Media Consumption: One-Quarter of Americans Still Swallowing Legacy Media Slop

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Image: Ubisoft Despite only officially launching the game in spring of this year, Ubisoft has already announced that it’s ending development and sunsetting its free-to-play team-based shooter XDefiant. Like Hyper Scape before it, XDefiant had high expectations, with Ubisoft touting more than 1 million players in its closed beta last year. Now, it will disappear quickly, as it’s no longer accepting new players as of today and is scheduled to shut off the servers entirely next June. Despite a delayed launch, Ubisoft said that XDefiant had reached more than 10 million players in its first two weeks and “outperformed expectations thanks to acquisition and strong average revenue per session day.” However, it couldn’t maintain that momentum, and by this fall, rumors of trouble surfaced, with Insider Gaming reporting that concurrent player numbers across all platforms had fallen below 20,000. Ubisoft states, “The game will remain available to all players who joined XDefiant before December 3rd, 2024. All functionalities, including progression, events, rewards, and achievements, will continue to be available until June 3rd, 2025.” The planned Season 3 content will still launch, and the company is refunding anyone who bought the Ultimate Founders Pack, as well as players who bought VC and DLC in the last month. Like with Concord developer Firewalk Studios, this shutdown comes with job losses. According to Ubisoft, “difficult consequences” are leading to “the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney.”

There are few disasters as unifying as an internet outage. Whether it's a popular website, social network, or online service, everyone collectively freaks out when it goes offline, as was the case when all three major US cell carriers suffered outages on the same day earlier this year. With that in mind, the network intelligence firm Ookla sifted through Downdetector data from the first three quarters of 2024 to pinpoint the biggest outages of the year. Based on the data Ookla gathered, these were the world's 10 largest outages of 2024: World's largest outages in 2024, according to Downdetector. Image source: Ookla The analysis is not an exact science, as the rankings only take into account the number of user reports on Downdetector during the outage. That said, it's clear that the major Facebook outage on March 5 impacted more people than any other individual outage in 2024. https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1765042684132241580 It wasn't an especially long outage, but it was the most widespread of the year (so far). Some of these outages impact a small subset of users or users in specific regions, but the Meta crash hit everyone all at once, which is why it received so much attention. "The second largest global outage may be the most memorable. While CrowdStrike is not a service most people think of, we saw nearly 5 million reports to services that rely on it (or rely on Microsoft which relies on Crowdstrike), including emergency services, airlines, and ride sharing apps when a routine software update went bad on July 19," Ookla notes. Even if you've forgotten about Facebook and Instagram going down, you probably remember when the faulty update from CrowdStrike nearly turned the world upside down. Don't Miss: 8 iOS 18 features that Apple has delayed to 2025 The post These were 10 the biggest internet outages of 2024 appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Early Black Friday deals: Nintendo Switch games, $249 Oura Ring 3, $25 Crock-Pot, $100 Beats Pill, more Best Apple deals for Black Friday 2024 70mai has the best 4G dash cam deals of Black Friday 2024 Black Friday begins: 20% off Sonos, $29 Magic Bullet, $60 Vortex air fryer, $79 Ember heated coffee mug, more

More than three-fourths of Americans (77%) say that news organizations tend to favor one side when presenting the news on political and social issues, while only 22% say the media deals fairly with all sides, according to a Pew Research Center survey released on Tuesday.

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., refused to address the sweeping pardon that President Joe Biden handed his son, Hunter Biden, telling reporters Tuesday that "I've got nothing for you on that."

Republicans in Congress are discussing a two-step plan to push ahead on President-elect Donald Trump's agenda when they take control of both chambers next year, potentially starting with border security, energy and defense before turning to tax cuts.Incoming Senate Majority...