EU approves Microsoft's Activision Blizzard purchase, ASUS in hot water and more

Here is a roundup of the tech news that you may have missed this week.

EU approves Microsoft's bid to purchase Activision Blizzard.

A few weeks after the United Kingdom blocked Microsoft from purchasing Activision Blizzard, the EU has given the green light for the acquisition to happen.

Although this may be good news for Microsoft, the fact that it is still blocked in the UK may pose a problem for the acquisition.

Microsoft has said that they are working to aggressively appeal the decision in the UK.

Sometimes, all it takes is for one of the regulating bodies to not agree to the deal, and it could be the end of it all. The same thing happened to Meta, when the UK told the parent company of Facebook that they will have to sell GIPHY due to anti-competition concerns.

Although it the purchase of GIPHY was smooth sailing in the United States, Meta was forced to sell the company afterwards even after appealing the decision made by the UK.

Overwatch 2 cancels its most-awaited features

Speaking of Activision Blizzard, it is a pretty sad time to be an Overwatch fan, as the developers have come out to say that the supposed Player vs Environment (PvE) mode, showcased in the introduction of Overwatch 2 in 2019, is not going to contain a lot of the promised features.

In the 2019 reveal, it was said that each hero would have skill trees akin to characters in Diablo and Borderlands, that will give each of the heroes a more unique way of tackling the PvE missions.

In a developer video released on Tuesday (16 May), Blizzard came out to inform the public that the promised skill trees would not be present in any of the PvE materials released in the future.

They, however, did mention that the first story-based PvE event will be out in Season 6 of the game. At the time of this writing, we still do not know if players will be required to pay to access the content, or will it be free for all to play.

ASUS motherboards kill CPUs, tech YouTubers call them out

At the beginning of May, there were reports of ASUS motherboards killing AMD Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. The CPUs ended up showing signs of melting and burning, and the most common thread of fault was that it only happened on an ASUS motherboard.

It was discovered that ASUS motherboards were supplying the CPUs with higher voltages that weren't really safe for day-to-day use.

Tech journalist and YouTuber, Stephen Burke from Gamers Nexus did a deep dive into the problem and released a detailed video on how the problem exists on ASUS's Ryzen motherboards, and also called out ASUS and the way they were handling the problem.

Not only that, another big Youtuber, JayzTwoCents, also came out to say that he would be dropping any kind of sponsorship deal with ASUS and will also not work with them again in the near future.

Although it is quite damning news for a large company like ASUS, so far the problems seem like they only stem from the motherboard department.

In fact, ASUS even had a successful launch of their long awaited Steam Deck competitor, the ROG Ally, this week.

There is a Singapore Scamshield scam

The Scamshield app in Singapore allows its users to scan incoming calls for fraudulent numbers, and will inform the user if the incoming calls are from an 'illegal' number, which most likely turn out to be a scam number.

The app must have been doing a good job because scammers have their eye on spoofing the app, and turning it into a scam itself.

Long story short, scammers are targeting victims of scams to introduce this fraudulent app to them to take more money from them. You can read about it more here.

Dominic loves tech and games. When he is not busy watercooling his computer parts, he does some pro wrestling.

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