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Service

Hermen Hulst, managing director and co-founder of Guerrilla Games, speaks during a Sony Corp. event ahead of the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Monday, June 15, 2015.

After cancelling 8 of the 12 live service games Sony promised to release by 2025, PlayStation studios boss says the number doesn’t really matter: ‘What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences’

by admin August 25, 2025

By the time Sony started printing money releasing its exclusives onto PC, the company had made a name for itself delivering the biggest and best singleplayer games on the market. Its run of solo PS4 exclusives from Bloodborne to The Last of Us Part 2 was so strong that it blew Microsoft’s console strategy out of the water, in a way that the Xbox has arguably never recovered from. Even we PC heads with our vast Steam libraries had to acknowledge those games were pretty great.

Yet for the PlayStation 5, Sony decided it would almost completely ignore that legacy, and instead be all about live service. In 2022, former CEO Jim Ryan promised Sony would make and release 12 live-service games by 2025. As of 2025, only one of these—Helldivers 2—has enjoyed a successful launch. Seven were cancelled before release. Three are supposedly still in development (including the deeply troubled Marathon) and one of them was Concord.

It’s a strategy that has, so far, proven catastrophic, leaving the PS5 largely bereft of quality first-party exclusives. But if you thought gazing upon this virtual graveyard might cause Sony to reconsider its priorities, think again.

Concord – Gameplay Trailer | PS5 Games – YouTube

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Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Studio Business Group CEO Herman Hulst was recently asked about Sony’s live-service strategy by the Financial Times (via GamesRadar), as part of an in-depth article about the company’s broader business strategy. “The number [of live-service releases] is not so important,” Hulst told the FT. “What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.”

Instead of changing strategy to avoid massive live-service failures like Concord, or cancellations like The Last of Us Online, Hulst says he basically wants Sony to fail better. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”

To change these massive failures into, er, smaller failures, Hulst says PlayStation has implemented several new safeguards, such as “more rigorous and more frequent testing in many different ways.” According to the FT, this includes a higher priority on group testing, more cross pollination of ideas within Sony, and “closer relationships” between top executives. “The advantage of every failure…is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”

I would be more convinced by what Hulst says if Sony had demonstrated its PS4-era strategy no longer worked before going all in on chasing the theoretical live-service money train. Those glossy singleplayer titles were often enormously expensive to make, and selling games in general has become significantly harder over the last five years. But while Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 seems to have been a commercial disappointment, God of War: Ragnarok was the fastest-selling PlayStation title ever on launch in 2022, and had sold 15 million copies a full year before it came to PC in September last year.

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August 25, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Coinbase Helped Secret Service Crypto Seizure Operation

by admin June 25, 2025

Crypto exchange Coinbase says it played a “key role” in supporting a US Secret Service investigation that resulted in the seizure of $225 million linked to crypto investment scams earlier this month.

On June 18, the Department of Justice filed to seize more than $225 million in crypto recovered by the Secret Service that was allegedly stolen by pig butchering scammers, which Agent in Charge Shawn Bradstreet said at the time was the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the agency’s history.

Coinbase said in a blog post on Tuesday that it joined several other exchanges in an “investigative sprint” with the Secret Service in 2024 to identify scam victims, analyze chain flows and help build a case to seize the crypto.

Over 130 Coinbase customers caught by scam

Coinbase said that between Feb. 26 to Feb. 29 last year, its team traced millions in crypto transactions to illicit wallets and other account activity that could help flag victims for the Secret Service.

Source: Coinbase Support

“This blockchain analysis and subpoena records production allowed the USSS to identify more than 130 Coinbase customers who were unknowingly defrauded, representing $2.3 million in losses,” Coinbase said.

The Secret Service also traced some of the frozen funds back to 140 accounts at the crypto exchange OKX, many of which were held in the names of individuals being held at scam compounds in Southeast Asia, according to Coinbase.

Tether burns $225 million in USDT

Stablecoin issuer Tether, which the DOJ acknowledged for its assistance in the investigation, froze 39 wallet addresses containing the $225 million in 2023, which were mainly in its self-titled stablecoin Tether (USDT). The stablecoin issuer later burned all the tokens.

Coinbase said the equivalent amount of new USDT was then reissued and transferred to a wallet controlled by the Secret Service.

“This process was visible onchain, offering a real-time example of how crypto can enhance transparency in law enforcement operations,” the exchange said.

Related: Australia unmasks $123M crypto laundering ring behind security firm

Burning tokens means they are permanently removed from circulation. Generally, this is achieved by sending them to an inaccessible wallet address.

Global authorities seizing stolen crypto

In May, the Australian Federal Police seized nearly 25 Bitcoin (BTC), worth over $2.6 million, which were allegedly linked to a heist of 950 Bitcoin stolen from a French crypto exchange in 2013.

A few months earlier, in February, German law enforcement seized 34 million euros ($38 million) in crypto from eXch, a cryptocurrency platform allegedly used to launder funds stolen after Bybit’s $1.4 billion hack.

Magazine: Coinbase hack shows the law probably won’t protect you: Here’s why

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June 25, 2025 0 comments

NFT Gaming

Coinbase Assists Secret Service in One of the Largest Crypto Scam Crackdowns Ever

by admin June 24, 2025

US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has revealed that it assisted the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) in recovering roughly $225 million worth of Tether (USDT) stolen via the so-called “pig butchering” crypto scams.

Scammers typically lure potential victims by pretending that they are willing to start a romantic or business relationship. After some time, they eventually convince their potential victims to invest in fraudulent crypto projects. Expectedly, bad actors end up cutting contact as soon as enough money gets squeezed out of the victim.

In late 2023, the stablecoin giant froze a total of 39 wallets connected to such scams.

Coinbase joined forces with the USSS to track down stolen crypto on-chain and identify the exchange’s customers who were affected by such fraudulent schemes. They managed to find a total of 130 users who lost more than $2 million.

Overall, the USSS confiscated a total of $225 million, and Tether burned the tokens on-chain. The same amount of stablecoins was then reissued in order to be distributed to potential victims.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has now initiated a restitution process. Victims have to prove that they got scammed by sharing their transaction history on Coinbase or another exchange.

Pig butchering scams are treated as a top crypto crime priority by the FBI, the USSS, and other agencies.

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June 24, 2025 0 comments

A Viera with a furrowed brow looks sad or frustrated.

Gaming Gear

Final Fantasy 14 director Yoshi-P admits ‘our quality of service has declined recently’ and ‘we got used to things a bit too much and got comfortable’

by admin June 23, 2025

As I wrote earlier this year, Final Fantasy 14 is in a bit of a weird spot. The highs of the Endwalker’s narrative conclusion and the WoW exodus have officially tapered off, leaving players with a fairly middling introduction to its new story and frustrations around patch cadence.

There are smaller snags between the more glaring issues, too—DDoS attacks continue to plague servers, last year’s graphical overhaul and Xbox launch have caused a snafu or two, and there was even one particularly odd bug last year that caused one of the game’s easiest raids to go turbo hard mode.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXXXVII – YouTube

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Director and producer Naoki Yoshida is pretty aware of the disruption it’s all been causing, as he briefly discussed at the beginning of a livestream last week. “I’ve been feeling that our quality of service has declined recently, I am very for that,” Yoshida told viewers (thanks to the Final Fantasy 14 community Discord for the translations), adding that there have been “too many bugs that we need to have an emergency maintenance or a hotfix for.”

Yoshida claims he’s had chats across both the community and development team, before saying: “It feels like we got used to things a bit too much and got comfortable.”

Now he’s probably talking more about the multitude of tech-related hiccups here, but it’s a sentence that rings true across the entire game. It feels like there’s been a real ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality that’s been keeping the MMO ticking along in recent years. And I mean, it ain’t quite broke. But it’s certainly incredibly rusted.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

I do think he’s at least somewhat cognizant of that, though, as he follows up by saying: “We grew bigger and processes didn’t fully work the way we had intended them to, we want to improve this again. Especially with new and big content we have recently released, this was difficult. We want to keep providing fun and engaging content and we will strive to do better.”

Stagnant game design and a lack of any meaningful, repeatable midcore content for an entire half of an expansion’s life is certainly harming Final Fantasy 14, and this all does make me wonder if Square Enix has at least sort of started to recognise that the formula isn’t working as well as it used to. Especially as the gap continues to widen between itself and WoW, with Blizzard practically running circles around Square at this point.

It does spark some kind of hope in me that we’ll start to see some larger overhauls, though they likely won’t manifest until the next expansion at the very earliest. We have already seen the developer dabbling with different fights like tougher 24-player boss fights, and returning to older concepts like Diadem and Bozja in the form of Cosmic Exploration and the Occult Crescent. Sentiment on all three has been rather mixed—which is to be expected, I guess—but I do hope Square Enix takes the feedback to evolve and catch back up to its competition, rather than going for its usual method of canning the content all together.

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June 23, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Tesla’s Robotaxi Service Hits the Road in Texas

by admin June 23, 2025

The company has said that Tesla owners will eventually be able to transform their own cars into self-driving taxis that can collect fares while they’re not being used. But the company released no timeline Sunday for that plan.

Tesla’s driver assistance technology has been the subject of federal safety probes, two recalls, and customer complaints related to reports that the vehicles suddenly brake for no apparent reason and can collide with stationary objects—including emergency vehicles. That tech, which includes the older Autopilot feature and the newer Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature, is distinct from Tesla’s autonomous features. With the assistance features, the drivers are required to stay behind the wheel and keep their eyes on the road at all times. Autonomous features don’t require any driver action or attention.

Issues with those older technologies raise questions about the safety of Tesla’s new autonomous tech, says Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst who focuses on autonomous technology at Telemetry Insight. Full Self-Driving (Supervised) “will work fine for perhaps hours at a time and then randomly make very serious mistakes in ways that are not necessarily repeatable,” he says.

Unlike other autonomous technology developers, which use a number of pricier sensors to detect obstacles around their vehicles, Tesla depends only on cameras. Some experts have cast doubt on that choice, which could potentially lead to issues with sun glare and has been blamed for previous Tesla collisions with emergency vehicles. But financial experts say the approach could give Tesla an advantage in getting its less expensive tech in the hands of consumers more quickly.

Tesla did not respond to questions about robotaxi safety. Musk said earlier this month that the company is “being super paranoid about safety.”

Heavy Traffic

Tesla enters a suddenly busy American autonomous vehicle space. Waymo first launched a driverless service in metro Phoenix, Arizona in 2020, and now operates in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Austin. It is slated to soon open service in Atlanta, Georgia, and Miami, Florida, where customers can order a Waymo using the Uber app.

Amazon-owned Zoox says it will launch its own autonomous service in Las Vegas later this year. May Mobility is aiming to offer rides around Atlanta through the Lyft app this year. VW’s Moia subsidiary announced this spring that it would launch a self-driving service in Los Angeles in 2026, also on the Uber app.

The experiences of those companies show that Tesla has several logistical hurdles to jump before its robotaxi service expands widely. There are the human roles: Remote assistance workers might be on hand to help confused riders remotely; maintenance workers might repair cars during their downtime; cleaners might clear away trash, lost items, or anything worse left behind by riders.

There are infrastructure needs, too. VW’s Moia has operated an electric ride-sharing service in Hamburg, Germany since 2019, using that experience to prep for eventual driverless cars. The firm has determined that it will need a well-developed and decentralized footprint across any city it services. Scattered depots will “host the vehicles and provide charging and maintenance infrastructure, and also the opportunity to do constant safety checks for the vehicle,” says Sascha Meyer, the company’s CEO.

In other words: There’s a big difference between a handful of self-driving cars and a self-driving service.

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June 23, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Elden Ring Nightreign update brings new challenges and a welcome live service twist

by admin June 21, 2025

A new update for Elden Ring Nightreign has been shadow dropped, bringing stronger Nightlords to defeat on a weekly basis.

These limited-time versions of bosses are known as the Everdark Sovereigns and will have new moves and increased power. The first to appear will be an enhanced Adel, Baron of the Night (Gaping Jaw) for this week, to be followed by the Sentient Pest and Darkdrift Knight.

The remaining Nightlords will be added at a later date. At the end of each week the “Sovereign will disappear from the available Expeditions… for now”.

Elden Ring Nightreign Review – An Authentic Souls ExperienceWatch on YouTube

Note that these Everdark Sovereigns will only be available once the original form of that Nightlord has been defeated.

What’s more, defeating the Everdark Sovereigns rewards players with Sovereign Sigils. These are unique tokens that can be exchanged for special Relics and items. Additional Sigils will be rewarded the first time an Everdark Sovereign is defeated.

“This is only the beginning of the Everdark Sovereign cycle,” read the update notes. “As the power of the Night ebbs and wanes, the Sovereigns will soon return to the abyss they came from.”

At the start of the month, FromSoftware stated that “enhanced fights against existing Nightlords” would be on the way, while a duo mode is coming “at a later date”. Even before this, though, dataminers discovered game files for new phases of each Nightlord encounter, so this update was very much expected.

What wasn’t expected, perhaps, was the weekly cycle of these encounters. It’s a smart live service-esque twist to keep players coming back regularly and exactly what the game needs to extend its longevity.

Once all the Nightlords are defeated, the only reason to return is to complete Remembrances with each character. This may not be attractive enough for some, so seeing the beginning of regular updates is a welcome addition.

DLC is also on the way, although it’s unknown what this will include. Would a Bloodborne pack of returning bosses be too much to ask?

The Everdark Sovereign version of Adel, Baron of the Night is available from today, 19th June until 26th June at 1:59am UK time.

Elden Ring Nightreign is FromSoftware’s online multiplayer spin-off to Elden Ring. It’s “an exhilarating rush and a celebration of the studio’s prior achievements Souls veterans will devour,” I wrote in Eurogamer’s Elden Ring Nightreign review.

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June 21, 2025 0 comments