The Winter Games featured the likes of Olympic gold medallists Nico Porteous and Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, but it couldn’t continue. Read...

The games were considered the largest snow sports event in the Southern Hemisphere. Read...

Squid Game and live sports, including the Jake Paul v Mike Tyson fight, fuelled new memberships. Read...

Electronic Arts is one of the most notable publishers in the video games industry. Not only does it own extremely successful franchises like EA Sports FC, The Sims, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, the company also plays a key role in setting trends in the games market. For a long time, EA games could only be purchased, downloaded, and played digitally via EA Origin (at least on PCs). Eventually, some titles became available on Steam. Now, EA is altogether discontinuing Origin, which will be effective April 17, 2025. By then, you’ll need to switch to the EA app, which has been available since 2020 and serves as the new launcher for EA’s games. The switch is necessary to continue using purchased games and save data. How to switch to the EA app Users who previously only had EA Origin installed must download the new EA app. Then, log in with the same account details you previously used for Origin. The app should automatically recognize you and display your usual game library without a hitch. For games that are already installed on your PC, you don’t need to download them again. As for games with data saved to the cloud, some games will automatically transfer save data over while others must be transferred manually. The same applies to game mods. It’s also important to note that the EA app is 64-bit, so it won’t run on older 32-bit systems (as explained on this EA page). In order to proceed, you’ll need a PC with a 64-bit CPU — and that might mean you have to buy a new PC if you don’t want to lose your EA games. What if you don’t want to? Or can’t? If you’re a fan of EA games, it’s worth knowing that you no longer have to pigeonhole yourself into using EA’s dedicated app just to play EA games. Most EA games are now also available on Steam, such as the recently released Dragon Age: The Veilguard. You can also link your Origin account to your Steam library in order to launch previously purchased games via Steam. Navigate to Games > Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library, then find the relevant Origin games you want to add. It’s one of the many lesser-known Steam tips to level up your PC gaming. Read...

Hollywood film director Joe Russo joins the board of Championship side Sheffield United a month after the takeover by COH Sports. Read...

Sports scientist Anton McElhone has worked closely with Ange Postecoglou at Celtic and speaks to BBC Sport about his methods. Read...

A round up of sports news in brief from around the region. Read...

Nine sports presenter Tony Jones has responded to comments he made about 10-time champion Novak Djokovic during a broadcast at the Australian Open. Read...

According to one analyst firm, the combined shipment of desktop and laptop computers in 2024 was 245.3 million units. That’s a big number — a new computer for one out of every thirty or so people on the planet — and it’s showing a growth over 2023. But with the previous post-pandemic slump in sales, and big pushes around AI and Windows 11, it still feels like a big disappointment. The numbers come from Gartner, which lays out a lot of statistics for the global and US markets broken down by major manufacturers. Apple’s Mac computers and ChromeOS devices are included. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Asus (9.8 percent growth), Acer, Apple, and Lenovo are the big winners in terms of total shipment increase over Q42023, with HP and Dell getting small dips. Apple, Asus, and Lenovo showed the biggest jumps in market share globally, while HP had a sizable seven percent dip. Restricting the focus to the US market shows a healthier shipment increase, 17.192 million shipments in Q4 with an increase of 3.5 percent. Asus and Acer made huge gains over the same period in previous year, 35 percent and 20 percent respectively, while Dell and HP were both down by small margins. Gartner summarizes 2024 as a “modest recovery” for the PC market, with the consideration that 2023 was the weakest year in the last decade. Compared to 2021, when 340 million units were shipped at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, sports fans would say we’re still very much in a rebuilding phase. Considering the hard marketing pushes this year, I can’t help but feel like a modest recovery is still damning with faint praise. Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm and most of the major laptop manufacturers to push the Arm-based Snapdragon platform, arm-in-arm with Copilot AI and a renewed plea for consumers to buy new machines and upgrade to Windows 11. Google had its own AI-focused marketing around Chromebook Plus-certified devices. But since Microsoft and Google have both been forced to integrate AI features into existing software and web services while upping the price, it’s safe to assume that not enough people were interested in the original $20-a-month upsell. And while “AI-capable” PCs appear to be on the rise, it’s not at all clear that consumers are actually interested in those features instead of, you know, just buying a new PC. At the close of the third quarter 2024 Canalys says that 20 percent of new PCs sold were “AI-capable” (read: had an NPU), but only 720,000 of the sales in that quarter were the Snapdragon-equipped laptops Microsoft had so aggressively promoted. Microsft is still pushing hard for Windows 11 with the out of service deadline for Windows 10 looming later this year, and opening up Windows on Arm to other chip makers like Nvidia and MediaTek might shake up the market a bit. But I doubt I’ll be contradicted if I say that the PC market is hoping for a much bigger jump in 2025. Read...

Many fans raved about the concert, but local sports players aren’t impressed. Read...