Month: May 2021

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  In 2019, EGS saw a series of daily user spikes surrounding the release of new free games. [credit: Epic v. Apple court filing ]

Last month, a filing in the Epic versus Apple court case showed the public just how much money Epic has been throwing at free games and exclusive "guarantees" to establish a market foothold for the Epic Games Store. Now, a new filing in the case gives a detailed breakdown on how that money was spent over the first 11 months of the Epic Games Store's existence (through October 2019).

While this version of Epic's Review of Performance and Strategy is a bit dated now, it still gives the clearest public indication yet of how Epic sees huge upfront spending on free and exclusive games as key to attracting new users to EGS. Epic hopes that, in turn, will help eventually make EGS a self-sustaining, profitable storefront with a significant share of the PC gaming market.

How to make money with free games

All told, in the first 10 months of EGS' existence (through September 2019), the filing shows Epic spent roughly $11.6 million to distribute just over 104 million free copies of 42 different titles. The "buyout price" paid from Epic to the publisher for each individual title varied, but the middle half of titles (25th to 75th percentile) cost $80,000 to $350,000 each. Two of the free games in the bunch were worth at least $1 million to Epic—Mutant Year Zero ($1M) and Subnautica ($1.4M)—while offering free copies of the three collected Batman: Arkham games cost Epic $1.5M total.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Since 2018, an almost endless series of attacks broadly known as Spectre has kept Intel and AMD scrambling to develop defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities that allow malware to pluck passwords and other sensitive information directly out of silicon. Now, researchers say they’ve devised a new attack that breaks most—if not all—of those on-chip defenses.

Spectre got its name for its abuse of speculative execution, a feature in virtually all modern CPUs that predicts the future instructions the CPUs might receive and then follows a path that the instructions are likely to follow. By using code that forces a CPU to execute instructions along the wrong path, Spectre can extract confidential data that would have been accessed had the CPU continued down that wrong path. These exploits are known as transient executions.

“Dangerous implications”

Since Spectre was first described in 2018, new variants have surfaced almost every month. In many cases, the new variants have required chipmakers to develop new or augmented defenses to mitigate the attacks.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster includes a handful of notable first-party Nintendo Switch games marked down to $40 at various retailers, including Super Mario Odyssey, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. While we've seen a couple of these games go for slightly less around Black Friday, Nintendo still tends to be stingy about discounting its own Switch titles, so each deal is about $5-10 lower than the usual going rates we see online over the majority of the year.

More importantly, the games themselves are worth the money: Odyssey is virtually a must-have for any Switch owner or Mario fan, Fire Emblem pairs an engaging tactical-RPG with a surprisingly nuanced (anime) political thriller, and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe and Xenoblade Chronicles are touched-up versions of a well-liked 2D platformer and a beloved action-RPG, respectively. If you're a Switch owner looking for something new to play, you could certainly do worse.

Elsewhere, our deals roundup has lower-than-usual prices on a number of Amazon devices ahead of Mother's Day—including our longtime favorite e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite—as well as recommended true wireless earbuds from Jabra, GPS running watches from Garmin, noise-canceling headphones from Sony, and much more. You can check out the full rundown below.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rafe Swan)

Frontier Communications emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, saying that it plans to double its fiber-to-the-premises footprint by extending fiber to an additional 3 million homes and businesses.

"Frontier is deploying capital and pursuing an extensive fiber build-out plan that will accelerate the company's transformation from a legacy provider of copper-based services to a fiber-based provider... Under the first phase of the plan, Frontier intends to invest heavily and pass more than 3 million homes and business locations, enabling a total of over 6 million homes and businesses with Gig-plus speeds," the company said in a press release.

Expanding to 3 million additional homes will take multiple years, as Frontier said it plans to reach "approximately 495,000 additional locations in 2021." That apparently includes 100,000 new fiber locations already built in the first three months of this year.

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  Jessie Mei Li stars as Alina Starkov, a cartographer in the First Army of Ravka. [credit: Netflix ]

A lowly orphan and military cartographer in a war-torn world discovers she may be the key to her country's survival in Shadow and Bone, a new Netflix series based on young adult author Leigh Bardugo's bestselling "Grishaverse" novels. Those YA roots are mostly hidden in this lavish, entertaining adaptation, which boasts strong performances, terrific production design, and compelling mythical storytelling. Think Cursed meets The X-Men, with embellishments from Doctor Zhivago.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

As we've reported previously, Bardugo published Shadow and Bone, the first of a trilogy, in June 2012, followed by Siege and Storm in 2013 and Ruin and Rising in 2014. She told Entertainment Weekly in 2012 that she deliberately avoided the usual medieval fantasy motifs and drew inspiration for her fictional kingdom of Ravka from the Russian Empire in the early 1800s. In 2015, Bardugo published Six of Crows, followed by a sequel, Crooked Kingdom, the following year. This duology is set in the 17th-century equivalent of the Dutch Republic, a town called Ketterdam. Ravka is also bordered to the north by the Scandinavian-inspired Fjerda and to the south by Shu Han (inspired by Chinese and Mongolian cultures).