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California law targeting loud streaming ads takes effect on July 1

Posted on June 29, 2026 by faz_business

Streaming ads might be getting a lot quieter this week.

A California law banning streaming services from showing ads “louder than the video content” that they accompany is set to take effect on Wednesday, July 1. (Existing legislation already imposes similar volume restrictions on broadcast and cable TV commercials.)

Ars Technica notes that streaming services have not shared additional details about how they plan to comply with the law. While the volume limitations only apply to California for now, it seems likely that any relevant changes would be deployed more broadly, especially with a similar bill set to take effect in Illinois next year.

When the law was passed in 2025, its sponsor, State Senator Thomas Umberg, said it was inspired by “every exhausted parent who’s finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all that hard work.”

Industry groups including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Streaming Innovation Alliance opposed the bill, claiming streamers were already working to address the issue, and noting that they have to deal with a variety of output devices, including TVs, tablets, and phones.

Why Phase 0 Is Crucial for New Product Development and Physical Product Design Firms

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

As you all know, every New Product Development (NPD) project goes through multiple phases, from ideation and validation to production and commercialization. Any sane person would assume that ideation, the first phase of the process, occurs before anything else. Some people also refer to this earliest step as discovery or concept development. But it turns out there’s a “Phase 0,” just because we have to accept that a “good idea” cannot just come out of thin air. It has to spring up from somewhere or be born out of something, and most importantly, it can never be truly accidental. Phase 0 is often regarded as the foundation of the whole product development operation.

It captures the essence of the project and therefore affects every aspect of how progress is made. Phase 0 is more than just a roadmap or an action plan; it’s a baseline understanding of how to run the operation as a whole. If this is about driving a car, Phase 0 isn’t exactly a route or list of stops you need to make along the way. It’s a pre-driving inspection to see whether the engine runs, the oils are good, the brakes work, the tires have enough pressure, the driver actually knows how to drive, and so forth. If you find yourself hesitant to start an NPD project or bewildered by the looming complexities of it all, well then, that’s a pretty strong sign you’re at the door of Phase 0.

Because frankly, that’s what Phase 0 is all about: wrapping your head around the project to save yourself from terrible headaches to come. People like to think they can be inventors, build a product, launch it to market, and make a good profit. Now there might be some truth to that, but really, it’s the ability to handle Phase 0 that separates the amateurs from the professionals. The only certainty here is that everybody can use help, preferably from seasoned designers and engineers, to run a product development project and actually keep it on track. Even established design firms hire consultants and independent experts to provide fresh perspectives on tackling Phase 0.

You, too, may need assistance from professionals, not because Phase 0 is the most difficult thing in the world, but for the simple reason that it’s crucial for NPD that you must leave no stone unturned, see what’s underneath it through a microscope, and from every possible angle. Cad Crowd, a US-based freelancing platform focused on product development and engineering, is widely regarded as the best place to hire the most qualified professionals in the business. Backed with 15 years of experience, flexible hiring options, and an accuracy guarantee, Cad Crowd comfortably connects you with specialized talents for even the most complex product development projects.

🚀 Table of contents

What Is Phase 0?

No one knows exactly what it is, but all descriptions seem to point to one very agreeable fact: it’s the preliminary research in a new product development, obviously. It takes place before concept generation, so basically, you’re making sure that the idea makes sense at all from both technical and financial viewpoints. What you have at this point is nothing more than a vague concept of a product. If you were about to launch a project right away, you’d be scrambling all over the place just to figure out how and where to start. You have no clear understanding of the problems you’re trying to solve, no specific product definition, no detailed scope of work, no design requirements, no budget estimation, and nothing.

Phase 0 aims to make “educated assumptions” about project goals, methods, milestones, costs, and activities so you can run the project in a much more focused manner. A pretty sizable portion of the work in Phase 0 revolves around the research into product design requirements. Like any good research ever done by anybody, you begin with a list of good questions. And specifically for this whole “Phase 0” exercise, here’s a glimpse of some questions you’ll be answering:

What problems this product is supposed to solve, and equally important, how?
What critical functions does the product offer?
What features should be included in addition to the critical functions?
How do you justify the inclusion of those features?
Who are the target users?
What do the users need from the product?
Does the product need to meet certain regulatory requirements?
Do you have the capabilities to build the product?
Do you need to hire professionals, and if so, in what specialized fields?
How much money does it take to build the product?

Think of Phase 0 as a homework you must complete before you can take any further steps into the project. Since every product is unique, with its own strengths and weaknesses, there’s no right or wrong answer to any of those questions. That being said, all the answers together should point you to the following points:

Strategic-product-branding-before-market-commercialization

Can you actually build the product? It’s a matter of technical feasibility. Perhaps you’re not the kind of person who reads Popular Science or the International Journal of Product Development, but you have the Internet at your service, so we imagine it’s not that difficult to know whether you have an executable idea or a far-fetched one. If your idea is to build a hammer made of glass, you might actually succeed. The hammer is useless as a tool, but it can be a good decoration at least. Now, if you want to build anti-gravity shoes, well then, the laws of physics are not on your side.

Will people buy the product? Market research process tells you whether there’s going to be any demand for the product. This is where you take a trip to the real world and look into the problems people have. For example, you figure out that buyers in the home decoration market are furious because glass ornaments lack variety. Remember, you’re not yet at the point where you’re busy designing the sought-after products. You’re merely identifying a demand or a problem, and that people might actually pay good money for a solution.

Can you make a profit from the product? There’s bound to be some math involved in this. You do simple calculations to estimate the production cost (including materials and shipping) and your asking price. If the production cost stands at a minimum of $20 per unit, while buyers won’t spend more than $15, it’s probably best to abandon the project altogether before it makes you go broke. But if there are still possible workarounds to further lower the production cost, keep at it.

At the end of the day, Phase 0 should give you a general guideline on how to proceed to the next steps in the NPD project. It tells you where the finish line is, what challenges lie ahead, and what you need to do to overcome them. No matter what unique product you have in mind, you want to be the first to launch it and launch well.

How important is phase 0?

The short answer is: very. Being a guideline, Phase 0 sets the boundaries of what you should and shouldn’t do. By the time the engineers and designers get to work, they’re well aware of what to achieve and will not waste their time on more brainstorming sessions. All the ideas and parameters have been set, so they’re not scrambling to experiment with anything irrelevant. And this holds significant importance in every NPD project for many reasons.

Curb your enthusiasm

If Larry David were here, he’d probably say, “Why don’t we rename Phase 0 to Phase 1, why? And start from there? Like normal people?” or something along those lines. But thankfully, he’s not here, so that’s one less thing to worry about. It’s called Phase 0 because you aren’t technically in the project yet. Think of it as taking a drive along the marathon route a week before the race. In addition to learning how many inclines you need to climb and where the potholes are, the preliminary drive helps you manage expectations for the timeline. At the very least, you have a clearer idea about how to set up the milestones, when to expect them, and what they will be. It’s not like a New Product Development project is going to finish in a week, is it?

Build the right team

Now that Phase 0 gives you a good idea of the technical challenges, you have time to hunt for the right talent for the tasks. Ideally, you don’t want to start the project on your own and then bring in more players at random points later. It’s best to gather the team first, so you can get everyone on the same page early on. And who knows? Maybe the professionals can contribute ideas to improve the concept. Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know. Having some experts on your side from the get-go minimizes the risk of major design revisions in an ongoing project. Even if you’re running a design firm already filled with NPD professionals, it’s possible you still need to hire an additional expert or two to speed things up a bit.

Money matters

Truth be told, developing a physical product is expensive. We’re not saying that digital products like software or apps are cheap to make; it’s just that you don’t have to think about mass production or shipping. With software, if things go wrong during beta testing or the programming, you have every opportunity to rewrite the code or even start again from scratch without throwing money down the drain. Building a physical product from the ground up is quite the opposite. Fabricating a prototype alone costs money for materials and labor.

New-product-development-before-successful-market-launch

And to think that this is an iterative process and you probably have to build a dozen or more prototypes, there’s a lot at stake here. Phase 0 affords you the opportunity to take a close look at the project’s economics. You’re forced to learn about buying materials in bulk, manufacturing processes, minimum order quantities, and all the rest of it before the project kicks off. And hopefully, you’ll also discover a way to make sense of the project, financially, in the first place. There’s no guarantee that you will, but Phase 0 gives you the chance to scrutinize the money matters and plan for the best at a time when you haven’t spent too much.

Lesson about supply and demand

Some people say you have to create a market for the product you sell. Despite the lack of clear signs that people actually want the product, they’ll buy it anyway once you make it available. There’s some truth to that, but likely it applies only to the really groundbreaking stuff. Take, for example, the iPhone. We didn’t know we wanted a full touchscreen smartphone until the first iPhone hit the market, and suddenly, everybody yearned to have it. For most other products, however, it’s always best to play it safe. Determine if there’s a real demand for them, and then rush to get the development started.

Demands can be misleading, too. Just because people want something, it doesn’t always mean they’ll gladly pay the amount you ask for it. Let’s say you found out during your Phase 0 research that people liked the idea of a solar-powered coffee machine. Because such an appliance requires a lot of power to work, you’ll need to engineer the circuitry and mechanism to make it much more energy efficient. As a result, you’ll have to sell it at a premium to make a small profit per unit. Will people buy this thing they said they wanted for the price? If the answer is no, ditch the idea right there. Stop the project at Phase 0 and plan for something else.

Is the product buildable at all?

New-product-development-phase-zero-planning-process

People want a lot of things, and many of them are too expensive or downright impossible to build. Flying cars? Or cars that can transform into robots? Yes to both. Hoverboard, perhaps? Definitely on demand. Printers that use coffee grounds as ink? Certainly.

Again, demands can be misleading. Some products only exist in imagination because we don’t have the technology to build them, at least at present. In other cases, such as flying cars, the technology exists, but the final product will be outlandishly expensive. Not to mention, the driver must also be a licensed pilot to fly the vehicle. It’s true that a big part of Phase 0 is about discovering demand and finding out whether people like the idea of a product. But at the same time, Phase 0 tells you to do a reality check. Many products look good on paper, and sometimes, that should be the end of that. An exercise in hubris is not for the business-minded.

Can you take on the competitors?

There was a time when Steve Jobs believed that for Apple to win, Microsoft didn’t have to lose, or something like that. It was a long time ago, but we know now the statement hasn’t aged well. There was a time in the past when Apple was the underdog in the tech market, overshadowed by Microsoft. But it turned out that the underdog had more than enough to take its single biggest competitor. You might think your idea is completely unique, and there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world. That being said, this is highly unlikely. Chances are, some other companies have already released similar products, with varying degrees of success.

Part of Phase 0 is to conduct a teardown analysis to identify competitors. More importantly, the analysis should examine what they do well and what they do not do well. Obviously, you focus on the latter and how your product can be a better alternative. It can be as simple as pricing and the choice of materials, or as complex as features like battery life, ergonomics, and eco-friendliness.

Closing thought

This will sound pretty weird, but almost the entire point of Phase 0 is to give you a buffer against wastefulness. If you find out that the production cost is too high, demand is not as high as you expect, or that the engineering service will take too long, it’s probably best to go back to the drawing board and rethink the ideas. Thanks to the preliminary research during Phase 0, you might reveal that quitting now is better than spending time and money on something that makes little sense. Conversely, if it shows you all the good signs of market opportunity and profitability, the research tells you what to do to make it a reality.

How Cad Crowd can help

Phase 0 can be either an ultimate “Green Flag” or “Kill Switch” depending on what you discover. However, it can only serve that function when you do it properly, with zero prejudice and an all-around objective view of the product idea. Simple as they may seem, they take a real-world NPD experience to explore every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned. At Cad Crowd, you’re spoiled with easy access to some of the best in the business, experts who specialize in NPD workflow from the very start of Phase 0, prototype fabrication, hardware/firmware integration, certification, all the way to product launch and commercialization. Contact us today and start bringing your ideas to life with a free quote.

MacKenzie Brown is the founder and CEO of Cad Crowd. With over 18 years of experience in launching and scaling platforms specializing in CAD services, product design, manufacturing, hardware, and software development, MacKenzie is a recognized authority in the engineering industry. Under his leadership, Cad Crowd serves esteemed clients like NASA, JPL, the U.S. Navy, and Fortune 500 companies, empowering innovators with access to high-quality design and engineering talent.

Connect with me: LinkedIn ✦ X ✦ Cad Crowd

Visual novel Coffee Talk Tokyo serves up an image of ‘Cool Japan,’ but not much more

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

Coffee Talk started out as a slice-of-life visual novel casting you as a night-shift barista serving Seattle’s uniquely magical residents, from elves to vampires to succubi, hearing out and advising their whims and woes over steaming cups. Its strength was not just in the individual lines of dialogue spouting from these monsters (affectionate), but also in how those were placed within the context of Magical Seattle: a thread of societal distaste towards interspecies relationships, for example, is held taut through several characters’ arcs, not just in the two characters whose parents explicitly disapprove of them for it. Opinions and arguments towards the ills facing this world are treated with the weight they deserve, acknowledging the fluidity of both public opinion and the problems themselves.

Continue reading “Visual novel Coffee Talk Tokyo serves up an image of ‘Cool Japan,’ but not much more”

Jessica McCabe built ‘How to ADHD’ by solving her own biggest problem

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

Jessica McCabe started posting on YouTube because she knew she couldn’t lose it.

McCabe lost notebooks and phones and was even capable of losing “her own head,” according to her mother. So whenever she wanted to revisit helpful articles, research, or her own notes on strategies for living with her ADHD, McCabe didn’t have an organizational system that made it easier for her to find (or actually remember) the information. Then, she realized one already existed.

“Anytime I wanted to show people this one really funny video on YouTube, I could find it. So I was like, YouTube. I won’t lose YouTube,” she told Mashable.

Thus, How to ADHD was born. Now, about 10 years later, the mental health creator has 1.94 million subscribers on YouTube, 100,000 followers on TikTok, a book she wrote called How to ADHD, and a second book in progress. The day before we spoke at VidCon, she gave two presentations at the World Confederation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists Congress alongside experts, including doctors and research fellows, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

So yes, McCabe is a mental health creator, but she’s also a verifiable force in the global mental health community. Mashable sat down with her to learn how her channel transitioned from a place to catalog her findings for herself to a full-fledged business, how she stays organized as a neurodivergent creator and mother, how she can care for yourself while connecting with her audience, and her hopes for the online mental health content creation space.

Tell us about the research process that goes into your videos, both when you first started and how it has evolved over time.

The research process has definitely evolved. It started out as me Googling things, like, “I have ADD. What does that mean?” And I was like, oh, a lot of articles say it’s not called ADD anymore. It’s apparently all ADHD now. And oh, it doesn’t just impact focus. It impacts executive function, too. I didn’t know that. Over time, as I was posting this information on the channel, people in the comments would be like, “Do you know about Google Scholar? Do you know about PubMed?” Or eventually it was, “Hey, I’m an ADHD researcher. Would you like help? I see you’re trying to disseminate good scientific information about ADHD.”

So I started working with researchers. And even then, it took a little bit. The first researcher that I worked with was very pedantic and wanted to use very technical language. And I was like, I’m trying to disseminate to a lay public. I need to simplify a bit. I need to do that without losing important nuance, but I do need to be able to restate it in words that anybody can understand.

The current researcher I work with is Dr. Patrick LaCount. He’s now our chief science officer, and he reviews everything on our channel. So if you see that we have the little badge on our channel that says, “We’re on the Health Shelf“, it means it’s a channel from a trusted provider. That’s because Dr. Patrick LaCount reviews everything that I put out before I put it out.

That’s not a given on every mental health channel. It’s amazing that you guys have that.

It’s really important to me to ensure the information we’re putting out is accurate. Especially the fast pace that you have to go to as a content creator, where you’re posting every week or maybe sometimes more often than that. It’s really easy for things to slip through the cracks. So it’s really important to me to have that review process of, is this accurate? Because if it’s not accurate, then what am I doing?

Before you had researchers working with you, how did you handle that while maintaining a consistent posting schedule?

I did have a consistent posting schedule, and I am a recovering perfectionist, but I gave my perfectionism a different target. I was like, “OK, you can get as perfectionistic about this as you want. You can read as many articles to make sure that everybody’s agreeing with you and that you’re getting the right information as you want, as long as you can get that video out on Tuesday. And that was non-negotiable for me. For a while, I was able to do that, but then, as the amount of information I was trying to include grew, the scripts and videos got longer, and it became harder and harder to hit that mark.

So we’re still trying to figure it out. What that means for me now is that I’m not researching a brand-new topic every week like I did in the beginning. I’ve played around with different ways of doing it. One was like, “For this month, I’m learning about this topic, and all the content will be about it.” Now it’s a lot of, “Oh, I already know this stuff. I’ve already researched this stuff. I can make another video about the same topic.” But at first, I was killing myself because it was a new topic every single week, and I had to research from scratch.

That’s intense.

I don’t recommend it, but I did learn a lot. And now I have a book as a result.

So tell me a little bit more about the workflow you developed and how it came about.

So the workflow evolved quite a bit, too. When I first started, I was planning to do it by trial and error, like, OK, I struggle with organization or cleaning my house, so I’m going to try this strategy for a week. I’m going to film it and then edit it. Then I quickly realized that’s not actually doable in a week. You can’t figure out the strategy once a week, try it for a week, then edit it.

Instead, what I did was, OK, let me learn about this thing. I had a format that I used every single time: introduce the problem, explain the problem, introduce the solution, and explain the solution. I just did it on a blue wall and added graphics afterward. That worked really well. What didn’t work well was me trying to do it off the cuff because I learned really quickly I’m very hard to edit. I’ve gotten better. Hopefully, this is not terrible.

So, quickly, my process went from “let me try and speak off the cuff about what I’ve learned” to “that’s not going to work, that’s going to be impossible to edit” to “what if I outline?” But then I would look at the outline, and my mind would go blank because there would be all this pressure to like say whatever it was that I meant when I had that bullet point written down. So then I was like, I need to script. I just need to script.

Mashable Trend Report

The problem is that as an actor, I didn’t do very well, partly because I had such a hard time memorizing lines. So very early in the process, I had a giant whiteboard, and I printed out every single word in giant, like 36-point font, and I just taped it to this whiteboard. I used what was my strength, which was I got really good at cold reading, but really bad at memorizing lines. Anytime I went into an audition as an actor, I was like, “Let me cold-read.” So I’d glance down, glance up, and say the line, glance down, glance up, and say the line. So some of it was happy accidents. Like our punch-in, punch-out style was to cover the fact that I had to look down between the lines.

For the part of your workflow that involves other people, at what point did you decide you needed to build out your team, and how did you approach that process?

That evolved over many, many years. At first, it was my boyfriend at the time, like, “Hey, you’re an editor. Can you throw a couple of graphics on this?” Once I edited it, I was like, here you go, make it pretty, and he would take like a few hours to punch it up.

Over time, it became clear that what I was doing was really meaningful to people and could turn into something, right? More than just a personal project. So he did more and more until I was like, OK, I’ve got to pay this guy. I actually ended up hiring him full-time before I was full-time.

I was still waiting tables, but I was like, I need an editor. I will work for free 24/7. He will not, understandably. Eventually, I was able to go full-time as well. Then, when that marriage fell apart, I had to hire a team. There were a couple of people that I actually met at VidCon who were like, “Oh yeah, we can do some editing for you, and we can do some animations.”

Digital organization was such a big struggle for me as someone with ADHD that I ended up hiring somebody literally to organize my shit. Our community manager had been volunteering on our Discord for a long time, and finally, after a couple of years, I was like, “We should hire you, though.” Basically, my whole strategy was that whenever I wanted to hire a new person, I brought one on. Now I have a pretty robust team.

What’s having a team like? Because content creation and running a team are very different skill sets.

It is a very different skill set. Also, moving from “I’m going to have people I know help me with this thing” to “oh, I am hiring for a position, and I need to vet that person” was interesting.

An ADHD creator friend of mine, Dani Donovan, recommended a recruiter that she had worked with because she was also in the same boat of hiring friends. So for the first time, we used a recruiter who found us our current producer, and I was like, this person is amazing.

If I could go back in time, I’d work with a recruiter. It’s really important as a creator to work with people. I made the mistake early on of prioritizing the hard skills. How good are you at animating? How good are you at editing? How good are you at these skills? And I didn’t prioritize the soft skills — how are you collaborating with the rest of the team? Are you an easy person to work with? Can you take feedback? Now I really prioritize soft skills.

I would love to talk about your relationship with your audience. I imagine it has grown, but I feel like, especially being a mental health creator, there’s an extra weight to that, and people come a lot with their personal experiences. So how do you navigate that?

It’s tough because I started out as a peer in my community. I was somebody who was learning about my ADHD for the first time; they were learning about theirs. We kind of came up together, and that was a really cool experience.

It also meant that if someone was struggling, it was almost like I was struggling too. We were in the same boat. And my boat was starting to float, and I didn’t want to let their’s to sink. I wanted to respond to every comment. I wanted to help everybody. As the channel grew, I couldn’t anymore. I would get to the point where I would be overwhelmed with taking on a lot of people’s pain and needs. I would need to step away for a little bit, but then I would come back, and there would be so many messages.

Facebook was really the first place where this was overwhelming for me, all of the direct messages that you would get. One day, I went to respond to a message, and by the time I got through like five messages, that person had already responded, so I was in a conversation with them. And I went — it’s not just that I’m procrastinating or avoiding or like not doing the right thing by not responding. I can no longer respond to people.

So that’s when I had to evolve it to let me read the comments and hear what people are saying. Then I need to make content that speaks to that struggle, content that will be for more than just that one person. That was a tough evolution for me in moving away from that one-to-one relationship.

I imagine there could have been some guilt there. Like, you’re letting a version of a relationship go.

It was painful moving into this parasocial space where I don’t know everybody in my community anymore. We don’t have regular conversations, but I still very much care and want to be there for people. I just can’t in the same way. So one of the things we’re doing now that I’m really excited about is that I’m going to start coaching people one-on-one.

I can get the one-on-one I really value, but then we put that content online so other people can benefit, too.

Since becoming a mom, do you feel that the way you approach the content itself, or the way you approach the work of creating the content, has changed?

It has changed. The first change is obviously having to take a break. As a content creator, you’re producing content week after week after week, maybe day after day after day. But maternity leave is a thing that is apparently important! So I had to figure out how to keep putting out content while I’m away and set my team up for success to do that.

Even then, it was really rough that first year to create content, because it felt like my brain had been hijacked by this new passion, this new child. My brain had literally been rewired. It also coincided with finishing my book and putting that out into the world. I finished my project of learning everything I could about my ADHD brain, putting it somewhere I could find it again, and making it available to other people, and I was embarking on a new one: motherhood.

And suddenly, my entire hyperfocus was on being a mom, and I did not have a channel for it. I don’t want a channel about being a mom. So most of what I was learning no longer made sense to share with my community. That was a big, big shift for me because I had to figure out how to keep making content for this community when that’s not where my head is at. So we changed up how we were doing content. I was no longer just a talking head on a blue wall. We also hired the wonderful new producer I was telling you about, and he’s local, so we were able to start filming skits in my house and doing wild projects like having Cas from Clutterbug come down and help me reorganize my entire house. We were able to do different kinds of content.

But it was very much an exploration of what kinds of content my brain can focus on. What kind of content do I want to make?

What are your hopes for the mental health content creation space going forward? And as a second part, who are the creators in that space now that you think more people should be watching?

Therapy in a Nutshell is great. Dr. Tracey Marks is great. Also, Daniel from The Aspie World. He’s great for anybody who’s dealing with autism. A lot of people who watch my channel are like, can you do this, but for autism? And I’m like, I don’t have autism. But my friend does!

There are a lot of great mental health creators. But what I’m hoping for in this space is that we get more people with lived experience connecting with people who have research-backed, evidence-based information, and then we disseminate that. There are many academic researchers speaking to it, and many speaking from personal experience. But I would love to see more people doing what I’m doing, which is speaking about their personal experience as a vehicle to share evidence-based information, so it’s not just, “This one thing worked for me.” It’s, “This is what works for a lot of people, and it worked for me. Maybe it would work for you, too.”

Ghost Master: Resurrection Free Download

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

Download File

Ghost Master: Resurrection Direct Download:

The classic Ghost Master returns from the depths of the underworld, resurrected in a glorious rebirth of terror and intrigue. This faithful remake of the beloved original brings back the essence of the classic, now infused with stunning new graphics, a powerful new engine, and refined mechanics that will leave you screaming for more. Dude Simulator

Key Features

Command an army of specters: Wield the power to summon and control a variety of grim specters, howling banshees, and sly gremlins, each with their unique abilities and strengths, now with enhanced visuals and improved AI.
Unleash terror on Gravenville: Explore 11 expansive and distinct locations, including the town’s lunatic asylum, military base, sorority and frat houses, and police station, now with new environments and detailed textures.
Solve puzzles and unlock mysteries: Delve into a world of mystery and intrigue, where clever thinking and strategic planning are essential to success in unique, hair-raising adventures with multi-branching scenarios, now with new challenges and hidden secrets.
Experience a thrilling blend of strategy, adventure, and resource management: Combine the best of strategy, adventure, and resource management games in a coherent plot and complete virtual world, now with new gameplay mechanics and fresh content.

Rediscover the Terror
Relive the classic gameplay that made Ghost Master a cult classic, now with the benefits of modern technology and design. Ghost Master: Resurrection is the ultimate treat for fans of the original and newcomers alike, offering a fresh take on a timeless formula.

Screenshots

System Requirements

Minimum
OS: Windows 10 (1903 min)/11 64-bit
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Intel Core i5-8600K
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: 6 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon RX 580 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 14 GB available space
Support the game developers by purchasing the game on Steam

Installation Guide

Turn Off Your Antivirus Before Installing Any Game

1 :: Download Game
2 :: Extract Game
3 :: Launch The Game
4 :: Have Fun 🙂

Download File

Next Week on XBOX: New Games for June 29 to July 3

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

Welcome to Next Week on XBOX! In this weekly feature we cover all the games coming soon to XBOX Series X|S, XBOX One, XBOX on PC, and Game Pass! Get more details on these upcoming games below and click their profiles for further info (release dates subject to change). Let’s jump in!

RV There Yet?

Nuggets Entertainment

☆☆☆☆☆
173

★★★★★

RV There Yet? – June 30
Game Pass / Optimized for XBOX Series X|S / XBOX Play Anywhere

A co-op adventure about driving your Recreational Vehicle home. You and your buddies are on your way home from a relaxing vacation but are forced to take an alternate route. Get your RV through the back country and find the exit to Route 65.

Monopoly: Star Wars™ Heroes vs. Villains

Ubisoft

☆☆☆☆☆
3

★★★★★

$29.99

Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains – June 29

Assemble your team, build your roster of iconic Star Wars characters, and battle with your friends and family for control of the galaxy as you move across storied planets and locations. Choose from a wide array of Star Wars heroes and villains, each with their own unique abilities. Whether you’re teaming up with Luke Skywalker or unleashing Darth Vader, every match is packed with team strategy, surprises, and classic Star Wars moments. No two battles unfold the same way, the fate of your team is yours to shape!

EA SPORTS™ College Football 27 Deluxe Edition

Electronic Arts

☆☆☆☆☆
308

★★★★★

$99.99

$89.99

EA SPORTS™ College Football 27

Electronic Arts

☆☆☆☆☆
309

DevilishGames

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$8.99

Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence – July 3
Optimized for XBOX Series X|S / Smart Delivery

William is a young writer in search of his first literary success. He travels to a distant abbey, shrouded in a vow of silence. Among thick stone walls and unspoken secrets, William slowly immerses himself into the life of the abbey and its silent inhabitants. What begins as a search for inspiration soon turns mysterious, leading William to uncover not just a story to tell, but a secret that was never meant to be discovered. Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence is a classic 90s-style point & click adventure featuring dark, detailed pixel art, environmental puzzles, and a deep narrative with touches of black humor.

Swamp TD 2

EntwicklerX

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Swamp TD 2 – July 3
XBOX Play Anywhere

Swamp Defense 2 is a classic tower defense game with unique weapons and monsters as enemies for any beginner or defensive specialists. Fight countless enemies with a huge selection of gun turrets (in the form of comic heroes) and additional helpers (mines, air support, block wall) on more than 60 maps. Earn coins to obtain improvements in the integrated shop system and to buy new towers.

Tanky Tanks – Reloaded

EpiXR Games

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$4.99

Tanky Tanks – Reloaded – July 3
Optimized for XBOX Series X|S

It’s fast. It’s fun. It’s addicting. Deafest the enemy tanks while dodging their deadly bullets. Improve your aim and maneuvering skill while war itself is trying to end your adventure. Level by level the enemy’s tanks get faster, smarter, and deadlier. Can you make it to the end and defeat their leader?

The Legend of Fireball

QubicGames S.A.

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

The Legend of Fireball – July 3

Aim your shot, release the flame, and blast through anything that stands in your path! In The Legend of Fireball, you begin as a young fireball fighter training in an ordinary room, breaking simple objects to build your strength. Home appliances, computers, motorcycles, cars, massive buildings – every target brings you closer to true fireball mastery.

Zaxoid

M80 Games Inc.

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Zaxoid – July 3

Face an alien onslaught in Zaxoid, an adrenaline-inducing, twin-stick mayhem shooter! Defend the galaxy from relentless invaders by upgrading your ship or fortifying your city with strategic choices that make every run unique. Wield dual joysticks for precision chaos, transform into tank mode to repel surface invasions, and protect your population. Intense gameplay that takes you back to the golden years of gaming.

Indian payments chief thinks AI will be heavily involved in next era of digital payment growth

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

India’s digital payment share has increased over the years, with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. With an aim to reach over a billion daily transactions, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, thinks AI would be heavily involved in the next phase for user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution.

During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026 last month, Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users with NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government working together.

“AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints,” he said. “We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler.”

Many companies have talked about voice as an interface being important in India for chatting with companies or systems. Asbe believes that it is early days for that, as voice models will need to be more accurate. NPCI launched a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023. Asbe noted that adoption for that yet to take off, and with the right use case, voice can become a critical component in the payment ecosystem.

AI in finance and regulations

In the U.S., startups and public companies are racing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow agents to trade on users’ behalf, and OpenAI lets you load personal account data into ChatGPT to get financial advice. NPCI has shown some demos around agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year. However, there hasn’t been a wider rollout of some of these capabilities.

NPCI’s CEO thinks that with robust regulations and a framework, India can also adopt AI-powered finance. He said that there should be enough protection for users and mitigation for risk — and in case something goes wrong, the system should be able to look at the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.

Besides the usage of models, Asbe thinks that the Indian finance ecosystem has an opportunity to build small language models.

“We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them,” he said. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem. I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies — the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem — to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible.”

Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to solve user disputes. Asbe noted that it is serving over a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and is scaling fast.

UPI competition

NPCI has long sought healthy competition between UPI apps, but data suggests that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have over 80% of the market share. The regulator’s plan to cap an app’s market share at 30% is set to take effect on December 31, 2026, unless it defers the deadline date again.

During the conversation, Asbe said that UPI apps have very low switching costs and most core features are shared. He noted that PhonePe and Google have poured millions into their apps to attain their market position. He said that if new apps find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their share will rise.

“I believe that there are multiple issues why we see this concentration risk exist, and one of the important reasons is the availability of a viable commercial model. The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem, I believe newer players will start investing very heavily,” Asbe said.

In 2024, the payment body spun off its BHIM UPI app to make it more competitive and grow its usage. While its transaction volume has grown, its overall market share is around 1%. Asbe said that with BHIM, there is no particular target market share NPCI is eyeing. But it wants to make it a sovereign and secure alternative to other apps, Asbe said.

India is one of the biggest digital economies, and investors around the world will be looking at the regulatory landscape to put money into newer fintech solutions and make the market more competitive.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

62 Last Minute Prime Day Weekend Deals: Up to 45% Off (2026)

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

These are the best-sounding open earbuds, with clear audio and instrumental detail. The rollable build offers a secure fit with minimal discomfort, but it may take a few tries to attach them correctly. Battery life lasts about seven and a half hours, and they have an IPX4 rating, meaning they’re resistant to splashes and light rain. Lastly, they’re equipped with some of Bose’s advanced features, including multipoint pairing, Bose Spatial Audio, and push-button controls for playback, calling, and volume adjustments. —Boutayna Chokrane

Our favorite Bluetooth speaker is on sale for Prime Day. Our reviewers say the JBL Flip 7 the perfect balance of portable design and sound quality, with surprisingly full sound in its compact package. The Flip 7 is plenty durable for the outdoors with a drop-tested design and water resistance, and it also supports Auracast to sync with other new JBL models. —Nena Farrell

Jump to Section: Best Tech Deals, Best Amazon Device Deals, Best Apple and Apple Accessory Deals, Best AV Deals, Best Home & Kitchen Deals, Best Beauty & Wellness Deals, Best Mobile & Wearable Deals

Best Home & Kitchen Deals

Google

Nest Cam Indoor (Wired, 3rd Gen)

Easily the smartest indoor security camera currently available, Google’s third-generation Nest Cam indoor kicks the resolution up to 2K at 30 fps, with HDR and night vision. There’s also two-way audio, enforced two-factor authentication, and accurate detection to alert you about people, animals, or vehicles. The Google Home Premium subscription is pricey at $10 per month ($100/year) for 30 days of event video history and familiar face alerts, but it covers all your Nest devices. —Simon Hill

Quantic Dream’s Star Wars: Eclipse is struggling: ‘We’re understaffed,’ say devs

Posted on June 28, 2026 by faz_business

Star Wars Eclipse – Official Cinematic Reveal Trailer – YouTube

Watch On

You’re forgiven if you’d forgotten about Star Wars: Eclipse. After being revealed with a flashy cinematic trailer in 2021, all we heard about Quantic Dreams’ Star Wars game was the briefest of mentions in a blog post by studio founder and CEO David Cage last year, in which he said, “Of course, development of Star Wars: Eclipse continues, and we are eager to share more with you in the future.”

Quantic Dream was also working on a live-service game at the same time, a MOBA called Spellcaster Chronicles, which suffered a fate all too common in the genre when the plug was pulled on it back in May. 115 staff who worked on it came in line for the inevitable layoffs.

As reported by French outlet Gamekult, Quantic Dream’s employees say those staff are needed to help with a struggling Star Wars: Eclipse, and laying them off will hurt its chances of ever being finished. They went on strike during a studio visit by LucasFilm to get their point across.

Ticketmaster’s ‘customizable pass’ collab with Google Wallet sounds great for gameday

Posted on June 27, 2026 by faz_business

What you need to know

Ticketmaster announced its partnership with Google Wallet, which brings “customizable passes” to Android.
Clients of events can customize their digital passes with flashy designs and up to 12 links for important venue details.
Users benefit from this last note, as they can find info on parking, food, drinks, merch, and VIP access directly from their pass.

This summer is going to be packed with events of all kinds. To try and help, Ticketmaster announced a partnership with Google Wallet for more unique digital passes on Android.

Ticketmaster says that what it’s worked on with Google Wallet are “customizable passes” that are designed for “branded experiences” on Android. Passes are mobile tickets saved in Google Wallet, but Ticketmaster says this new direction offers a new sense of “brand presence.” Brands can offer customized hero images, tour artwork, and more.

If you’re attending a group’s stop on their nationwide tour, you might see unique album artwork or sports game visuals if you’re going to an NFL game.

Digital passes continue to evolve

Ticketmaster partners with Google Wallet to add "customizable passes," which lets clients of events bring flashy designs and useful links to users before arriving. — (Image credit: Ticketmaster)

Passes and digital tickets have been a big aspect of Google Wallet for years now. The company rolled out a useful update to Wallet, one that would automatically surface a pass you might need. “Context-aware” is what drives this feature. Google states that as the user approaches a location, like a train station, the Wallet app would produce their train ticket on their lock screen.

This removes the need for users to open their phones, navigate to the Wallet app, and select their appropriate pass. Google says this capability extends to airport gates, concert venues, and stores. Considering this new partnership with Ticketmaster, perhaps something like this would occur for these customizable passes.

Android Central’s Take

I like this partnership, and this is coming from a sports guy. Getting my tickets ready for gameday is an exciting feeling. I can just imagine a White Sox or a Bears ticket through Ticketmaster’s new approach for passes. The hype would be unreal. What’s more, these links would help with stadium navigation for parking in case anything changes.