Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

You might have heard the news: Microsoft has announced plans to acquire gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard King and its subsidiary development studios. The deal is valued at $68.7 billion—or roughly 17 acquisitions of the Star Wars series—and that kind of money doesn't get spent without an expectation of major moves (and revenue) going forward.

After my colleague Kyle Orland chronicled everything we know thus far about the deal, I wanted to take a deeper look at the shape these combined companies (and their expected game launches) may take going forward.

Game Pass must be fed—and Kotick is eager to offer prey

The best sellers in the console industry continue to be holiday-adjacent releases, and Activision has a long track record of topping holiday sales charts. But Microsoft has been bullish about its Xbox brand growing not because of console sales and gifts under Christmas trees, but because of the bigger profits possible when fans subscribe and spend money on the Xbox brand every single month, primarily via Xbox Game Pass. Within that business model, subscriber numbers are what matter, not breakout first-party games or console sales.

Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Greetings, Arsians! We have something special for you today: the premiere of a new science series we're creating, called Edge of Knowledge. We've recruited physicist and author Dr. Paul Sutter (Google Scholar link) to be our host and guide on an eight-episode romp through the mysteries of the cosmos, touching on topics that we at Ars find fascinating. This means we'll have episodes on black holes, the future of climate change, the origins of life, and, one of my favorite topics for our premiere: dark matter.

Dark matter: The universal majority

As Ars readers, you're all probably familiar with Douglas Adams' "Space is big" opening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but "big" only tells part of the story. You might assume that, as a corollary to all that bigness, space should also be generally vast and empty, with just an occasional stray hydrogen atom whipping its way through an otherwise perfect vacuum of nothingness—but nothing could be further from the truth.

Enlarge / A rendering of the single-stage-to-orbit Radian One vehicle. (credit: Radian Aerospace)

A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway.

"We all understand how difficult this is," said Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder, chief technology officer, and former head of the Future Space Transportation and X-33 program at Boeing.

On Wednesday, Radian announced that it had recently closed a $27.5 million round of seed funding, led by Fine Structure Ventures. To date, Radian has raised about $32 million and has 18 full-time employees at its Renton, Washington, headquarters.