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.
A regulatory crackdown on behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook is more likely than ever, according to Brian McCullough, author of "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone."
Mozilla is looking to capitalize on consumers' increased awareness of data privacy with new anti-tracking features built into the latest version of its Firefox browser. The new tools are part of Mozilla's commitment to giving "agency" back to the user, COO Denelle Dixon said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
The fast-paced push to bring autonomous vehicles to market is at sharp odds with an imperative to make the tech safe and trustworthy. Both new tech companies and legacy automakers are under pressure from investors to show off their advances in autonomous vehicle deployment ー or risk being cast aside as has-beens, unable to keep pace.
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Twitter shares are surging Thursday after the company smashed its third-quarter earnings report, posting a nearly 30 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a nine percent increase in the all-important daily active user metric. The release did not disclose the actual number of DAUs.
Tesla shares surged in after-market trading on Wednesday after the company surprised investors with strong adjusted quarterly earnings of $2.90 a share, far exceeding expectations. "As a Tesla bull, this is the quarter we've all been waiting for," Galileo Russell, founder of HyperChange TV, told Cheddar. "This is proving that Tesla can make money, they're on their way to being the most profitable automaker in the entire world. This is justifying the company's valuation; this is all good news."
Snap has hired a new chief business officer and chief strategy officer. The news comes a day before the company's earnings release and as Cheddar's Alex Heath reports an internal survey suggests 40 percent of Snap employees don't plan to stay around very long.
After Trivago's latest earnings report on Wednesday, it can once again claim profitability, a milestone the CEO hopes will restore faith in the travel-booking platform.
"I think for us it was super important to get back to profitability, to really show what this company can achieve and to gain confidence and to show the markets, 'Hey, Trivago can be a profitable company,'" Rolf Schroemgens told Cheddar Wednesday.
Tesla shares are surging as investors prepare for the company to release quarterly earnings Wednesday after the markets close. President Trump criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (again) in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And Kerry Bishé and Corey Stoll join Cheddar to talk about their roles on Amazon's new series 'The Romanoffs.'
Stocks declined sharply Wednesday afternoon, with the Nasdaq recording its biggest monthly drop in almost a decade, as bad housing news and global trade concerns added to another tumultuous day on Wall Street.
