Daily Tech News 31 January 2026

Top Story

• One third of video game workers have been laid off in the past two years. (Variety)
  
  I'm a little surprised it's not higher, but the article points out that layoffs have hit major - so called "AAA" - Triple A - studios twice as hard as indies, so it is higher for the companies I'd focus on with news stories.

  The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers, with 5% opposed and 13% unsure.

  And I was just about to feel some sympathy for these people.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft has cancelled six games and closed three of its studios in the wake of disastrous sales of its recent major titles. (BBC)
  
  The studios on the chopping block include Ubisoft Halifax, which unionised earlier this month. (Games Industry)
  
  That went about as well as could be expected.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The latest high-budget disaster is called Highguard. (Destructoid)
  
  Produced by Wildlight Entertainment, which is a private company so we don't have details of the financials, but they've had over a hundred experienced developers working on this game for four years in California. So somewhere north of $100 million.
  
  It's free-to-play. It reached nearly 100,000 players on its first day... Then lost 90% of them on its second day.
  
  Not because it is particularly buggy. Players have shown problems with being disconnected from the servers, but for the most part it seems technically competent. The problem is that it is completely uninspired.
  
  It got the top billing during the recent Game Awards (which had more viewers than the Super Bowl), with shameless promotion from the presenter. Everyone watching saw it as derivative slop and predicted it would fail, hard, and it was, and has.

  Highguard was in for a bloodbath, and I cannot believe that the devs didn't know that. With so much experience at AAA powerhouses like EA, I genuinely think they fully understood the implications of that TGA shenanigan, and cannot fathom why they never reacted.

  Toxic positivity.
  
  
  
• Anna's Archive - a massive and not entirely licit online library - has been hit with a $13 trillion lawsuit by Spotify, Universal, Warner, and Sony Music. (MSN)
  
  "Hey, you can't steal the work of countless artists and not pay them a dime! That's our job!"
  
  
  
• Tesla throws in the towel on car sales. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Of course, this is not true, but The Verge has abandoned any pretense at being a news site.
  
  
  
• The $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI seems to have encountered choppy waters. (WSJ) (archive site)
  
  The plan, unveiled in September, was for Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI so that OpenAI could purchase $100 billion of Nvidia hardware.
  
  Now... Not so much.

  Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.

  OpenAI has name recognition - it's the company behind ChatGPT - but its CEO is a snake oil salesman.
  
  
  
• Researchers have discovered 175,000 publicly exposed Ollama servers worldwide. (Tech Radar)
  
  Ollama is an AI tool that you run on your own hardware, but can also talk to services like ChatGPT and Claude.
  
  Around half of those servers are configured not just to answer questions but to execute code... For anyone in the entire world.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 CPU chiplet is slightly smaller than Zen 2. (WCCFTech)
  
  It has twelve cores and 48MB of L3 cache vs. 8 cores and 32MB of cache for Zen 2 (and 3, 4, and 5), but the move to the latest 2nm process means that it's about the same size as it always has been. Zen 2 on 7nm was 77mm2, and Zen 6 is 76mm2.
  
  If the promises for TSMC's N2P process node are borne out, this should be a major upgrade - not just 50% more cores, but cores running 30% faster at the same power requirements.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has gone all-in on the video cards you don't want. (VideoCards)
  
  Reportedly - Nvidia hasn't announced this officially but it matches my own and everyone else's market observations - 75% of GPU supply from Nvidia will go to three models: The 5060, the 5060 Ti 8GB model, and the 5070.
  
  The high-end models and the 16GB 5060 Ti will have limited availability going forward, with the entry level 5050 not even rating a mention. And the 5090 already isn't available anywhere for less than 50% over MSRP.
  
  I bought an AMD 9060 XT 16GB fearing shortages and price increases, which haven't happened to that model, though the 9070 which was briefly available below MSRP no longer is.