Nintendo Switch becomes gaming giant's best-selling console in history The Switch is now the best-selling Nintendo console in history, having surpassed 155 million sales since it launched in 2017. It means the device, which saw a huge boom in sales over the pandemic, has now surpassed the Nintendo DS as the firm's most successful gaming hardware. And the Switch is now behind only Sony's PlayStation 2 in the overall gaming charts, which sold more than 160 million units in the years following its launch in 2000. But Nintendo's latest financial report, where it announced the news, also saw shares in the company fall 11% following investor concerns over software sales and memory chip prices. Despite this, the company said its sequel the Switch 2, had got off to a good start since its release in June 2025, selling 17 million units as of the end of the year.

Disruptions to personnel rosters caused by absenteeism often necessitate last-minute adjustments to the employees' working hours. A common strategy to mitigate the impact of such changes is to assign employees to reserve shifts: special on-call duties during which an employee can be called in to cover for an absent employee. To maximize roster robustness, we assume a predict-then-optimize approach that uses absence predictions from a machine learning model to schedule an adequate number of reserve shifts. In this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate the robustness of rosters generated by the predict-then-optimize approach, assuming the machine learning model will make predictions at a predetermined prediction performance level. Instead of training and testing machine learning models, our methodology simulates the predictions based on a characterization of model performance. We show how this methodology can be applied to identify the minimum performance level needed for the model to outperform simple non-data-driven robust rostering policies. In a computational study on a nurse rostering problem, we demonstrate how the predict-then-optimize approach outperforms non-data-driven policies under reasonable performance requirements, particularly when employees possess interchangeable skills.

This also becomes something of a wild card around another major marketing point for EA's game: The Ryder Cup. A press preview event in mid-January made reference to the inclusion -- in some fashion -- of the Ryder Cup, the highly popular semiannual event that pits the top golfers from the U.S. against their European peers. Presumably, a full Ryder Cup mode would include playable rosters for each side, similar to the Pro Bowl rosters in EA's Madden NFL franchise. But will all of those players be available in the game if the rosters include LIV golfers in real life?

It's possible to love a video game. To be devoted to it, to value what it does for you, and how it makes you feel. To want the best for it. Not in the same way you love a person -- or at least, I hope not. But take a look at any major fan convention for video games, movies, TV, or almost anything that develops a subculture, and you can see this love is real, active, and powerful. And if it's possible to love a video game, then of course it's possible to fall out of love.

It's possible to love a video game. To be devoted to it, to value what it does for you and how it makes you feel, and to want the best for it. Not in the same way you love a person -- or at least, I hope not. But take a look at any major fan convention for video games, movies, TV, or almost anything that develops a subculture, and you can see this love is real, active, and powerful. And if it's possible to love a video game, then of course it's possible to fall out of love. To feel disconnected from what first drew you to it.

EA Sports added the rosters to women's International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) teams to the previous installment of the annualized hockey sim, "NHL 22." It also recently added women's soccer club team rosters from the top leagues in England and France to its FIFA franchise for its upcoming installment, "FIFA 23," which releases Sept. 30. Chelsea standout Sam Kerr will be featured on one version of that game's cover; another will feature French forward Kylian Mbappé. The company had previously featured U.S. Women's National Team striker Alex Morgan on the cover of "FIFA 16" alongside Argentine phenom Lionel Messi.

RALEIGH, NC / ACCESSWIRE / August 8, 2022 / 919 Marketing, one of the nation's fastest-growing content marketing agencies, announces the acquisition of ClickCulture, a Raleigh, N.C. -based award-winning web development and digital marketing company. This is the third acquisition by 919 Marketing to boldly expand its roster of technology-focused marketing services to become the full-service marketing leader for emerging and mature franchise brands and non-profit companies. "This exciting new partnership with the team at ClickCulture expands our company to give us more creative firepower and a deeper bench of talent to better serve our clients", says David Chapman, CEO, and founder of 919 Marketing. "We can now elevate our creative capabilities to include custom applications for websites, unique digital campaigns, and elite, award-winning graphic design to help our clients attract more customers and grow their businesses. We have a lot of smart people doing great work and now we have the data-driven creative capabilities needed to truly dominate as the holistic, one-stop solution for nonprofit companies and multi-location and franchise brands."

Evil Geniuses' first priority with the team will be getting to know them, which LaPointe Jameson said is essential to victory. "Valorant" players in both of Evil Geniuses' teams receive a personalized assessment to identify areas for growth. That could be anything from more in-depth training for a player's team role, improving intrapersonal communication or confidence building programs. Once that is done, Evil Geniuses has its sights set for the top.

Even skilled fantasy football managers can be disappointed by their mid-season rosters as some players inevitably fall short of draft day expectations. Team managers can quickly discover that their team has a low score ceiling even if they start their best active players. A novel and diverse combinatorial optimization system proposes high volume and unique player trades between complementary teams to balance trade fairness. Several algorithms create the valuation of each fantasy football player with an ensemble of computing models such as Quantum Support Vector Classifier with Permutation Importance (QSVC-PI), Quantum Support Vector Classifier with Accumulated Local Effects (QSVC-ALE), Variational Quantum Circuit with Permutation Importance (VQC-PI), Hybrid Quantum Neural Network with Permutation Importance (HQNN-PI), eXtreme Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGB), and Subject Matter Expert (SME) rules. The valuation of each player is personalized based on league rules, roster, and selections. Similarly, the cost of trading away a player is related to a team's roster, such as the depth at a position, slot count, position importance, etc. Teams are paired together for trading based on a cosine dissimilarity score so that teams can offset their respective strengths and weaknesses. A knapsack 0-1 algorithm computes outgoing players for each team. Postprocessors apply analytics and deep learning models to measure 6 different objective measures about each trade, such as parity, pain, and fairness. Over the 2020 and 2021 National Football League (NFL) seasons, a group of 24 experts from IBM and ESPN evaluated trade quality through 10 Football Error Analysis Tool (FEAT) sessions. Our system started with 76.9% of high-quality trades and was deployed for the 2021 season with 97.3% of high-quality trades. To increase trade quantity, our quantum, classical, and rules-based computing have 100% trade uniqueness. This paper will discuss our diverse computing paradigms that value players, cost determinations, personalization experience, knapsack 0-1 algorithm and our experimental results. Throughout the 2020 season, we served over 239 million trade proposals and insights with over 55 million user interactions. In 2021, we introduced trade personalization so that the trade proposals were created around user preferences.

Plain Complex is a Finnish startup company founded in 2021, although the initial product development started already three years ago. As an anesthesiologist Sasu Liuhanen repeatedly witnessed the challenges of planning nurses’ shifts in his daily work; the process was slow, required a lot of manual work and the quality of the rosters left all too often a lot to desire.To develop a solution to the problem, Sasu Liuhanen, an experienced anesthesiologist and software developer, Tuomo Peltola, a seasoned professional in health-tech sales and marketing, and Stefano Campadello, a professional in business development and information technology founded a company and are now commercializing its artificial intelligence-based roster planning software. 150k from Finnish angel investors  The first angel investment round of the company was completed with four renowned angel investors. Ali Omar (FiBAN business angel of the year 2019), Reima Linnanvirta (chair of the board, FiBAN), Henry Nilert (founder of IoBox, FiBAN angel investor), and Pekka Ylitalo (Dimerent) made a 150 000 € seed investment into the company.  - Roster planning affects a great number of nurses and their families. Hence, the quality of the rosters has an immense effect on employees’ work-life balance and their well-being. Artificial intelligence is a true game-changer and enables finding optimal shifts for each employee, says Ali Omar.  - Well-being employees are the focus of Plain Complex, but at the same time, an organization can achieve significant cost savings brought by the uniform quality and fairness of the rosters. Using artificial intelligence is a true win-win, says FiBAN’s chair of the board, Reima Linnanvirta.  Artificial intelligence improves well-being at work and brings costs savings to healthcare  An ongoing pilot in a large Finnish hospital has already proven that artificial intelligence can plan rosters where employees can combine shift work and personal life in a way that has not been possible before. Transforming the previously long and tedious planning process from days or even weeks into a few minutes opens up new and unseen opportunities. - A good roster needs to comply with all applicable laws, collective agreements, organizational requirements, criteria for ergonomic design, and the employees’ personal wishes and preferences. Such a puzzle is often extremely difficult to solve and frequently it is the employees’ wishes that need to give in. Artificial intelligence can change all this and solve the puzzle in a way that everyone wins. A plan that takes all the aforementioned aspects into account is ready in minutes, says Sasu Liuhanen, CEO and co-founder of the company.  More information: Sasu LiuhanenCEO, Co-Founder, Plain Complex040-516 6467sasu.liuhanen@plaincomplex.complaincomplex.com / linkedin.com/company/plaincomplex Antti ViitanenDeal Flow Manager, FiBAN+358 45 2565 220antti@fiban.orgfiban.org