Electronic Arts is in some trouble with its Star Wars fan base.
"Star Wars Battlefront 2," officially comes out on Friday, but many players are already upset over the expensive in-game transactions necessary to unlock certain characters. Tamoor Hussain, editor at GameSpot and Russell Holly, managing editor of VRHeads.com joined Cheddar to discuss the concept of paying extra within a game.
Hussain says that it used to take a significant number of hours to gain points in order to unlock certain characters, which upset players. So, companies began to add the option to buy the power to unlock them. But people are still upset. He says it could impact sales this week, but many people won't be looking into the issue too deeply.
Holly says in-game transactions are a tremendous business for Electronic Arts, which just bought Respawn Entertainment for over $400 million.
To ease some of the pressure, EA said that it will reducing the amount of resources it'll take to access key players in the upcoming game.
"They kind of changed the discoursed around the game," Hussain said, adding that this move will sway public opinion positively.
The head of security for Huawei, the embattled Chinese tech giant that has been accused of working as a front for Chinese intelligence services, told Cheddar's Hope King on Monday that "no government has ever asked us to spy" and that those accusations were part of a "drumbeat of anti-Huawei criticism."
It's become par for the course for Epic Games to release game-changing items in Fortnite just before tournaments. Ghost Gaming's Kayuun shares his worries for what that means for competitive Fortnite.
People with "get a job" on their list of New Year's resolutions should look to the tech industry, according to a trends report from PayScale. "Tech is the winner when it comes to where you really want to go for good career opportunities, high job satisfaction, and good wage growth," Katie Bardaro, PayScale's Chief Economist and VP of Data Analytics, told Cheddar Friday.
New York is getting into a crypto state of mind with plans to create the nation's first Crypto Task Force. "New York State is the financial capital of the world, and we must have the proper regulations and proper balance to be able to figure out how to regulate in this space," N.Y. Assemblyman Clyde Vanel told Cheddar.
Roku's new content partnership with Showtime, Starz, and other premium channels is "just the beginning" of a greater expansion into paid content, the company's VP of programming and engagement told Cheddar Thursday.
PepsiCo is spearheading an autonomous food delivery service on the campus of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., where students can now order snacks via an app that are then delivered to them via a small robotic vehicle. The "snackbot" is a "first-of-its-kind" experiment in self-driving and robotics technology, Scott Finlow, vice president of innovation and insights at PepsiCo, told Cheddar.
Tim Cook is an excellent steward of Apple, but he's no Steve Jobs ー and what Apple really needs right now, is innovation, said Andy Cunningham, who worked with Jobs to launch the Macintosh.
Major indices followed Apple lower after the iPhone maker's unexpected announcement it would cut revenue guidance sparked fears that the days of Apple's hyper growth are over. The Dow closed down 2.8 percent or 660 points on Thursday, while the S&P finished trading down about 2.5 percent and the Nasdaq closed lower by more than 3 percent.
Netflix may benefit in the short-term from its decision to pull an episode of a comedy show that criticized Saudi Arabia's royal family, but in the long-term, the move could hurt the public's trust in the brand, Jack Crowe of the National Review told Cheddar Wednesday.
In a new era of transportation, safety testing is critical for cars that are now more dependent on tech than on steel and rubber. The American Center for Mobility is a 500-acre testing facility located in Ypsilanti, Mich., just over 30 miles from Detroit. On the center's highway speed loop, vehicles are tested for safety on a range of roadway and weather conditions. "It's gotta work all the time, every time," the center's interim CEO, Kirk Steudle, told Cheddar's J.D. Durkin.
