Daily Tech News 4 September 2024

• Concord is a flop. (Mashable, 28 August)
  
  
  
• Concord is dead. (Mashable, 3 September)
  
  Yes, Concord, Sony's $200 million (ish) tentpole hero shooter Overwatch clone (depending on your generation, digital laser tag/cops and robbers/cowboys and indians/Mycenaeans and Sea People) has officially been unalived less than two weeks after release.
  
  Despite desperate attempts by the entire tech and gaming press - apart from Mashable, as it turns out - to drag its flyblown corpse across the finish line, Sony read the hemlock leaves and decided that there was no way to fix this mess without setting even more money on fire.
  
  Everyone who bought a copy - estimated at less than 25,000 - will receive a refund. The Steam page is already gone, and the servers will go offline this Friday, probably for good.
  
  At time of writing, the game has 43 players. In the entire world. So even among the unfortunates that bought the game, fewer than one in 500 are playing it.
  
  
  
• Dustborn currently has 9 players.
  
  
  
• Soulash 2 has 110. Which is still not a lot, but it's a paid early access game written by one guy living in Poland.
  
  
  
• Core Keeper, another indie game very broadly in the same genre as Soulash, has 20,680 players right now.
  
  
  
• If your doctor has advised you to increase dietary schadenfreude I present The Verge and Kotaku. Kotaku is in the seventh stage of grief, which like the first six stages consists of blaming gamers.

• Intel has launched its Lunar Lake mobile CPUs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel promises much better battery life than its recent offerings. That may well be true, because these chips max out at 8 cores (4 Performance and 4 Efficiency), lack hyperthreading, and are built on TSMC's 3nm process rather than by Intel itself.
  
  They also come with memory soldered onto the chip itself. 16GB or 32GB. No other options, no possibility of upgrade, ever.
  
  These are targeted at the thin-and-light market exclusively, and may actually be good for that market. We don't know yet, because this is paper launch. There are no laptops available yet, much less reviews.
  
  Those should come before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops will receive a free Microsoft Copilot update in November. (WCCFTech)
  
  Whether you want it or not.
  
  
  
• Remembering the days when disk drives were lethal. (GitHub)
  
  We're talking an original IBM RAMAC here, which contained fifty 24-inch platters and weighed over a ton.

  The thing that kept us from getting killed was a shield that Don Johnson invented to put around the whole RAMAC disk assembly. It slowed down the shrapnel. Leonard and I were the only ones in the room. We started it up. It didn't even get up to full speed before it started to fly apart.

  Yes, those were the days.
  
  
  
• Canva has increased the price of its Teams product - in some cases by more than 300%. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I wouldn't care except that Canva recently bought Affinity and the Affinity suite is good software at a very reasonable price, with free updates and no subscriptions.
  
  I hope they don't mess that up.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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