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.
As the electric vehicle movement takes off, SparkCharge is gearing up to save drivers from "range anxiety" with deliverable charging in 2019. "There's this huge gap in the market in terms of alleviating that pain over where, when, how you charge your electric vehicle," SparkCharge CEO Joshua Aviv told Cheddar Wednesday.
Tesla's latest production miss proves it is no longer a "hyper-growth story," Tesla short Mark Spiegel told Cheddar. Tesla shares tumbled close to 7 percent on Wednesday after the company missed expectations on car deliveries and broadly discounted its vehicles to offset subsidy cuts.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "out of touch" year-end post foreshadows a challenging 2019 for the social media giant, said Mark Douglas, CEO of digital display advertising platform SteelHouse.
2018 has been transformative for retail: Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Toys “R” Us shuttered its doors, and Amazon entered the U.S. into an extravagant pageant to find a base for its second HQ. As the landscape of shopping changes yet again, 2019 promises another existential moment in retail. We’re forecasting the biggest trends and predicting which fads will get the boot from consumers.
Institutional investors changed the cryptocurrency market in 2018, veering away from their blockchain-not-bitcoin attitudes and trying out strategies for entering the new crypto asset class. Cheddar is gazing into our crystal ball to predict what's ahead for crypto in 2019.
As 2018 comes to an end, Cheddar is picking the year's top winners and biggest triumphs for Cheddar's Hall of Fame.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
Samsara, one of the hottest tech startups in the freight and logistics space, is raising $100 million in fresh funding, Cheddar has learned. The new round will value the three-year-old startup at about $3.6 billion, or more than double the valuation it achieved through its last round of funding just nine months ago.
As 2018 dwindles, we're reviewing the year's most extravagant fails as part of Cheddar's Hall of Shame.
With oil prices nearing 18-month lows, John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, is worried about the negative impact of lower prices. In fact, he says, if prices drop below
$40 a barrel, the cost of production will exceed the revenue it brings. That said, Hofmeister noted that lower oil prices are having a big impact on the consumer. People are driving more, and the impact hits everything from plastics to clothing and air fares.
