C’est par le biais d’un article de nos confrères de Game Developer que l’on a appris qu’une partie de l’équipe de 10 Chambers, qui développe Den of Wolves, avait été licenciée. Le studio suédois, créé en 2015, est à l’origine de l’un des meilleurs jeux coopératifs de ces dernières années sous les traits de GTFO, mais les fondateurs avaient auparavant conçu PAYDAY: The Heist et PAYDAY 2 lorsqu’ils travaillaient encore pour Starbreeze. Avec Den of Wolves, ils annonçaient un retour à leurs premières amours, puisqu’on nous promettait de revenir aux braquages, mais dans un univers dystopique.

Il faut croire que malgré un concept plutôt maîtrisé, les ambitions ont été un peu sous-évaluées, puisque le jeu n’est pas terminé, et le studio a décidé de se séparer d’un « grand nombre » de sa centaine d’employés. D’autre part, les développeurs ne sont pas les seuls touchés : d’après les déclarations du studio, on pourrait même supposer qu’il ne reste plus que deux des huit confondateurs initiaux, Ulf Andersson and Simon Viklund. Une situation qui ne semble pas idéale pour la poursuite du développement du jeu. D’ailleurs, les termes utilisés dans la communication ne sont pas très rassurants :

we’re taking a hard look at how we work and how the studio is set up, so Den of Wolves can become the game it deserves to be.

Dans la langue de JuL, ça donne quelque chose comme « nous examinons attentivement notre façon de travailler et l’organisation du studio afin que Den of Wolves puisse devenir le jeu qu’il mérite d’être ».

Eh bien, on leur souhaite une bonne vue, et surtout bon courage aux salariés restants. Den of Wolves n’a toujours pas de fenêtre de sortie, mais vous pouvez l’ajouter à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam. En revanche, si vous avez quelques minutes à perdre, on vous encourage à vous rendre sur le site officiel, puis à scroller vers le bas. La réalisation est assez incroyable.

A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period. More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

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Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require "regular adoption" of artificial intelligence, according to an internal email seen by the Financial Times. The consultancy has also begun collecting data on weekly log-ins to its AI tools by some senior staff members, the FT reports. Accenture has previously said it has trained 550,000 of its 780,000-strong workforce in generative AI, up from only 30 people in 2022, and has announced it is rolling out training to all of its employees as part of its annual $1bn annual spend on learning. Among the tools whose use will reportedly be monitored is Accenture's AI Refinery. The chief executive, Julie Sweet, has previously said this will "create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value."

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Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law. Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year. Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos' Seattle-area garage. Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion. Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon's revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart's, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.

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India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.

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