Amazon Prime Day is here now, but alongside all the great deals to be had, shoppers have been warned to be careful when browsing.
A study from Check Point Research (CRP) has found scammers are impersonating Amazon or affiliates to trick online shoppers – and in the last 30 days alone, over 1,000 new Amazon related domains have been registered, 88% of which were identified as suspicious.
Many of these domains are ‘parked’ or not in use, but could be activated in the coming days, or used in phishing attacks. The scams come in a number of forms, but commonly advise customers to update their payment methods to ‘access’ prime benefits – and of course then steal their sensitive information.
Prime targets
As Amazon Prime Day grows in popularity, such scams have become sadly more common – and because the event specifically encourages customers to order within a specific time frame to access deals and benefits, fraudsters pressure victims into acting fast with urgent calls to action.
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The deception goes beyond just emails too, with some criminals going as far as to call customers to ‘inform’ them that their memberships are missing information or a payment method – data that they will collect and exploit.
Every year around Prime Day, bogus sites pop-up at an accelerated rate looking to take advantage of shoppers looking for discounts.
To stay safe this year, CPR recommends checking URLs and email addresses carefully, common misspellings are often used to trick users by impersonating a trusted site. Also, look for HTTPS website URLs, which indicate a more secure connection.
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We know the deals on Prime Day can be pretty juicy, but be wary of any that seem unrealistic – trust your instincts on sales, an iPhone for $10 is probably less than legit. Ideally, shoppers should stick to the verified Amazon website or App, and never click on links to third parties.
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As the company behind immensely popular games like World of Warcraft, Diablo IV, and Overwatch 2, Blizzard Entertainment has always been one of gaming’s megapowers. Now, a new book delves into the company’s long and complicated history. Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, is the latest book from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. It begins at Blizzard’s creation, goes through its success with hits like Warcraft III, and culminates with its recent struggles, including feuds with parent company Activision, the 2021 sexual harassment lawsuit, and the impact of Microsoft’s 2023 acquisition of the company.
It’s a fantastic read, and I highly recommend you pick a copy up for yourself. It gives great insight into what studios gain and lose when becoming one of the most popular companies in the video game industry. For fans of Blizzard, there are some especially juicy tidbits to learn, including a long list of canceled projects from the developer’s long history. I’ve compiled every canceled project featured in the book, from StarCraft: Ghost to Odyssey, but you can learn much more about the projects and the context around them in Play Nice.
Bloodlines was a “space vampire” game in development at Blizzard. Play Nice reveals it was canceled because it “didn’t resonate with enough staff to justify its existence.”
Blizzard Entertainment attempted to publish games made by other developers in the 1990s. This included a sequel to the empire-building real-time strategy game Pax Imperia: Eminent Dominant and a “top-down shooter made by a small studio in Boston” called Crixa. Both were canceled, although Play Nice doesn’t go into specifics as to why they were canned.
James Phinney, a lead designer at Blizzard, tried to get a turn-based strategy game called Shattered Nation off the ground at Blizzard in the 1990s. It was inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization series of video games. It was ultimately canceled because Blizzard founder Allen Adham didn’t want Blizzard to make a turn-based video game.
At one point, Blizzard co-founder Allan Adham told employees that the studio was “in early discussions” to create a Star Wars strategy game. “Before they could even build a prototype, Adham came back with news that their Star Wars game wasn’t happening after all,” Play Nice subsequently reveals. Former LucasArts President Jack Sorensen told Schreier he “didn’t recall having any discussions with Blizzard about making a Star Wars game.” Instead of creating a Star Wars RTS, Blizzard continued to develop the sci-fi RTS idea, which eventually resulted in StarCraft.
Play Nice touches on the well-known story of Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a LucasArts-inspired strategy game that followed the story of Thrall. While the game has since leaked online in full, Blizzard never officially released it, but that was not for lack of trying. They worked on it for two years, but felt that “the art style seemed amateurish and the puzzles weren’t quite clicking.” The book even includes an anecdote about Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe playing the game at a trade show and lamenting, “If you guys can’t make this work, then who can?”
Sorcerer and Zork Zero designer Steve Meretzky was brought in to see if there was a way to save the game and increase its quality without spending much more money. Meretzky would write up design documents on how to improve the game, but a few weeks after doing so, he got a call that Blizzard had canceled the game. “The cancellation cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Adham and [former CEO Michael] Morhaime knew that if Blizzard ever released a product that was widely perceived as subpar, it would destroy the company’s reputation,” Play Nice concludes about Warcraft Adventures’ cancellation. The whole game has leaked and been remastered by fans; you can watch a full playthrough below.
WARCRAFT ADVENTURES: LORD OF THE CLANS – CUTSCENES REMASTER 1.0 Full Game Walkthrough
Amid frustrations with Blizzard over events that you should read Play Nice to learn more about, over a dozen developers — including James Phinney, Jesse McReynolds, Eric Flannum, Robert Djordjevich, and Maxx Marshall, and Justin Thavirat — left Blizzard. They founded a new company called Fugitive Studios and attempted to make a 3D action RPG, but it failed due to design and technological overambition and the fact that “one of their business partners turned out to be unreliable.” Fugitive Studios shut down within a year, and some of its developers returned to Blizzard.
Programmer Mike O’Brien was the main driving force behind Blizzard’s Battle.net, so he got to pitch his own project. It was Warcraft: Legends, a 3D spinoff where players didn’t have to worry about constructing bases, had fewer and more powerful units to command, and did so from an over-the-shoulder camera perspective. It was called a “role-playing strategy” game by Blizzard when it was announced in September 1999. Ahead of that announcement, Warcraft: Legends was rebranded to Warcraft III, but this may have been the death knell for the project.
Other Blizzard staff did not want Legends becoming Warcraft III as “they wanted to advance the real-time strategy genre, not develop something else entirely, according to the book.” Because O’Brien had “made a few too many enemies” at Blizzard, he could not get enough people on his side to support his vision. He would be removed from the project after a year and left Blizzard with fellow employees Jeff Strain and Pat Wyatt to start what would eventually become Guild Wars developer ArenaNet.
After the release of Diablo II, a lot of Blizzard North’s leadership took sabatticals or had a very laid-back management style when present. Play Nice says this meant that there were some developers who “broke off to follow whims that never materialized, like a version of Diablo for Nintendo’s Game Boy.”
Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik eventually decided to helm “Project X,” a new IP for the studio. Brevik had trouble settling on a concept because he was burnt out. After two years, Project X became Starblo, which, as its title suggests, “was a sci-fi take on Diablo” where players would “hop in a spaceship and travel between planets, collecting new guns and battling aliens as they traversed the stars.”
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Unfortunately, Starblo would not see the light of day after Blizzard North’s leadership, frustrated with a lack of communication and uncertainty with the company, threatened to resign. While this move was meant to be a bluff, Blizzard parent company Vivendi accepted their resignations and forced them out of Blizzard North. Starblo was canceled as a result.
The original version of Diablo III, which emerged around the same time as Project X, was inspired by Ultima Online and a 3D MMORPG where “hundreds, if not thousands of people would be able to interact and play together.” After the turmoil at Blizzard North around Starblo, the game was scaled back to be closer to Diablo II. The project also struggled as it constantly changed direction due to feedback from different Blizzard executives. In the summer of 2005, Blizzard North was shut down, and the development of Diablo III moved to Blizzard proper in Irvine, California.
In 1998, cinematics department developer Duane Stinnett pitched a game called Nomad. It was a postapocalyptic game inspired by Necromunda that had some “outlandish concept art featuring surreal depictions of turtles and ostriches.” Stinnett struggled to fully form and explain how its gameplay would work, so Blizzard decided to pursue a Warcraft MMO inspired by EverQuest instead. That project would become World of Warcraft.
Vivendi Games executive Bruce Hack canceled MMOs based on Marvel and The Lord of the Rings to focus on World of Warcraft. Both franchises would eventually get MMOs from different game developers.
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4 Minutes of StarCraft Ghost Gameplay (With Commentary)
A former LucasArts and Blizzard developer named Robert Huebner started Nihilistic Software and pitched a third-person StarCraft shooter for consoles. This project would become the now-infamous StarCraft: Ghost, which followed a Terran agent named Nova. Play Nice explains that “the loose, interactive process that had been great for early production made it tough to lock down ideas as the game entered proper development” and that it constantly switched between being a stealth and action game under Nihlisitc.
Blizzard removed Nihilistic Software from the project in June 2004, and the project was given to Metal Arms: Glitch in the System developer Swingin’ Ape Studios. Swingin’ Ape started development from scratch and took inspiration from Halo as itshifted focus to prioritize multiplayer. Blizzard acquired Swingin’ Ape in May 2005, but the single-player part of StarCraft: Ghost especially was not ready as the next generation of consoles approached. Blizzard “indefinitely postponed” the project in March 2006.
Hearthstone and Marvel Snap’s Ben Brode, who worked for Blizzard’s creative development department at the time, tried to convince Blizzard to release the multiplayer portion of StarCraft: Ghost as a budget Xbox Live title. That didn’t happen, with Brode telling Schreier, “Blizzard was not very good at jumping on opportunities.”
After StarCraft: Ghost didn’t pan out because it was for last-generation consoles, Swingin’ Ape pitched some other projects as Blizzard’s console division. One such idea was “creating a different StarCraft spinoff,” but Swingin’ Ape was eventually shut down so Blizzard could refocus on World of Warcraft.
Diablo III director Jay Wilson and Left 4 Dead designer Mike Booth came up with an idea to “do for Minecraft what World of Warcraft had done to EverQuest: take the core idea, fix everything they didn’t like about it, and give it the Blizzard polish.” They started prototyping a game called Avalon. Wilson had to take a sabbatical as he battled depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder in the wake of the deluge of harassment and death threats he received over Diablo III’s rocky launch. Wilson left the Avalon team and started working on World of Warcraft when he returned to Blizzard. Avalon was eventually canceled.
The Diablo III team brainstormed ideas for a second expansion; unfortunately, the team was told in an all-hands meeting prior to Reaper of Souls’ launch that Diablo III would not get a second expansion even if Reaper of Souls performed well. Play Nice asserts Diablo III was abandoned because they “saw Diablo III as a failure” and “didn’t think Reaper of Souls would be good enough to turn it around.” Diablo III: Reaper of Souls is a beloved expansion that sits at 87 on Metacritic. “Morhaime and other Blizzard executives would later privately admit that canceling Diablo III’s second expansion before Reaper of Souls even came out had been a tactical error,” Play Nice reveals.
Team 3 Director Josh Mosqueira was given free rein to explore what was next for the Diablo franchise. First was a game code-named Hades. “The camera would be over-the-shoulder rather than isometric; the combat would be punchier, akin to the Batman: Arkham series; and the game would have permadeath,” Play Nice explains. Unfortunately, Team 3 struggled to adapt the Batman: Arkham combat formula to multiplayer, and Mosqueira became hard to track down. Blizzard decided to restart Diablo IV from scratch after Mosqueira left Blizzard in July 2016.
Blizzard worked with Upper Deck to create the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and eventually planned to make a digital version after hiring director Cory Jones. They wanted to “make playing as frictionless as possible” and called it WoW: TCG Online. Eventually, the development team concluded that there were some “serious flaws” with the physical card game that would become even more obvious in a digital version. They headed in a new direction that eventually resulted in Hearthstone.
After the player-created Defense of the Ancients map and game mode became very popular, Play Nice reveals that Blizzard considered “creating an official version of DOTA for Warcraft III or even developing a sequel in-house.” But when they tried to recruit DOTA designer Icefrog, Blizzard did not want to accommodate his list of requests that included full creative control. Blizzard ultimately ignored the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) trend that DOTA kicked off. In the years that followed, Riot Games released League of Legends, which became very popular and resulted in the poaching of several Blizzard developers. Icefrog would work with Valve to make DOTA 2.
Blizzard All-Stars was the first iteration of Heroes of the Storm, created in StarCraft 2’s map editor. Blizzard considered releasing it around the same time as the Heart of the Swarm expansio,n but eventually decided it would be better served as a standalone game. Heroes of the Storm failed to become as popular as League of Legends or DOTA 2.
After the success of World of Warcraft, a similar treatment for Starcraft was considered. “The natural next step seemed like a World of StarCraft, but they struggled to envision StarCraft lore fitting into an MMORPG, so instead they decided to develop a new fictional universe,” Play Nice reveals.
That new fictional universe would be Titan, a game where players control superhero characters in their everyday and heroic lives. Unfortunately, there were political battles behind the scenes between Chris Metzen and Rob Pardo, so Titan constantly changed direction, and little progress was made. Metzen wanted a superhero universe similar to Marvel and DC, while Pardo wanted its characters to be more like secret agents or spies.
The idea was that there would be “Titan Town” where players didn’t focus on combat and did things more similar to Animal Crossing, and a separate part of the game with combat based around different superhero character classes. Blizzard had trouble connecting those two parts of the game to create a compelling core gameplay loop and was hampered by lackluster development tools. In 2013, the project was rebooted and eventually became Overwatch, but this MMO development misfire cost Blizzard over $80 million.
Jeff Kaplan initially had ambitious plans for the Overwatch franchise. “They’d start with this first game, which was limited to player-versus-player multiplayer, then add a story and computer-controlled enemies for the sequel before culminating in an Overwatch MMORPG that would finally execute on the vision of Titan,” Play Nice says of Kaplan’s overarching vision of Overwatch. That’s not how the franchise ended up evolving over time.
As part of an incubation program Allan Adham started after returning to Blizzard in 2016, a Warcraft game that played like Pokemon Go, code-named Orbis, was in development. Orbis was eventually canceled because of developer attrition, its scope creep, the pandemic, and unengaging combat.
Another incubation project, Odyssey, was conceived as Blizzard’s take on the survival game genre. Its first prototype used Unreal Engine, and Activision executives liked it, but problems emerged when it switched to a new internal engine called Synapse. Ubisoft’s Dan Hay was brought in to lead development, and its team grew to over 200 developers. Blizzard even publicly teased Odyssey, but it continued to face problems with its design and technology and got canceled following layoffs in January 2024.
Play Nice describes Orion as “an experimental mobile RPG with asynchronous turns. It was helmed by former Hearthstone director Eric Dodds and a few of his old Team 5 colleagues.” It was fun to play in a room with others, but less fun on the go, as turns could take hours. It was canceled in favor of dedicating more resources to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2.
StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm director Dustin Browder was working on a first-person StarCraft shooter code-named Ares. It was “heavily inspired by EA’s Battlefield” and was in development for over three years with over 50 developers. However, it was canceled because Activision executives disliked Battlefield and were ambivalent toward StarCraft. Like Orion, its staff was moved to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 development.
Warcraft III: Reforged was originally an ambitious reimaging of the RTS. It would’ve had a rewritten script to bring its lore more in line with World of Warcraft’s and some missions and characters would have been rdesigned. These concepts were eventually dropped due to a lack of time and funding, and Warcraft III: Reforged was hated upon its release in January 2020.
Blizzard developer Tim Morton attempted to get a new RTS game greenlit at Blizzard multiple times in the late 2010s. He floated ideas for Warcraft IV, StarCraft III, and even a Call of Duty RTS. None of these ideas could get off the ground, so Morten eventually left Blizzard Entertainment to create Stormgate at Frost Giant Studios.
Andromeda is described as a “high-fidelity action game, like Sony’s God of War, in the Warcraft universe.” When creative director Alex Afrasiabi was let go from Blizzard due to “misconduct in his treatment of other employees,” the project was canceled.
Activision Blizzard Studios had been working with Netflix to create shows based on Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft. These shows were canceled, potentially because Netflix poached Activision Cheif Financial Officer Spencer Neumann.
NetEase, the company that made Diablo Immortal, also worked with Blizzard on a mobile spinoff of World of Warcraft set in a different era than the PC MMO. This project, code-named Neptune, was canceled in spring 2022 because Blizzard and NetEase’s contract negotiations were not going well, and China had frozen the release of any new video games.
Most of Overwatch 2’s development focused on PvE content, but only some was released. A replayable Hero Mode was canceled in May 2023 so Blizzard could focus on its multiplayer component. Some story missions were released in August 2023, but it does not appear Blizzard will release any more of them.
The design of the Vivo X200 series gets highlighted in the first promo video
The video itself was released in China, but it got reshared by a tipster on X. It has a duration of around half a minute, and in it you can see all three upcoming phones, the Vivo X200, Vivo X200 Pro, and Vivo X200 Pro mini.
All three of these phones have a similar design language, though the Vivo X200 Pro mini is easy to set apart. Why? Well, it has a different camera placement inside its camera oreo on the back. It has a rhombus-shaped camera layout, compared to the two by two setup on the other two phones.
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All three smartphones will be made out of metal and glass, though we may get a vegan leather model too, even though we haven’t seen one yet. All phones will have a camera oreo on the back, and at least three cameras. ZEISS branding is visible in the camera island, and all physical buttons will sit on the right side, it seems.
They’ll have flat sides, and ‘micro-curved’ front and back portions
The sides of these phones will be flat all around. The back side will be flat for the most part, but it will curve toward the edges, into the frame. It will be a micro quad curved setup, it’ll basically be proportional to what the display will offer.
A display camera hole will be centered at the top of the displays on the front, and all three phones will have very thin bezels. We’re not sure if there will be any difference in bezel thickness between models, but it probably will be.
All three of these devices are tipped to utilize the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chip, which will launch soon. It remains to be seen, however. They’ll have rather powerful specs in general. The Vivo X200 Pro Mini, as its name says, will be a compact alternative to the Vivo X200 Pro.
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These phones will launch in China on October 14, but they’re coming to global markets. Well, at least some models. The company also shared a bunch of new official images that you can check out below.
Crude oil futures fell about 2% on Tuesday, as the rally on geopolitical risk took a pause while the market waits for Israel to strike back against Iran.
“Oil can keep ascending only for so long purely based on perceptions and not actual supply disruption,” Tamas Varga, an analyst at oil broker PVM, said in a Tuesday note.
Oil prices have surged about 13% through Monday’s close since Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel last week, raising fears that Israel might retaliate by hitting Iran’s crude industry.
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Here are Tuesday’s energy prices at around 7:39 a.m. ET:
West Texas Intermediate November contract: $75.52 per barrel, down $1.62, or 2.1%. Year to date, U.S. crude has gained about 5%.
Brent December contract: $79.31 per barrel, down $1.62, or 2%. Year to date, the global bench mark has risen more than 2%.
RBOB Gasoline November contract: $2.1149 per gallon, down 1.81%. Year to date, gasoline has advanced more than 2%.
Natural Gas November contract: $2.772 per thousand cubic feet, up 0.95%. Year to date, gas is ahead about 9%.
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Prime Day has returned for the fall, which means there are tons of deals to check out at Amazon. Robot vacuums (and cordless ones for that matter) are some of the machines we most recommend picking up during sale events like this because you can often save hundreds on the stick price. One of the best Prime Day robot vacuum deals we found is on the iRobot Roomba Combo j9+, which is a vac-and-mop hybrid. You can snag it for $800 right now, which is $600 off.
This is our pick for the best robot vacuum and mop combo. The Roomba Combo j9+ covers all the bases — and floor types — as it offers just about everything you could want in such a device.
iRobot
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Our favorite robot vacuum and mop combo device is on sale for Prime Day. The Roomba Combo j9+ is $600 off for the event.
It has strong suction, the ability to give your floors a deep scrub and the intelligence to avoid obstacles. The accompanying Clean Base not only allows the Combo j9+ to self-empty, it refills the robot’s liquid tank with water or solution. As such, you shouldn’t have to empty the debris bin or top up the base’s liquid tank for weeks at a time.
You can set up vacuuming and mopping routines, and ask Alexa or Google Assistant to start an ad hoc cleaning. The Combo j9+ can map out your home faster than previous models and you can label objects to help direct the Roomba to clean a specific area.
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The Combo j9+ is certainly a more premium option, but there are other Roombas on sale for Prime Day. Another vacuum and mop combo (Y0140) has dropped from $275 to $219. Meanwhile, you can pick up the even more budget-friendly Roomba Q0120 vacuum for $190. It usually costs $250.
iRobot Roomba Robot Vacuum and Mop Combo (Y0140)
iRobot Roomba Vac Robot Vacuum (Q0120)
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice, and stay tuned to Engadget.com for all of the best tech deals coming out of October Prime Day 2024.
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