Exclusive: Laid-off Keywords union members set to strike outside of BioWare Edmonton

 At a whopping $9.8 bn, Black Friday shoppers have created an online spending record, Adobe Analytics reported, offering a positive sign for retailers facing lackluster sales forecasts for the holiday season.

Wizards of the Coast’s Secret Lair site is offering a 10% discount on all of its special edition Magic: The Gathering sets — many of which are already discounted. The Black Friday promotion is running through Cyber Monday, giving you plenty of time to save. The savings vary depending on what you’re after, but to our knowledge, this exciting deal is the first of its kind to be hosted on Secret Lair.

In a historic move in the cryptocurrency space, Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao has agreed to step down from the position of the company CEO and has pleaded guilty to violating US anti-money laundering charges brought down by the US Department of Justice. The settlement of the case comes at an unprecedented 4.3 billion dollars to resolve a long-running investigation into the world's largest cryptocurrency by trade volume. But who is Zhao, who created this massive empire and brought it to a fall, conceding a personal payment of 50 million dollars as a penalty to the US government? Let us take a closer look.

Embracer Group, the Swedish video game and media holding corporation responsible for a wide range of intellectual properties and game studios, has announced that it's laid off a total of 900 employees over the past three months.

Chinese giant NetEase Games has unveiled yet another new studio.

Swedish mega-publisher Embracer Group has laid off more than 900 people as it looks to mitigate its massive $1.3 billion in debt. With these cuts — and more to come — Embracer expects to lower that number to below $1 million by the fiscal year’s end. The company, which is known for its rapid expansion and industry consolidation, has 15,701 employees as of late September, according to its latest financial report.

Embracer has had a bad year. What once felt like the inexorable rise of a games industry goliath began to stagger in May, when a six-year, $2 billion mystery deal the company had drawn up collapsed at the last minute. Embracer announced a «comprehensive» restructuring the following June and since then, news about the company has been a grim parade of studio closures and job losses.

Embracer co-founder and CEO Lars Wingefors has confirmed 900 employees were laid off in the past financial quarter, representing five percent of the workforce.

There are some things we know about solar storms. First is that they strike the Earth near the polar region, due to the magnetic field lines of our planet. We also know that this is why auroras are primarily seen in the high latitude regions, as due to high concentrations of charged particles in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen get ionized and create these fantastic colors. As the charged particles move down south, the charged particles dissipate and auroras are not visible. However, the solar storm strike on the night of November 5 and early morning of November 6 might well have created history after sparking auroras as far south as the equator itself.

On Tuesday, former Keywords Studios QA testers based in Edmonton, who worked on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, picketed in front of developer BioWare Edmonton, despite EA's attempts to block the demonstration.

It’s been confirmed that 124 more jobs have been cut at Ubisoft — this time across IT teams and business administrative services. The company has already seen multiple waves layoffs this year. 

By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.