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The FTX drama is not over yet — and Amazon wants a piece of it. The company is partnering with Russo Brothers, best known for Marvel movies, to make a show on the spectacular collapse of the giant cryptocurrency empire.

Amazon has partnered with the duo’s production house AGBO to make the show, which will go into production in Spring 2023, Variety first reported. Amazon is also trying to rope in the brothers to direct the show, the report added.

The company confirmed the news in a statement and said “Hunters” creator David Weil will write the pilot.

“We are excited to be able to continue our great working relationship with David, Joe, Anthony, and the AGBO team with this fascinating event series I can’t think of better partners to bring this multifaceted story to our global Prime Video audience,” Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke said.

The Russos are also working with Amazon to createa multinational international spy series called “Citadel.”

“This is one of the most brazen frauds ever committed. It crosses many sectors — celebrity, politics, academia, tech, criminality, sex, drugs, and the future of modern finance,” the Russos said of the upcoming show surrounding FTX in a statement. “At the center of it all sits an extremely mysterious figure with complex and potentially dangerous motivations. We want to understand why.”

FTX collapse

FTX and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have been at the center of media coverage across the world after the celebrated cryptocurrency exchange imploded earlier this month.

Coindesk reported earlier about the concerning finances of Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried and intertwined closely with the exchange. The report triggered a set of events, culminating in Binance chief executive Changpeng “CZ” Zhao unveiling plans to sell FTX’s native token FTT that it had received as part of an investment exit from the firm.

The move shook the confidence of retail investors and prompted a bank run on FTX and unraveled fraudulent misuse of FTX customers’ data.

Bankman-Fried, who along with his firm have attracted regulatory scrutiny in recent weeks, attempted to salvage FTX by signing a deal to be acquired by Binance, its chief rival then. Binance pulled out of the deal after finding FTX had dug too deep of a hole in its balance sheet. Within days, FTX filed for bankruptcy with Bankman-Fried stepping down from the CEO post.

In the aftermath of this chaos, Bankman-Fried gave a Vox reporter an interview over Twitter direct messages in which he criticized regulators and expressed regrets about filing for bankruptcy and walked back on many of the long-believes he had portrayed about himself to the world. Reports have since also found that FTX usedcorporate funds to purchase houses for employees and owes the top 50 creditors over $3 billion.

Bankman-Fried is scheduled to speak at the Dealbook summit next week, so we may hear more about what is going on with FTX soon.

Time for the show

All of this makes for a good TV, for sure. It also helps that startup founders doing things has become a sleeper hit of a genre in recent years as evidenced by hits like “WeCrashed” (Apple TV+) on the WeWork and Adam Neumann fiasco, “Dropout” (Hulu) on the Theranos-Elizabeth Holmes saga, and “Super Pumped” (Showtime) on Uber led by Travel Kalanick. So Amazon is keen to get a hit show centering on a controversial tech founder on its catalog. But we could see more adoption of the FTX story.

Earlier this week, Deadline reported that buyers — including Apple — are chasing to sign celebrated author Michael Lewis’ yet-to-be-published book. Lewis — who has previously written hits that were later adapted into movies such as “The Big Short,” “Moneyball,” and “The Blind Side” — had been closely following Bankman-Fried for over six months before the recent implosion.

Amazon’s show will be based on “insider reporting” from various journalists who have covered the issue extensively, according to Variety.

Amazon is working on a TV series about FTX drama with Russo Brothers by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Google Cloud has partnered with SuperGaming to offer the Indian gaming startup’s proprietary gaming engine, SuperPlatform, to developers worldwide, the latest in a series of recent steps from the Android-maker to expand focus into the gaming industry.

The cloud arm of the search giant said Thursday that as part of its partnership, it will offer the Pune-headquartered startup’s gaming engine to help developers worldwide to help them manage their live ops, matchmaking, player progression and data, analytics, server scaling and merchandising. These tools are designed to help firms maintain, optimize and scale their games.

The upstart SuperGaming, which uses its gaming engine in its own titles as well as the official PAC-MAN game for mobile devices, has garnered millions of downloads to its mobile titles such as MaskGun, Silly Royale and Tower Conquest.

SuperGaming initially developed SuperPlatform to power its own games, and started to license the service to other developers in 2019.

The two firms aren’t stranger to one another. SuperGaming originally relied on AWS for its cloud needs, but moved to Google Cloud a couple of years ago after seeing advantages including “a significant amount of savings,” SuperGaming co-founder and chief executive Roby John told TechCrunch in an interview.

That move put wheels in motion to make the platform available via Google Cloud as an independent software vendor for developers, said John. “I’m very excited to bring our platform to Google Cloud, which powers 70% of our top customers already,” he added.

Developers will continue to have the choice to use SuperPlatform on AWS as well as Azure, though Google Cloud will be SuperGaming’s preference as a result of the partnership, he said.

Prior to talks about a potential partnership, John said SuperGaming had been working closely with Google Cloud engineers to use the cloud platform for the upcoming battle royale game Indus. The teams on both sides exchanged insights that helped bring the partnership very organically, he said.

“The partnership is beyond just saying, okay, here’s computers and infrastructure and all the rest. It’s about saying, how can we come collectively together and with the business objective of succeeding,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India, in the joint conversation.

The two did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Google Cloud’s competitors AWS and Azure do offer native liveOps solutions for game developers to let them run their games as a service and get real-time telemetrics. Google Cloud, however, seems to utilize SuperGaming’s expertise — alongside its platform — to bring some distinctions.

“It’s always about developers, or it’s about players. And this partnership allows us to influence both,” said Bedi.

SuperGaming, which counts Texas-based Skycatcher, Tokyo’s Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund, Kirkland-based 1UpVentures and Ant Group-backed BAce Capital among its investors, has so far raised $6.8 million, with $5.5 million infused through a Series A round last year.

The startup also launched TowerConquest: Metaverse Edition as its free-to-earn Web3 game, which it said will also run on Google Cloud — alongside the existing titles and upcoming Indus.

Google Cloud partners with Indian startup SuperGaming to offer gaming engine to developers by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch