The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.
I don't know if I've laughed more at a headline than when I sat down with a coffee this morning and saw "Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse".
The Verge today quoted Microsoft executive VP and marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi in saying the company’s vision is to “rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.” Do you want this? I sure as shit don’t want this, and I especially don’t want to be strong-armed into it so Microsoft can fudge the numbers on its AI products’ popularity.
This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
When searching for the blog post that kicked off the marketing beat earlier today, I noticed it has been removed from Xbox Wire.
Nick is a winningly benign presence at the heart of the wasteland. Infused with the memories of a pre-war cop and now running his own detective agency, he exemplifies the best of humanity.
Epic had the means to just shut Fortnite down and come up with a new title to compete with PUBG, but it had the restraint to rethink its strategy and greatly overhaul Fortnite to overcome its own shortcomings and innovate.
While a great many things have changed in the games business in the past few decades, certain basic principles remain unyielding.
I love Capcom's approach to nostalgia here, the way it frequently finds its way into the core mechanics of Requiem.
Highguard is now confirmed to be the latest in a long line of failed live-service shooters, after an announcement today.
In early 2025, when Bluepoint again pitched the idea of Bloodborne remake, the studio was told that the numbers made sense but FromSoftware didn’t want it to happen, according to people familiar with the process.
How has Waymo the technical ability to self-drive a motor vehicle around a city carrying human passengers, but they do not possess the skill to automate closing a door?
When a game like Highguard, with its Apex Legends creators and reported Tencent funding, comes out and just kind of flops, you have to wonder what happened to get it to this point.
After a disastrous series of events dating back to the launch of the Xbox One and repeated entreaties from us to lay off a few high-paid executives instead of thousands of workers, somebody has finally taken the hint: Phil Spencer.
Bluepoint Games, an American studio specialising in remakes like the God Of War Collection, the Ico & Shadow Of The Colossus bundle, Uncharted Collection and Demon's Souls, has been shut down by Sony...
Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site.
Apologies to all fans of Harry from Disco Elysium, but the best alcoholic in all of videogames is a hamburger-gutted spaceship engineer who spends most of his time looking simply furious.
"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.
Maybe we don’t need the Turing test, because there’s a mighty obstacle that’s proving far more challenging to AI models’ supposedly burgeoning intelligence: running a vending machine without going comically off the rails.
Multiple developers from Wildlight, maker of the online shooter Highguard, have posted on Linkedin today that they've been laid off, just two weeks after the game's release.
Horses developer Santa Ragione has responded to comments from an Epic Games Store executive claiming he "made provably incorrect statements about the game's content".
For quite some time now, investors have fought the suggestion that the artificial intelligence industry may be forming a massive bubble, risking an eventual collapse of epic proportions that could take down the US economy with it.
That article points out that Rutschlé doesn’t place the full blame on Guillemot, but he adds, “It’s his company, at the end of the day. … But everyone around him are just yes men.” He continues, “I expect nothing from this guy.”
Despite being approached "many times", Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has so far said no to a Stardew Valley film or TV adaptation.
A financially successful, breakout indie hit can be transformative for its developers.
The Steam Machine was supposed to be out pretty soon, along with the Steam Controller and Steam Frame, but Valve announced today that not only has all this hardware's release been delayed, but that it'll probably be more expensive whenever it comes out, too.
Amidst national turmoil, the Dodgers might abandon a century-old tradition of reigning World Series champions visiting the White House.
Microsoft is taking a pounding in the stock market.
An Assassin's Creed designer who publicly spoke out against Ubisoft's return-to-office mandate claims the company have now fired him.
INTERTAPES is an updating collection of found cassette tapes from different locations. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more.
Good morning, passengers. You’re on the maiden voyage of Mothership, a gaming site for her, them, and yes, him too.
“Ubisoft remains dedicated to our mission of over-hiring after a mild success, panicking, and executing the seemingly endless mass layoffs that we’ve always been known for.”
The organizational restructuring, which has been in the works for a year, is designed to help the French publisher “reclaim its creative leadership” and “drive a sharp rebound”, following a turbulent few years of disappointing game launches and plummeting stock value, which recently resulted in a minority sale to Tencent.
Twenty-four hours after artists called foul the AI-friendly policy, Comic-Con updated the language on its site. “Material created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) either partially or wholly, is not allowed in the art show,” it now says. AI is now banned at the art show.
Those are just a few ideas off the top of our heads. And they all feel potentially more impactful than using ads as a way to let Xbox players stream copies of games they already purchased.
The drawbacks of our dependence on US tech companies have become more obvious with every passing year, but now there can hardly be any denying that where we can pry ourselves away from them, we should make the effort to do so.
Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gamble on the metaverse, which involved renaming the company from Facebook to Meta in 2021, has gone nowhere.
I saw a brilliant comment on the Anthem subreddit, which is awash with fond farewells at the moment, in which someone described the game as the "greatest What If game" there's ever been, and they're right.
The simple, disarming intimacy of being understood. Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You is the kind of romance where letting the long fuse of this oddball relationship burn at its own pace is part of the delight.
"Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology," the companies said, in a statement. "These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year."
The Liberal government has continued to use X despite the controversy.
Truly pathetic. Not sure why I expected anything less.
Elon Musk and anyone at X or xAI directly working on that functionality should be criminally held to account for the consequences of their actions.
The mystery involves a series of spider webs across the map, as well as other symbols that the Red Dead Redemption 2 community believes are pointing to a bigger mystery.
While it's true that Steam numbers don't tell the whole story and that other platforms are important to keep in mind, Arena Reloaded's low numbers do combine with the mixed reviews and controversies to paint a worrying picture for the game's future. Hope that silly hat was worth it.
This is a man drunk on repulsive levels of executive pay and global power, whose brain has been turned to mush by Linkedin and executive self-improvement podcast speak to the point where he writes shit like this down and, instead of recoiling in horror at the first re-read, hitting delete, looking at himself in the mirror and leaving it all behind to go live in the woods decides to publish it for the world to see.
We’ve been living with ChatGPT and its competitors for over three years now. There is no excuse for professional reporters to not understand the basic mechanics of what these systems are and aren’t. When a chatbot generates text, that is not a corporate statement. When you need a corporate statement, you contact the corporation. And when the corporation responds with “Legacy Media Lies,” that’s your story.
How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.
Apple has been subject to a lot of criticism over its AI strategy, especially after it delayed several powerful Siri upgrades earlier this year.
The big earner is Absolute Batman, Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’s very viral ongoing that sees a blue collar (and pretty big) Bruce Wayne fight crime and reinvented versions of his classic enemies in Gotham.
As welcome as Leon’s return will be, however, it also raises the question of what the game could have been, had Capcom chosen not to invoke fan service and instead gone with an entirely original cast of playable characters.
In a video posted to BlueSky over the weekend, Six One’s Mike Towndrow stated that Sandfall told the IGAs that no gen-AI had been used in the creation of Clair Obscur, only admitting that in fact it had been on the day of the awards.
With the release of Google’s new video generating AI Nano Banana Pro, dorky nerds the world over are using the AI tool to make it look like they’re chummy with loads of cool and famous people — a perfect encapsulation of their desperation to be accepted by the artists they love, and the culture at large.
“Obviously, real competition won’t happen, and consumers won’t benefit, when Apple abuses its position between users and competitors to obstruct honest dealing between them. This is another sad day in the history of relationships between platform makers, developers, and consumers, and we will be raising our complaints with the Japanese Fair Trade Commission.”
Dude knows a thing or two about dishonesty.
Games That Weren’t has preserved and shared a build of the game in its most complete state possible – taken at the point it was cancelled – and it’s believed this version may finally be playable from start to finish.
Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large.
SEAL — Shadow Emergency Alliance Internal Directive 047-EX All footage was captured from live operational environments (codename: RTX4090). Should you detect...
The horrors of the Oldest House have spilled out into New York City, Jesse is MIA, and Dylan must bash his way through it all to find her in a Devil May Cry-esque manner. Interesting enough a setup, but I am bothered by one thing: Remedy say you don't need to play the first game to play this one.
Remedy Entertainment describes the in-game Manhattan as a “expansive, unfamiliar world as an invading cosmic force reshapes the environment, defiles natural law and distorts gravity, reordering reality into a geophysical nightmare.”
From blockchain to "metaverse" and now to artificial intelligence — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can't seem to prioritize effectively, and the cracks are starting to shine through.