Month: March 2020

Enlarge / AT&T service van driving in June 2019 in Oakdale, California. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

AT&T is planning tens of billions of dollars worth of cost cuts, AT&T President and COO John Stankey told investors yesterday. Stankey also discussed the future of DirecTV satellite service, saying it won't be the primary TV option AT&T pitches to most customers going forward.

For the company-wide cuts, AT&T management "has looked at effectively 10 broad initiatives that we believe can generate double digits of billions over a 3-year planning cycle," Stankey said at a Morgan Stanley conference, according to a transcript posted by AT&T.

One of the first of those 10 initiatives will include job cuts, which Stankey called "headcount rationalization." Stankey noted that AT&T has already been cutting jobs but said the company plans "additional work" in that area:

Ah, it seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Half-Life 2: Episode 3's original announcement. But now, as we approach 14 years since the promise of a Half-Life that has the number "3" in the title, the impending release of the VR-exclusive prequel Half-Life: Alyx has proven Valve hasn't totally forgotten about the franchise.

What does all the work on Alyx mean for the long-delayed vision of an honest-to-goodness Half-Life 3? Game Informer put that very question to Valve's Robin Walker in a recent interview, and the answer, though vague, is the clearest indication in years that Valve hasn't given up on the idea of an honest "threequel."

Half-Life means a lot to us, and it's been incredibly rewarding to refamiliarize ourselves with its characters, setting, and mechanics. There are Half-Life: Alyx team members who have been at Valve since Half-Life 2, and quite a few who go back to the original Half-Life. There are also people on the team for whom Half-Life: Alyx is their first time working on this series at all—and many of them certainly hope it's not the last. We absolutely see Half-Life: Alyx as our return to this world, not the end of it.

Walker's discussion of the current makeup of the Half-Life: Alyx team is important to note here. Long-time Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw left the company in 2016 (before sharing a potential Half-Life 3 plot summary on his blog), followed the next year by the departure of series scribes Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek. Animator Doug Wood and Senior Engineer Ken Birdwell also left the company in 2016, rounding out a handful of other notable departures since the last time Valve worked on a Half-Life game.

Enlarge / Astra could not quite get its payload off the ground on Monday.

On Monday, Astra came within 53 seconds of launching its Rocket 3.0 from a spaceport in southern Alaska. With less than a minute to go in the countdown, a sensor delivered some data about the rocket that Astra's chief executive, Chris Kemp, said "really concerned us."

Despite the prospect of losing out on a $2 million check from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and potentially $10 million more later this month, Astra engineers halted the launch attempt. They thought the problem may lie with a faulty sensor, as bad data was intermittent, but they weren't sure.

"By making the decision to not fly today, we’ll have the opportunity to fly this rocket safely at a later date," Kemp said. He said the company is likely "weeks" away from trying again, rather than months.