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Roblox man hanging out in front of a garden

Surprise Roblox game reportedly sets biggest player count record in history

by admin June 17, 2025

Roblox game Grow a Garden has just reached another staggering milestone in terms of concurrent player count, now beating even Fortnite.

The past few weeks have been absolutely massive for a Roblox game called Grow a Garden. It’s been shattering records left and right, with a previous update managing to bring the player count to a whopping 11,694,315 concurrent users.

It didn’t stop there, though. Following the new Working Bees event update, the idle game is back with yet another milestone, as on June 15, 2025, it hit over 16,000,000 concurrent players as seen from reports all over social media.

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With that in mind, the game didn’t just break its own record, but now clears some of the biggest live service games ever and even several top titles on Steam’s most-played charts.

Roblox’s Grow a Garden concurrent player count has reportedly surpassed Fortnite’s peak

If the previous record wasn’t impressive enough, this time, the game has gone beyond and reportedly surpassed Fortnite’s peak player count. For the record, Epic’s Battle Royale title peaked at 14,343,880 six months ago thanks to Chapter 2 Remix’s live event.

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“Grow a Garden” is now the single biggest video game… in the world. 🌍

Today, this single @Roblox experience reached 16,411,769 concurrent users, surpassing the previous world record set by @Fortnite at 14,343,880 in November 2024. pic.twitter.com/9MryxBafE3

— Bloxy News (@Bloxy_News) June 14, 2025

In comparison with other games, according to data from SteamDB, PUBG still holds the highest peak concurrent player count at 3,257,248, which isn’t even half of what Grow a Garden has reportedly achieved so far.

Additionally, even if you combine this number from PUBG with the rest of the games in the top five according to the highest concurrent player records on Steam alone, the total is still less than Grow a Garden’s newest peak.

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Of course, it’s worth taking the intel with a grain of salt for now though. It’s near-impossible to independently verify user data across platforms. But if genuine, it’s a herculean feat.

The premise of Grow a Garden is exactly as its title suggests. Players start growing their own garden from an empty plot by buying seeds, planting and harvesting crops, and even getting exotic plants. As an idle game, the players’ crops will continue to grow even when they’re away.

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Despite the game already managing to attract a large number of players, however, it has also been accused of using bots. That said, Roblox has previously pushed back against this claim.

Speaking to Game File, a spokesperson said: “Grow a Garden’s global success is fueled by exceptional user retention, vibrant social interactions — with friends driving play — and strong Robux engagement. “Our preliminary analysis confirms genuine popularity, not artificial inflation, validating the game’s authentic community-driven growth.”

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Taiwanese mobile game banned in Hong Kong for reportedly “advocating an armed revolution”

by admin June 14, 2025

Taiwanese mobile game Reversed Front: Bonfire has been banned in Hong Kong for reportedly “promoting secessionist agencies” by encouraging players to defeat communist regimes.

As reported by The New York Times, Hong Kong police said the game was “advocating an armed revolution” and that any residents who have downloaded or recommended the game will face legal charges which could lead to jail time.

“Reversed Front: Bonfire was released under the guise of a game with the aim of promoting secessionist agencies such as ‘Taiwan independence’ or ‘Hong Kong independence,” it said (via BBC News).

“Those who have downloaded the application should uninstall it immediately and must not attempt to defy the law.”

As noted by The Guardian, in-app purchases may be seen as funding the game’s developer ESC Taiwan “for the commission of succession of subversion”.

ESC Taiwan is described by the NYT as “a group of anonymous volunteers who are outspoken against China’s Communist Party”.

The developer states on its website that Reversed Front: Bonfire is a “work of non-fiction” and that “any similarity to actual agencies, policies, or ethnic groups of the People’s Republic of China in this game is intentional.”

The title launched in April 2025. As of Wednesday (June 11), the game is no longer available on Google Play or Apple’s App Store in Hong Kong.

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June 14, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

AMD’s Instinct MI355X accelerator will reportedly consume 1,400 watts

by admin June 12, 2025

Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of AMD, formally introduced the company’s Instinct MI355X accelerators for AI and HPC at ISC 2025 — revealing massive performance improvements for AI inference, but also pointing to nearly doubled power consumption of the new flagship GPU compared to its predecessor from 2023, reports ComputerBase.

AMD’s CDNA 4 enters the scene

AMD’s Instinct MI350X-series GPUs are based on the CDNA 4 architecture that introduces support for FP4 and FP6 precision formats alongside FP8 and FP16. These lower-precision formats have grown in relevance in AI workloads, particularly for inference. AMD positions its Instinct MI350X processors primarily for inference, which makes sense as scale out world size of MI350X continues to be limited to eight GPUs, which reduces their competitive capabilities compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs. Still Pegatron is readying a 128-way MI350X machine.

AMD’s Instinct MI350X family of AI and HPC GPUs consists of two models: the default Instinct MI350X module with a 1000W power consumption designed for air cooling as well as the higher-performance Instinct MI355X that will consume up to 1400W and will be designed primarily for direct liquid cooling (even though AMD believes that some of its clients will be able to use air cooling with the MI355X).

Faster GPUs incoming

Papermaster expressed confidence that the industry will continue to develop even more powerful CPUs and accelerators for supercomputers to achieve zettascale performance in about a decade from now. However, that performance will come at the cost of a steep increase of power consumption, which is why a supercomputer offering a ZetaFLOPS performance could consume 500 MW of power — half of what a nuclear power plant can produce.

At ISC 2025, AMD presented data showing that top supercomputers have consistently followed a trajectory where compute performance doubles roughly every 1.2 years. The graph covered performance from 1990 to the present, demonstrating peak system GFLOPs. Early growth was driven by CPU-only systems, but from around 2005, a shift to heterogeneous architectures — mixing CPUs with GPUs and accelerators — took over. Now, in what AMD calls ‘AI Acceleration Era,’ systems like El Capitan and Frontier are pushing beyond 1 ExaFLOP, continuing the exponential growth trend with increasingly AI-specialized hardware.

But performance comes at a cost of power consumption. To maintain performance growth, memory bandwidth and power scaling have become urgent challenges. AMD’s slide indicated that GPU memory bandwidth must more than double every two years to preserve the ratio of bandwidth per FLOPS. This has required increasing the number of HBM stacks per GPU, which in turn results in larger and more power-hungry GPUs and modules.

Indeed, power consumption of accelerators for supercomputers is increasing rapidly. While AMD’s Instinct MI300X introduced in mid-2023 consumed 750W peak, the Instinct MI355X, set to be formally unveiled this week, will feature a peak power consumption of 1,400W. Papermaster envisions 1,600W accelerators in 2026 – 2027 and then 2,000W processors later this decade. By contrast, AMD’s peers from Nvidia seem to be even more ambitious when it comes to power consumption as their Rubin Ultra GPUs featuring four reticle-sized compute chiplets are expected to consume as much as 3,600W.

The good news is that in addition to increased power consumption, supercomputers and accelerators have also been gaining performance efficiency rapidly. Another one of AMD’s ISC 2025 keynote slides illustrated that performance efficiency increased from about 3.2 GFLOPS/W in 2010 to approximately 52 GFLOPS/W by the time exascale systems like Frontier arrived.

Looking ahead, maintaining this pace of performance scaling will require doubling energy efficiency every 2.2 years. A projected zettascale system delivering 1,000× exaflop-class performance would need around 500 MW of power at an efficiency level of 2,140 GFLOPs/W (a 41-fold increase from today). Without such gains, future supercomputers could demand gigawatt-scale energy — comparable to an entire nuclear power plant, making them way too expensive to operate.

AMD believes that to increase the performance of supercomputers dramatically a decade from now, not only it will need to make a number of architectural breakthroughs, but the industry will have to keep pace with compute capabilities to provide adequate memory bandwidth. Still, using nuclear reactors to power supercomputers seems in the 2030s seems to be a more and more realistic possibility.

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June 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Playtika reportedly cuts “as many as 160 jobs” affecting teams in Israel and Poland

by admin June 7, 2025

Playtika has reportedly cut “as many as 160 jobs”, affecting teams based in Poland and Israel.

As reported by Mobilegamer.biz, a source claimed “their team of over 200 is now down to around 40”, while another suggested “at least 80” workers were laid off at Playtika’s Poland offices.

Employees affected by the layoffs have been sharing the news on LinkedIn, such as talent acquisition specialist Natalia Santorek, Unity developer Filip Gralak, and Best Fiends level designer Lee Shapira.

Mobilegamer.biz suggested that employees in engineering, level design, art, and QA were also impacted, while PocketGamer reported that roles “mainly affected” by these cuts were its Best Fiends and Redecor teams.

Both publications reached out to Playtika to clarify how many jobs were lost, but the company declined to comment.

Last month, it was reported by PocketGamer that around 50 people were laid off from Playtika-owned developer Wooga.

Playtika previously reduced its staff by 10% in January 2024. It also cut two executive roles amid leadership restructuring last May.

The games firm acquired Best Fiends studio Seriously in 2019. The studio was shut down in 2022, with production of games including Best Fiends moving to other Playtika studios in Israel and Poland.

Playtika acquired Redecor developer Reworks in 2021 in a deal worth up to $400 million.

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June 7, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Tesla is reportedly blocking the city of Austin from releasing Robotaxi records

by admin June 6, 2025

Tesla has been awfully cagey with its self-driving data this week. Reuters is now reporting that Tesla is trying to stop the city of Austin from handing over public records involving its robotaxi operations in the city, which are set to expand this month. This comes just a few days after the automaker asked a judge to prevent the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from releasing certain data related to crashes that involved its cars with self-driving features.

Reuters says that it requested two years’ worth of communications between Tesla and Austin officials in February, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Austin would play home to the robotaxi experiment.

Dan Davis, an Austin public information officer, told Reuters in April that “third parties” were asking the city to withhold these records in the interest of protecting “privacy or property.” After the publication escalated the matter to the Texas Attorney General’s office, an attorney for Tesla wrote Ken Paxton opposing the release of what it called “confidential, proprietary, competitively sensitive commercial and/or trade secret information.”

Reuters also spoke with Neal Falgoust, an Austin Law Department official overseeing public records issues about the matter. Falgoust told reporters that the city of Austin doesn’t take any particular position on the confidentiality of the materials involved. When Reuters pressed further, asking if the people of Austin have a right to information about the driverless cars that would be traversing their streets, Falgoust did not respond.

Tesla said just last week that it had been testing driverless Model Ys in Austin for several days, which Elon Musk said was a month ahead of schedule. This would not be the first fleet of autonomous taxis on the streets of the Texas capital, with Waymo operating there since 2023 within a specific geofenced area. Waymo has also partnered with Uber in Austin since March.

By Texas law, the Attorney General’s office has 45 business days to decide whether the city of Austin is required to make these records public, which would be next week.

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June 6, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages

by admin June 5, 2025

Future Amazon orders may be delivered to your door by a humanoid robot workforce. The Information reports that Amazon is developing AI software that will enable robots to operate as package delivery workers that are ferried around in Rivian electric vans, and will soon be ready to start real-world testing at a new facility.

Citing an anonymous source “involved in the effort,” The Information says that Amazon has almost finished constructing an indoor “humanoid park” at one of the retail giant’s San Francisco offices that’s roughly the size of a coffee shop. The obstacle course reportedly contains one Rivian van for training purposes, with Amazon aiming to have humanoid robots “hitch a ride in the back of Amazon’s electric Rivian vans and spring out to deliver packages.”

The report coincides with Amazon launching a new agentic AI team to help develop technologies that will power robots “operating in Amazon distribution and logistics hubs.” In a statement to Silicon Valley, Amazon says that “instead of rigid, specialized robots, we’re creating systems that can hear, understand, and act on natural language commands, turning warehouse robots into flexible, multi-talented assistants.”

Hundreds of thousands of people currently handle delivery operations at Amazon globally. Amazon acquired the robotaxi company Zoox in 2020, suggesting a desire to fully automate end-to-end package delivery, from the warehouse to your front door.

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June 5, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Switch 2 US preorders reportedly cancelled by major retailers

by admin June 2, 2025

A number of would-be customers across the pond in the United States have experienced unexpected Switch 2 cancellations.

Posts on the likes of reddit and social media platform X show several patrons have had their Switch 2 orders cancelled from retailers such as Walmart and Target.

Mario Kart World Hands-On Preview: Is It Good? Watch on YouTube

“Just checked because I [saw] a post on X from Wario64 and it was about [making] sure payment is and all is good to go for when they are ready to ship.. I [checked] and my order got cancelled two days ago,” reads one reddit post titled Target cancelled my order. According to replies, the original poster is not the only one this has happened to.

Another post – Did anyone else’s Switch 2 preorder get cancelled out of nowhere? – shared on the Walmart subreddit said the same thing. “I just got an email saying it was canceled due to a payment error even though it was the same card I preordered it with,” it reads.

Even more examples of these Switch 2 cancellations can be found on X. “Walmart you have failed me for cancelling my switch 2 preorder when my payment method is valid and has funds available, give it back,” one poster wrote over the weekend.

While Walmart and Target seem to be the main retailers in the US to have cancelled Switch 2 orders, GameStop has also been namechecked online, although the problem doesn’t appear to be as widespread.

These reports follow last week’s news here in the UK, which saw retailer GAME admit it had cancelled a number of Switch 2 online pre-orders, with just days to go before the highly anticipated console’s release. At this time, GAME said it was aiming to “reinstate as many affected pre-orders as possible”.

The Switch 2 is set to release later this week, on 5th of June. Eurogamer’s former EIC Tom Phillips has already been hands-on with Nintendo’s upcoming console. You can read his Switch 2 impressions here.

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June 2, 2025 0 comments

Apple MacBook with M3 silicon used as a gaming laptop

Gaming Gear

Apple is reportedly creating its own Steam-like game launcher, but it’s still missing the key to making gaming on Mac great

by admin June 1, 2025

Apple’s 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC,is just a couple weeks away. Like every year previous, it sounds like Apple is going to squeeze gaming into its software announcements.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to unveil a “dedicated gaming app” that “will serve as a launcher for titles and centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity.”

That sounds a lot like Steam, only this app will feature games from the App Store and, of course, the Apple Arcade subscription service. However, Gurman also mentioned that the Mac version “can tap into games downloaded outside of the App Store,” so maybe it will connect to your Steam or Epic Games library somehow.

Cliffhanger’s Black Panther game reportedly would have built upon the famously patented Nemesis System

by admin June 1, 2025

Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel’s Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can’t be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.

For starters, according to the report, the announcement came as a shock to Cliffhanger staff. This was in part because the studio was actively hiring, and Black Panther had passed a “gate”, a term EA use for when executives look at how a game is doing and decide whether production should continue.

Some sources did also say that EA executives were still frustrated it hadn’t left pre-production despite being in the works for four years. That slowness was apparently due to the fact that a lot of now laid off staff were hired within the last year, even just the last few weeks and months.

The game itself sounded interesting too. Cliffhanger were being led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, the same studio behind the Middle-earth: Shadow series of games. Monolith’s beloved (and patented) Nemesis System was apparently going to be the basis of a new system in Black Panther expanding on those ideas. This included things like being able to play as T’Challa, Killmonger and Shuri, all of which would be competing for the Black Panther role.

You’d be able to play as one of them, with the other two becoming rivals that you could form relationships with. There would be Skrulls, shapeshifting aliens, that would have been trying to overtake Wakanda, some of which might pretend to be allies, others acting based on previous things you as the player might have done. You can see the similarities to the Nemesis System.

However, showing off this feature to executives was apparently difficult; building a game and a studio side by side was part of the struggle here, reportedly. On top of that, Cliffhanger were based in Kirkland, Washington, an expensive city that meant staff would need appropriate (and deserved) wages. EA also recently put in a return to office mandate, so it all seems to add up to the game not being far enough along with a studio that costs too much to run, in their eyes. Probably worth a reminder that EA CEO Andrew Wilson and EA Entertainment president Laura Miele took about $40 million home last year.

The whole thing is just tremendously unfair, and a massive shame. I would have loved to have seen a studio build upon the Nemesis System, easily one of the most interesting gameplay systems in the past decade locked behind something as stifling as a patent. As always, big solidarity to those affected by the layoffs.

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June 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Microsoft’s Xbox handheld reportedly “sidelined” as it focuses on third-party portable devices

by admin June 1, 2025

Microsoft has reportedly “sidelined” the development of its long-teased first-party handheld gaming device as it focuses its attention on third-party portable opportunities, including ASUS’ Project Kennan, which is supposedly still due this year.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer first discussed an Xbox handheld back in 2017, when he revealed Microsoft had “roughly designed” one in the past, and it’s a subject he’s repeatedly returned to in recent years, fuelling speculation the project had been revived. Then, this March, Windows Central reported Microsoft had settled on a multi-pronged handheld strategy, and would be teaming up with a third-party to release an Xbox-branded portable gaming PC this year under the codename Kennan while it worked on its own internally developed device to release alongside an Xbox Series X/S successor in 2027.

Now, though, Windows Central claims Microsoft has had a bit of a strategic rethink, and development of its own handheld device has been “sidelined”. According to the publication’s source, the company has internally announced it’ll instead “prioritise its teams to improve Windows 11 gaming performance, specifically for devices like the ASUS partner device Project Kennan” (NB. the site originally reported this under the name “Keenan” back in March, but has since updated its original story). It doesn’t sound like Microsoft is completely abandoning its own handheld plans, however; Windows Central says the company “still has big ambitions and is investing heavily to deliver a native Xbox handheld”, but third-party devices and Windows 11 improvements will be where it focuses its resources for now.

As for Project Kennan specifically, the website claims it’s “essentially finished” on the hardware side, but that there’s currently a “significantly boosted effort” between Microsoft’s Xbox and Windows teams to “improve the experience on the software side”. The plan, however, is that the Xbox-branded ASUS device will still launch “later this year”.

Microsoft’s decision to refocus on providing adequate infrastructure for Windows 11-powered third-party devices is perhaps not entirely surprising given increasing competition elsewhere; back in January, Valve announced it’s been working to bring SteamOS, which powers Steam Deck, to third-party handheld gaming, and the operating system is now available on a variety of devices, including recently released official partner machine, the Lenovo Legion Go S.

Beyond its handheld plans, Microsoft continues to developed its Xbox Series X/S successor, which Xbox president Sarah Bond previously claimed would deliver “the largest technical leap that you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.” According to Windows Central, there are currently “three prototype devices in development for Microsoft’s Gen-10 effort”, and the company is also said to be working on “next-gen Xbox cloud systems” to bring latency more in line with NVIDIA’s GeForce Now service.

As for games, we’ll know more about Xbox’s future slate once this year’s Xbox Games Showcase airs on Sunday, 8th June at 6pm UK time. Eurogamer will, of course, have news from that and more as the Summer Game Fest season gets underway next week.

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June 1, 2025 0 comments