After Amazon's first effort in the smartphone market came up short more than a decade ago, it appears the retail and technology giant is trying again, and with the help of a former Xbox boss.

Reuters reported that Amazon is working on a new phone, known inside the company as "Transformer," and it will be AI-driven and meant to push people to Amazon's products and services.

Amazon is said to be developing this phone via its "ZeroOne" unit, which sources said is a team with the goal of creating "breakthrough" products. J Allard, the former Xbox boss who helped created the original Xbox and the Zune music player at Microsoft, is leading the team.

FBC: Firebreak bombed. The multiplayer spin-off of Remedy's hit game Control, which imagines players as squads of gun-toting supernatural janitors meant to clean up the messes inside its eerie and magical setting, did not find the audience that the original game did. If the readily available Steam charts are any indication, it missed the mark by a sizable margin and Remedy itself has since confirmed that the title underperformed. And yet, the multiplayer title, which Remedy has spent the better part of a year tuning up and molding into something more appealing to players, isn't just disappearing from the face of the Earth after failing to connect with audiences. With its dying breath, it is actually setting a standard that the rest of the games industry ought to rise to meet.

When Remedy announced that it would be sunsetting FBC: Firebreak after one final update, I was prepared to see an expiration date: a finish line or resignation of sorts. Instead, I found this: "FBC: Firebreak will stay online and continue to be playable for years to come. We have done engineering work to ensure we can sustain the upkeep of the relay servers when the player volume is lower." This move, and the addition of a friend pass system--allowing one person to own the game and share it with others who don't--has assured that FBC: Firebreak will have legs for some time to come.

This is a shocking, and very welcome, development at a perilous time for multiplayer games. While titles like Marathon try to find an audience (let alone one the size of its most immediate competition, the viral sensation Arc Raiders), others, like Highguard, have come and gone seemingly in the blink of an eye. And when a game like these is deemed dead, the industry all but assures it stays that way. Like Concord, games are ripped off of physical and digital store shelves. They are delisted and pulled from libraries. Teams are laid off and studios are outright shuttered. The servers powering these games are given an end date and, before long, they are shut down and all we're left with is memories of them.

Blizzard is aware it's hard to keep up with Diablo 4 when it receives foundational changes regularly, but that doesn't mean it's going to let "obsolete" parts of the game live on without being reworked or fixed.

Diablo 4 has been in a near-constant state of change since release in 2023, with major updates significantly overhauling loot, endgame bosses, monster behavior, and difficulty in the last few years. And that's on top of new seasons every few months that introduce limited-time mechanics and features of their own.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Diablo 4 game director Zaven Haroutunian made it clear that Blizzard knows the frequent changes to how Diablo 4 works isn't ideal, especially for casual players.

Almost a year after it first launched for PS5, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has landed on PC, and so far, it's doing pretty well. At the time of writing, the game has reached 55,444 concurrent players on Steam, surpassing the peak player counts of the first game (32,515) and its Director's Cut edition (22,080).

That figure also puts it ahead of several other PC ports of games from PlayStation Studios, such as Marvel's Spider-Man; Miles Morales (13,539), Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (28,189), The Last of Us Part 1 (36,496), and The Last of Us Part 2 (30,690). Currently, Helldivers 2 holds the record for the highest CCU amongst PlayStation PC ports on Steam, at 458,079 concurrent players. One thing to point out here is that while player CCU is important, ultimately, that single data point isn't meaningful in measuring the overall success of a single-player game.

The number may rise even further, as the first weekend of a new game launch is usually responsible for its best performance. It's an impressive start for the game, as it'll be sharing the weekend with Crimson Desert. The Pearl Abyss-developed action-RPG is already off to a strong start, with 2 million sales, and a peak player count--so far--of 239,045.