CEO News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

After months of anticipation, the Honor X9b has been launched in India. It is the latest smartphone from Honor which already has several other smartphones in the Indian market including the Honor 90. HTech CEO Madhav Sheth took to the stage and highlighted the notable features of the Honor X9b such as an Ultra-Bounce 360-degree anti-drop display that increases its durability, and 3 days battery life. Alongside the smartphone, Honor also launched the Choice Watch and Earbuds X5.

The upcoming boss of Sony's PlayStation, Hiroki Totoki, has said that bringing the company's first-party line-up to PC could be a way of improving its margins.

European games firm Embracer Group has cut its workforce by eight per cent since it started a "restructuring" process in 2023.

Bluesky CEO, Jay Graber, has announced the imminent introduction of comprehensive hashtag support on the emerging platform, signalling the next evolution in user engagement that has boosted its profile as one of the strongest emerging rivals to billionaire Elon Musk's X. In a recent interview on the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast, Graber emphasised the logical progression of "linkifying" hashtags to enhance the user experience.

Catering to millions of users worldwide, Slack is one of the world's most popular tools for communication used by professionals and businesses. The platform has a vast number of features that give it an advantage over other forms of communication. And now, Slack has taken a big stride forward into the new tech that is on everyone's tongues - artificial intelligence. To provide a more efficient yet broader user experience, Slack has introduced a new suite of AI features under Slack AI, and not just that, but importantly, it even gets integrated with popular platforms such as Perplexity, Notion and PagerDuty.

Following the Q3 2023 earnings release where Sony announced the latest PlayStation 5 sales figures, the earnings call provided interesting tidbits from Sony executives.

Helldivers 2 is a video game with guns in it, which means somebody out there is clamoring for it to add a PvP mode, seemingly ignoring the fact that its lethal friendly fire means PvP is always at your fingertips. But according to CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt of developer Arrowhead, a PvP mode is "never" going to happen because the inevitable toxicity ain't worth it. 

Innovate UK has awarded five UK women-led studios with an accolade that includes a combined total of £215,000 in grants.

Sony's new chairman has been in his role for four months now, and his early impression is that PlayStation's studios need to understand business a bit better.

The CEO of Polish developer Bloober Team, Piotr Babieno, has placed the blame for last month's poorly-received trailer for its Silent Hill 2 remake on publisher Konami.

The Snapdragon X Elite is closer to its official release, as Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon stated during the San Diego firm’s earnings call that its new chipset is tailor-made for Windows laptops and will arrive in mid-2024. This essentially means that Apple and its M-series of custom silicon will have a new competitor to worry about, and according to earlier benchmarks, we have seen some impressive performance numbers.

Last week, PlayStation put on its first State of Play showcase of the year, giving us a better look at a handful of games coming out in the next 12 months. One of these titles was Silent Hill 2 Remake, and while it was nice to get some gameplay footage for the first time, a lot of fans of the original game descended upon the trailer to criticize its heavy use of combat, something which isn't particularly associated with the Silent Hill series.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a bright spot in an altogether down financial report from Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro, which says Larian's "mega hit" RPG, having driven around $90 million in revenue in the last year, is a good sign for more video games to come from the D&D license. 

The 27th D.I.C.E. Awards are nearly here and are set to celebrate the best of the best in the world of video games. The show kicks off later this week in Las Vegas and will once again be hosted by IGN's Stella Chung and Kinda Funny CEO and IGN's Greg Miller.

Magic: The Gatheringfansshould expect more and bigger Universes Beyond sets in the future. Following the success of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, CEO Chris Cocks told investors Tuesday morning that the game and toy manufacturer expects two equivalently-sized sets to launch every calendar year beginning in 2025. First out of the gate will be a collaboration with Square Enix on a Final Fantasy set, and then multiple Marvel-themed sets after that.

AI roundup: Across the world, governments and corporates are looking to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to power up growth and harness new areas of generating revenue. Now, a Google study reveals what India thinks about the new tech. It emerges that India has become the most hopeful country as far as AI is concerned. On the other hand, there are dangers present in this space too. OpenAI CEO has expressed his fear that AI could be dangerous if misalignments occur in technology goals and expectations. Know more about what happened in the AI-verse today.

The CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Tuesday that the dangers that keep him awake at night regarding artificial intelligence are the “very subtle societal misalignments” that could make the systems wreak havoc.

The official Xbox Twitter account has announced that a 'special edition' of the Official Xbox Podcast will be happening soon.

Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he's kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours.

 Six years ago, automakers and tech companies thought they were on the cusp of putting thousands of self-driving robotaxis on the street to carry passengers without a human driver.

Despite being delayed six times so far, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot is highly confident in Skull and Bones, so much so that he is tempting fate, invoking the dreaded «AAAA» moniker. The last developer we can recall doing that was the ill-fated Striking Distance Studios with The Callisto Protocol, a game with a sad ending.

Recently, successful survival-crafting releases like Palworld and Enshrouded have turned early 2024 into a competitive market for the genre. Inflexion Games has been crafting their take on the genre, Nightingale, for over five years now.

The Official Xbox Podcast episode dropping later this week is going to be a big one. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, President of Game Content and Studios Matt Booty, and Xbox President Sarah Bond will finally address rumors that have been tearing the Xbox community apart for the past week. After leaks and rumors indicating that titles like Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Starfield, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would come to Nintendo Switch or PlayStation 5 began to circulate, people got very confused about what this all means for Xbox as a platform going forward.

Helldivers 2 has been praised for avoiding the tedious and intrusive microtransactions common among live-service shooters, so it's perhaps no coincidence that the game's creative director, Johan Pilestedt, reckons games "have to earn the right to monetize," which is why developer Arrowhead "really applied ourselves to not make it pay-to-win."

In August of last year, Ascendant Studios developer Aaron (name changed for anonymity) was ready to take a well-deserved victory lap. He had crunched hard with many of his colleagues in the final sprint to complete Ascendant’s debut game, Immortals of Aveum, but the team had finally done it. He attended a launch party in the Bay Area where he celebrated with his colleagues, some of whom he said had to pay partially out of pocket to make the trip. But while the event was supposed to be jubilant, there was an uneasy atmosphere: it seemed like Immortals of Aveum wasn’t performing especially well. At the party, developers kept asking leadership how the game was doing, only to be met with non-committal answers.

Microsoft Gaming will host a special edition of the Official Xbox Podcast on February 15 at 12:00 p.m. PT / 3:00 p.m. ET / 8:00 p.m. GMT, where it will share “updates on the Xbox business” with company CEO Phil Spencer, president Sarah Bond, and head of studios Matt Booty, the company announced. You will be able to watch it on YouTube.

It would appear that the studio behind Helldivers 2, Arrowhead, didn’t quite anticipate the massive surge in popularity the game received following its February 8 release date. With an all-time Steam peak of over 155,000 concurrent players, Helldivers 2‘s servers simply couldn’t keep up with the attention.

Helldivers 2's developer has doubled its player count following server issues, but says that it's "still not enough" to meet the demand. 

The boss of Helldivers 2 maker Arrowhead Studios, Johan Pilestedt, has said that developers have to "earn" the right to monetise their games.

Ubisoft has defended Skull and Bones' lofty price tag, dubbing it a "quadruple A game," but many who've played the recent beta aren't sold on it. 

Helldivers 2 has been a hit since it dropped on PC and PlayStation 5 last week. Perhaps more surprisingly, its monetisation is even receiving some praise, as many players are relieved to see it show some restraint, at least compared to other live services.

In the digital age, where online dating has become increasingly nuanced, a new trend is emerging that prioritizes more than just compatibility in interests or physical attraction. This is signified and the trend is set to be captured by the launch of the new Score dating app, which will debut on Valentine's Day in the United States. And it has already stirred conversation with its unique approach: pairing potential matches based on their credit score!

Sarvam AI, an emerging AI startup that is dedicated to addressing India's unique requirements, has successfully raised $41 million in a Series A funding round. Led by Lightspeed, the investment round also saw participation from Peak XV Partners and Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures, marking a significant milestone as the largest early-stage fundraising endeavour for an Indian AI startup to date.

The CEO of Jagex, Phil Mansell, has reassured players of the developer and publisher’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games, RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, that the company being acquired won’t negatively impact the games. Namely, «there are no intentions of changing our [games’] business models.”

Johan Pilestedt, the CEO of Arrowhead Game Studios and creative director of Helldivers 2, has made some interesting comments about their approach to monetization.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's tour of India has put the spotlight on artificial intelligence and he has highlighted the abilities of the country's technology workforce to provide transformational economic growth and that too at good speed. India could be one of the countries that can benefit significantly from AI which may also result in solving the country's distinctive structural issues according to Nadella. In a number of interviews over the last few days, Nadella has said that he believes India, with its wide range of talent and massive developer community, could give major competition to developed countries even in this space and achieve transformational change. So, even though India initially missed the digital bus when it came Internet, computers, smartphones and more, currently, on AI, the country is right at the forefront of progress being made. At the Microsoft CEO Connection event in Mumbai, Nadella said, “This is the first time I feel what's happening in India and what's happening in the rest of the world—there is no impedance (delay), there is no gap.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been in the news virtually throughout the whole of the last year and 2024 has started with a bang too. This is courtesy of the major strides the company has taken in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) where its big bet on Sam Altman-led OpenAI has meant that Microsoft is virtually leading the race against rival tech titans with Google, Meta Platforms, and Amazon playing catch up. And the biggest rival of them all, Apple, is yet to start the race. With AI set to transform the world in every way imaginable and some ways that are still to be thought-up, the leadership in this space would itself have ensured Nadella's place at the top of the best tech CEOs ever list after Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The anticipation surrounding GTA 6 has ignited a surge in interest for decades-old GTA Trilogy titles on Netflix's gaming platform. Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnik, revealed during a recent earnings call that the "Grand Theft Auto Trilogy" dominated downloads on Netflix Games following the announcement of "GTA 6."

If you have looked at any website for the past month or so, you have heard about Palworld. It is avoidable. Inescapable. Inevitable.

Coyote vs. Acme, a Looney Tunes courtroom comedy starring John Cena and produced by James Gunn, is reportedly set to be completely deleted by Warner Bros., despite interest from other studios. 

It’s a dismal time to be in video game development, as companies continue to announce layoffs. Now, Take-Two Interactive – the parent company of Rockstar – is looking to enact a “significant cost reduction plan,” but it doesn’t necessarily mean redundancies.

Assassin's Creed Codename Red is slated to launch before the end of Ubisoft's next financial year concludes in March 2025. This is according to an earnings report unveiled by CEO Yves Guillemot, which not only summarizes the company's sales over the last fiscal quarter but also announces its plans going forward.  

Amid an industry with extensive layoffs, including Activision-Blizzard post-acquisition by Microsoft, publisher Take-Two Interactive is looking to avoid the same. Following an earnings call for its recent fiscal report, CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety, “We have no current plans for layoffs.

The CEO of indie publisher Devolver Digital, Douglas Morin, has stepped down.

GTA 6 is scheduled to release sometime in 2025, and the sequel's publisher said during a financial results call that it's looking for perfection before the long-anticipated open-world game finally launches.

Alongside the company’s latest earnings report, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has been reflecting on the effects of the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer leak.

Sophie Wilde might have made a name for herself in the world of horror, but the actor actually has her heart set on a very different role. Speaking to GamesRadar+ following her nomination for the EE BAFTA Rising Star Award, the Talk to Me star said she’d love to play Batman villain Harley Quinn.

French startup Murena has finally launched its latest smartphone, the Murena 2 (or Murena Two). The smartphone aims to protect users against constant data collection and is known as a “deGoogled” smartphone. Although it is an Android smartphone, it does not have Google and its suite of services. Instead, it is powered by /e/OS, a fork of LineageOS. The company's mission is to “give people freedom of choice, so they can regain control over their lives.”

Pocket monster smash hit Palworld has been played by over 19 million players.

12 members of staff at the developer Wayfarer, Airship Syndicate, are being made redundant.

The founders of Until Dawn maker Supermassive Games are departing the company after 15 years.

Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent has upped its stake in Swords of Legends publisher Wangyuan Shengtang to take control of the company.

Are the Helldivers 2 servers down? Arrowhead Game Studios’ frantic third-person shooter launched today (February 8) on PC and PlayStation 5, and players have been reporting matchmaking issues and crashes. However, it now also seems that the Helldivers 2 servers are struggling, with players flagging outages. Here’s what we know. 

Moana 2 is officially on its way, and the sequel is coming out way sooner than you think.

GTA VI was unsurprisingly brought up several times during Take-Two's Q3 2024 earnings call. When an analyst from BMO Capital Markets asked how the publisher and Rockstar would settle on the release date, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in response:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a successful entrepreneur and the mind behind the widely-used generative AI tool ChatGPP, is known for bringing natural language and conversational AI tools to the tech industry. ChatGPT and his constructive strategies to meet the innovative demands of the technological world have led aspiring entrepreneurs to want to be like Altman. However, to gain unparalleled success. one has to navigate through a long and intricate journey, which requires hard work and much struggle. Therefore, to make the process easier for budding entrepreneurs, Altman has laid out 13 powerful ways on how to be successful.

The CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a message: Hey billionaires, give away more of your money to address inequality and do it soon. Mark Suzman made the call in his annual letter released Thursday that led with the story of Chuck Feeney, a billionaire whose philanthropy inspired Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French-Gates. Feeney, who died in October, made a fortune through duty free stores and gave away $8 billion during his life, much of it anonymously.

It can be difficult keeping track of the various comings and goings in the games industry, which is why we compile them in semi-regular round-ups.

Away from the media spotlight, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is silently steering his latest project, White Stork, towards the production of AI attack drones in the United States and Ukraine. The startup, shrouded in secrecy through a network of LLCs, is actively working on mass-producing drones with advanced AI capabilities for target identification.

Major technology companies pouring money into artificial intelligence could come to dominate the emerging technology, Aleph Alpha GmbH Chief Executive Officer Jonas Andrulis said. 

If there were any lingering doubts about the multi-device future of PlayStation, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida dispelled them in a video interview with the Norges Bank Investment Management. The executive said PlayStation would remain on console, but the gaming experience will be expanded to PC, mobile, and cloud.

Palworld, the viral hit action-adventure survival title from Japanese developers Pocketpair, has taken the gaming industry by storm, climbing to the top of Steam charts and selling six million copies in just four days of release. But as the game's player count balloons, it has found itself embroiled in a plagiarism controversy, with many on the Internet pointing out alleged similarities between the designs of Palworld's creatures and those in popular Pokémon games. A user on social media platform X has gone as far as to compare in-game 3D models from both Palworld and Pokémon, claiming evidence of outright plagiarism.

Pocketpair’s CEO has commented on the plagiarism controversy surrounding their recent release, Palworld. But, he isn’t the only one who has chimed in.

The CEO of Palworld developer Pocketpair has stated that the game's artists have received death threats, and has asked that people stop directing messages towards studio staff.

The director of Steam’s colossal breakout hit, Palworld, has responded to allegations of plagiarism, as accusations mount that the game could have copied Pokémon designs.

The CEO of Wimo Games, Dave Rosen, has confirmed that the VR studio is closing down.

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has paid a visit to China, to celebrate Beijing's New Year Party, marking his steps into mainland China after several years.

Masimo CEO Joe Kiani, waging a legal fight with Apple Inc. over a blood oxygen feature on Apple Watch, said that consumers are better off without the iPhone maker's version of the technology. The remarks followed Apple's decision to cease sales of smartwatches Thursday that had the tool — a gauge of blood oxygen saturation known as a pulse oximeter — which had been a heavily marketed health feature on the devices. The move stemmed from a ruling by the US International Trade Commission that found the technology violated Masimo patents.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, who has been working to raise billions of dollars from global investors for a chip venture, aims to use the funds to set up a network of factories to manufacture semiconductors, according to several people with knowledge of the plans.

Mighty Kingdom shareholders today voted against a resolution brought by the studio's former CEO Shane Yeend to oust its current board of directors.

Davos [Switzerland], January 19 (ANI): In a Davos session themed 'Technology in a Turbulent World,' Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, delved into the future trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI), offering profound insights into its role as a driving force for global economies and societies.

Amid concerns raised in various quarters about risks posed by AI, ChatGPT creator OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Thursday said artificial intelligence (AI) won't replace human care for each other, just like computers didn't kill the game of chess. Speaking at a session on 'Technology in a Turbulent World' at the World Economic Forum (WEF 2024) here, he said even with its very limited current capability and very deep flaws, people are finding ways to use this tool for great productivity gains or other gains and understand the limitations.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees to expect more job cuts at the Alphabet-owned company this year, The Verge reported on Wednesday, citing an internal memo.

With the acquisition of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard, Microsoft can now be a “good publisher” across all platforms, including rival consoles, the boss of the company has said.

Larian CEO Swen Vincke has been reading Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay's thoughts from yesterday about how players need to "get comfortable" with renting their games as a package, rather than "having and owning" an individual copy. His broad takeaway is: that ain't it, chief. In a social media thread today, Vincke wrote that "it's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not". He feels that "direct from developer to players is the way". As such you shouldn't expect Baldur's Gate 3, Divinity: Original Sin 2 or any other Larian RPGs to join the Game Pass bandwagon anytime soon.

You won't find any Larian Studios games on a subscription service, said its CEO Swen Vincke.

The CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games said Tuesday the company's court battle to open up Apple's iPhone to alternative app stores was lost after theteThe high court announced it would not hear appeals by either Apple or Epic in the long-running case, effectively putting an end to the legal saga.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have given new tools to science, but the most interesting thing to watch out for will be what it can do to accelerate science, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said on Tuesday.

At the end of 2023, OpenAI went through a whirlwind situation that saw CEO Sam Altman leave the company, agree to join Microsoft as head of an AI team, and then rejoin OpenAI as CEO, along with a new board. In the midst of all that, it was revealed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had been mediating talks. It was suggested that investors of the company behind ChatGPT, namely, Microsoft, weren't happy with Altman's sacking, and wanted him back, a wish that was ultimately fulfilled. Now, Nadella has said that while he wants consistency and good governance at partner OpenAI, he's not worried about the company's nonprofit structure and doesn't want greater control over his partner.

Adding to a painful week in gaming and tech layoffs, Discord is the latest company to announce downsizing, with a 17% cut to its staff.