Today is the first day of former president Donald Trump’s $250 million fraud trial in New York. A case brought by the state’s attorney general accuses the Republican primary frontrunner of lying about his net worth by billions of dollars to try to secure more favorable loan terms. One of his attorneys, Alina Habba, showed up with what appears to be an Asus ROG gaming laptop. Its RGB logo changed colors during the hearing.

Update 10/5/2023 11:54 a.m. ET: Habba did not respond to a request for comment but did tweet about this story three days after it was published to clarify that the laptop actually belonged to the court and was used for the live transcript feed. She just happened to be the person seated in front of it.

“When the world thinks you’re a gamer because the court’s live transcript feed computer is placed in front of you #fakenews #notagamer,” she tweeted.

Original story follows.

The laptop was spotted by Ryan Rigney, marketing director for the recently released anime sports game, Omega Strikers. “Gamer lawyer brought the 2070ti asus laptop with the blue underglow to the court hearing,” he tweeted. Various pictures taken at different times during the hearing appear to show the Asus ROG emblem on the front of the laptop, as well as the underglow, cycling from blue to orange.

The laptop in question looks like it could be the ROG Strix G17 G712 model. Originally released in 2021, it sports a 17-inch screen, an RTX 2070 Super GPU, 2.3 GHz Intel i7, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and of course, an RGB keyboard and light bar with Asus’ Aura Sync. It currently sells for about $1,700.

Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what the exact model of the laptop was, how often she games on it, or if Trump has ever watched her play on it.

During today’s court poceedings, Habba, who is also a senior advisor for Trump’s Super Pac, MAGA Inc., told the judge in the case that, “There was no intent to defraud, period, the end.” The ex-president, who was also indicted in August on four criminal counts related to alleged attempts to overthrow the government, tried to delay the current fraud case and get it thrown out but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Habba didn’t get her law degree until 2010, and didn’t meet Trump for the first time until 2019. She was previously accused of racist behavior in a 2022 lawsuit by a former employee at her law firm, including saying “I hate that Black b*tch” about New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the current fraud case against Trump. There were also allegedly recordings of her loudly “dropping ‘N’ bombs” while rapping along to music in her New Jersey law office. The lawsuit was settled out of court later that year.

Cyberpunk 2077’s highly acclaimed and massive expansion, Phantom Liberty, almost feels like its own game. That’s probably because the developers behind the expansion spent over $60 million on developing Phantom Liberty and $21 million on marketing it, bringing the total cost of producing the DLC to about half of what it cost to develop the entire Cyberpunk 2077 base game.

After launching in a pretty awful state in 2020, CDProjeckt Red’s massive open-world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 has received numerous updates, bug fixes, and even a popular Netflix anime. All of this helped the futuristic RPG become more popular than ever. And while some say the game’s core problems can’t be fixed, CDPR hasn’t given up on Cyberpunk 2077. The RPG’s only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty (and the free 2.0 update) released on September 26 to rave reviews, and fans declaring the game “saved.” But building something like Phantom Liberty isn’t cheap.

On October 5, during an investor’s presentation, CDPR revealed the total budget for Phantom Liberty. Its costs were split between zł275 million on “direct production expenditures” and another zł95 million on “marketing campaign costs.” If we do some converting, that equals out to just about $63 million and $21 million in USD, respectively, or roughly $84 million total.

Buy Cyberpunk 2077: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

As a point of comparison, it reportedly cost $174 million to develop Cyberpunk 2077. That number gets ever larger when you factor in the $142 million CDPR spent on marketing the dystopian RPG. Looking at these numbers, it’s almost impressive how little money CDPR spent on marketing the new DLC compared to the main game.

No matter how you slice it, spending nearly $85 million on developing and marketing a single expansion is wild and a sign of just how expensive game development is these days. It’s also a great example of how big, expensive games aren’t allowed to be flops.

Cyberpunk 2077 had to be a beloved hit, no matter the cost

During the presentation, the translator suggests that CDPR spent zł178 million or about $40 million USD on bringing the game to next-gen consoles and building the sweeping 2.0 update. This would suggest CDPR spent almost $125 million on fixing Cyberpunk 2077’s image and saving its reputation. However, a CDPR representative has contacted Kotaku saying that this 178 million figure in fact is mostly made up of funds spent on the base game

However, based on how well Cyberpunk 2077 and its new expansion are selling after the update—CDPR claims there was a “surge” of sales following update 2.0—the company is likely going to wind up making a lot of money off the game. CDPR pointed out during the investor presentation that it is “confident” that the DLC and its main game will be “big sellers” for a long time, pointing toward the continued sales of The Witcher 3 and its DLC years after launch.

With the development of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel starting and news of a live-action spin-off in the works, it makes sense that CDPR would be willing to invest so much money into making sure Cyberpunk 2077’s legacy amounted to more than a failed launch and bad console ports. It needed the game to be a huge hit with millions of fans. And it got there, even if it cost a lot of money in the end.

Update 10/6/23 11:30 a.m. ET:  This article’s headline has been altered, and additional details added, in response to CDPR’s clarification over what appears to have been a translation error during its investor day presentation.

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10 years ago, Ubisoft launched Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, an open-world pirate-themed RPG that set the stage for the modern iteration of the long-running series by revitalizing its open-world exploration and adding remarkable naval combat. And in that time, millions of people have played the game.

Read More: Assassin’s Creed IV Is Still Great
Buy Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

Ubisoft took to X (formerly Twitter, or whatever Elon Musk will change the social media’s name to in the middle of the night) on October 29 to announce that over 34 million people have played Black Flag since its 2013 launch.

That’s a staggering number of players for any game, especially one that’s a decade old. But Black Flag has aged better than most. It puts you in the boots of the Welsh pirate-turned-assassin Edward Kenway as he explores early 17th-century Caribbean seas to unravel an ancient mystery.

While its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed III, gave you a ship to command, Black Flag expanded on the vessel’s limited use, with thrilling sea battles that allowed you to dodge cannon fire and board ships to sink them in the deep blue. It also improved on some of Assassin’s Creed III’s failings, such as allowing you to freely enter and exit your ship without waiting for a loading screen, while putting less of an emphasis on the modern-day storytelling so you can just stab people to your heart’s content. This was the first game in the series to explore piracy, which Ubisoft brought back and refined in 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which featured robust ship sailing and village pillaging mechanics.

In fact, it’s the ship steering that made Black Flag so revered. As former Kotaku staffer Luke Plunkett wrote in December 2017, this Assassin’s Creed game is great because of “how beautiful it was to simply sail over a calm sea at midnight,” and he ain’t wrong. Black Flag truly blew the door wide open on our expectations of what Assassin’s Creed could be thanks, in part, to the Jackdaw. Ubisoft’s worlds are typically huge, but Black Flag’s rendition of the Caribbean felt exceptionally massive with its connected waterways only traversable by sea. And the vastness of the ocean gave the game an eerie sense of isolation and intrigue, as you never knew what lurked in the distance in front of or below you. Ubisoft’s bloated design ethos may have fallen out of fashion, but Black Flag felt like lighting in a bottle.

Lots of folks reflected fondly on Black Flag to mark the occasion, many of them sharing their memories of the game in Ubisoft’s mentions. Black Flag ranks among the best Assassin’s Creed game to this day, and it nearly made the top of Kotaku’s very own ranked list.

Read More: Sources: Assassin’s Creed Publisher Remaking Black Flag, The Pirate One

While most folks were getting misty-eyed about Black Flag, a few were hoping Ubisoft would either drop a current-gen patch for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, or just straight-up remaster the game. Kotaku reported earlier this year that a Black Flag remake is in the works, but Ubisoft still hasn’t officially confirmed it. Let’s just hope it isn’t stuck in Davy Jones’ Locker the same way the still-MIA RPG Skull and Bones has been.