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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The number of people subscribing to Sony’s PlayStation Plus fell from 47.3 million to 45.4 million this quarter, the company announced in its latest earnings release. It’s the subscription service’s third quarterly decline in a row, and comes despite Sony launching a revamped subscription lineup between May and June this year including new tiers that offer inclusive access to hundreds of games to download and stream.However, while subscriber numbers were down, revenue from “Network Services,” which includes earnings from PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Network advertising revenue, and the now-discontinued PlayStation Now, has increased from 100 billion yen to 117 billion yen (around $679 million to $794 million), year-over-year. These... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two more executives are reportedly on their way out from Apple. According to Bloomberg, vice president of online retail Anna Matthiasson is leaving the company, and Chief Information Officer Mary Demby is retiring.The two women held important roles at Apple; Matthiasson was in charge of Apple’s online store, and Demby managed the tech that ran that store, as well as Apple’s services and manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that Karen Rasmussen will now be in charge of online retail, but says it’s unclear who will be replacing Demby. Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the executives leaving.Demby and Matthiasson are just the latest in a string of higher-ups leaving the company in recent weeks. Evans... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An Instagram outage that started Monday morning has been resolved, Instagram confirmed on its Twitter account. During the outage, Instagram locked users out and told many of them that “we suspended your account on October 31, 2022.” Reports of the issue seemed to have been concentrated among iPhone users, with some saying their app was recently crashing and unusable ahead of an update earlier this morning.“We’ve resolved this bug now — it was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers,” Instagram wrote. “Sorry!” The platform first confirmed the issue on Twitter at 10:14AM ET but didn’t say things were resolved until many hours... Continue reading…

Blizzard The scariest thing in Overwatch 2 right now isn’t the Junkenstein’s Revenge: Wrath of the Bride event but a bugged Mei. Players, take heed and take heart: the demon of quick play, the terror lurking the ladder, the creature of comp is being temporarily disabled to address a glitch.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Elon Musk wants Twitter to make money, and apparently, the first place he’s looking is its power users. Over the weekend, we learned that Musk plans to charge $20 per month for a Twitter verification badge, an update that might be rolled out next month. It’s a change that fits with Musk’s plans to make Twitter’s premium subscription service more valuable for its most active users. But verification serves a central trust-building role for Twitter — and Musk’s proposal could erode that trust just as the platform threatens to spiral out of control.Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a... Continue reading…

Double-tapping the side of the Quest 2 triggers passthrough mode, letting you see what’s happening around you. | GIF by Owen Grove / The Verge Virtual reality is for checking out. The wider the field of vision and the less light peeking in, the better. But as VR becomes more mainstream, there needs to be a way to quickly check back in with reality. A safe word, so to speak, to pull you out of VR, whether you’re feeling overwhelmed by a game or if you want to feel more present.That’s exactly what the passthrough button offers on Meta’s Quest and Quest 2. It’s both a safety tool, as well as a practical one to let you see what’s going on outside of the headset without having to struggle to take it off. After firmly double-tapping either side of the headset where the straps attach to it, a view of your room — albeit a pixelated, monochromatic feed as seen through a handful of... Continue reading…

Jason Voorhees’ iconic hockey mask. | Image: Warner Bros. Pictures It’s been 13 years since Warner Bros.’ last Friday the 13th slasher feature hit theaters, made a bunch of money, and then never led to the sequel many fans expected would follow soon after. Though we may never know what might have come from a sequel to that 2009 film, Bryan Fuller has an idea or two about what Jason Voorhees has been up to in the distant past that’s set to be explored in a new “expanded prequel” series for Peacock.Peacock announced today that Fuller has signed on to write, showrun, and executive produce Crystal Lake, a new Friday the 13th series from A24.In a press release about the new show, Fuller reminisced about how he first became familiar with the Friday the 13th franchise as a kid while reading an issue of F... Continue reading…

Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. | Image: Marvel Studios The way Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Talocan bears little resemblance to the Atlantis of Marvel’s comic books is one of the most intriguing things about the movie and its central villain: the sea-dwelling antiheroic King Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta. Namor’s short shorts, winged feet, and intense hatred of the surface world are all still important parts of his character that Wakanda Forever spotlights with a tale about how he’s moved to lead Talocan to war.But what Huerta was most moved by as he stepped up to the challenge of bringing Namor to the MCU is how Wakanda Forever’s story and its conceptualization of Talocan are celebrations of Latin American identity with a distinct focus on its shared Indigenous and African roots.U... Continue reading…

The Hummer EV e-bike was inevitable. | Image: Recon GMC joined forces with the world’s largest supplier of e-bikes for law enforcement to produce an over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire electric bike to complement its equally over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire Hummer EV truck. It’s the latest sign that automakers are trying to seize on the popularity of e-bikes to help promote the shift to electric vehicles.The Hummer EV all-wheel drive e-bike (as it’s referred to in its press release) features twin 750W hub motors with a peak output of 2,400W, a 48-volt / 17 amp-hour LG-made battery (with an option to upgrade to a 21Ah version) and will be available to purchase either online at gmcebike.com or at GMC dealerships for the price of $3,999. (A little expensive for an e-bike, but... Continue reading…

This tiny new feature has already improved my daily work. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Slack is now rolling out typing indicators in threads, and they’ve already dramatically improved my Slack experience.At The Verge, we use threads a lot. We’re constantly sharing interesting and potentially newsworthy stuff we find around the web, and we use threads to help corral conversations about links or topics into one zone. At any given time, there might be a lot of people talking in one thread, especially with everything going on right now. But because typing indicators used to appear in the main channel even if someone was typing in a thread, it could be hard to tell who might be workshopping a witty one-liner for the thread or drafting something new for the channel.These new in-thread typing indicators handily fix that. The... Continue reading…

Photo by Joao Laet/Getty Images He rose to power by exploiting online platforms — so what happens now that he’s lost? Continue reading…

The side panel is getting an upgrade. | Image: Google Google Chrome has a new sidebar that should make it faster and easier to check out a bunch of search results in a row without having to bounce back and forth between the search page and whatever websites it links to. Google also says that it’s bringing its price tracking feature to desktop after a few months of it being available on mobile versions of the browser.Google’s blog post explains how to access the new sidebar: after you click on a search result, you’ll be taken to the webpage, and a little Google logo will pop up in your address bar. Clicking that button opens the sidebar that shows you results for the search you did to get to the page (though you can search for something new if you like). From there, you can click on... Continue reading…

Outside of stellar game industry coverage, Nibel was best recognized for their Mob Psycho avatar, which displays the titular character Mob against a yellow backdrop. | Image: One / Dark Horse Comics Nibel (@Nibellion) has left the building. The popular Twitter user best known for their steady, reliable stream of gaming industry news and recognizable Mob Psycho avatar announced today that they would be leaving the platform, citing a lack of financial support and concerns over Elon Musk’s leadership.A final message was posted to the now-locked account announcing the departure, definitively saying, “After some introspection, I’ve made the decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere and move on from Twitter. This marks the end of my video games coverage and my active participation in this platform.” Nibel posted a more detailed message to their Patreon subscribers, confirming that the month-old Patreon account would also be... Continue reading…

Gwendoline Christie | Photo by Gareth Cattermole / Getty Images for BFI The second season of Severance has just started filming, and to mark the milestone, we have some new details on the cast. As Deadline reports, there are quite a few fresh faces joining the offices of Lumon Industries for season 2. That includes: Gwendoline Christie, Bob Balaban, Merritt Wever, Alia Shawkat, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and John Noble. That’s a lot of handshakes (available upon request).It’s still not clear when the next season of Severance is due to hit Apple TV Plus; it was first announced in April, just ahead of the season 1 finale. We also have essentially no details on what to expect in season 2, though today, Apple did release this photo of star Adam Scott’s face on Twitter:

Photo by Michael Zelenko / The Verge George Hotz is stepping down from Comma AI. The 32-year-old CEO, who rose to fame under his “geohot” hacker alias when just a teenager, made the announcement on his GitHub page, admitting that he doesn’t feel “capable” to continue running the driver assistance technology company he founded seven years ago.At age 17, Hotz made a name for himself in hacker circles as the first person to carrier unlock the iPhone. A few years later, he got in trouble with Sony for hacking the PlayStation 3 (the company sued and then later settled out of court). In 2015, he got in a fight with Elon Musk, after Musk allegedly tried to hire him, for claiming he could make a better version of Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving software Autopilot. Tesla called... Continue reading…

Image: Activision “We’re not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation” is the message from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer this week. Spencer has recently been discussing the future of Call of Duty if the Activision acquisition clears, and he’s made his clearest comments yet in a new podcast interview with YouTubers Justine and Jenna Ezarik.“As long as there’s a PlayStation out there to ship to, our intent is that we continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation,” says Spencer on the Same Brain podcast. “Similar to what we’ve done with Minecraft, since we’ve owned that, we’ve expanded the places people can play Minecraft. We haven’t reduced the places, and it’s been good for the Minecraft community in my opinion, and I want to do the same as we think about... Continue reading…

Image: Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren is hopping on the battle bus. The brand is the latest fashion house to partner with Fortnite — and as part of the deal, the company’s iconic horse logo has been redesigned with a cartoon llama.There are two sides to the announcement. First, there’s the digital part, with two Lauren-designed in-game outfits that’ll be available in the Fortnite item shop starting on November 5th. You can check them out below: Image: Ralph Lauren There’s also a physical component with a capsule collection of IRL clothes that will be available starting on November 2nd. This will include hats, hoodies, and — of course — polo shirts. The company also says it’s working on a physical version of the boot the in-game characters... Continue reading…

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying satellites for the US Air Force ahead of a launch scheduled for June 24th, 2019, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. | Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images On November 1st, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch into space for the first time since 2019. The giant rocket is slated to send payloads into orbit for the US Space Force tomorrow in a mission called USSF-44.The mission is the first National Security Space Launch for the Falcon Heavy, the Space Force said in an emailed press statement. As with all national security launches, details are sparse. The Falcon Heavy is supposed to send a microsatellite called TETRA-1 into geosynchronous orbit, according to launch details posted on the Kennedy Space Center website. Other than that, not much is known about the satellites that are going up.As with all national security launches, details are sparseFalcon Heavy is scheduled to lift... Continue reading…

TuSimple may have defrauded investors by failing to disclose its ties to a Chinese firm. | Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images Autonomous trucking company TuSimple is under investigation for its ties to a Chinese company, The Wall Street Journal reports. The FBI and SEC are said to be looking into whether the San Diego-based company defrauded investors by financing and transferring technology to Hydron, a company led by one of TuSimple’s founders.It was the latest sign of the hard road ahead for many AV companies, as the industry shrinks, capital dries up, timelines are pushed out, and regulators spot cracks in the system. TuSimple, a leading supplier of autonomous truck technology, is already under scrutiny from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a crash involving one of its trucks earlier this year.It was the latest sign of the hard road... Continue reading…

Billions of voice messages are sent every day. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Over the past few months of peak TV, the voice message has emerged as one of my favorite ways to talk about what I’m watching. I’ll finish this week’s episode of Andor, mute the show’s credits, and immediately start recording a voice message of my thoughts to send to a friend.The main reason we use voice messages (or voice notes, depending on where you are in the world) is their asynchronicity — we don’t have to both be free at the same time to communicate. Sometimes, he’s managed to watch the episode hours or even days before me and has already sent a message for me to listen to, while other times, I’ll be the first one to share my thoughts. But every week, the format is the same. The recording starts with a spoiler warning, and then... Continue reading…

The fastest Fire TV yet offers extensive hands-free voice controls that you can’t get from any other streaming player, but it still puts too many ads in your face Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter’s combatting an increase in hateful tweets after Elon Musk officially acquired the company on Friday. Yoel Roth, the platform’s head of safety and integrity, said on Twitter that the company’s taking action against an “organized effort” to spread hate speech on the platform.According to Roth, a “small number” of accounts posted a rash of tweets containing “slurs and other derogatory terms” over the past two days, with the goal of making users think Twitter’s policies surrounding content moderation have changed. Roth says that just 300 accounts sent out over 50,000 tweets using a “particular slur,” and that almost all of the accounts in question are inauthentic.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Telegram removed the ability for users on iOS to create pay-to-view posts due to Apple’s strict App Store guidelines (via 9to5Mac). In a post on Telegram, CEO Pavel Durov says creators on the platform have been using third-party payment or donation bots to sell access to certain posts on their channels, but that Apple was “not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple.”Apple doesn’t allow developers to use third-party payment processors in their apps and charges up to a 30 percent commission on any in-app purchases. As noted by 9to5Mac, Telegram initially appeared to have been testing a paid posts feature, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. However, Telegram said in a... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales Apple’s new M2-equipped 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros may not arrive until early next year, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. While previous rumors suggested Apple could release the upgraded devices by the end of this year, now Gurman believes they’ll launch in the first half of March.As noted by Gurman, this release window would allow Apple to launch the new MacBooks around the same the macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3 updates come out, which are expected sometime between early February and March. This prediction aligns with Ming-Chi Kuo's tweet from August that suggests Apple could release the new MacBook Pros early next year, as well as a recent rumor from Korean leaker Lanzuk (yeux1122), which also indicates the new... Continue reading…

The Libby app puts thousands of books into your pocket for free. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge I wanted the convenience of ebooks, the curation of a local bookstore, and the affordability of a library. This is how I got it. Continue reading…

The Spin 714 isn’t terrible, but it’s not the champion the 713 was Continue reading…

Season 3 of The Witcher hasn’t even premiered yet. | Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic Although season 3 of The Witcher hasn’t premiered yet, Netflix just announced a major change coming to season 4: Liam Hemsworth is replacing Henry Cavill as the titular Geralt of Rivia. Both actors posted about the change on Instagram, with Liam Hemsworth saying he’s “over the moon about the opportunity to play Geralt of Rivia.” Netflix nor Cavill provided a reason for the casting change.“My journey as Geralt of Rivia has been filled with both monsters and adventures, and alas, I will be laying down my medallion and my swords for Season 4,” Cavill said on Instagram. “In my stead, the fantastic Mr Liam Hemsworth will be taking up the mantle of the White Wolf. As with the greatest of literary characters, I pass the torch with reverence... Continue reading…

The customization options let you take things in some wild new directions with your builds | Image: Alice Newcome-Beill A host of bugs and undercooked features keep the addictive building simulator from reaching its full potential Continue reading…

The 10-inch display on the Google Next Hub Max features a terrific camera and can provide personalized info at a glance. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge This weekend we’re talking about Google devices, specifically Google’s Nest Audio and Nest Hub Max, along with a number of other excellent discounts you might want to take advantage of while you still can.First up we have Google’s compact Nest Audio, which is on sale for $49.99 at Best Buy, Target, and the Google Store, saving you $50 on the smart speaker’s regular price. The compact speaker offers excellent sound quality and can even pair with another Nest Audio to provide stereo sound. While the reliability of its voice controls can be a bit hit or miss, the Nest Audio provides a solid listening experience in an attractive and affordable package. Read our review.You can also find the Google Nest Hub Max on sale at Wellbots, Target,... Continue reading…

The projects you can build with Lego’s Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit, which will be going away by the end of the year. | Image: Lego As reported by Lego fan sites like Brick Fanatics and Brickset, Lego is discontinuing its Mindstorms kits, which are meant to let people make robots out of Lego bricks, pins, beams, motors, gears, and other pieces, and then program using Lego’s control hubs (via Gizmodo). The devices have been sold as a way to let children and adults easily build and program robots since 1998.While the company isn’t completely done with the idea of educational robotics kits, it will stop selling its Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit by the end of this year.The company’s statements suggest there’s an end date on its support for the various apps used to program and control Mindstorms robots on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Fire OS, saying that it’ll... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Organizers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland claim that the company isn’t telling the whole truth when it comes to withholding benefits from workers at the location. As the company’s first retail location to unionize in the US pushes to negotiate a contract, workers say it’s making it difficult for them to bargain for their benefits.In a letter addressed to Tim Cook, the negotiating committee says they’re disappointed to learn the company won’t be offering workers at the location some new health and education benefits that are rolling out to other retail employees. The union also says that Apple has been spreading “misinformation” by saying workers would have to bargain for those benefits to be included in their contract.... Continue reading…