Amaya Toman Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starlink project should finally leave beta testing and be available to the general public in the foreseeable future. Elon Musk himself announced this in his recent tweet. On the other hand, the upcoming AR game Catan: World Explorer will not reach the public. Niantic announced late last week that it will put the title on hold for good in November.
It could be interest you
The launch of the Starlink program to the public is in sight
The director of SpaceX Elon Musk published a post on his official Twitter account at the end of last week, according to which the Starlink program could leave the stage of public beta testing as early as next month. The program, under which consumers can use the so-called "satellite Internet", was originally supposed to see its launch for the general public during this August - at least that's what Musk said during this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC), where he mentioned, among other things, that should Starlink reach more than half a million users over the next twelve months.
The Starlink system consists of almost twelve thousand satellites, providing a continuous connection to the Internet. The price of the user terminal is 499 dollars, the monthly fee for the Internet connection is 99 dollars. Public beta testing of the Starlink program was launched in October last year, in August Elon Musk boasted that his company had already sold one hundred thousand user terminals, consisting of a satellite dish and a router, to fourteen different countries. With the exit of the beta test phase, the number of Starlink customers will also logically increase, but at the moment it is not possible to clearly say in which time frame Starlink will reach the mentioned number of half a million customers. Among other things, the target group for the Starlink service should be residents of rural areas and other locations where common methods of connecting to the Internet are difficult to access or problematic. With Starlink, consumers should achieve upload speeds of up to 100 Mbps and download speeds of up to 20 Mbps.
Next month
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2021
Niantic is burying the AR version of Catan
The game development company Niantic, from whose workshop the popular game Pokémon GO comes from, for example, decided to put on ice the upcoming game Catan: World Explorers, which, like the aforementioned Pokémon GO title, was supposed to work on the principle of augmented reality. Ninatic announced plans for a digital adaptation of the popular board game about two years ago, but has now decided to end the project.
Gallery
Cata: World Explorers has been playable in Early Access for about a year. On November 18 of this year, Niantic is going to make the mentioned game title permanently unavailable, and it will also end the possibility of making payments in the application. According to Niantic, players who play Catan: World Explorers in early access until the end of the game can enjoy an increase in in-game bonuses. Niantic has not yet specified what led it to decide to put this game on ice for good. One of the reasons could be the complicated adaptation of game elements, known from the board version of Catan, to the environment of augmented reality. In this context, the developers stated that they even moved away from the original game due to the aforementioned complications. The most successful augmented reality game to come out of Niantic's workshop is still Pokémon GO.
