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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Will Helldivers 2 Break the Four-Player Lobby Barrier? The Truth Behind the Limit
https://fandomwire.com/will-helldivers-2-break-the-four-player-lobby-b
arrier-the-truth-behind-the-limit/
Why does Helldivers 2 limit co-op to just four players? Arrowhead’s CEO reveals the truth: performance issues, not a lack of ambition.

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The world record for the most people simultaneously playing one game is held by Grow a Garden on the Roblox platform, which recently reached a peak of 21.6 million concurrent players on June 24, 2025. This surpassed the previous record of 14.3 million set by Fortnite.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
The first casualty of UK’s Online “Safety” Act - Discord leaks Up to 500,000 government IDs
https://communities.win/c/KotakuInAction2/p/1ARJYI5x1L/the-first-casua
lty-of-uks-online/c

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
a small indie game company beat all the Big Studios

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Tragic Video Shows Call Of Duty Co-Creator, Vince Zampella, Crash His Speeding Ferrari Into A Concrete Barrier In California, Killing Him Instantly

https://vidmax.com/video/236343-tragic-video-shows-call-of-duty-co-cre
ator-vince-zampella-crash-his-speeding-ferrari-into-a-concrete-barrier-in-california-killing-him-instantly

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't want to watch the video.

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The Super Bowl will showcase the lords of legalized betting, even as they’ve already colonized every other reach of human experience.
Matt Alston

The outcome of the 60th Super Bowl won’t be known for another few days, but here’s one surefire prediction: The game will be a bonanza for the legalized sports-betting industry. The American Gaming Association, the trade group for betting interests, forecasts that $1.76 billion in legal bets will be placed on the big game—a projected 27 percent increase over last year’s take.

Legalized gambling of course involves all sorts of hidden costs, from addiction to bankruptcy to allied social ills like alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence. But under the new regime of betting administered via the digital protocols of surveillance capitalism, the gaming industry is also poised to engulf the scarcest commodity of online life: attention. By relentlessly “gamifying” the vast range of human experience, from the incremental progress of Congress to what Mr. Beast will say next to which people are likely to lose health care coverage, legalized gambling is poised to make even the most personal and idiosyncratic features of our lives fodder for transactional prognosticating and second-guessing.

And this, in turn, threatens to transform much of our lived experience into monetized commodities, setting us on a joyless, eternally frustrated quest to realize maximum returns on things we shouldn’t be treating as profit centers. In one online ad for the omni-betting, er, “predictions” app Kalshi, a young woman thrills to the prospect of making money on mundane forecasting propositions, because, as she explains, her friends and she are constantly making predictions—without noting that anyone living life on those terms has to be a) perpetually exhausted; and b) unbelievably boring. Yet the alleged frisson of seeing a banal forecast come to life is what company cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says with a straight face is the dream of “making money out of what you know and your passions.” The company’s best-known slogan is likewise a desperate bid to upgrade glorified psephology into the height of intellectual ambition: “everybody is an expert on something.”

To get a more realistic read on how rampant and venal gamification is affecting our basic capacity to pay attention, it’s useful to revisit another recent media event that’s pretty much the opposite of the Super Bowl, in terms of overall cultural reach: the 83rd Golden Globe Awards, which took place in late January. This year’s Globes ceremony proceeded in typical fashion, offering a downmarket preview of the March Academy Awards broadcast. There were some fine speeches, some heartfelt and pointed denunciations of ICE and the MAGA war on immigrants and dissidents, as well as a few comic grenades lobbed at CBS and Trump by emcee Nikki Glaser. There was some fun at the expense of the absent former host Ricky Gervais.

But in the midst of all this fairly standard Hollywood banter and gestures of protest, there was something new, and painfully omnipresent: the blockchain-based prediction app Polymarket, whose sponsorship blanketed the ceremony’s broadcast like a stock-car driver’s jacket or a cable-news ticker. Each time an award winner was announced, overlaid graphics swooped in just beforehand to register Polymarket’s predictions onscreen.

Polymarket, like Kalshi, is basically a gambling app. The differences between prediction-based assets stored on the blockchain and a sportsbook are nuanced, and important for regulatory purposes, but for the average Golden Globes viewer, the difference was moot. The chyrons infesting every moment of the Globes broadcast—“Best Podcast Odds Presented by Polymarket” is a real string of words that were displayed—looked and felt just like gambling odds. An award would be announced, the broadcast would show us, say, a 62 percent “probability” that Amy Poehler would win Best Podcast, and then Amy Poehler would win best podcast. Polymarket probability charts called the correct winner that evening with a 92 percent success rate—which meant that the drumroll-please moment that viewers tune into awards shows to see was deflated and made redundant 26 of 28 times.

The moral, public health, and personal financial hazards we can correlate with widespread digital sports gambling are more or less clear since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision reversing a federal ban on and leaving regulatory authority to the states. A predictable land rush in legal gambling ensued: Thirty-nine states so far (plus DC and Puerto Rico) have given anyone who is 21 or older who possesses internet access and a bank account the ability to empty said account into a sportsbook via a smartphone app.

The result has been to transform the daily rounds of life for many app users and addicts-in-the-making into a 24/7 version of the Golden Globes. If you’re an NBA bettor, you can be continually interrupted by push notifications letting you know you’ve incorrectly guessed Donovan Clingan’s steals total, or wrongly wagered that a hapless Nets team will cover the spread on a Wednesday night, as your swift journey to financial ruin speeds onward. Different bets have their own personalities, like the every-bit-as-dull-as-it-sounds baseball wager on a “No Run First Inning.” And naturally, the internet is a bottomless pit of bad betting ideas, like spamming live “flash” props across an entire sports game. One pro tip: don’t spend too much time fixating on Czech table tennis matches you cannot see; they’re apparently being fixed.

The trapdoors and dangers of becoming addicted to, and chasing, gambling highs are documented in some of the most forcefully admonishing idioms in the English language: Don’t throw good money after bad; the house always wins; know when to walk away, know when to run. The marketing strategies of the gambling industry understandably direct users away from such big-picture thinking, and stress, in the vein of Kalshi, the experiential bang for your endless regress of lost bucks. As the sports-betting leviathan FanDuel enthuses, it is there to Make Every Moment Mean More.” When the digital sportsbooks came to my home state, we were bombarded with the somehow dumber claim from FanDuel’s chief market rival DraftKings that “Life’s More Fun With Skin in the Game.” No one is pretending—and especially not promising—that untold riches are attainable through savvy bet placements in the way that the suckers in Vegas are lured into all-nighters at the blackjack table. The digital sportsbook and online gambling economy is saying instead: this is just a little treat. A way to make watching more fun.

Speaking for myself, watching was already fun. I’m thankful I’m neither addiction-prone nor wealthy enough to justify big bets and stomach big losses, but even so, I am not sure any of us needs the force-multipler of “winning money” to make watching sports fun. The Golden Globes revealed something that was hiding on every ESPN broadcast since that network’s offerings also became glorified extensions of the gaming industrial complex: handicapping and oddsmaking are all about betting on outcomes. By design, they take you away from the present moment. Whether you’re analyzing the past to find patterns for your next bet, ruminating a loss, or wondering how you’ll be able to cover your next foray into meaning-making financial ruin, you’ve left the here and now for ruminations and daydreams.

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