With Bungie growing, Sony plans to invest half of its PlayStation Studios development budget in live-serve games this year – TechCrunch

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Happy Friday, Crunchers! It’s May 27, 2022, and we’re going to have a long weekend because it’s Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. No news on Monday – Haje is 🍷 tasting wine in Sonoma and Christine plans to spend Monday 🛋️ sitting on the sofa doing absolutely nothing, which we celebrate wholeheartedly. We’ll see you here on Tuesday!

Don’t know what to do this weekend? Payment procedures brings together all the great podcasts we published this week. It will keep you busy for at least a few hours. – Haje and Christine

TechCrunch’s Top 3

• Golden goose: Spanish caught fire today, writing not one but two of our top stories of the day. The first is about Jar, an Indian fintech company that is considering a $50 million Series B round. The country’s citizens have bank accounts to save money, but Jar helps them do something they may not be familiar with – invest. And the company chose to start with what Indians love, gold.
• Revolving door: Manish’s second story involves another Manish – Manish Maheshwari, former head of Twitter India who left the startup he co-founded after just 6 months. Our Manish reported in December that Maheshwari left her post on Twitter to form the edtech company Invact Metaversity with Tanay Pratap. The arrangement did not seem to go as planned, with some hiccups for the company regarding getting products out the door and some disagreements in leadership.
• Sometimes it doesn’t mean: In the case of Substack, a new round of capital. Connie went through their details yesterday try to raise the Line C, but then ceased operations when the terms favorable to investors did not change. Today, Alex peels off several layers of onions to explain why Substack’s goals, based on a Series B gain in 2021, don’t translate well into the 2022 investment climate.

Start-ups and VC

Earlier this week, Anita report that Adam “WeWork” Neumann is back with a new startup, and upgrade support from a16z. In today’s Chain Reaction podcast, Anita and Lucas discuss is Neumann really worth 70 million dollars and another chance. We’re totally confused why anyone would bet on him, and we’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on his new startup.

Some other gems for you:

Ride or diesel

Image credits: Bloomberg Creative (Opens in a new window) / Beautiful pictures

The price of diesel alone is causing about 17% of the inflation we see today, and Heart write an interesting paragraph about how petrol and diesel are probably not the bestespecially as the economy is teetering off a cliff into an abyss about the same depth as our general optimism about the climate right now.

Maybe that’s exactly what’s needed: Maybe when the economic and climate interests match, we find the ‘surely we can live on this planet in a few years’ jar at the end of the bridge. rainbow.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams rise to the top. You can register here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Sony Direct Service Packs: Sony is focusing on its live services. This follows the company’s acquisition of Bungie earlier this year. This week, Sony laid out its plans for the life of the company after the acquisition, including investing heavily in the live-service games sector, though it didn’t go into specifics about the acquisition. Your commercial rights will be dealt with.
• Cling to it: We thought Snapchat was just individuals pushing small “snapshots” to other individuals, but the social media giant has bigger plans than that. Its hot new feature, “Shared Stories”, is an introduction to the “Custom Stories” feature to allow users, you can see where we are going with this. Here’s how it works: Users added to a group can also add their friends to make it easier to share their stories. Don’t worry, if someone in your group isn’t your cup of tea, your stories won’t be shared with them.
• Debug Database: Voto Consulting, a talent acquisition company in New Jersey, has learned how hard it is when you don’t password-protect a database and leave it on the internet. The resumes and personal information of about 30,000 workers were exposed. As Zack reports, the story gets more interesting – something you really need to check out for yourself.
• Driving time: In today’s traffic news, Rivian opened the hood and rearranged some things with the company engine (yes, we know it’s an electric car) by way of hiring new COO Frank Klein. This comes amid a number of other leadership changes as its head of production has said goodbye. While, Tesla has announced that it will not open a manufacturing plant in India until it can sell and service the first car in the country. Spanish Indicates the ongoing back-and-forth between the country and the company: National officials want cars to be made domestically, and Tesla is subject to its high import tariffs. Tesla doesn’t want to pay higher fees just yet if the market doesn’t do well. So a superfun deadlock.