The Verge

Evo 2025, the biggest fighting game tournament in North America, starts this weekend. If you tune into one of the nine different Evo Twitch channels, you'll see some of the top players in the world compete in fighting game staples like Street Fighter and Tekken and newer games like Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves [...]

Just about every piece of hardware that Nintendo sells is getting a little more expensive in the US - with the exception of the Switch 2. That includes all models of the original Switch, a bunch of accessories, and even a motion-activated alarm clock. The changes were made ahead of sweeping Trump administration tariffs that [...]

Google is largely reversing course on its plans to discontinue support for all shortened goo.gl URLs on August 25th. Goo.gl URLS that already show a message saying that they will be deactivated in August will still stop working - the company started showing the deactivation message nine months ago on URLs that showed no activity [...]

On Friday, Anthropic debuted research unpacking how an AI system's "personality" - as in, tone, responses, and overarching motivation - changes and why. Researchers also tracked what makes a model "evil." The Verge spoke with Jack Lindsey, an Anthropic researcher working on interpretability, who has also been tapped to lead the company's fledgling "AI psychiatry" [...]

Yesterday, when Epic won its Google antitrust lawsuit for a second time, it wasn't quite clear how soon Google would need to start dismantling its affirmed illegal monopoly. Today, Google admits the answer is: 14 days. Google has just 14 days to enact major changes to its Google Play app store, and the way it [...]

Verizon just announced a three-year price lock in April, but now the company has confirmed that it's making some adjustments" that will raise the cost of your phone bill anyway. In a statement to The Verge, Verizon spokesperson Adria Tomaszewski says the vast majority" of customers will see a price hike of less than 30 [...]

Reddit is pausing its plans to let people make subreddits with content behind a paywall, CEO Steve Huffman said as part of Thursday's earnings. The company is making the change as part of a shift in how it's prioritizing its resources. Huffman said last year that the company was looking into a way for users [...]

Nintendo is raising the price of the original Switch family of systems and products," the company announced on Friday. Along with the first-generation Nintendo Switch, the price change also affects the Switch OLED, Switch Lite, and select" accessories. Nintendo hasn't confirmed what the new prices are, but, as pointed out by Wario64, Target's website briefly [...]

There's a new turn in the itch.io story. In a forum post, itch.io creator and founder Leaf Corcoran has notified users that the company has begun the process of restoring thousands of NSFW pages that were deindexed - that is, content that has been removed from search results and recommendation lists. The catch is that [...]

Startup Brilliant Labs has announced a successor to its $349 open-source Frame smart glasses, which debuted early last year with features like AI-powered translations and the ability to identify what you were looking at. Its new $299 Halo smart glasses are priced closer to Meta's entry-level Ray-Ban models and come with upgraded AI capabilities, including [...]

Ryan Coogler's first Black Panther feature set itself apart by pushing audiences to think about how comic book heroes and villains would fit into a world shaped by horrors like the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Black Panther and its 2022 sequel, Wakanda Forever, used their characters to comment on our reality's complicated and oftentimes ugly history [...]

The Trump administration may have just axed the IRS Direct File program. During a summit earlier this week, IRS Commissioner Billy Long said the free tax filing service is gone," adding that big beautiful Billy wiped that out," as reported earlier by Bloomberg Law. President Donald Trump's Big Beautiful Bill includes a provision to establish [...]

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 11 SE next year, five years after it launched the operating system on low-cost laptops that were designed to compete with Google Chromebooks. Windows 11 SE was only available on devices for education customers, such as schools, and it was supposed to convince them not to switch to Chrome [...]

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wanted to make Google dance two years ago, with an AI overhaul of Bing that was designed to steal Google's all-important search market share. Now, there are plenty of signs that Microsoft has successfully taken search share off Google, both in the US and worldwide. Earlier this week Microsoft reported that [...]

Samsung smart TVs appear to be functioning normally again after experiencing a global outage yesterday. Users across Reddit and Samsung's community forum started reporting issues with their TVs at around 5PM ET on Thursday, finding themselves unable to open apps like YouTube, Apple TV, Hulu, and Prime Video. While apps were still visible on the [...]

Nintendo's financial year is off to a bumper start thanks to explosive sales of its Switch 2 console. Following its launch in June, the Switch 2 console has now sold 5.82 million units according to Nintendo's Q1 earnings report, more than double the 2.7 million unit sales achieved by the original Switch in its first [...]

LeapFrog has announced a new electronic learning system that swaps controllers for a camera. In fact, the LeapMove looks like an oversized, kid-friendly webcam, but is designed to connect to TVs like a console and get kids off the couch using educational games that require full-body movements to play. It's reminiscent of the Xbox Kinect [...]

Apple has been the target of a fair amount of criticism over the past year, from its AI missteps to a strong distaste for its new design ethos. But the numbers don't lie, and if Apple knows how to do anything it's sell iPhones. Specifically, three billion of them, as CEO Tim Cook announced on [...]

Apple is spending a lot on President Donald Trump's tariffs. During an earnings call on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the duties could add $1.1 billion to its costs during the September quarter. Cook says Apple has already spent around $800 million during the June quarter, which is less than the $900 million that [...]

Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company is open" to mergers and acquisitions as it significantly" increases its investment in AI, as reported by CNBC. Cook's statements were made alongside the release of Apple's third-quarter earnings results, which revealed that the iPhone maker raked in $94 billion between April and June, marking a 10 percent [...]

During the most recent Prime Day, the Google Pixel Tablet with Wi-Fi and 256GB of storage briefly dropped to just $309 ($190 off) - but the deal disappeared in a matter of hours. Fast forward to today, and the deal is back, but this time it's available at Best Buy. Unfortunately, the discount is for [...]

Reddit knows that it has valuable data from actual people - it's already reached deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share its data with them. But Reddit is also investing in improving its own search capabilities, and in its latest note to investors, CEO Steve Huffman says that the company is [...]

We knew DJI had a hard time importing its drones into the United States to the point that many shelves have gone bare, but it's not just drones anymore. Today marks the first time it's formally skipping the US with a non-drone product, its 8K Osmo 360 camera - and it's not clear if it [...]

Following an appeals court victory on Thursday, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that the Epic Games Store for Android will be coming to the Google Play Store." This is despite Google's plan to appeal the Ninth Circuit panel's decision, which declined to overturn a 2023 jury verdict that Google's app store and payment system had [...]

Aaron Sorkin is writing and directing a follow-up to The Social Network, and Jeremy Strong is reportedly the lead candidate to play Mark Zuckerberg. According to Deadline, Sources say no formal offer has been presented but that he is the top choice to play the Facebook founder." Jesse Eisenberg played Zuckerberg in the first film. [...]

Tesla's newly launched ridehailing service in San Francisco isn't quite ready for the robotaxi" designation. After launching its robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, with a safety monitor" in the passenger seat last month, a video of Tesla's service in San Francisco shows a vehicle arriving with a human at the wheel, as reported earlier by [...]

Epic has won again. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will not overturn the unanimous jury verdict from 2023 that Google's app store and payments system have become illegal monopolies - and it appears to be pressing play on a previously paused permanent injunction that would crack open Android to undo those monopolies. Total victory [...]

Believe it or not, summer break is winding down and it's almost time to head back to school. It's sad, I know, but look at the bright side: retailers like Amazon are using the occasion as an excuse to launch yet another sale. We're not complaining, mainly because the deals encompass a wide range of [...]

Microsoft's stock price has risen so much today that it has passed a $4 trillion market valuation for the first time in its 50-year history. The software maker is the second company to be valued at $4 trillion, after Nvidia reached a market cap of over $4 trillion earlier this month. Microsoft has reached this [...]

Ford is preparing a major electric vehicle announcement that CEO Jim Farley calls a Model T moment," as reported earlier by InsideEVs. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Farley said the company will reveal plans to design and build a breakthrough" EV, along with a new platform, at an August 11th event in Kentucky. Even [...]

It's always a risk betting on new video game hardware from a little-known company: what if game developers never show up? But the $50 Thumby Color, on sale this week, is an easier sell - the two-inch handheld is cute as a button, fits on your keychain, and lets aspiring programmers build and publish games [...]

GuliKit is following the release of its $49.99 Elves 2 Pro controller with a slightly cheaper alternative that brings a feature that's still somewhat rare among third-party gamepads: remotely waking the Switch 2. The new GuliKit Elves 2 sacrifices some of the Pro's more premium features like advanced haptics, but for $29.99 - available now [...]

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge.Today, I'm joined by Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter. We're talking about the AI talent wars and why some researchers are suddenly getting traded like they're NBA superstars. If you've been paying attention at [...]

We've already seen what every Pixel 10 model looks like, and now we might know the pricing, too. A new leak from Android Headlines suggests the base Pixel 10 with 128GB of storage will have the same $799 starting price as its predecessor, while the rest of the lineup isn't seeing any major changes, either. [...]

About two years ago, we ran an article in which Verge staffers talked about their favorite backpacks and other bags. It's time for a new one, and so we asked the staff to tell us about their favorite travel packs, day-to-day bags, and other ways to carry stuff around. Here's what they told us. Backpacks [...]

Nvidia is releasing a new GeForce Game Ready Driver today that expands support for Windows 10 devices, alongside some games and G-Sync displays. Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support will now be available for GeForce RTX GPUs until October 2026, a year beyond when Microsoft is planning to stop supporting the operating system on October [...]

It was a sweltering Sunday in Brooklyn. Instead of being wasteful and spending $10 on a five-minute Uber, I decided to walk the 20 minutes to a cutesy Japanese stationery cafe with an even cutesier name. Despite the 85 percent humidity, my vanity demanded I wear a full face of makeup with a snatched nose [...]

It's been a little over a month since the Switch 2 launched, and Nintendo's ready to share more of the games coming to the console. Today's Nintendo Direct presentation will be a short one at only 25 minutes long, and focused exclusively on third-party games. It's likely that Hades 2 will make an appearance. The [...]

DJI has announced the company's first 360-degree action camera designed to compete with the Insta360 X5 and the aging GoPro Max (which the company is planning to replace soon). The new DJI Osmo 360 slightly edges out the X5's recording capabilities by capturing 8K videos at 50fps instead of 30fps, and features a design that's [...]

The menus on your next Uber Eats order may be embellished using generative AI. The food delivery service is rolling out new features that aim to help businesses advertise and communicate with customers, which include AI additions to menu descriptions, food photos, and review summaries, along with a live chat tool and payments for user-submitted [...]

Microsoft first started using the "Xbox PC" term in a blog post announcing the Gears of Wars remaster in early May. It was a new branding effort designed to signal that games are available on PC through its own Xbox PC app and store. The Xbox PC branding didn't last long though, as Microsoft has [...]

Mark Zuckerberg's AI hiring spree is costing a lot of money. His investors don't care. Meta's stock price shot up over 10 percent on Wednesday after the company reported better-than-expected earnings. Revenue generated in the second quarter was $47.5 billion, up 22 percent from a year ago. Daily users across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp [...]

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that will suspend the de minimis exemption - which allows packages with goods valued less than $800 to enter the US duty-free - for all countries. Earlier this year, Trump ended the de minimis exemption for goods from China and Hong Kong. The White House says [...]

Have you ever wondered what bops powerful figures are listening to on Spotify? You'd be amazed what you can get with a profile search - but just in case you want them all in one place, there's the Panama Playlists, a newly published collection of data on the musical listening habits of politicians, journalists, and [...]

Microsoftjust postedthe fourth and final quarter of its 2025 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $76.4 billion in revenue and a net income of $27.2 billion during Q4. Revenue is up 18 percent, and net income has increased by 24 percent. Like clockwork, cloud services are the strong point of Microsoft's revenue this quarter. [...]

Analogue's 4K remake of the Nintendo 64 has been delayed again and again due to the US tariff situation. But at least you can get 8BitDo's updated take on the N64 controller, which was announced alongside the Analogue 3D, while you wait. You can get one through Amazon in white or black for $39.99 and [...]

Ziff Davis, the media conglomerate that owns outlets like CNET, ZDNet, PCMag, and Mashable is laying off 15 percent of its unionized workforce, for a total of 23 people. The majority of layoffs are coming from CNET, where 19 people will lose their jobs - even as Ziff Davis goes on a shopping spree. The [...]

Dropbox is discontinuing its password manager. The tool, Dropbox Passwords, will be discontinued on October 28th, and the company is recommending that you transfer your passwords to another app like 1Password ahead of that date. The company will shut down Dropbox Passwords in phases. Starting August 28th, Dropbox Passwords will be view-only from both the [...]

Roblox and Fortnite are two of the biggest games around, and a huge part of why is because they aren't just one game: instead, they're vast platforms where you can party up with your friends, dress up in ridiculous digital outfits, and quickly jump from one experience to another. Back in the day, Fortnite copied [...]