Koreantoast writes: With the number of carjackings more than doubling in the city of Chicago during 2020, one lawmaker knows who to blame: the video game “Grand Theft Auto.” According to Chicago ABC 7, Democratic State Representative Marcus Williams believes the video game is causing the rise in carjackings, stating that “Grand Theft Auto’ and other violent video games are getting…
Tag: XBox Live
‘We Messed Up’. Microsoft Rescinds Xbox Live Gold Price Hike
“We messed up today,” the Xbox Live Gold team wrote late Friday night, “and you were right to let us know.” Their blog post’s new title? “No Changes to Xbox Live Gold Pricing, Free-to-Play Games to be Unlocked.” Forbes reports: It has been a very strange few days for Microsoft and Xbox fans. On Friday, Microsoft announced that for effectively no…
CenturyLink Outage Led To a 3.5% Drop in Global Web Traffic
US internet service provider CenturyLink has suffered a major technical outage on Sunday after a misconfiguration in one of its data centers created havoc all over the internet. From a report Due to the technical nature of the outage — involving both firewall and BGP routing — the error spread outward from CenturyLink’s network and also impacted other internet service providers,…
Major Internet Outage: Dozens of Sites are Down
“Cloudflare, an internet service that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself Sunday, taking dozens of websites and online services along with it,” reports CNN: Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems Sunday morning. Cloudflare said the problem was with a third-party “transit provider,” and its service was…
Is Microsoft Planning To Phase Out Xbox Live Gold?
Yesterday, a Microsoft rep confirmed that the option to purchase 12 months of Xbox Live Gold has been removed from the Microsoft Store. That’s exactly a week ahead of the July 23 games presentation, where Microsoft could be announcing a plan to phase out the subscription service altogether with the launch of Xbox Series X. Inverse reports: “At this time Xbox…
Microsoft Announces New Windows 10 Start Menu Design, Updated Alt-Tab
Microsoft is testing a number of Windows 10 upgrades to a small number of testers, including changes to the Alt-Tab function and a new Start menu design. The Verge reports: “We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent…
Some Believe the US Has Been Hit By Large-Scale DDoS Attack — Others Are Skeptical
Forbes reports major internet outages across many companies including T-Mobile, Fortnite, Instagram, Comcast, and Chase Bank. Some experts believe it is the result of a coordinated attack, others not so much. Slashdot reader bobthesungeek76036 shares the report: On June 15, a flurry of reports on a number of different services in the U.S. have indicated that the country may be experiencing…
Insignia Project Aims To Resurrect Xbox Live For the Original Xbox
Last week, Kotaku reported on a new project, called Insignia, “that aims to recreate the original Xbox Live service, potentially restoring online play to many dozens of classic Xbox games that fell offline when the original Xbox Live service closed on April 15, 2010.” From the report: The project’s announcement on the r/originalxbox subreddit came from SoullessSentinel, a screen name of…
Microsoft’s Big Xbox Game Pass Bet is Starting To Pay Off
Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company said during an investor call yesterday. It’s the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it’s a sign that the company’s ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. From a report: Microsoft has been trying to build a “Netflix for…
Videogames Are Setting New Records For Simultaneous Users
Forbes reports that in a world filled with school closings and social isolation, gaming has surged:
– Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record 20,313,451 concurrent users to the 16-year-old service, according to third-party database SteamDB – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, released by Steam-owner Valve in 2012, seems to be the top beneficiary of the…