As Summer Game Fest draws to a close, it’s a great time to reflect. Not just about the cool games we saw announced (and there were a bunch), but also about an industry that, in recent years, has reached exciting new creative and artistic heights alongside deeply depressing lows in the form of layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures. Xbox reveals its introspection in broad daylight. New CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty penned a public memo to the gaming company’s employees to mark the first 100 days of Sharma’s tenure at the helm of Xbox. The takeaway…
Author: Woozad
The French publisher would try to reduce its costs without leaving aside key franchises like Rainbow Six: Siege. Alex Van Aken/Shutterstock After a series of layoffs in January and February, Ubisoft is reportedly once again restructuring its studios and laying off staff. According to The gaming businessthe publisher is closing its studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade, while laying off staff in Barcelona. The layoffs also affect staff at Ubisoft’s San Francisco offices, which ended their development studio operations in 2024 but still house some of the company’s IT and marketing teams, Insider games reports. The Winnipeg…
This remake of the story of the first game will be released on consoles on July 28. We are about six weeks away from the launch of Halo: Campaign Evolvedwhich is a remake of the single-player campaign from the very first game in the franchise. You know what that means: Marketing is starting to heat up. Xbox just released three robust gameplay videos, as well as a blog, that highlight various mechanics. The first video highlights the many ways players can modify gameplay to suit their tastes and preferred difficulty level. Each mission can be completed alone or with a…
I got a sense of this new approach from the game’s prologue, which served as an extended tutorial. As Blake, I had to maneuver through the dead forested area of the planet to reach the crashed module. Compared to the eerie silence of Sevastopol Station, the colony is noisy and chaotic, with limited visibility of the world beyond. With time running out to reach the module before a flood hit, I had to carefully maneuver through the debris field to reach the crash site. Inside the module, my gaming memories Extraterrestrial: isolation came running back. Much like the original film…
The delayed reboot comes to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC on February 23. Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios Xbox has shared a lengthy gameplay video for Fablewhich shows what the developers at Playground Games call the Living Population system. It’s about the over 1,000 non-playable, fully voiced characters in the action RPG, and how your interactions with them (and your actions in the wider world) affect how they perceive and react to you. Playground says these NPCs each have their own personalities and daily lives, all of which the studio hand-designed. Your character (who others simply…
Amanda Alamsyah/Shutterstock Long-time iPhone users may be familiar with the crescent or half-moon symbol that appears in the iPhone’s status bar, assuming they’ve used the handset’s Do Not Disturb or Focus mode at least once. New iPhone buyers might be surprised to see it after enabling a Focus mode for the first time, however. The symbol is called the Do Not Disturb icon, according to Apple, and it was first used for Do Not Disturb mode introduced in 2012 via iOS 6. Nearly a decade later, Apple’s iOS 15 introduced…
This is why we can’t have nice things. Valve Valve will not renew its stock of physical gift cards for Steam. The gaming company predicts that the cards will be completely gone from retailer shelves by the end of 2026. In an update to one of its support pages, Valve explained that it was making this change in response to scammers. Using gift cards to extract money from people has become a common enough trend that the Federal Trade Commission has an FAQ on the practice. In Valve’s case, it appears that the company’s increasing measures…
The smarter, better version of Siri is finally here, available on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate. Updates are limited to developers at the moment, but there’s plenty to look forward to this fall. Personal Context is a Siri feature that sets Siri AI apart from other chatbots like Claude and OpenAI. Siri has access to your iPhone’s data, from emails and messages to photos and files. Siri can find whatever you’re looking for. Apple has rebuilt its search index for Siri AI, and it’s more comprehensive for a better search experience. Siri can see what’s on your…
Buradaki/Getty Images This year’s Artemis II mission was special, breaking records, marking historic firsts and reigniting interest in space exploration for many who watched from the ground. But while many people are looking to the Moon and Mars, NASA is also planning to explore Venus in the coming years. Tentatively scheduled for 2030, the DAVINCI mission intends to study our closest planetary neighbor with flybys and an atmospheric probe that will collect information during its descent to the surface, marking the first landing on Venus since 1984. Throughout the 1970s…
Joan Cros Garcia – Corbis/Getty Images A new law introduced in Pennsylvania would require manufacturers and retailers to include an indicator light on all new smart glasses or other wearable recording devices built or sold in the state. It would also make it illegal to turn off the indicator after the wearable is sold (although you might want to revisit ways to know if you’re being recorded by smart glasses, regardless). House Bill 2603 was introduced in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the lower house of the Pennsylvania state legislature…