Six months after the disastrous launch of Payday 3, Starbreeze CEO is out as the company says it needs ‘different leadership’ for the future-
Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren has been shown the door, as the board of directors has decided that it is in need of “different leadership” to take the company forward. The move comes just six months after the catastrophic launch of struggling heist-shooter Payday 3.
Sjögren became acting CEO of Starbreeze in October 2020 following the resignation of then-CEO Mikael Nermark, and was appointed to the position permanently in March 2021. Three years later, he’s very suddenly out, and while a specific reason for his ouster was given it sure doesn’t sound like the Starbreeze board of directors was happy with how things have been going.
“The company has a clear strategy centered around creating attractive games on our own and licensed IPs,” Starbreeze chairman Torgny Hellström said in a press release (via Game Developer). “The board’s consolidated assessment is that the execution of strategy needs a different leadership.”
Hellström thanked Sjö…
Secretlab’s shaved $30 off my favorite overall gaming chair for Black Friday-
Secretlab’s pricing is a bit odd; you have direct pricing, indirect pricing, and now a Black Friday sale price. What that usually means you’ll find a Secretlab gaming chair going for less on Secretlab’s own website than on, say, Amazon. Though through Black Friday you’ll also score an extra discount to bring the fantastic Secretlab Titan Evo gaming chair down from $549 to $519.
That $30 discount is a familiar sight. It’s pretty much the standard sale price we expect to see from Secretlab on one of its ‘Signatures’ chairs for any major sales event throughout the year. Though it’s still a decent way to shave some money off the gaming chair that I still use in the office to this day, and the one I rate as the best gaming chair.
At least you know you’re getting this chair for pretty much the best price it’ll go for nowadays. These chairs have increased in price over the years with Secretlab citing increased shipping and material costs—you won’t often find one goi…
This is the cheapest RTX 4080 graphics card you’ll find on Black Friday, and it might not stick around-
There’s no getting around it: if you’re looking to pick up an RTX 4080 graphics card this holiday, the deals aren’t that impressive. Of the best GPU deals we’ve gathered, most sites are only cutting prices by $50-$100 bucks, the most elusive among them being the RTX 4080.
Good RTX 4080 deals are so rare that we’ve already seen one sell out—a $140-off deal for a Gigabyte card at Best Buy. Rest in peace, but the good news is there’s a Newegg deal that’s nearly as good still in stock: the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4080 16GB can currently be snagged for $1,080 at Newegg.
Just 20 bucks shy of the sold-out Best Buy card. Not too shabby, but be aware that’s only after going through Newegg’s $30 rebate process and punching in the $20 discount code BFCCY2Z36 at checkout.
- We’re curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.
As an added bonus, Nvidia is giving away Al…
The Rogue Prince of Persia revealed- a slick 2D roguelite coming to Steam in May-
I was a little surprised to learn that Ubisoft is publishing a second 2D Prince of Persia game so soon after The Lost Crown, meaning both were in development simultaneously. This one is a bit different though: It’s not developed by a Ubisoft studio, and it’s releasing on Steam in early access this May, which is notable because Ubisoft has been doing timed Epic Games Store exclusives for the past several years.
The Rogue Prince of Persia was announced at today’s Triple-I Initiative showcase, although its existence was leaked earlier. It’s being developed by Evil Empire, the studio founded to make DLC for popular roguelite Dead Cells while Motion Twin moved on to a new project, and sees the Prince reacting to a Hun invasion with his usual melee combat and platforming. As the “rogue” bit of the title hints, though, something new happens when the Prince inevitably finds himself at the bottom of a spike trap.
Lucky for our impaled Prince, he’s been “living a roguelite h…
I am mesmerized by the impeccable vibes of this trippy twin-stick shooter-
“A celestial flower blooms, as a vicious wasp protects. Complete their entwined symbiotic life cycle in a realm crawling with hunger,” reads the simple description for Nidus, an upcoming twin-stick shooter from indie developer Caleb Wood.
What it describes is some of the most entrancing gameplay snippets and trailers I’ve seen all year. Nidus is a twin-stick arcade shooter that looks to be some seriously demanding gameplay. Here’s the trick: You control both flower and wasp as a symbiotic organism to survive their strange ecosystem long enough to complete their life cycle.
The two characters push and pull against each other. The wasp can smash, slice, and sting enemies with great speed. The flower has a more stable movement, and can seemingly fire projectiles both directionally and in spinning bursts. As the wasp takes down enemies it collects energy that it can use to pollinate the flower, which lets it unleash those burst attacks—and heal the duo.
Non…
TSMC looks set to hit Intel where it hurts, announcing its A16 node with ‘Super Power Rail’ backside power delivery-
While Intel has been busy making bets on its 18A node as part of its accelerated roadmap towards chip making dominance, TSMC appears to have been beavering away in the background to undercut it.
It’s just announced its own “angstrom-class” process, A16, which thanks to its backside power delivery implementation looks set to not only offer significantly improved performance compared to its upcoming NP2 process, but also improve energy efficiency, too. Intel has its own competing backside power delivery tech, PowerVia. While Intel says it will begin producing chips on 18A next year, it doesn’t expect to start producing large volumes of chips on the 18A node until 2027.
TSMC says that chips built on the new A16 process will provide an 8-10% speed improvement over N2P at the same voltage, with a 15-20% power reduction at the same speed and up to a 1.10X chip density improvement for data centre products. The company aims to begin production on chips using the tech in 20…
Twitch bans ‘promotion or sponsorship’ of CS-GO skin gambling-
Late last year Twitch began to take the issue of gambling streams on its platform seriously, issuing new guidelines that prohibited such content and triggering an exodus of content creators that gambled on-stream. This saw major figures such as xQc, a hugely popular Canadian streamer who often gambles big money and admits he has a problem, move over to Twitch rival Kick, which allows gambling (though the $100 million definitely helped).
Twitch has now begun to get more laser-focused on these guidelines, and has issued a new edict that prohibits streamers from either promoting or being sponsored by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) skin gambling sites. Estimating the size of this grey industry is a near-impossible task, but it’s fair to say it is enormous, enormously popular, and has been a part of the CS:GO scene pretty much since Valve added skins (heck, I’ve gambled CS:GO skins in the past via sites that let you bet on tournament results). There a…
Three great Warhammer tabletop RPGs for under $20 is a deal worthy of the Emperor himself-
You might raise your eyebrow at me posting about tabletop RPG bundles two days in a row, and I wouldn’t blame you. But I’m afraid I can’t just ignore a deal this good on not one but three great Warhammer RPGs.
Humble Bundle’s latest deal includes PDFs of the core books, as well as sourcebooks and adventures, for three of the four major Warhammer TTRPGs: Soulbound, Wrath & Glory, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Imperium Maledictum is left out, but that’s new so we’ll forgive publisher Cubicle 7 for that. For just £15 / $18, you’re getting over £250 / $300 worth of stuff, with more than enough material to run a full campaign in all three systems.
Soulbound is a game of high-powered, mythic fantasy set in the Age of Sigmar universe. Huge fights against hordes of foes and towering monsters are quick and easy to play out; as I’ve said here before, I think it’s a fantastic alternative to D&D for those who love over-the-top adventure.
The RTX 4070 just leaked, looks like a match for an RTX 3080 without frame gen-
Nvidia is keeping the RTX 4070 under wraps but it looks like absolutely no one else is. We’ve got what’s claimed to be an entire specification list, and proof of third-party models from MSI and Palit, to ponder over ahead of the graphics card’s expected release.
Videocardz has got hold of a slide that is claimed to be from Nvidia. We’ve no guarantee of that, but it looks like it holds water.
The slide shows Nvidia will be using the AD104 GPU for the RTX 4070—the same GPU used in the RTX 4070 Ti. That checks out with what we’re expecting, and the rest of the spec is no surprise, either. There’s reportedly 12GB of GDDR6X memory capable of pumping out 504GB/s bandwidth across the card, working in tandem with a large L2 cache size of 36MB to push performance. That’s 9x the L2 cache of the equivalent RTX 30-series cards.
In terms of performance, there’s a graph comparing the RTX 4070 to the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070. It looks good, but what we’re looking at i…
Valve is working on a new Steam feature that will let you hide all those weird sex games from your friends-
Valve appears to be working on a new feature for Steam that will let you mark individual games as “private,” which will let you keep your profile public while preventing all your friends from knowing just how much time you spend playing Horny Housewives Booty Call Blackmail. (Or, you know, whatever.)
Currently, the privacy options on Steam are limited: You can set your profile, or individual parts of it (game details, friends list, and inventory), to public, friends only, or private. That provides some control over what the rest of the Steam universe can know about you, but it’s an all-or-nothing solution that lacks flexibility.
The addition of a per-game privacy option, spotted and shared on Twitter by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, promises to go a long way toward addressing that shortcoming. Steam users will be able to mark individual games as “private,” which will keep other Steam users—even their friends—from seeing it.
Let’s be honest wit…