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NCSoft launches MMO with terrible monetisation—puts out emergency broadcast 15 hours later, promising to fix it while its wax wings melt: ‘We were complacent and unthoughtful’

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I’ve seen some monetisation-related disasters in my time, but I think this one might be up there with the worst—NCSoft’s Aion 2, which launched in Korea and Taiwan November 18, has caused no end of problems for the company immediately after launch. Including, potentially, causing its stock price to tank a whopping 15%. As for … Read more

The PUBG extraction shooter spinoff springs back to life with a closed alpha test set for December, and its focus on exploration over pure combat sounds a lot like my favorite part of Arc Raiders

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We learned in 2023 that PUBG was being fitted for an extraction shooter spinoff, referred to at the time as Project Black Budget. It was set to launch in the second half of 2024, but then 2024 came, Project Black Budget didn’t, and frankly we forgot about the whole thing. I did, anyway. Now, as the … Read more

Poets are now cybersecurity threats: Researchers used ‘adversarial poetry’ to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard rails and it worked 62% of the time

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Today, I have a new favorite phrase: “Adversarial poetry.” It’s not, as my colleague Josh Wolens surmised, a new way to refer to rap battling. Instead, it’s a method used in a recent study from a team of Dexai, Sapienza University of Rome, and Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies researchers, who demonstrated that you can … Read more

Half-Life fans are in a frenzy over the prospect of a Half-Life 3 announcement that there’s (almost) no good reason to believe is happening

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Half-Life 3 fever has once again broken out across social media, and the Half-Life subreddit is full of both earnestly hopeful and sarcastically dismissive posts about the supposedly imminent announcement of a sequel to Valve’s landmark 2004 shooter—probably the most speculated-about game ever not to exist. You might think that all this anticipation was prompted by some big leak: … Read more