Respawn, the EA-owned studio behind Apex Legends has postponed the North American Finals tournament after hackers broke into matches and equipped players with cheats. The developer posted to X, formerly Twitter, that the delay has been caused due to the "competitive integrity of the series being compromised." Footage of the hacks, available available on Twitch, gave players the ability to see their opponent's location while notable player ImperialHal was handed an aimbot which artificially improves their aim while playing.

Cheating has been a continual issue for EA — and one that players claim the company is doing little to mitigate. Frustrated posts on EA's general discussion page include statements like "If EA gonna ban all the cheaters it wouldn't be enough players to play the game," and "The real issue lies in the process of banning/suspending players." Other grievances include a focus on profits over experience, such as bumping up the price of skins.

Furthermore, EA laid off five percent of its workforce — about 650 people — at the end of February. Respawn's in-progress Star Wars first-person shooter game was canceled alongside the terminations. At the time CEO Andrew Wilson told employees that EA was "streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere."

A new time for the North American Finals of Apex Legends hasn't been announced, but the X post stated that it would "share more information soon." In the meantime, EA and Respawn have to determine how to block the hacker's current access and how to reopen qualifications without risking further hacks.

Yeah, it’s not just Nintendo prepping new console hardware for 2024. Insider Gaming reports details for the PS5 Pro come from documentation Sony recently sent to third-party developers.

Hold onto your skepticism. Based on the reports, the PS5 Pro will offer a more consistent frame rate (fps) at 4K and a performance mode for 8K resolution. It’s also expected to render games up to 45 percent quicker and have ray tracing capabilities two to three times faster than current PS5 consoles.

The report says Sony may target a holiday release for the PS5 Pro, to target those heightened sales. Can it make Baldur’s Gate 3 look pretty like it does on PC? Please?

— Mat Smith

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The FCC just quadrupled the minimum download speeds of ‘broadband’

ISPs must now offer 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up to slap the coveted label on their services.

At the end of last week, the FCC raised the speeds required to describe internet service as “broadband” for the first time since 2015. The agency’s annual high-speed internet assessment concluded that 100 Mbps downloads and 20 Mbps uploads will be the new standard. The FCC’s report also broke down several areas where the country’s online infrastructure falls short, with broadband not being deployed quickly enough, especially to those in rural areas and those living on Tribal lands.

The FCC can’t force ISPs to boost their speeds, but it can prevent them from marketing their services as “broadband” internet if they don’t meet these new thresholds.

Continue reading.

LinkedIn is making in-app games for some reason

Is this a test?

LinkedIn may soon offer puzzle-based games to give its users something to do besides networking. App researcher Nima Owji posted a series of screenshots on X this weekend showing some games. Employees’ scores will reportedly affect how the companies they work for rank in the games, which suddenly sounds stressful.

Continue reading.

Starbucks stops wasting money on its coffee NFTs

Its Web3 rewards program ends on March 31.

Starbucks

Starbucks is pulling the plug on Odyssey, its Web3 rewards program that gives members access to collectible NFTs. The company updated its FAQ on Friday to let members know the beta program is closing on March 31 and they have a little over a week to complete any remaining activities (called journeys). Those will shut down March 25.

Don’t worry, Nifty Gateway will continue to host the priceless Stamps (Starbucks’ NFTs). And they will remain priceless. I mean… worthless.

Continue reading.

If you're not interested in a midrange smartphone but don't want to pay flagship prices either, Qualcomm has a possible solution. The company just unveiled the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor that offers flagship features, but performance just below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. 

It's built using a 4-nanometer (nm) process with a 1+4+3 core setup (one prime ARM Cortex X4 at 3.0GHz, four performance cores at 2.8Ghz and three 2.0GHz efficiency cores. That compares with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's 1+5+2 setup, so the "s" model swaps a performance core for an efficiency core. The prime core on the flagship chip also runs a bit faster at 3.4Ghz. 

The chip uses a previous-gen X70 5G modem, though it still offers Wi-Fi 7 support. You also get hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic gameplay. 

There's on-device multimodal generative AI that can run large language models (LLMs) with up to 10 billion parameters, meaning it'll support model's like Gemini Nano, along with AI assistants. However, it lacks some AI features found on the 8 Gen 3 chip. It also comes with the always-sensing ISP introduced with the last-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip. 

The new chip adds another sub-category to Qualcomm's lineup, particularly if you count the last-gen chips still used in devices like the OnePlus 12R. The chip will appear in Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi and Xiaomi smartphones announced later this month — so it'll be interesting to see how they're priced compared to the flagship models. 

Following Hertz's disastrous misadventure with EVs, CEO Stephen Scherr is stepping down, Bloomberg reported. He'll be replaced by the former COO of GM's robotaxi Cruise division, Gil West, who will also join the board of directors. 

A year after emerging from bankruptcy in 2020, Hertz said it would transform its car rental business by purchasing 100,000 Tesla EVs. "The new Hertz is going to lead the way as a mobility company, starting with the largest EV rental fleet in North America," the company said at the time. The announcement helped send Tesla's value soaring to a $1 trillion valuation. 

Scherr joined Hertz after that decision was made, but increased Hertz's bet on EVs by placing orders with Polestar and GM as well. The company didn't purchase many EVs from those automakers, but by the end, it had around 60,000 from the three automakers. 

Things went sideways after that, though. Tesla drastically cut prices of its Model 3 and Model Y EVs, scorching resale values. In addition, Hertz said that Tesla's vehicles were expensive to repair and unpopular with renters. 

As a result, the company started unloading 20,000 EVs, about a third of its electrified fleet. That resulted in a $245 million charge for Hertz and its largest quarterly loss since the pandemic. Other rental car firms have also recently ditched EVs, with Germany's Sixt doing away with its entire fleet. 

West, meanwhile, was one of nine Cruise executives dismissed following an incident that saw a pedestrian dragged by a Cruise vehicle after being struck by another car. Authorities accused the company of withholding a video that allegedly showed the victim underneath its vehicle.

Hyper Light Breaker is a hoverboard sim. Technically, it’s a third-person roguelite adventure set in a luminous fantasy-cyberpunk universe, but after playing a 30-minute preview, it’s clear to me that Hyper Light Breaker is all about the hoverboard. Vicious beasts, secret alcoves and shiny weapons are secondary to the feeling of gliding over green hills and shallow waters on my glowing blue slab, finding joy in narrowly avoiding enemy encounters.

Intentionally skipping battles was probably the opposite of what lead animator Chris Bullock wanted me to do during the first public hands-on opportunity with Hyper Light Breaker — but if that were the case, then he shouldn’t have told me about the hoverboard.

Heart Machine

Hyper Light Breaker is set to go live in early access on Steam this summer, complete with three-player online co-op. Developers at Heart Machine are letting people play it for the first time at Day of the Devs: San Francisco Edition, which is held in conjunction with GDC this week. I played a remote preview of the game at home, solo style, while Bullock watched on Discord (and probably cringed a whole lot).

Breaker is an open-world game with a hub station called the Cursed Outpost, a futuristic strip mall with shops, upgrade stations and NPCs. I briefly explored the outpost, but the bulk of the game plays out in the Overgrowth, a landscape of ever-shifting biomes, and I focused on diving into these. Biomes in the Overgrowth are built with hand-crafted and procedurally generated elements so that players will never enter the same realm twice, and each one has a boss to defeat called a Crown. Despite my desire to peacefully hoverboard through the half-hour demo, I messed around with two loadouts, took out a few slime hordes and twice tried to slay one of those Crowns — a huge bipedal wolf warrior with a golden sword named Dro.

In both of my battles with Dro, she started attacking instantly and with incredible force, swinging her blade wildly as she leapt in a giant arc across a temple and directly onto my head. I dodged and attempted to fill up her stagger meter by landing basic attacks with my sword and firearm, but the wolf was relentless, especially compared with the basic enemies I easily dispatched around the biome.

Heart Machine

Dro defeated me twice. At the end of each fight, I heard the game’s siren song luring me in, making me believe I could beat the big bad wolf next time, if I just employed an updated strategy. Parrying was key in this fight, according to Bullock.

“Her first opening attack, you immediately went for the parry on that,” Bullock said as I prepared to fight the boss again. “I love that you picked that up right away; that was the intention on that one.”

The parry had been an accident on my part, but I’d immediately noticed how effective it was, giving me a half-second at the very beginning of the encounter to step back and strategize. What I’d experienced with the parry was a fury attack, Bullock explained. Some beasts in Hyper Light Breaker glow red and then perform big moves that have to be perfectly parried in order to cancel out the damage, reverse a projectile or stun the enemy. With a fury attack, a non-perfect parry will mitigate some damage only.

“That is definitely the design goal, to make the combat clear, know when you're doing something well,” Bullock said.

These moments of tactical clarity are exactly what makes a roguelike or roguelite addictive. I can see how to beat the boss; now I just have to get good enough at the game to implement those moves before I'm killed.

Heart Machine

There’s no dialogue in Hyper Light Breaker, much like its predecessor, Hyper Light Drifter. Drifter was an incredibly stylish 2D action RPG that came out in 2016 after a few years of crowdfunding and significant hype, and it solidified Heart Machine’s reputation as a stellar indie studio. Hyper Light Breaker is technically a prequel to Drifter, since it's set 15 years before the events of that game.

Drifter co-designer Teddy Dief went on to found Team OFK and release the musical visual novel We Are OFK, while lead developer Alx Preston stuck with Heart Machine and released Solar Ash in 2021. Much like Breaker, Solar Ash is set in the same general universe as Hyper Light Drifter, but it’s a vastly different game and it’s not a direct sequel. Solar Ash is a third-person action platformer built around an incredibly satisfying glide-step mechanic, and its world is filled with alien environments, massive monsters and vaguely threatening deities.

“Hyper Light was a way for me to get started, it was a way for me to be more grounded and put together a crew and understand, can I do this? Can I actually make games?” Preston told me in 2021, during the lead-up to Solar Ash’s release. “And so having answered that question, then the natural next step for me was something in 3D. Can I put something out there that really opens up the world and makes you feel like you can truly escape into something, a creation that is otherworldly, that you otherwise wouldn't have the experience of? A lot of my childhood was spent escaping into those bigger experiences.”

Heart Machine

Breaker feels like the perfect amalgamation of Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash. Replace the Solar Ash ice skates with a hoverboard, add some friends and you’re set. Developers at Heart Machine plan to keep Hyper Light Breaker in early access for about a year, though they noted that this timeline might change with player feedback.

The full release of Hyper Light Breaker will support up to three players in online co-op, and it will have a handful of characters to choose from, each with customizable loadouts. I tried out a basic, slashy blade and a hefty buster sword, plus a standard rifle and a shotgun-type firearm, and they each performed well, though I ran out of ammo quickly and often. The heavy sword was slower than the simple blade, but it moved smoothly and hit hard. In the Cursed Outpost before loading up a new biome, I was also able to select four abilities called Holobytes from about a dozen options, such as increased armor or faster healing. My favorite trait was the blooming corpse seed, which planted an exploding AOE flower on the bodies of slain enemies.

But once Bullock told me that hoverboarding was an option, it was all I wanted to do. I spent a good chunk of my Hyper Light Breaker demo time gliding along the bright green grass, landing small jumps and occasionally falling into a pond. I’m still itching to find Dro again and fine-tune my parrying abilities across a range of weapons (and corpse flowers). Mostly though, I’ll be dreaming of that bright blue board until Hyper Light Breaker hits early access this summer.

LinkedIn, a platform that surely everybody associates with fun, may soon offer puzzle-based games to give its users something to do besides networking. App researcher Nima Owji posted a series of screenshots on X this weekend showing some of the games LinkedIn is working on, and the company has since confirmed the plan to TechCrunch. Employees’ scores will reportedly affect how the companies they work for are ranked in the games.

Per TechCrunch, the titles LinkedIn is working on so far include “Queens,” “Inference” and “Crossclimb.” LinkedIn provided the publication with some newer images of the games, but for everyone just anxiously awaiting their rollout, there’s no timeline yet for when they’ll be released. It’s unclear if games will be available in full to free users or reserved for LinkedIn’s paid subscribers.

A San Francisco judge has ruled that Apple must face a lawsuit accusing the company of negligence over the potential stalking risks created by its AirTags, Bloomberg reports. While the bulk of the roughly three dozen claims in the class-action suit were dismissed, US District Judge Vince Chhabria denied Apple’s bid to have the suit thrown out based on three plaintiffs’ claims alleging that “when they were stalked, the problems with the AirTag’s safety features were substantial, and that those safety defects caused their injuries.”

While the suit argues that Apple was warned of the potential for its Bluetooth item trackers to be misused and thus should be held liable under California law, Apple disagrees, according to Bloomberg. After it released AirTags, Apple later rolled out safety features designed to thwart stalking attempts, like an update that made it so AirTags would emit a loud sound when they get a certain distance from their owner and notifications about unknown trackers. Apple and Google also last year announced that they’re working together on developing industry standards to proactively fight the misuse of tracking devices.

Nevertheless, the lawsuit argues that AirTags have “become the weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers,” Bloomberg reports. The case was filed in the Northern California district court.

Apple’s second-generation Apple Pencil is down to one of the best prices we’ve seen yet in a deal on Amazon. The gen 2 Apple Pencil is going for just $79, in what amounts to a 39 percent discount. It’s normally $129, so this would save you $50 on what is the best stylus for the iPad (as long as you have a compatible model).

The second-generation Apple Pencil is great for artists and note-takers who make heavy use of their iPads. It works with the iPad mini (sixth generation), iPad Air (fourth generation and later), the 12.9-inch iPad Pro from the third generation on, and all 11-inch iPad pro models. When it comes to choosing a stylus for your iPad, you really can’t do any better than the Apple Pencil, as it’s designed specifically to be used with Apple’s tablets. It boasts pressure sensitivity for a more realistic drawing experience and has a hover feature that will preview your pen marks to improve precision.

The second-generation Apple Pencil also has a customizable double-tap feature so you can have easier access to the tools you use the most. It charges wirelessly as well, when it’s magnetically attached to a compatible iPad. Apple’s second-generation Pencil was also designed with a more practical flat edge on either side, so it’s less likely to roll off the table when you set it down.

This model of the Apple Pencil came out a few years ago, but it’s still the best of the current lineup. There have been rumors for months that Apple is planning to release new Apple Pencils, possibly as soon as this spring, but that has yet to be confirmed by the company itself. In the meantime, the second generation Apple Pencil is as cheap as the less feature-rich USB-C Apple Pencil.

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SpaceX has been contracted by the Department of Defense’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to build a network of hundreds of low-orbiting spy satellites capable of operating as a swarm and tracking targets on the ground, according to Reuters. The Reuters report, which cites five sources with knowledge of the program, builds on earlier reporting by The Wall Street Journal that revealed SpaceX had signed a $1.8 billion contract in 2021 with an unnamed agency.

This network, called Starshield, would reportedly be able to gather continuous imagery all over Earth for US intelligence, using a mix of large imaging satellites to collect data and relay satellites to transmit information. According to one source who spoke to Reuters, it has the potential to make it so “no one can hide.” Neither SpaceX nor the NRO directly confirmed the company’s involvement in the project, but an NRO spokesperson told Reuters, "The National Reconnaissance Office is developing the most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen.”

Last fall, it was reported that SpaceX had bagged a $70 million contract with the Space Force to provide satellite communications under its Starshield program. This is a distinct entity from SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, at least according to Elon Musk, who has said Starlink “needs to be a civilian network,” whereas Starshield is meant to be used for government and national security purposes.

Amazon’s Echo Buds are on sale for their lowest price yet. You can get the retailer’s AirPods alternatives today for a mere $35 (that’s $15 off). One of Engadget’s picks for the best budget wireless earbuds, the Echo Buds have a clear, detailed and balanced sound profile, built-in Alexa support and five hours of battery life. The discount comes a few days before Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is set to kick off on March 20.

The third-generation Echo Buds were redesigned to lose the silicone tips and adopt a more AirPods-like form factor. This leads to a more open design that makes it easier to listen to music, podcasts or audiobooks without blocking out your environment. Despite the buds themselves being longer than previous models, their USB-C charging case remains pleasingly compact.

The buds support multipoint connectivity, so you can seamlessly switch them between host devices. Setup takes place in the Alexa app, where you can view the battery life of each earbud and their charging case. You can also control their EQ, SideTone (how much of your voice you hear during calls) and VIP Filter settings in the app. It even has a Find My tool to help you locate them if you ever lose them.

None of that would matter if the Echo Buds sounded terrible, but we were impressed with what they offer for their price point. After testing them, Engadget’s Billy Steele wrote, “Softer and acoustic genres like bluegrass, folk and lighter country sound great, with the warm strums of Zach Bryan’s guitars and vocals on American Heartbreak cutting through the mix.” He found the Echo Buds’ tuning to be generally well-balanced across genres.

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, hear from Autoblog’s car experts on the best spring auto deals on Amazon, and find spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.