Relief For Tencent Holdings, NetEase And Others As China Softens Stance on Gaming After Rout

Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada has asked Native American fans of the series for their thoughts on the designs of fighters Michelle and Julia, and what advice they'd give to him if he created a new Native American character for the series.

The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG AFTRA) has announced a new deal which it claims will protect actors from unauthorized AI replications of their voices.

The main trailer for 3 Body Problem, the new sci-fi series from the creators of Game of Thrones, has been released. The Netflix show, based on the beloved novel by Liu Cixin, is helmed by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and True Blood producer Alexander Woo.

Open-world survival crafting game Palworld will launch in Early Access for Xbox Series, Xbox One, and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store on January 19 at 12:00 a.m. PT / 3:00 a.m. ET / 17:00 JST, developer Pocket Pair announced. It will also be available via Xbox Game Pass. It will support English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Korean language options.

The new Dawntrail areas revealed from the Japan Fanfest keynote were quite telling about certain elements of the next expansion’s story. Here’s how Solution Nine and other FFXIV Dawntrail areas could affect the story.

It is a radical form of recycling. Calendars from 1996 are being reused for 2024 as both are leap years that begin on a Monday. The quirk has sparked a flurry of interest on the internet, with 1990s nostalgia fans chasing down vintage calendars nearly 30 years old. As last year came to an end, people began posting about how the 1996 calendar works neatly in 2024, with one TikTok clip garnering over 1.5 million views. Another viral post, this time on X (formerly Twitter), playfully reminds people to start reusing their carefully saved calendars featuring then-child star Jonathan Taylor Thomas -- who is now aged 42.

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China removed an official at a government body overseeing its press and publications regulator, five sources who were briefed on the matter said, days after Chinese gaming stocks were hit by proposed rules to curb spending on video games. Feng Shixin was removed last week from his position as head of the publishing unit of the Communist Party's Publicity Department, the sources said. The department oversees the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) which in turn regulates China's vast video games sector.

The Chinese Communist Party—who had taken aim at free-to-play monetisation schemes just before the holidays—softened its stance. This was after "nearly $80 billion in market value" bled from Tencent (League of Legends) and NetEase (Diablo: Immortal). 

India's ISRO launched its first satellite, XPoSat, on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year. The spacecraft, named X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, was propelled into an orbit of 350 kilometers from an island near India's main spaceport of Sriharikota, off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The XPoSat satellite, weighing about 470 kilograms, will carry out research on X-rays emanating from around 50 celestial objects with the help of two payloads built by ISRO and a Bengaluru-based research institute.

 A new crop of artificial intelligence startups has shaken up Silicon Valley — and the wider business world — throughout this year, but there's one thing that hasn't changed: Big Tech still wields power. In the wake of Microsoft Corp.'s $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, other tech giants raced to partner with leading AI startups through funding and cloud computing deals. Salesforce Inc. led a round in Hugging Face at a $4.5 billion valuation. Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. invested billions in OpenAI rival Anthropic. And Nvidia Corp. seemed to back almost every AI startup of note. 

It's official: Bobby Kotick has left Activision Blizzard. After 32 years of leading the company, originally just Activision before the Blizzard merger, the controversial CEO is gone, having seen the Microsoft acquisition through to the end.