Jake Paul 1, Netflix 0
What a weekend. Never have we seen the human race so aligned against one common enemy: Jake Paul. On Saturday, Netflix hogged more than 60 million pairs of eyes worldwide, thanks to the streamer’s most ambitious event ever – a boxing bout between a true legend of the game, Mike Tyson, and… a 27-year-old former Disney Channel star.
It went just as you’d expect a fight at your local nursing home to go, except that the participants in this case each walked away with an extra $20 million in their back pockets. If only we, or the other 59,999,999 viewers could have seen it. When users could tune in, all they could see were Tyson’s glorious cheeks.
Netflix fumbled, hard. The streamer massively underestimated the number of users tuning in to the fight and couldn’t keep up with the traffic. This led to most users being unable to keep a consistent stream going, with a poor bitrate being the least of some users’ worries. Many walked away disgruntled, bleating about the poor showing, and more importantly, flushing money down the drain.
Netflix broke tradition by doing away with the pay-per-view model and allowed anyone with a Netflix subscription to tune in. Those subscribed to our streaming overlords will know that it isn’t cheap. It isn’t pleasant throwing the word ‘fraud’ around but the argument could be made here. The ordeal calls into question Netflix’s ability to handle the influx of users heading its way when it adds NFL streaming to its stable from December.
Save 100% on Half-Life 2 – seriously
Twenty years ago, Valve changed the gaming industry with the release of Half-Life 2. Now it’s time to celebrate the game’s amazing milestone, and Valve has dropped a major update to entice new users, though nothing can quite match the 100% discount on Steam. Valve is giving away this monument to gaming, but you’ll need to be quick about it. The sale closes today, at 20h00 SAST.
Grab the game before then and you’ll be privy to the game’s brand-new content update, where the patch notes are extensive. The biggest changes include new menus for the Steam Deck, new graphics settings, major bug fixes, and controls to better “match” the Half-Life 1 update released last year.
Also included are Half-Life Episode 1 and Episode 2 DLC expansions right in the base game, accessible from the main menu. Finishing the first will automatically move you onto the second now, while another change means players can access the Steam Workshop from the menu and customise their mods without ever leaving the game.
As Valve did with the first Half-Life’s 25th anniversary, it dropped a free, two-hour-long documentary on YouTube detailing the game’s arduous development process. The video’s description reads: “We’ve gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game’s development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more.”
Dark Souls 3 is back (maybe)
It’s not just us slowly losing our minds over the lack of a true Bloodborne remaster, right? We’d truly take anything at this point but Sony doesn’t want to budge. From Software, however, can do whatever it wants with Dark Souls, and what it wants to do is a Dark Souls 3 remaster.
That’s according to a rumour from Nick Baker on the XboxEra podcast (via Reddit). The word on the street is that Dark Souls 3 is the latest title getting the remaster treatment, despite being only eight years old. We’re not sure why Dark Souls 2 is being skipped, which, as the dumb kid of the bunch, is far more deserving of the company’s time and money to better implement those at-the-time odd ideas.
Xbox gamers will be the most pleased with the news – since DS3 is still capped at 900p even when running on a Series X. That’s because the console is technically still running the Xbox One version of the game, seeing as the PS4 Pro update didn’t make it to Xbox at the same time. Should Nick’s rumours ever come to fruition, it likely wouldn’t top the remake of Demon’s Souls, but better textures and lighting with smoother framerates are better than nothing.
The PS5 30th anniversary lands in SA this week
If you were one of the few people who put their name down to pick up one of those gorgeous 30th anniversary-themed PS5s, we’ve got some good news. South Africa’s local PS distributor has announced the consoles will now arrive earlier than expected – 21 November. That’s this Thursday if you were on the verge of checking your calendar, so we’d start laying the groundwork for a sick day while you still can.
Surprisingly, Koodoo has shaved off more than a week from the expected delivery date, initially scheduled to hit shelves on Friday, 29 November. We’re now officially on track to match up with the rest of the world – although South Africans were unable to get their hands on the PS5 Pro console sporting the grey makeover. They’ll be limited to the PS5 Slim, DualSense, DualSense Edge, and PS Portal – all costing a bit more than you might have liked.
