Daily Crunch: Less than a year after buying Hurdle, Spotify will shut down the music game on May 5.

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Happy Friday, our dearest friends!

Over the past few days, we’ve been telling you about all the cool things happening at Riot. Well, guess what — we’re getting a hardware upgrade too! Hardware will get its turn at Riot 2023…exciting times!

– Christine And came

TechCrunch’s Top 3

• You heard it hereChristine Hurdle thought a music guessing game like Wordle was too hard, so she quit playing it a while ago. However, in March 2022, it was the most popular game with the highest number of monthly desktop and mobile web visits at 69 million. right now Sarah Less than a year after buying Hurdle, Spotify wrote that it is shutting down the game. You will find six guesses as to why, but with a scan of the tears flowing on the Internet.
• Speaking of closureParlor, the social media network created when former President Donald Trump was banned from other sites, has a new owner. No, no, but digital media company Starboard. Oh, and Starboard plans to close it temporarily for renovations. Aisha It has more.
• Zoom in now you will see: Zoom is acquiring Irish-based employee communications platform Workvivo to boost its asynchronous offerings. Paul WorkVivo wrote that it had the “remote work revolution” on lock, which is probably what got the zoom.

Startups and VCs

James Murdoch’s venture fund Bodty Tree has cut its planned investment in Viacom 18 to $528 million, a 70 percent cut from the $1.78 billion it offered. Manish Reports. Viacom18, a joint venture between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Paramount Global, did not say why Bodi Tree cut its promised investment.

Meanwhile, PBS and a handful of other news organizations have joined NPR on Twitter, the social media platform once synonymous with breaking news. Taylor Reports. After Twitter misleadingly attached an account reserved for state-run media outlets to its account, NPR announced it was leaving the platform entirely.

And we have five more for you:

4 parameters of SaaS participation that attract investors

Image Credits: Tetra mages (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Past performance doesn’t always predict future results, but it’s the best place to find customer retention statistics that interest investors.

According to Oleksandr Yaroshenko, head of investment and strategy at edtech startup Headway, engagement rates for existing customers are “very good predictors of re-registration.”

In this post, he explores gamification strategy and shares ideas for building a “golden set” that represents your target audience.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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Big Tech Inc.

Want to read a 10,000 character tweet? And we won’t – oh wait, you said yes. Well, hold on tight because Twitter is now offering blue subscribers 10,000-character tweets, according to reports. Ivan. If you want to see what a 10,000 character tweet looks like, We got you, boo. How about a 10,000-character TechCrunch article? We stole one from the archives for you.

Moving to Washington state, Uber and Lyft drivers won paid family and medical leave. Rebecca The state Senate has passed legislation that would make it the first in the country to offer such a benefit to motorists, he wrote.

Now here are five more for you: