The Verge

Yuji Naka is best known for co-creating the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series, and worked at Square Enix on Balan Wonderworld 2018 and 2021. | Image: Square Enix / YouTube Yuji Naka, the famed co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, has reportedly been arrested in Japan (via Fuji News Network) in connection with an insider trading case involving former Square Enix employees.The scandal centers around former Square Enix employee Taisuke Sazaki, who obtained information that the Dragon Quest Tact mobile game was being jointly created by game developers Square Enix and Aiming. Sazaki and another ex-Square Enix employee, Fumiaki Suzuki, allegedly purchased 162,000 shares in Aiming between December 2019 and February 2020 for approximately 47.2 million yen (around $336,760) prior to the project’s public announcement on February 5th, 2020.

We don’t know how many of Twitter’s employees looked at Elon Musk’s “take three months’ severance or agree to stay and get Xtreme” offer and decided to head for the exits, but by all available accounts, it was a lot of them.As my colleagues Alex Heath and Mia Sato report, the departure of entire important teams leads people who know Twitter well to think that it’s only a matter of time until things break down. According to the New York Times, some “critical” employees were pulled into meetings with Musk and his advisors, who tried to persuade them to stay as the time ticked down.

Illustration: Jovana Mugosa / The Verge Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company. And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack. Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Roku has announced that it’s laying off 200 US employees, or around 7 percent of its workforce, according to Variety. According to the company’s statement, the cuts are meant to reduce its “headcount expenses” by around 5 percent as it tries to spend less on operations in the face of “current economic conditions” in the advertising and streaming industry.In some ways, the move isn’t necessarily surprising — several of Roku’s peers, such as Disney, Netflix, and Meta, have also announced layoffs in recent weeks and months.However, cutting 200 jobs is a much harsher change than the company was predicting just over two weeks ago when it released its Q3 earnings report. Its shareholder letter does call attention to the fact that its staff... Continue reading…

Image: Blizzard Everybody mark your calendars: instead of the Christmas holiday season, it’s gonna be Mei. After a brief hiatus to fix a glitch that allowed Mei’s ice wall to boost players to places they shouldn’t be, today’s Overwatch 2 update added her back to the game alongside a host of other hero tweaks and bug fixes.

Image: 1password 1Password has announced that passkey support will be available to its customers in “early 2023,” allowing users to securely log in to apps and websites without a password.Support for passkeys’ entirely passwordless authentication may seem like a bewildering feature for a password management service, but 1Password isn’t even the first, with Dashlane already integrating passkeys into its own service earlier this year. Apple has already rolled out support for passkeys via the iCloud Keychain in macOS Ventura and iOS 15, and Google recently announced passkey beta testing for Chrome and Android. Microsoft hasn’t announced public testing yet.FIDO Alliance member 1Password said “it may take time” to implement support for passkeysPasskeys are... Continue reading…

The self-assembly option is only available if you bought your Peloton Bike off Amazon. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Peloton is now offering customers the option to assemble their bikes on their own. There are a couple of caveats, though. The option is only available for folks who buy the original Peloton Bike on Amazon, and it doesn’t come with any discounts.We first heard rumors about self-assembly in August. Peloton confirmed it a few weeks later when it announced its partnership with Amazon. Previously, you had to set up a date and time for a white-glove delivery and allow people into your home for installation. According to a Peloton blog, the company decided to explore self-assembly after members said they wanted to be “involved in the set-up process.”Customers who laugh in the face of Allen wrenches can find an 11-minute instructional video... Continue reading…

Basically: they sold all the tickets in the presale. | Photo by Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic Ticketmaster is canceling the upcoming public sale of Taylor Swift tickets after the presale debacle earlier this week. Ticketmaster said it canceled the sale “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” in a tweet Thursday afternoon.Tuesday’s presale for Swift’s The Eras Tour was a disaster, with Ticketmaster crashing following “historically unprecedented demand.” Ticketmaster said millions came to the service to try and buy presale tickets.

Tudum, but Google. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is rolling out a new startup sound that sounds a lot like a Google-y version of Netflix’s “tudum.” You can hear it right here or in the trailer at the top of this post, which also features a slick new startup animation.I wasn’t aware of this sound until Thursday, but Google says in a new blog that you might have already noticed the new sound if you’ve used YouTube on a TV. I just checked the YouTube app on PS5, and sure enough, there it was. But it didn’t play for me on the Apple TV YouTube app.Google’s blog goes into extensive detail about how it designed the sound in partnership with the “sonic branding” studio Antfood. The intention was to make a sound that was:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge General Motors wants to be the biggest seller of electric vehicles in North America (maybe the planet, too?) and so far, it’s burning a lot of cash to get there. But by 2025, the cash burning will officially cease, as the company projects its EV program will be “solidly profitable” by then.The company, which is the largest automaker in North America, outlined the plan to achieve this goal to investors at a splashy event in Manhattan on Thursday. GM said it will sell 1 million EVs annually starting in 2025, and to illustrate this point, it had a variety of electric models on display, including the stunning $300,000 fastback Cadillac Celestiq that was first unveiled last month.Selling 1 million EVs a year will be no easy taskSelling 1... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge BrightDrop, the EV logistics company owned by General Motors, projects it will reach $1 billion in revenue in 2023, making it one of the fastest companies in history to reach that milestone.The announcement was made in advance of a GM investor event, at which the automaker was expected to outline its plan to cover its massive investments in electric vehicle development amid a cooling economy. And it comes just shy of two years since GM announced the creation of BrightDrop as its effort to corner the market on electric delivery vehicles.Since then, the company has released a modest slate of products, including the Zevo 600 electric van, an electric pallet for moving packages, and a suite of fleet management software. And it’s adding... Continue reading…

The Maingear MG-1, Shroud Edition. | Image: Maingear Maingear has quietly hand-built custom gaming PCs in New Jersey for the past 20 years, occasionally landing splashy partnerships to generate intriguing new systems. Now, it’s teaming up with one of the world’s biggest streamers: Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek.Today, the 50-person company is not only revealing a new desktop born out of the Shroud partnership but also a new company logo, as well as the “first full 3D product configurator”. That way, you can spin around a 3D model before you let them charge your credit card for a prebuilt gaming rig.Getting “celebrity creative director” vibes here, but we’ll see!Oh, and one other thing: Maingear says Shroud is now a co-owner of the company, whatever that means. “shroud now owns a significant... Continue reading…

Want the check mark? You may have to wait. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter won’t let accounts less than 90 days old sign up for its Blue subscription service when it relaunches (presumably on the 29th), according to an update to the About Twitter Blue page. This means that you won’t be able to just create a new account and instantly get it verified, which could be a bid to cut down on scams and impersonator accounts like the ones that almost immediately plagued the service the first time the updated Blue launched.The old program didn’t have a set waiting period, according to an archive of the page provided by the Wayback Machine, but it did have a warning that “Twitter accounts created on or after November 9, 2022, will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.” While that restriction... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge The thing that’s under-appreciated about lawyers — largely because they are so annoying — is that they are also writers and often talented ones. And so, in the spirit of literary appreciation, let’s all do a close read of the absolute banger filed today by John J. Ray III in the FTX bankruptcy case.Who’s Ray? He’s the guy running FTX now, and in the filing, he writes:

Zack and the Cactuar may not look as good on older consoles. | Image: Square Enix The remaster of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is out in less than a month, and if you have any recent console platform, you’ll be able to play it. But depending on which console you have, the resolution and frame rate will differ quite a bit, demonstrating just how complex console gaming has become.At the top end — the PS5 and Xbox Series X — you’ll be able to play Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion in 4K at a maximum of 60 frames per second. But if you’re playing on Switch, you’re getting the short end of the stick at 720p and 30fps in both docked and handheld mode. If you have a PS4 or Xbox One, performance will be different depending on which specific model you’re playing on. On Xbox Series S, the maximum resolution will be... Continue reading…

After previously failing to protect England’s Black football players, Meta has posted a statement reiterating its existing policies regarding online abuse ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. | Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images Meta is attempting to get ahead of harassment concerns during the 2022 FIFA World Cup by laying out what the company is doing to protect players and fans from harmful content. Both Facebook and Instagram were criticized last year for failing to protect Black players on England’s national football team from racist abuse, with players being bombarded with harassment during the 2021 European Championship tournament that resulted in a social media boycott from teams and organizations across England.In a blog post today, Meta says it is working with teams and associations like FIFA to teach players how to use anti-harassment features on Instagram, like “hidden words” and “limits.” It also highlights that it introduced new nudges to Instagram... Continue reading…

SpaceX founder Elon Musk during an event on August 25th, 2022, in Boca Chica Beach, Texas. | Photo by Michael Gonzalez / Getty Images A group of former SpaceX employees has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, The New York Times reports. The employees say they were fired illegally after putting together a letter that called on the company to strengthen its “zero-tolerance policies” following sexual harassment allegations against Elon Musk.Nine employees were ultimately fired after the letter came out in June, the Times reports, eight of whom filed the charges with federal regulators. The letter, first reported on by The Verge, asked SpaceX executives for three things: to curb “Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior,” to define and enforce the company’s sexual harassment policies, and ensure that all leadership is held accountable for... Continue reading…

Jabari Banks as Will Smith and Olly Sholotan as Carlton Banks. | Peacock Just in time to mark the anniversary of its season 1 debut on Peacock, Bel-Air is about to return to the streaming service for a second season of stories inspired by the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.After a season of focusing on young Will Smith (Jabari Banks) doing his best to get used to living with his upper-middle-class relatives in all their uber-luxe trappings, Bel-Air’s first season came to a dramatic close by unexpectedly bringing Will’s father Lou (Marlon Wayans) back into the picture. Between seeing his absentee father for the first time in years and learning that most of the adults in his family had been keeping a number of thorny secrets from him, Will came close to calling it quits in LA, and it seemed as if he was... Continue reading…

Businesses can be searched for like preexisting contacts. | Image: Meta WhatsApp is officially launching a new business directory feature across Brazil, the UK, Indonesia, Mexico, and Colombia. Meta says users will either be able to browse by business category (like travel or banking) or else search directly to find companies that are contactable on the service. Those signed up for WhatsApp’s Business Platform across all five countries will appear in the directory, while in Brazil, the directory will also be open to small businesses.The official launch of the feature follows a limited test that WhatsApp conducted in São Paulo, Brazil, last year. The feature is only available on Android in Brazil but is available across both Android and iOS in other countries.“While millions of businesses in Brazil use... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In an email early Wednesday morning, billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk gave the remaining employees at the company an ultimatum. They can stay and sign on to a “hardcore” culture of “long hours at high intensity” or leave. Employees have until 5PM ET today to fill out an online form with their decision.But just hours before the deadline, key questions about the terms of the agreement remained unanswered, with employee livelihoods, visas, and careers hanging in the balance. On Wednesday, confusion reigned as employees sought out answers to how their employment might be affected. How would severance offers work? What would happen to employees on leave or vacation? What about people on visas, for whom their ability to stay in the US... Continue reading…

The Meross Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini may be one of the first Matter devices you can buy. | Image: Meross While Matter has officially launched, you still can’t buy a Matter-compatible device to use with the new smart home standard. Today, smart home device maker Meross announced its Matter Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini, its first Matter-enabled smart plug. You can preorder it now for its release on December 31st.This might be the very first device you can buy with the Matter logo on it, indicating that it's ready to go with Matter out of the box. While some companies have announced updates to existing products — including Eve and Wiz, who have said they will roll out firmware upgrades this year to their existing products — most have said devices with Matter built-in won’t be available to buy until next year. Image: Meross T... Continue reading…

There are some nice new features coming to Google Maps. | Illustration: The Verge Google revealed some initial details about Search with Live View in September, but now it’s announcing the Google Maps augmented reality feature will begin rolling out in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo on Android and iOS beginning next week.The feature shows you things like coffee shops and ATMs when you’re holding up your phone and pointing it at the world around you.If you’re in a city where Search with Live View is available, just tap the camera button in the Google Maps search bar, point your phone’s camera at the buildings and places nearby, and look for the dots that pop up indicating where landmarks are.You can tap on a dot to learn more about it. This one is a little more easily understood in... Continue reading…

Old skewl meets new skewl with Google 3D and AR shopping. | Image: Google It’s now possible to use Google search for more than just Taylor Swift ticket queries: starting today in the US, the search engine will use augmented reality to help you find the perfect pair of shoes from the comfort of your home. The search giant is also making its AR beauty feature more inclusive and easier to use.As what appears to be a part of the reinvention of Google’s search engine, Google now displays 360-degree 3D views of sneakers after first introducing the feature during September’s Search On event. You can zoom in on the details, spin the shoes around, and use AR to see what they’d look like in your own space. Google now lets you shop for some sneaker brands like Vans in 3D and AR. For now, though,... Continue reading…

Microsoft’s “holiday” packaging for the Xbox Series S. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is dropping the price of its Xbox Series S console to $249.99 for the holidays. The new promotional price starts today and includes special holiday-themed packaging. It’s part of a series of Black Friday deals from Microsoft that includes up to $300 off the new Surface Laptop 5, $200 off select Surface Pro 9 models, and up to 67 percent off Xbox digital games.While we saw the Xbox Series S drop as low as $249 in a limited offer that lasted just hours at Woot earlier this year, Microsoft’s official promotion means Best Buy, the Microsoft Store, and other retailers will all be offering the console at this promotional price. Target is even bundling a $50 gift card with its own Xbox Series S deal.Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer... Continue reading…

Motional Motional, the autonomous vehicle joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, is bringing its robotaxis to Los Angeles, where they will be available to hail through the Lyft app.The service is comprised of Motional’s fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicles, which will be fully autonomous at the time of launch and not require a human safety driver behind the wheel.The company would not say when exactly the service will go live, though. “We plan to reveal timing when we are closer to launch,” a Motional spokesperson said. Previously, Motional said it wouldn’t deploy fully autonomous vehicles until 2023, so it’s probably safe to assume that LA residents won’t be able to hail one of the company’s vehicles until at least January.LA will... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is tweaking Android to offer a new prompt in the face of software crashes that reminds you to update your damn apps.“Update the app to fix crashes,” the prompt says, according to Esper’s senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman. “The app stopped working, but the latest update for the app may fix the issue. Install the update and then open the app again.”Obviously the prompt is only going to help if an app isn’t already fully updated. If you’re already running its latest version and it’s still crashing, then frustratingly it’s likely that a fix isn’t available (yet). Still, given the amount of times I’ve personally been able to resolve crashing issues with a simple update, I’m hoping that the new prompt will be more helpful than... Continue reading…

Pokémon Go developer Niantic has unveiled its latest tech demo showing off what it thinks could be the future of augmented reality gaming. The trailer, which apparently depicts “actual headset gameplay” shows a handful of players wearing AR glasses as they interact with shared virtual objects, including game elements as well as more practical virtual signage, while out and about. A couple of the players appear to be interacting with the game using handheld motion controllers, but there’s no sign of anyone needing to directly use a smartphone to play.The trailer was released to coincide with several announcements made at this year’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit. These include a new processor from the mobile chip giant, a new reference... Continue reading…

A trainer riding Koraidon, one of the new additions to Pokémon Violet and Scarlet. | Image: Nintendo The latest Pokémon release is a big, expansive adventure that also pushes the Nintendo Switch to its limits. Continue reading…

Qualcomm has announced a new subbrand of CPUs for its Snapdragon family of products, called Oryon. The new CPU will be released in 2023 and available to manufacturers to use in devices such as Windows PCs, smartphones, and other applications. The company announced the new CPU at its Snapdragon Summit on Wednesday, but provided few details about what it entails.The company has made Snapdragon-branded chips for Windows and Chrome OS computers for a few years now but has had slow traction getting them into many Windows devices. The few ultraportable computers that have used Qualcomm’s Arm chips have been niche, premium devices that appeal to a specific subset of PC buyers, but not the broader market. Image: Qualcomm ... Continue reading…

This is a photo of Aoki performing in Las Vegas, not at the Amazon event. | Photo by David Becker/Getty Images Amazon may have just confirmed that it would be laying off employees, but it seems to still have room for a Steve Aoki concert. On Wednesday evening, the superstar DJ performed a live concert for what appeared to be a group of Amazon warehouse employees, and the whole thing was streamed on the AmazonVestLife Twitch channel.We learned this was happening at all thanks to the New York Times’ Karen Weise, who tweeted about the performance shortly before it wrapped up. But it seems the concert wasn’t exactly a secret, as the “amazonvestlife” Instagram (which, like the Twitch channel, describes itself as the “official account for Amazon associates”) posted a story featuring Aoki to promote the show earlier on Wednesday. The DJ gave a shoutout... Continue reading…

Image: Toyota Toyota’s Prius has long been the ugly duckling of the eco-car market, but the automaker is finally delivering a version that’s easier on the eyes. The redesigned fifth-generation 2023 Prius was just revealed in Japan, with a sportier coupe-like look to hide that it’s still a four-door compact with hybrid and plug-in hybrid options.It’s certainly prettier, no doubt — the 1997 Prius was the first mass-produced hybrid electric vehicle, but it wasn’t very visually appealing, nor were any of the successive iterations. Toyota says this new one follows the “monoform silhouette” design introduced in the second-generation Prius (2003-2009), and the development team started from scratch to create a “Hybrid Reborn” concept that heavily informs... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The lending arm of the cryptocurrency brokerage Genesis is suspending redemptions and new loan originations as it deals with a wave of withdrawals following the fall of FTX. In a statement on Twitter, Genesis says the “abnormal withdrawal requests” have exceeded its “current liquidity.”FTX, which was once the third biggest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, filed for bankruptcy last week, causing panic to ripple through the crypto community as investors pull their funds from other exchanges in fear that they might suffer the same fate. This influx of withdrawals hit Genesis as well, which revealed last week that it has $175 million locked up in FTX.