Hasta La Gadget!

You might not get to play the PlayStation 5 remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic anytime soon: According to Bloomberg, its development has been delayed indefinitely. Sony announced that Aspyr Media, a company known for creating ports out of existing video games, was remaking BioWare’s classic Star Wars RPG last year. Aspyr had been working on the remake for three years by then and had industry veterans, as well as people who helped create the original game, onboard. Things certainly looked promising, but now the game’s future seems uncertain. 

Apparently, Aspyr finished a demo of the game to show Lucasfilm and Sony on June 30th and the developers were even excited by what they’ve achieved. A week later, however, the company fired design director Brad Prince and art director Jason Minor. On his LinkedIn page, Minor’s Aspyr credit shows his end of employment as July 2022, and his profile image currently features the “#Opentowork” frame.

Aspyr reportedly held a series of meetings in July about the situation to tell employees that the demo wasn’t where they wanted it to be and that the project would be put on hold. The studio heads also told staff members that the company will be looking for new contracts and development opportunities. 

While the developer’s reasons for firing Prince and Minor and for freezing the project aren’t clear at this point, one of Bloomberg’s sources suggested that it poured a disproportionate amount of time and money into creating the demo. If that’s the case, continuing what it’s been doing for the rest of the game wouldn’t be sustainable. Bloomberg says another possible point of contention is the game’s timeline. Aspyr has been telling partners that the game would be released by the end of 2022, but 2025 would be a more realistic target.

Some Aspyr personnel now believe that Saber Interactive, which has been doing outsourced work for the project, could now take over. We reached out to the company for a response to Bloomberg’s report and will edit this post with any information it may provide. To note, company released Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II for the Nintendo Switch back in June. The game went out with a bug that prevented people from finishing it, but Aspyr rolled out a patch to fix the issue in July.

Logitech has launched the Aurora Collection, a line of “gender-inclusive” gaming accessories including a mouse, keyboard and headset. The devices are built around “comfort, approachability and playfulness” based on “feedback from women gamers across the community,” the company said. They have all-new designs and some interesting features, but also carry high prices suggestive of a “pink tax” on products designed for women.

The G735 wireless headset is a good example of that. It’s Logitech’s first G gaming headset with Blue VO!CE microphone tech that helps modulate your voice, while letting you save preferred settings directly on the headset. It also promises comfort for gamers with smaller heads, 2.4Ghz wireless connectivity and up to 56 hours of battery life with the side LEDs turned off. However, it’s very expensive for a gaming headset at $230, compared to say Logitech’s high-end $200 Pro X headset with similar features. 

The wireless and wired $200 G715 and $170 G713 tenkeyless keyboards offer per-key and perimeter RGB lighting and a choice of GX mechanical switches (tactile, linear or clicky), along with a cloud-soft palm rest. The G715 can connect via Bluetooth or a 2.4Ghz dongle, and offers around 25 hours of battery life on a charge. 

Finally, the $100 G705 lightweight (85 gram) wireless mouse is specifically designed for players with small hands. It comes with an 8,200 DPI “gaming-grade” sensor, offers battery life up to 40 hours with the LEDs enabled, and can connect to the G715 keyboard to avoid clutter. 

On top of the devices, Logitech is offering accessories we don’t see with many of its other gaming products. Those include pink or neon boom mics with earpads for $20, keyboard top plates ($20) and colored keycaps ($40). It’s also offering $30 mousepads and a $40 case for the G735 headset and G705 mouse. 

Logitech said that when it looked at its gaming products, “we realized we could be doing more” in terms of delivering solutions for all gamers. In one way, it has certainly achieved that considering the $500 price tag for the entire collection. If it really wants to expand its offerings for more players, though, it may need to expand its Aurora lineup with more budget-oriented products that match the quality and prices of its standard offerings. 

Update 7/26/2022 10:46 AM ET: The article originally stated the new accessories were “gender-exclusive” rather than “gender-inclusive.” The article has been corrected with right term. 

Spaghettification, a form of gravity pulling, can happen to a star after it moves too close to a black hole.

Coinbase is facing a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe into whether it allowed users to trade digital tokens that should have been registered as securities, Bloomberg has reported. Coinbase, involved indirectly in another probe by the SEC and state of New York, recently caught the regulator’s eye after expanding the number of tokens it offers for trading. 

After taking a conservative approach to listing cryptocurrencies, Coinbase now lets Americans trade more than 150 tokens, according to Bloomberg. If any of those are considered to be securities, it would need to register as an exchange with the SEC. A token is considered to be a security if it involves investors putting up funds for a company in order to profit from the work of its leadership.

Last week, the commission accused a former Coinbase employee of violating insider-trading rules by helping his brother and a friend buy dozens of different types of tokens before they were listed on the platform. Coinbase itself wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, but the SEC said it considered nine of the dozens of digital tokens traded by the men to be securities, including seven listed by the exchange. 

In a response by chief legal officer Paul Grewal, Coinbase said that it “does not list securities on the platform. Period.” As evidence of that, it said that the US Department of Justice “reviewed the same facts [as the SEC] and chose not to file securities fraud charges against those involved.” 

Coinbase has previously complained that there’s no regulatory framework for digital asset securities. As it happened, the company filed a petition for rule making to clarify those rules just before the SEC filed charges. “Instead of crafting tailored rules in an inclusive and transparent way, the SEC is relying on these types of one-off enforcement actions to try to bring all digital assets into its jurisdiction, even those assets that are not securities,” Grewal wrote. 

“There was no order from the president,” former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller testified.