You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games hereFortnite Festival, which debuted in December 2023, has turned Fortnite into a rhythm game playground, borrowing inspiration from classic titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Harmonix created this mode, which allows players to perform hit songs on a virtual stage, solo or with friends, using various instruments such as guitar, drums, bass, and vocals. Each season of the Fortnite Festival has featured a prominent celebrity musician, delivering new music and exclusive in-game cosmetics to the player base. Starting with The Weeknd in Season 1, the game mode has successfully included artists such as Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, Metallica, Karol G, and Snoop Dogg over the course of its first six seasons, with each adding their signature tracks to the games expanding catalog.As Season 6 concludes, excitement grows for Season 7, which will debut with the next Fortnite update on January 14, 2025. The teasers for the same have started appearing online and hint at a well-known Japanese virtual pop diva, representing a big cultural crossover.Fortnite Festival Season 7 will bring Hatsune Miku skins and more cosmeticsHatsune Miku, known for her vivid aesthetic and large catalog of fan-made music, is set to bring a new wave of excitement to Fortnite Festival, building on the festivals heritage of musical innovation and celebrity collaborations.Two Hatsune Miku skins will be released with Fortnite Festival Season 7. Image by VideoGamer.In a series of posts on X, the official Hatsune Miku account and Fortnite Festival page have started teasing the collab where Mikus account posted, Mikus backpack is missing, has anybody seen it? Soon enough the official Festival page replied, Finders keepers? Dont worry, well hold it for you backstage. Furthermore, players can spot a physical Mikus backpack in the game across several locations such as Seaport City and Canyon Crossing POIs, thus confirming the collaboration.However, several leaks online have also revealed that the collab will bring a brand new Music Pass which will include a new Hatsune Miku skin, and the other one, the Neko Hatsune Miku skin based on a more futuristic version of the character will be released in the Item Shop.To those wondering, you can get the Music Pass included in your Fortnite Crew subscription alongside all the other passes in the game. However, if you choose to purchase it separately, itll set you back 1,400 V-Bucks, giving you access to the premium reward track. FortnitePlatform(s):Android, iOS, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/XGenre(s):Action, Massively Multiplayer, Shooter9VideoGamerRelated TopicsFortnite Subscribe to our newsletters!By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.Share

CES The Consumer Technology Association has issued some fresh predictions of how much more Americans may have to pay for their hardware if Donald Trump's hard-line import tariffs are enacted.The US-based association's latest study looks at two scenarios that have been floated by the incoming president: If Trump enacts a global 10 percent import tariff and imposes an additional 60 percent for China; and if he raises global import tariffs to 20 percent with an additional 100 percent for China.This comes after the CTA, which organizes the annual CES mega-conferences and represents the United States' $400 billion-odd personal and home tech industry, earlier suggested Trump's import tariffs would result in prices for laptops and tablets rising by as much as 46 percent in America.Tariffs are a tax on American businesses and consumersReferring to ten product categories laptops, smartphones, connected devices, video game consoles, computer accessories, monitors, desktop computers, televisions, lithium-ion batteries, and speakers and headphones "even accounting for alternative sources of supply and potential new US production, the proposed tariffs on these ten products alone would reduce American consumers' spending power by $90 billion to $143 billion a year," the report claimed."Price increases would be substantial if suppliers pass all the higher costs through to final consumers. Buyers of laptops, tablets and smartphones would feel the greatest impact."In the first scenario, the CTA which has a vested interest here as it obviously would rather not have sales-killing levies on consumer goods predicted the price of laptops and tablets would rise 45 percent for American buyers; games consoles would rise 40 percent; monitors would cost 31 percent more; and smartphone prices would rise 26 percent.But if Trump who ran for office on a promise to lower people's grocery costs enacted the harsher tariff regime, laptops and tablets prices would soar by 68 percent, consoles would see price increases of 58 percent, monitors would cost 48 percent more, and smartphones would be 40 percent more expensive, it is claimed."The tech sector is Americas economic engine, driving global innovation and job creation," said CTA CEO Gary Shapiro. "Proposed tariffs threaten the deflationary power of tech in the global economy. Tariffs are a tax on American businesses and consumers. We urge the incoming administration and Congress to prioritize an Innovation Agenda that fosters growth."Trump's argument is that slapping more tariffs on electronics that are made in China and imported into the United States will force manufacturers to onshore their factories, back to the US, and build products domestically. The report doubts this will ever happen, and instead, manufacturing will simply shift from China to other countries that are cheaper to operate in than the US, and have lower tariffs, which is in line with earlier research on the topic.Even if manufacturing did come back to America, the industry would still be dependent on Chinese component suppliers. The Middle Kingdom has invested to lead certain key sectors, such as lithium-ion battery production, low-spec processors, and high-volume parts for consumer electronics.There's also the question of retaliatory tariffs being levied against American exporters, since the rest of the world is also likely to raise barriers of their own against the US. Canada, amid continuous trolling by Trump as well as threats of tariffs and more, is said to be drawing up a list of retaliatory levies.And last year, the Mexican government warned that Trump's tariffs could result in the loss of 400,000 US jobs and and raise the average price of some vehicles, such as pickup trucks, by $3,000 or more apiece.Some in the technology world have been urging Trump to spare their industry, and the president-elect was reportedly going to soften his stance on the issue. However, on Monday, Trump denied this was the case."The story in the Washington Post, quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don't exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back," he said on Truth Social. "That is wrong. The Washington Post knows it's wrong. It's just another example of Fake News."Trump has proposed, for one thing, offsetting people's federal income tax bills with tariff revenue, which is a whole new kettle of fish: Prices still likely rise for everyone, but folks who file their taxes may pay less, depending on how it's all calculated.

Microsoft announced a sweeping series of artificial intelligence partnerships across Indias core sectors on Wednesday, a day after pledging to invest $3 billion in the country over the next two years as it intensifies competition with rivals Google and Amazon.The tech giants chief executive Satya Nadella (pictured above) unveiled agreements with five major organizations spanning railways, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and education.This includes an agreement with the Indian Ministry of Electronics and IT, as part of which Microsoft will contribute to the ministrys IndiaAI Mission Datasets platform by supporting data collection and synthetic generation. The company will also train 500,000 people in AI technologies by 2026, and the two will also establish an AI Center of Excellence, called AI Catalysts, to promote rural AI innovation and set up AI labs in 20 national skill training institutes.RailTel, a government-backed firm, has struck a five-year partnership with Microsoft to advance digital, cloud and AI transformation in the Indian railways. Apollo Hospitals plans to develop AI copilots for healthcare services. Bajaj Finance, Indias largest non-banking financial company, expects annual cost savings of $18 million by 2026 through AI implementations. Edtech startup Upgrad will work with Microsoft to build applications for use of AI in the workplace.The push comes as Google and Amazon are racing to broaden their AI offerings and court Indian businesses, and Nvidia strikes deals to supply AI chips to Indias largest companies.In October, Nvidias CEO Jensen Huang announced partnerships with Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries to build AI infrastructure. The chip designer also signed deals with Tata Communications and Yotta Data Services to deploy thousands of its H100 chips.Google, which has operated in India for over two decades, recently introduced new AI-powered tools for Indian merchants that allows them to build their digital presence.

Wirecard, a German fintech that raised hundreds of millions of dollars only to collapse in 2020 in a sea of scandal and insolvency, still makes headlines today as lawsuits continue against different entities and people once connected to the business. Meanwhile, a Dublin-based startup called Nomupay that was formed in 2023 out of some of Wirecards regional payment licenses, has been on a quiet growth trajectory, solving payment problems in areas that bigger companies like Adyen and Stripe have yet to tackle.Focused primarily on cross-border payments for merchants across Asia and the Middle East, Nomupay has now raised $37 million in funding to expand its business. The Series B funding from Endeit Capital, Uneti Ventures and previous backers comes on the heels of Nomupays revenue growing 100% annually for the last two years, and a projection that it will turn profitable this year on ARR of about $20 million.We understand that Nomupays valuation has grown, too, to around $200 million. The company has now raised around $90 million in total, including a $53.6 million investment in 2023, from investors that included Finch Capital, the VC firm that bought the Wirecard licenses and established Nomupay to turn those licenses into a business.Nomupays unique selling point is that its building cross-border payment rails and enabling payments for users between countries that Peter Burridge, Nomupays founder and CEO, claims larger players like Stripe and Adyen have overlooked for being too complex or too small. Nomupay is striking while the iron is hot: Not only are businesses in its target regions underserved, but thanks to the boom of e-commerce, they are demanding more.Burridge refers to larger payment providers as monos monoliths that require buy-in to wider suites of services that the customers who use Nomupay typically do not need, while not providing them with the facilities that they do.At Nomupays advantage is that the payment landscape has always been fragmented, even within single countries, and compounding that across multiple geographies becomes even harder to parse.There are more than 5,000 ISOs for Visa alone, he said. They all use some kind of gateway or point of sale technology to access card schemes and payment methods. I look at us as enabling everybody else to compete with these bigger businesses. ISOs are Independent Sales Organizations, merchant services companies registered with card brands, which partner with payment processors, allowing them to sell and service merchant accounts.Malaysia alone has some 20 different payment methods and 20 different wallets that potentially need to be supported at a point of payment; those numbers become even more complex when you add in more countries.We are solving problems that havent been solved before, Burridge said. He did not say how many customers the company has working across its network today, but they include the likes of Ikea, which runs payments for its stores in Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand on Nomupay.One aim of the new investment will be to further Nomupays M&A strategy. The company said it has operations in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong and Thailand, and its currently in talks with a fintech in Singapore, primarily to secure a license for the country. The companys other targets for expansion include Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam. Outside of Asia, Nomupay also has operations in Ireland (Dublin), the U.K. (London and Manchester, where it acquired a startup called Total Processing), Estonia (Vilnius), Turkey (Istanbul), Dubai and New Zealand.One vote of confidence about its newest investors: Burridge mentioned that Uneti, which was founded by Adyens earliest employees, only became an investor after Endeit Capital in the Netherlands brought Uneti in as an advisor to run due diligence. They liked it so much they wanted to invest themselves, he said proudly. For us, that was a validation of the platform.

Mova is making its debut at CES this year with some groundbreaking smart home tech.

While tech brands are showcasing high-concept and futuristic gear, some great devices you can buy now have also been unveiled - including TVs, headphones, and more.

The Asus RT-BE58 Go can provide Wi-Fi 7 support at home and create 5G mobile hotspots outside. But if your laptop doesn't support Wi-Fi 7, then Acer's Wave D7 can give it that ability.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - APRIL 13: Alex Pereira of Brazil prepares to face Jamahal Hill in the UFC light ... [+] heavyweight championship fight during the UFC 300 event at T-Mobile Arena on April 13, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)Zuffa LLC via Getty ImagesEA UFC 6 is in production, per several sources.In October 2024, UFC commentator Jon Anik confirmed he and others were already recording lines for EA UFC 6.For those of us who love the series, havent stopped playing it since it was released in October 2023, and who own every Alter Ego, this is good news.When is the game coming out? Thats a huge question. We dont have that information yet, and its tough to get a bead on it based on previous release dates.All of the first five versions of the game released in different months. Unlike Madden, EA FC, and NHL, EA UFC is not an annual title, so there is no automatic release month.That said, EA UFC normally releases close to a pay-per-view event. I believe EA UFC 6 will release in the third or fourth week of October, which should put it close to UFC 320.We dont have a location or date for UFC 320, but if it lands in Abu Dhabithats where UFC 294 was, which is the PPV that took place closest to the release of EA UFC 5.While were predicting, here are four more educated guesses on the next version of EA UFC 6:MORE FOR YOUEA UFC 6 - The Return of Ultimate TeamIt seems inevitable that EA UFC will bring Ultimate Team back into the fold with the next version. It failed miserably in EA UFC 4, mostly because the direction and concept didnt focus on the fighters and various versions of current stars and all-time greats.I expect to see EA lean into UFCUT with dynamic card types based on Contender Series, Ultimate Fighter, performance bonus winners, iconic versions, Alter Egos, and more.EA UFC 6 - Pure Boxing ModeYou could make a strong argument that if you played EA UFC 5 using only the punch buttons, you might have the most exciting boxing video game experience available. Imagine what would happen if EA UFC had a pure boxing mode that featured slightly nerfed power and a ring instead of an Octagon.UFC President Dana White has said he is getting into boxing. Incorporating boxing into the video game could marry well with Whites push into the Sweet Science.EA UFC 6 - Simplified Submission SystemThe current submission system is the best its been, but it still isnt ideal. The best submission system EA could deliver is one that doesnt use too much screen real estate, making your game look like a flight simulator. However, users need some sort of meter that is balanced by the submission offense, defense, and resiliency remaining in the defender.EA UFC 6 - Alex Pereira is the Cover AthleteUnless were looking at a dual cover featuring Jon Jones and Pereira, Im not sure how we go in another direction. Pereira is arguably the biggest active star in the UFC today.Keep an eye out over the next couple of months as more information on the game should begin to surface.

Megalodon from prehistoric times scene 3D illustrationgettyPaleontologists who study earths ancient fossil record might not seem to be the obvious choice when asking about the prevalence of intelligent life in the cosmos. But paleontology, the study of ancient life, is a good place to start when asking profound philosophical questions about the evolution of life here on our own planet and elsewhere.To that end, at least one prominent evolutionary biologist, who has devoted his career to studying the fossils of extinct marine invertebrates, says that while life itself may be common off world, intelligent life - particularly of the sort that can build radio telescopes and spaceships - is likely to be very rare indeed.The number of highly intelligent species on earth represents an incredibly small percentage compared to the total number of species, Bruce Lieberman, the books co-author, and an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, told me via email. It took more than 100,000 years for our species to be able to develop the technology to build spaceships, he said. Thus, the development of species that could create complex technologies seems extremely rare, Lieberman told me.That doesnt mean that the onset of life here was a surprise, nor should it be elsewhere.Based on what we know of the fossil record here, life should be extremely common, said Lieberman. But the evolution of complex life on this planet took a long time to happen, about 2 billion years if we treat that as the origin of the eukaryotic cell (a cell with a membrane-bound organelles), he said. It then took another 1.4 billion years from that point to the origin of animals, said Lieberman. This makes me think that complex life should be rare, he said.Thats a refrain thats often repeated by Lieberman and co-author American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Niles Eldredge, in their new book, Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould. MORE FOR YOUMacroevolutionaries is in part an homage to Liebermans former mentor and Eldredges colleague, the late Harvard University paleontologist Stephen J. Gould who had a remarkable ability to turn a phrase.Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay, Gould noted in his 1997 book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.Macroevolutionaries takes a look back both at Goulds work on the history of evolution here on earth and its relation to the broader cosmos.MacroevolutionariesColumbia University PressThe Case For Geographic IsolationIf a population is geographically isolated from the rest of the species for long enough, it is likely to diverge and then speciate, said Lieberman. That might take a few hundred years to many tens of thousands of years, he said.But theres a downside to rapid evolution.Groups with high rates of speciation evolve quickly, said Lieberman. But high rates of speciation almost always go with high rates of extinction, because the same process that causes speciation, geographic isolation, also leads to extinction, he said.The authors aim is not only to pay homage to Stephen J. Gould, but to look at the history of life on our own planet through a long societal and cultural lens. In so doing, sometimes even strangely enough, they find parallels with the history of speciation and extinction on earth with the vagaries of the U.S. stock markets.If you look at the performance of stocks in the Russell 3000 over the forty-year period between 1968 to 2008, stocks in the upper quintile of volatility performed extremely poorly, said Lieberman. By contrast, those with volatility in the bottom quintile, whose price tends to not vary much, perform extremely well, he said.Why financial crises are analogous to mass extinctions.During a market crash, when the probability of a price drop goes way up, stocks that have a higher probability of changing value are much more likely to experience a significant drop, said Lieberman. When stocks reach a zero-price point, their companies go bankrupt, which is somewhat equivalent to biological extinction, he said. From the perspective of evolution, for a group to succeed in the long term the best strategy is slow and steady, said Lieberman.The biologist Sven Erlacher checks a trilobite for the exhibition in the Natural science museum in ... [+] Chemnitz, Germany, 7 November 2016. The fossil is part of the exhibition "Rock Fossils", which will show fossils named after rock musicians starting from the 11 November 2016. Customarily, palaeontologist name their new findings after the place, the type of fossil or even renowned colleagues. Sometimes fans of music prefer to name their findings after Lemmy from Motorhead or the boys of AC/DC. Photo: Jan Woitas/dpa | usage worldwide (Photo by Jan Woitas/picture alliance via Getty Images)picture alliance via Getty ImagesEven so, life often needs a push.From studying the history of life preserved in the fossil record, Ive learned that theres not much evolution until life gets a push, said Lieberman. Usually that push is an environmental change that causes populations of species to move, he said.This causes a given species geographic range to either expand, or shrink and fragment.When species ranges shrink and fragment, they become especially at risk of going extinct, but theyre also more likely to evolve into a new species, said Lieberman.In the end, Macroevolutionaries is most successful when giving us insight into how life here on earth has been affected by both astrophysical events and climate-induced environmental change.A Case In PointA gamma-ray burst some 440 million years ago and 6,000 light-years away may well have played a key role in causing mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician period, the authors write. This mass extinction spelled the end for perhaps 70 percent of all marine species, including many species of trilobites, they note.As For Nearby Supernovae?The types of radiation released by a supernova would be most detrimental to organisms with large body size, and the Megalodon (a kind of ancestral shark), was as big as a bus, the authors write. Some argue that supernovae radiation may have even triggered its extinction, they note.Both gamma-ray bursts and supernovae have affected life here over the course of its 4-billion-year evolution. However, as Lieberman points out, comets and asteroids likely played a larger role in our evolution.Why does any of this matter?The history of life here remains one of the biggest philosophical questions that we can pose. What we learn about how life first began, evolved, speciated and then went extinct time and again is going to be very instructive in understanding the panoply of extrasolar planets out there circling other sunlike stars.Although astrobiologists like to paint a pretty picture of the progress weve made, these are still early days when it comes to remotely detecting life on any sort of exoplanet.The Bottom Line?We are an epiphenomenon when it comes to the history of life, said Lieberman. Theres no reason to suppose that would be different anywhere else in the universe, he said.

Getty Images and Shutterstock are merging.The merger aims to save $200 million and boost revenue in three years.The new company will face competition from AI image-generation tools like Adobe's Firefly and DALLE 3.Getty Images and Shutterstock are merging in a deal that could help the company better prepare for artificial intelligence.On Tuesday, Getty's stock jumped 24%, while shares of Shutterstock rose 14%, a sign that investors welcome the merger.The combined company, which will be called Getty Images, will be worth $3.7 billion, Getty said in a release on Tuesday. It expects the deal to generate up to $200 million in cost savings overOn a call to announce the merger, Craig Peters, Getty's CEO, who will head the new company, and Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock's CEO, gave little weight to AI risks, saying AI is an opportunity for the companies."Our businesses have not seen any impact as a result of GenAI," Peters said. He said the companies would benefit from combining their products with AI."We see increased usage in our stock content from our AI customers, and we're seeing new customers coming into the franchise for our AI products," Hennessy said. "There's a one plus one equals to three on that front."The companies are two of the largest in the visual content business. They provide editorial photographs and stock images used for content creation.Getty is offering to pay about $28.85 in cash, or about 14 shares of Getty Images shares, for each Shutterstock share.Details on the timeline of the combination were not announced.The combined Getty and Shutterstock business will have stronger finances and plans to invest in content creation, event coverage, and generative AI, the release said.Companies across industries are being proactive about AI-proofing their core businesses.Getty and Shutterstock's stock image businesses face competition from AI image-generation tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, OpenAI's DALLE 3, and Adobe's Firefly.Getty also offers an image-generation service, trained on Nvidia's Picasso. In October, Shutterstock-owned GIPHY, a GIFs and stickers library, announced a partnership with TikTok to provide AI-powered GIF recommendations on the platform.In June, Hennessy said Shutterstock earned $104 million in annual revenue from AI licensing agreements in 2023. He also projected that this revenue could reach up to $250 million annually by 2027.Wedbush analysts led by Michael Pachter called the deal "Bigger is better," while reiterating their outperform rating on Getty."The two companies are highly complementary, with each stock photo service serving a different niche in terms of customer size, geography, asset type, and platform type," they wrote in a note on Tuesday.The analysts added that they expect the deal to pass antitrust scrutiny because the industry is so competitive.