and release date

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

Priced at $3,999 / £3,799 / AU$6,599

The Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 is on sale now, and in the United States it sells for $3,999. In the United Kingdom the asking price is £3,799, and in Australia you’ll have to part with AU$6,599.

Not cheap, is it? Anyone who takes an interest in this sort of thing will know Astell & Kern has no problem in pitching its products as uber-high-end propositions, but no matter how many times I see one of its products priced this way, it remains difficult not to do a double-take…

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Features

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

4 x AKM4191 and 4 x AKM4499EX DACs in 1:1 architecture
4 x opamps per analogue output
Snapdragon 6125 octa-core processor

Something would seem amiss, wouldn’t it, if a digital audio player costing very nearly four thousand of your US dollars wasn’t groaning under the weight of its specification? Well, when you consider the extensive nature of the SP4000, it’s a wonder it’s not even bigger and even heavier than it actually is.

It follows that I should try to be reasonably brief, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

At its most fundamental, the SP4000 is built around ‘octa’ audio architecture. The digital-to-analogue signal processing is in a 1:1 structure, with one AKM4191 digital processor paired with one AKM4499EX DAC. This allows digital signals to be delivered to a single DAC, four times over – this is a true quad-DAC design, with the aim of allowing precise signal transfer with a vanishingly low signal-to-noise ratio. The ability to deal with PCM resolutions of up to 32bit/768kHz and DSD512 means any realistic digital audio file is catered for.

There are eight opamps deployed, four attending to the unbalanced 3.5mm analogue output and four dealing with the 4.4mm balanced equivalent. The intention is to increase dynamic range and enhance detail retrieval – Astell & Kern calls this arrangement ‘high driving mode’ and suggests it provides powerful and stable signal output.

A newly developed LDO (‘low drop-out’) regulator in the power supply stabilizes battery voltage in an effort to suppress noise. Proprietary ESA (‘enhanced signal alignment’) technology is designed to improve the alignment of frequency signals (sometimes opaquely referred to as ‘timing’) to minimize distortion and enhance clarity. The PCB is a high-end ‘Any Layer HDI’ design that allows for extremely complex circuitry to be laid out in a very small space, minimizing signal loss.

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

What else? The audio block sits behind a 99.9% pure copper shielding can, offering significant shielding from electromagnetic interference. The audio block itself is Astell & Kern’s ‘Teraton X’ design, which incorporates HEXA-Audio circuitry along with power-efficient amplification and considerable power noise cancellation, to deliver what the company suggests is the ‘ultimate sound solution’.

The entire show is run by a Snapdragon 6125 Octa-core processor that features a high-performance CPU and 8GB of DDR4. CPU, memory and wireless comms circuitry are configured as a single module, and with the digital circuit components arranged in the same area it’s effectively a system on a chip.

I could go on. There are six digital filters available to allow the user to, in a small way, design their own sound. The ‘crossfeed’ feature allows a little of the left-channel mix into the right channel (and vice versa) and, in conjunction with some adjustment options, tries to replicate the effect of listening to speakers when listening to headphones. The second generation of Astell & Kern’s DAR (‘digital audio remaster’) technology, dubbed ‘Advanced DAR’, uses a ‘virtual sound extender’ as part of a two-stage upsampling process that can convert PCM signals of up to 48kHz to 385kHz or to DSD128, and signals of greater than 96kHz to DSD256, for playback.

Surely, though, the broad point is made by now. Astell & Kern didn’t leave space for the kitchen sink, but it has thrown pretty much everything else at the A&ultima SP4000.

Features score: 5 / 5

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Sound quality

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

Epic levels of insight and detail
Rhythmic and dynamic positivity
Sounds simultaneously open and unified

Yes, you can fiddle around the edges of the way the A&ultima SP4000 sounds – investigate filters, fool around with EQs, you name it – but what you can’t do is alter its overarching sonic character. Which is just as well, because this Astell & Kern digital audio player is a staggeringly direct, informative and, ultimately, complete listen. Few are the sources of audio information, of any type and at any price, that can match its powers of communication – and I have heard plenty.

No matter if you’re listening to a 16bit/44.1kHz FLAC file of Ride’s Leave Them All Behind, a 24bit/48kHz FLAC file of James Holden’s Common Land or a DSD64 file of The Band’s I Shall Be Released: it’s all the same to the SP4000. In every circumstance it’s a profoundly detailed, rhythmically positive, articulate and energetic listen. There really isn’t an aspect of music-making at which it doesn’t prove itself masterful.

And it’s not as if I can offer a “yes, but…” or two in the name of balance. The longer I listen to the SP4000, the more beguiled I become.

Tonal balance? It’s basically impeccable. Frequency response? Smooth and even from way down at the low frequencies to the vertiginous top end. The Astell & Kern sounds naturalistic and unforced, and it’s completely even-handed in the way it presents the frequency range. And at every point, it’s absolutely alive with detail both broad and fine. The minutiae of tone, timbre and texture are made absolutely apparent, and the player loads all of this information onto the listener without being in any way showy or uptight about it. This fanatical attention to detail is simply a way of ensuring you get as complete a rendition of your digital audio files as possible.

The presentation is spacious and well-defined at the same time, and no matter if it’s a large ensemble all packing the stage or just one voice with a single guitar as accompaniment, the SP4000 lays it all out in confident and coherent fashion.

It deals with rhythm and tempo with similar authority, keeping momentum levels high and observing the attack and decay of bass sounds (in particular) with obvious care. It can ease back if necessary, though – nothing gets hurried along, but rather is allowed to proceed at its own chosen speed. Dynamic headroom is, to all intents and purposes, limitless. From the smallest, quietest event in a recording to the last almighty crescendo, the SP4000 is on top of things – the distance between these two states is prodigious. And the smaller, but no less crucial, dynamics of harmonic variation, the attention to the over- and undertones that surround the fundamental when listening to a solo instrument, are given very judicious weighting. Context is everything, and the SP4000 seems to almost instinctively understand it.

And the Astell & Kern even has the decency not to be sniffy either about the music you listen to or the headphones via which you access it. Obviously it does better work (or, rather, its potential is best exploited) by hi-res files and high-end headphones – but if you want to connect your bog-standard true wireless in-ear via Bluetooth and listen to Spotify’s free tier the SP4000 won’t judge you. Not too badly, anyway.

Sound quality score: 5 / 5

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Design

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

Polished 904L stainless steel and PVD-coated ceramic
150 x 85 x 20mm
615g

Ordinarily, a digital audio player is designed to be reasonably compact, and light enough to be slipped into a pocket. Of course, Astell & Kern sets out for its digital audio players to be anything but ordinary.

So the SP4000 is a fairly large (150 x 85 x 20mm) device that weighs a considerable 615g. Too big and heavy, in other words, to be comfortably carried in any pocket smaller and less robust than that of a military greatcoat. This is its naked weight, too. If you add one of the included screen protectors (which is, admittedly, going to make negligible difference to the weight) and slip the player into its supplied Perlinger leather* protective case, it becomes heavier still. At least that case prevents the player’s sharp, pointy corners from digging into hands or pocket linings, mind you.

(*I’m not a vegetarian. I know people who are, though, and some of them are just as interested in high-quality audio as I am. So once again I find myself wondering why companies like Astell & Kern imagine real leather – in this instance, leather made from “the soft, delicate hide of calves under one year old” – to be the untouchable height of luxury. Surely it’s possible to offer a protective case for the SP4000 that looks and feels upmarket but that isn’t going to alienate who knows how many prospective customers? Or is that just me?)

The four sides of the SP4000 are built of 904L stainless steel (the same stuff the likes of Rolex uses, on the basis that it will accept an extremely high polish), and feature some of the angularity and asymmetry that Astell & Kern established as part of its design vocabulary a good while ago. The front is of toughened glass, 152mm on the diagonal, and is almost entirely touchscreen. The rear panel, meanwhile, is finished in PVD-coated ceramic.

It really goes without saying that the standard of build and finish on display here is flawless. With the design of the SP4000, Astell & Kern has set out to deliver a product that blurs the line between ‘electrical hardware’ and ‘luxury accessory’. Or, as the company’s website rather feverishly has it, “a work of art where technology, design, intuition and performance converge”. You may feel that Astell & Kern has done exactly what it set out to do, you may find the design rather self-consciously opulent. Taste is a very personal thing, after all.

It’s worth noting the grandeur of SP4000 ownership starts well before you peel the protective covering off the player itself. It arrives in a branded box that’s a similar size to that which contained a pair of size 10 Tricker’s boots I bought the other day. Inside there is another, branded, clasp-fastening box covered in what I strongly suspect is a further quantity of leather.

Inside that you’ll find the SP4000, along with compartments that contain that Perlinger leather cover, a case with a flap covering into which the player (in its cover) can be slipped (more leather, I presume), various guides and warranty documents, a congratulatory note from the company, and a reasonably heavyweight, branded USB-C to USB-C cable. I am pretty sure this all comes under the heading of ‘the experience’.

Design score: 4 / 5

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Usability and setup

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

2160 x 1080 touchscreen
Supports Full Android OS
Qualcomm QC3.0 fast charging

The SP4000 represents the first time an Astell & Kern product has supported full Android OS. The convenience and all-around common sense of the operating system is intended to help the SP4000 be as flexible and convenient as possible, while some of the Snapdragon 6125 octa-core processor’s responsibilities center around rapidity of the OS response and the smooth, comfortable user interface motion.

Happily, it all works very well. The big 2K (2160 x 1080) touchscreen is responsive and swift, smooth-scrolling and consistent. The operating system will be mercifully familiar to anyone whose smartphone isn’t an iOS device, and it’s just as wide-ranging and usable here as it is in its most successful smartphone applications.

Setting up the SP4000 is no kind of hardship. It’s simply a question of connecting it to your local network (its dual-band Wi-Fi is tenacious when it comes to making and maintaining a connection to your router or tethering to your smartphone if you’re out and about), and from there it’s simple to load the apps you require. The ‘AK File Drop’ function makes transferring files from a PC, smartphone or FTP program on a common network faster and easier than before, too.

The Astell & Kern also supports Qualcomm QC 3.0 fast charging, which means it can be charged more rapidly (and more efficiently) than previous flagship A&ultima models. Mind you, ‘fast’ and ‘rapid’ are definitely relative terms in this instance. From ‘flat’ to ‘full’ takes around five hours, which is about half the time it takes for the SP4000 to flatten its battery if you’re listening to ordinary files at ordinary volume levels.

There are a few physical controls arranged around the edges of the SP4000. As you look at its touchscreen, there’s an elaborate volume control/power on/off on the top-right edge – it’s pleasantly shaped and knurled, and a light behind it glows in one of a variety of different colors to indicate the resolution of the audio file it’s currently playing.

On the opposite side there are three buttons that deal with skip backwards/rewind (accessible via ‘press’ or ‘press and hold’ respectively), skip forwards/fast-forward (same) and play/pause. There’s a ‘button lock’ switch on the top edge, to the right of the 3.5mm hybrid optical/unbalanced analogue and 4.4mm balanced analogue outputs, and on the bottom edge you’ll find a USB-C socket and a microSD card slot, which will accept cards of up to 1.5TB.

Usability and setup score: 4.5 / 5

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Value

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

First things first: you don’t contemplate ownership of the Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 because you’re in any way concerned about value for money. Is it the best-sounding DAP out there? Sure. Is it twice as good as alternatives from the likes of FiiO or Astell & Kern itself that cost comfortably less than $2k? Not a chance.

No, the value in the SP4000 comes from its status as the shiny flagship of the Astell & Kern range. It comes from the knowledge that no one you bump into when in the First Class Lounge has a more expensive DAP than you. It comes from the ability to add ‘DAP’ to the list of ‘madly luxurious accessories I own’.

Should I buy the Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000?

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000 review: Also consider

How I tested the Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000

Tested for over a week
Tested with streamed and downloaded content
Tested with wired and wireless headphones

I slotted a microSD card filled with hi-res content (up to 24bit/192kHz and DSD64, anyway) into the SP4000, and I downloaded the Tidal and Presto music streaming apps while I was at it.

I used Sennheiser IE900 IEMs connected via the 4.4mm balanced output, Austrian Audio The Composer over-ears via the 3.5mm unbalanced alternative, and tried out the Technics EAH-AZ100 true wireless in-ears and Bowers & Wilkins Px8 wireless over-ears too.

I listened to lots of different types of music, via lots of different file types and sizes – and I did so indoors and (with some trepidation, I don’t mind telling you) outdoors too.

First reviewed in September 2025

Astell & Kern A&ultima SP4000: Price Comparison

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Nasdaq XRP Player Kick-Starts $200,000,000 Treasury Plan: Details

by admin September 2, 2025

Nasdaq-listed VivoPower has announced its decision to deploy $30 million as the first stage of its planned $200 million XRP treasury yield program.

VivoPower, which was initially founded in 2014 and listed on Nasdaq since 2016 and has global footprint spanning the United Kingdom, Australia, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, is undergoing a digital treasury shift.

XRP institutional demand grows

In August, VivoPower announced its acquisition of Ripple shares, as part of a strategic boost to its XRP-focused digital asset treasury strategy, budgeting an initial $100 million to buy privately held Ripple shares. Aside from this, VivoPower says it will continue to directly acquire and hold XRP tokens.