Technical Doctorz

To drum up hype for Crackdown 3 ’s release on February 15th (and as a consolatory gift for making gamers wait so long), Microsoft is making the original Crackdown free for all Xbox One owners. The game, which originally launched in 2010 on the Xbox 360, is backwards compatible on the Xbox One S and Xbox One X. If Crackdown is your first foray into the series, it’s a good place to start. Though its mission design and NPC dialogue haven’t aged all that well, you’ll still get at least a few hours of entertainment running around its open world, collecting orbs, and quickly scaling buildings with superhuman leaps. Microsoft last offered Crackdown for free during its XO18 fan festival in November 2018 when it announced backwards compatibility support for the title, adding that Crackdown 3 would be coming to Xbox Game Pass at launch. Speaking of Game Pass, Microsoft’s buffet-style subscription service for games, the company recently announced that Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Batman

Microsoft launched Office 2019 late last year , but if the company’s new ad campaign is anything to go by, the company would really prefer if you didn’t buy it. Instead, Microsoft’s latest ads pit sets of identical twins against each other to complete office-themed challenges, with the end result showing that the company feels you’d be much better off with a monthly or yearly subscription to Office 365 instead, as spotted by TechCrunch . The commercials are, put simply, extremely bizarre , with Microsoft intentionally going out of its way to show just how bad and inefficient the one-time payment version of its productivity suite is compared to the constant stream of updates it pushes to the subscription-based version. It’s the style of ad that you’d assume Microsoft would use to show Office’s strengths compared to a competitor like Apple’s iWork suite or Google Drive, right down to the heavily skewed tasks that of course favor a specific side. But it’s dramatically more bafflin

Last year, Flickr announced a new pricing plan: users would have to pay $50 for a Pro membership, or be limited to 1,000 images. Those users who opted not to pay and who were over the limit would have those additional images deleted by February 5th. Those users will have a bit more time: USA Today reports that Flickr is now saying it has extended the deletion deadline until March 12th. Last year, rival site SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo , saying it would leave it as a standalone community, and that it would get a bit more attention than Verizon / Oath gave it. The first big changes came back in November , when Flickr unveiled its new membership model: users would have until January 8th to upgrade to a $50 Pro account, and at that time, would not be permitted to upload any additional images if they had more than 1,000 images on the site. On February 5th, those over-the-limit users who hadn’t upgraded and who hadn’t downloaded their archives would have their photos deleted, st

Spotify announced today that the company plans to spend up to $500 million on podcast-related acquisitions. The first purchases in that journey are Gimlet Media, which makes Reply All and other popular shows, and Anchor, which allows anyone to easily create their own podcasts. This is huge news for the growing podcast industry, as it’s already expected to generate nearly $700 million in revenue by 2020. Spotify made its name as a music app, but now CEO Daniel Ek says the company is interested in not only being a listening platform for any podcast, but also creating its own exclusive releases. Suffice it to say, Spotify wants to be a big player in the podcast space and is heavily investing to fill that role. Before it’s a podcast behemoth, though, the company needs to work on its signature app. Here’s what Spotify needs to do before it can be the greatest place to listen to and possibly create podcasts. Clearer separation of podcasts and music First and most obviously, Spotify ne