The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’re a Comcast TV and internet user, prepare for price hikes. The company is planning to increase the prices of a variety of services starting January 1st, 2021, according to Ars Technica and a document detailing the various price increases being shared on Reddit.The increases include as much as $4.50 per month added to the “Broadcast TV” fee and up to $2 per month added to the Regional Sports Network (RSN) fee, which collectively would add as much as $78 per year.In a statement to Ars Technica, a Comcast spokesperson confirmed the above fees, as well as a $3 per month increase for internet-only service and up to a $2.50 per month increase for TV boxes on the primary outlet, with a decrease of up to $2.45 per month for TV boxes... Continue reading…

Photo by Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images On October 24th, 2020, an art trafficker in Darnah, Libya posted a series of unusual ads. For sale: a Greco-Roman statue, its marble bust covered in a toga. If it looked like it belonged in a museum, that’s because it did. The seller posted photos of the piece in private Facebook groups dedicated to trafficking antiques.The black market for looted goods is flourishing on Facebook. While the company banned the sale of historical artifacts in June, many of the posts are in Arabic, and Facebook lacks the expertise to properly enforce its new policy. Photo courtesy of Athar Project When Facebook is able to identify groups that flout its guidelines, experts say the company simply deletes them, expunging crucial... Continue reading…

A slate of new emoji was announced in January. Months later, they’ve finally trickled onto most people’s phones... but in one case, it’s really more of a skitter. I’m talking about the cockroach, arguably the most shudder-inducing emoji of 2020 — and the product of a great little short story about the looming end of the world.As my colleague Jay Peters and an excellent 2019 documentary explain, anyone can submit an emoji proposal to the Unicode Consortium. The proposal must convince the consortium that many people will use the emoji in a variety of ways. And for the authors of the cockroach application — Jason Li, Melissa Thermidor, and Amanda Hickman — that includes the aftermath of a nuclear war.It starts with a line from the opening... Continue reading…

Get the Surface Laptop Go at an early Black Friday discount. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Black Friday week has arrived, and that means you can pick up some Microsoft products at their lowest prices of the year. Whether you’re looking for Surface Pro tablets, Xbox accessories, Windows laptops, or PC games, you’ll find discounts left and right at the Microsoft Store and other retailers such as Best Buy.We’ve collected the best deals you can find on Microsoft products, and they’re all significantly lower-than-usual prices. We’ve also included some deals on Windows computers that are available for a good price. As more deals appear as the big day approaches, we’ll add them to this post.If you’re looking for even more Black Friday sales, be sure to check out our article rounding up all of the best deals across a variety of... Continue reading…

It’s your first (and hopefully last) Thanksgiving holiday during a pandemic, and you might be looking for some kind of outlet for your newfound stress. Well, you’re in luck: New York Times Games is streaming collaborative crosswords on Twitch right now.This collaborative take on the NYT’s online crosswords works kind of like Twitch Plays Pokémon, relying on chat inputs from viewers watching the stream. (Of course, in this case, you’re entering in crossword answers rather than picking moves in a pokémon battle.) Commands are formatted like “23d barn” meaning “the answer for 23 down is barn.” From there, the game is smart enough to select the correct boxes and fill them in. It’s designed by Sam Von Ehren, an NYT game designer.The game... Continue reading…

Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Square Enix, the studio behind the Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Tomb Raider games, says it’ll allow most of its employees to work from home permanently. The policy comes into effect on December 1st and will see its employees designated as either “home-based” or “office-based.” In its announcement, the company says it expects around 80 percent of its employees to be designated as home-based from December.The company gives a number of reasons for making the policy permanent. These include creating a “flexible and diverse working environment,” helping employees “achieve the optimal work-life balance,” and helping to “bolster productivity.” It also hopes the policy will help it better adapt in the future, whether it’s to disasters or... Continue reading…

Watching the original Animaniacs today is probably the closest you can get to scrolling through a TikTok feed from the mid-’90s. The madcap variety show was like Looney Tunes by way of golden-age Saturday Night Live, a pre-social media era meme factory that seemed more interested in parodying show business and celebrity than actually entertaining children. (The first episode is about a dang psychiatrist to the stars!) Funny thing is, kids loved the antics of the Warner brothers and sister as they guffawed and rampaged their way across studio lots. Adults, on the other hand, were laughing at the jokes actually taking place on said studio lots — jokes full of innuendo and references meant for avid consumers of celeb gossip, alongside... Continue reading…

Image: CCAEJ / ESRI You might not see it each time you make a purchase, but online shopping takes up a lot of space in the real world. The number of warehouses built to keep e-commerce running smoothly is growing quickly, and they’re creeping closer to neighborhoods in order to meet consumers’ expectations for quick deliveries.Online shopping has changed the landscapeThese images taken by satellite show how dramatically online shopping has changed the landscape of one county in California. I grew up in this county, and I’ve seen that transformation happen in person. A lot of the stuff that Americans buy passes through here. The nearby ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle about 40 percent of all goods Americans import. Once it gets off a ship, most... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Baltimore County Public School (BCPS) system has canceled classes after an apparent ransomware attack shut down internal networks. Described by officials as “a networking issue,” the outage is affecting the schools’ email and grading systems, among others.BCPS chief of staff Mychael Dickerson confirmed on Twitter that the outage is believed to be the result of a ransomware attack. “We were the victim of a ransomware cyber attack,” he said. “Our BCPS technology team is working to address the situation.” Dickerson could only tweet the message since the BCPS website is currently down.As a result of the outage, offices have been closed for the day and students have been given the day off. “We knew it wouldn’t be a quick fix,”... Continue reading…

Last week, the streamer Félix “xQcOW” Lengyel was temporarily banned from Twitch for cheating at a GlitchCon Twitch Rivals event. It was the third time this year he’s been suspended from Twitch, and his teammates Rabia “Nightblue3” Yazbek and Lucas “Mendo” Håkansson were banned alongside him. I got in touch with Lengyel to chat about what happened, and what he’s learned from the experience.According to him, the stream sniping incident — when he and his teammates queued into a competitor’s lobby with the intent to derail their game — was a bit of banter that went too far, though Lengyel is careful to note that he’s not trying to justify what happened. “The atmosphere was really like funny, banter-y — we went to their Discord, they went... Continue reading…

On Tuesday night, SpaceX successfully launched another batch of the company’s internet-from-space Starlink satellites to orbit, using a very space-hardened Falcon 9 rocket for the job. This launch marked the rocket’s seventh flight to space and back — the first time SpaceX has flown such a seasoned vehicle to orbit.The Falcon 9 took off at 9:13PM ET from SpaceX’s launch site at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, with 60 Starlink satellites in tow. After a quick trip to space, the first stage of the Falcon 9 — the bulk of the vehicle that contains the main engines and most of the fuel — separated from the rest of the rocket and came back to Earth. It then performed one of SpaceX’s signature rocket landings, touching down on... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holoway Krales/ The Verge Over six years after it was first released, Sony suddenly created a new set of buttons for its DualShock 4 controller.The Back Button Attachment was a bizarre product, both conceptually and in terms of timing. The vaguely wing-shaped accessory had two extra buttons and an OLED panel on the back that allowed players to add new functionality to their controller. And it was released in January 2020 — just months before Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 and its feature-packed DualSense controller.Sony’s sudden interest in offering back paddles on the DualShock 4 fit with existing trends in the console world. Microsoft’s Elite controllers offered similar removable paddles, and third-party controllers with swappable parts and advanced... Continue reading…

1Password was recently updated to support macOS Big Sur In case you still don’t use a password manager, or if you’re looking to switch services, 1Password is offering an exclusive Black Friday offer to readers of The Verge until Thursday, December 3rd. You can save 50 percent each month on the cost of a family subscription (up to five people, and not restricted to a single household) to 1Password’s services, costing $2.50 per month for up to one year. After that year is up, you’ll be charged the regular $5 per month rate.Having a password manager within reach is one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you try it. That’s just one feature that 1Password provides with a subscription: letting you access your saved, secure passwords through its app on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, or... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony on Wednesday confirmed it would have more PlayStation 5 consoles available from retailers this holiday season after what the company is calling its “biggest” launch ever.Without concrete numbers, we have no idea what that means — the company could be referring to how many consoles were actually purchased by consumers, known as sell through, or the less impressive number of consoles that are simply bought by retailers. Without context or specifics, it’s hard to say.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Pay’s old iOS app, Android app, and website are set to lose many of their payment features in January, the company has confirmed to The Verge. According to a Google support document the old apps will soon no longer be able to send or receive payments or withdraw money. Meanwhile, a notice on the Google Pay website says it’s also losing the ability to send and receive peer-to-peer payments. Google is also introducing a 1.5 percent fee when you transfer money out of Google Pay using a debit card, 9to5Google reports.The changes follow the service’s massive relaunch last week, which includes a new app and new features like the option of automatically scanning your Gmail inbox and Google Photos account for receipts to import. The new... Continue reading…

Xiaomi’s Poco sub-brand has launched its latest entry-level phone, the Poco M3. As with most other Poco phones, the M3 has an strong spec sheet for its comparatively low price.The Poco M3 has a 6.53-inch 1080p LCD screen with a waterdrop notch for the 8-megapixel selfie camera. The display is pretty basic: the chin at the bottom is quite big, the fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button on the side rather than the screen, and the panel is only 60Hz, but it’s sharp enough and perfectly serviceable.The phone’s design certainly stands out from behind, with a large glossy camera bump emblazoned with a bright white “POCO” logo. The main camera is 48 megapixels, but the other two cameras are just 2-megapixel sensors for depth... Continue reading…

The upcoming Monster Hunter movie doesn’t exactly look like the most faithful adaptation of the games, centering as it does around a gun-toting US Army soldier played by Milla Jovovich, but that’s not stopping Capcom from engaging in some cross-promotion. Downloadable content based on the movie is coming to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne next month.You’ll be able to embark on a two-part event quest featuring the Black Diablos and Greater Rathalos, two monsters featured in the movie, and special bonus items will be available. There’s also a player skin based on Jovovich’s character Captain Artemis, which you can see in action here:

Utah Department of Public Safety Last week, a sheep-counting expedition found a mysterious monolith deep in the Utah desert, and they warned the world to stay away.This is a great opening for a science fiction story, and also the actual events of late November 2020. As local news outlet KSL TV lays out, a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter crew discovered a 10- to 12-foot steel object that they described as a “monolith.” The crew found the object installed in the canyon’s rock floor on November 18th, and they found “no obvious indication” of its source. On November 23rd, they posted photos of it to Instagram and the DPS site.“There is a significant possibility they may become stranded.”DPS has avoided saying exactly where the monolith is. “It is in a very... Continue reading…

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Amazon announced a joint operation with the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) on Tuesday, focused on stopping counterfeit goods from entering the US. The partnership will rely on intelligence gathered from Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit, logistics company DHL, and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to proactively stop the sale of counterfeit products.“Operation Fulfilled Action” relies on Amazon’s dominant positioning as both a distributor and marketplace for products. Because of the amount sold on Amazon’s various storefronts, IPR Center and Amazon have shared information previously, even collaborating on a crackdown on fraud related to COVID-19. This new operation marks a more long-term... Continue reading…

Popular streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has announced his next piece of branded gear — a custom $60 hoodie with a “patent-pending” system that’s designed to let customers wear a headset over the hood while still enjoying their music or games uninterrupted. The hoodie works by featuring a “polymesh” ear hole on each side of the hood, allowing for sound from the headset to pass through instead of getting muffled by the (usually) thick material of a sweatshirt hood.

Image: Samsung Samsung on Tuesday announced the Galaxy A12 and A02S, two new entry-level phones set to launch next year in Europe. Both offer a lower barrier to entry for anyone looking for a modern Android smartphone.The A12 is designed to be a successor to the A11, sporting a 6.8-inch HD+ display with a notch for the 8-megapixel front-facing camera, an octa-core processor, a fingerprint sensor on the side, and a 5,000mAh battery. Photos are covered by a quad-array of cameras on the back, including a 48-megapixel main sensor, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, and a pair of 2-megapixel sensors to help out with macro and depth shots.The A02S is slightly less impressive: it has the same display and battery but with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (though you... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge YouTube has temporarily suspended right-wing outlet One America News Network (OANN) for promoting a false COVID-19 cure. OANN’s channel will stay online, but it will be prevented from uploading new videos for a week, and it’s been removed from YouTube’s advertising partner program.Axios reported the news today, and YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi confirmed it to The Verge. “After careful review, we removed a video from OANN and issued a strike on the channel for violating our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure,” Choi says. “Additionally, due to repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy and other channel monetization policies, we’ve suspended the channel from the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ready to re-up your Netflix subscription for another year? What about Spotify or Apple Music? Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be the perfect opportunity to lock in your streaming services for less money than they’d usually cost. Whether you’re after music, live TV streaming, or something more niche, there are a host of offers and limited-time deals to choose between.Once you’re done scoping out the streaming offers, check out our big roundup of the best Black Friday deals you can get right now.Get Hulu for $1.99 per month for the next yearHulu’s hard-to-resist Black Friday promotion is back for another year. It lets you subscribe to the standard (with ads) plan for $1.99 monthly instead of the regular $5.99 rate.Here’s the fine... Continue reading…

In 2017, Zunum Aero was flying high. The Kirkland, Washington-based aviation startup came out of stealth mode with bold plans to build a fleet of 12-seat hybrid electric jets for short, regional hops between cities. The company, which had received millions of dollars from the venture arms of Boeing and JetBlue, said it would be ready to fly by 2022.Not long after, those dreams came crashing down to earth. In 2018, Zunum ran out of cash, forcing it to lay off nearly all of its employees and vacate its headquarters. It struggled to raise additional funds that it needed to get its plans back in motion. And now, Zunum is striking back at one of its former investors. The company filed a lawsuit in Washington Superior Court this week... Continue reading…

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Comedian Dave Chappelle has succeeded in getting his old sketch comedy program Chappelle’s Show removed from Netflix, after requesting the streaming service do so because the original rights holder, ViacomCBS, began licensing it without his permission.The news means Netflix subscribers will no longer have access to the show’s three seasons that originally aired on Comedy Central. Netflix first made the show available on November 1st, and it’s no longer discoverable on the platform as of Tuesday afternoon. Netflix declined to comment.“They agreed that they would take it off their platform just so I could feel better.”Chappelle’s Show aired on ViacomCBS-owned Comedy Central from 2003 to 2006 and the program has aired in the years... Continue reading…

At 17 years old, Call of Duty is not quite America’s longest war, but it’s close. When I went into the single-player story mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, I knew what to expect: a pleasing shooting gallery with familiar narrative twists (there’s always a nuke about to go off) and re-shuffled scenery (this time the walls are plastered in vintage Doritos ads). But the real twist is that I left feeling frustrated about the game it could have been.Black Ops Cold War is the kernel of a thrilling and intimate spy story that’s tragically strapped on the front of a runaway train. The game begins in a neon-drenched bar in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve 1980, where your CIA partner beckons you to quickly follow him away from the party.... Continue reading…

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, which launched on the Nintendo Switch last week, is a curious thing: a blockbuster release that’s both a sequel and a prequel. It’s a follow-up to 2014’s Hyrule Warriors, a game that mashed together the fantastical realm of Hyrule with the action-heavy gameplay of the Dynasty Warriors series. But it’s also a game that takes place before the pivotal events of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, making it a key piece of lore for diehard fans.To find out a bit more about how the game came about, and how developer Koei Tecmo partnered with the Zelda team at Nintendo, I was able to ask a few questions of Age of Calamity producer Yosuke Hayashi and director Ryouta Matsushita. Here’s what they had to say... Continue reading…

Image: Activision The new Call of Duty is a bloated mess, even when the individual parts succeed Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge.Twitter’s announcement confirms earlier reporting in June from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong suggesting that the company was creating a new verification system. In Twitter’s Tuesday blog post, the company confirmed that this new system would roll out in “early 2021.” Twitter is also asking for feedback on a draft proposal for verification.If no changes to this proposal are made, the accounts that would be eligible for verification would include government accounts, companies, brands, nonprofits, news media accounts, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers,... Continue reading…

Image: 100 Thieves 100 Thieves has made a virtual version of its sprawling LA headquarters, the Cash App Compound, that you can explore inside of Fortnite’s Creative mode.The map isn’t just an empty virtual building; there are also hidden Easter eggs and quests that “correspond with” popular 100 Thieves streamers Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag (who is also the founder and CEO of the organization), Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, Rachel “Valkyrae” Hofstetter, and Brooke “BrookeAB” Bond. You can see a preview of the map in this video from 100 Thieves.

The Expanse will come to a (second) end after its sixth season, Amazon Studios announced today. The news arrives ahead of the show’s fifth season premiere.Amazon first picked up The Expanse when it was canceled by SyFy in 2018, bringing the show to its Amazon Prime Video streaming service for a fourth season. The season became the seventh most in-demand title in the United States, according to Business Insider, likely helping Amazon Studios executives’ decision to renew for a fifth season. Now, after a few years, Amazon is moving on.“We’re very happy we can give the incredibly loyal and passionate fans of The Expanse the satisfying conclusion to the series that they deserve,” Vernon Sanders, co-head of television at Amazon Studios,... Continue reading…

Microsoft Flight Simulator is getting one of its biggest updates for the US today, adding nearly 50 points of interest. The White House, Fort Knox, Hoover Dam, and the Las Vegas Strip are among many areas across the US that are getting updated with high-resolution points of interest.A trailer for the update shows just how detailed some of these updated areas are. The Las Vegas Strip now has a night mode, where the entire strip lights up and it looks incredible from the virtual sky above. The nearby Grand Canyon looks like it will be worth touring inside Microsoft Flight Simulator, too. Kennedy Space Center in Florida is also part of the update and looks incredibly intricate. Microsoft Grand Canyon in Microsoft... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has prevailed in a lawsuit claiming it secretly poached eBay sellers. The companies and a group of Amazon managers filed arbitration updates for two complaints, one from 2018 and another from 2019. The complaints alleged that Amazon employees signed up for eBay accounts under false pretenses, then lured eBay merchants to their platform.In both cases, eBay convinced an arbitration panel that there was a breach of its user contract. But it couldn’t prove it suffered harm as a result, according to documents filed with the Superior Court of Santa Clara and a California district court. More generally, eBay was unsuccessful in arguing that Amazon had coordinated a poaching campaign against it.The decisions come as Amazon faces an... Continue reading…

Image: Google Google has around 400 games on the way for its Stadia game streaming service, according to Jack Buser, the service’s director of games. Buser gave the figure in an interview with MobileSyrup, where he said that the company has “a roadmap of about 400 games in development from 200 developers” for the service.Buser stopped short of giving specific information on individual games but said that most would be arriving in 2021 and beyond. This list of Stadia games maintained by Android Police, however, includes around 50 unreleased games that have been announced for the service, alongside another 100 or so that are already available.“We have a very exciting many years ahead of us.”The director used the number of games on Stadia’s roadmap as... Continue reading…

The multiplayer portion of Red Dead Redemption II will be a standalone game starting next month. Developer Rockstar Games announced that the mode, called Red Dead Online, will be available to purchase separately on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC starting on December 1st. (It’ll be playable on the next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X via backwards compatibility.)To start, the game will be relatively cheap: Rockstar will be selling RDO at an “introductory” price of $4.99. Starting on February 15th, 2021, that price tag will shoot up to $19.99. You may also need to clear out some hard drive space to fit the game, which will clock in at up to 123GB of space. It will also include the option to purchase the main story campaign.The news shouldn’t be too... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook, in the days after the US election, decided that an uptick in viral misinformation related to election results and President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede needed an extreme measure to be dealt with. So the company made a temporary change to its News Feed algorithm to favor mainstream news outlets, according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday.Facebook specifically tweaked how much weight the News Feed gives to “news ecosystem quality” scores, an internet metric designed to quantify the trustworthiness and quality of a news source. That way, users of Facebook would see more news from publishers like The New York Times, CNN, and NPR and less of the hyper-partisan pages that tend to peddle in inflammatory... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, let’s talk about the deceptively bold way in which Snapchat has reimagined TikTok as part of its new feature, Spotlight. A new milestone on TikTok helps to explain the opportunity.I.Over the weekend, TikTok saw its first creator reach 100 million followers. The creator is Charli D’Amelio, who hit that mark just 18 months after she created her account. That speaks to the broad appeal of her personality and her videos, which often feature popular dances of the moment. The mark also reflects the rapid growth of TikTok, whose shortform videos are rapidly taking over all social networks.But in another way, D’Amelio’s achievement wasn’t remarkable at all. In fact, in many ways, it was textbook: a fast-growing new platform, a young... Continue reading…

The professional Valorant esports scene is about to get a lot more structured. Today, developer Riot Games announced its plans for competitive Valorant in 2021, and it includes a new global tournament series that will see teams play in regional competitions before making their way up to play the best in the world. Riot calls it the Valorant Champions Tour.While no specific competitions or dates have been announced yet, the competition is divided into three tiers. There are regional “challengers” events, and the best teams from these will move on to three different “masters” competitions, which will serve as the qualifying round for the final global championship event where 16 teams will compete. Riot says tournaments will take place in... Continue reading…

In a recent episode of The Mandalorian, tiny puppet baby Yoda ate a blue cookie. I don’t watch The Mandalorian, but I am online enough to have seen photos of the tiny puppet baby Yoda eating blue macarons. You can now buy these macarons, called “Nevarro Nummies” from Williams Sonoma. Haha cool! I love macarons hell yeah. Except that they cost $49.95 for a dozen.io9 kindly did the math for me because I cannot add or divide, and it estimates them to be about $4.17 per cookie. To which I say, you’re out of your goddamn mind. You want 50 bucks for 12 cookies that look like prop food? Eyeball these Hostess rejects and tell me you don’t have concerns:

Microsoft is in the early phases of rolling out its xCloud streaming service on mobile devices, but TVs are the next logical step. In an interview with The Verge, Xbox chief Phil Spencer has revealed we’ll likely see an Xbox app appear on smart TVs over the next year. “I think you’re going to see that in the next 12 months,” said Spencer, when asked about turning the Xbox into a TV app. “I don’t think anything is going to stop us from doing that.”Spencer previously hinted at TV streaming sticks for Microsoft’s xCloud service last month, and this latest hint suggests we might see similar hardware or an Xbox app for TVs during 2021. Microsoft is currently working on bringing xCloud to the web to enable it on iOS devices, and this work... Continue reading…

A few weeks ago, I put on some rubber boots, grabbed a shovel, and went gold prospecting. There’s allegedly gold throughout the river systems near my home in western Washington state, and I made it my goal to find some. I went partly to tick another “things The Verge paid me to do” box and partly to demystify one of the most enduring and unique commodities in the world.Gold has been highly valued for pretty much as long as humans have been formally valuing things. It’s been used as jewelry, money, a dental filling, a garnish, a critical component in electronics, and even a medicine. It’s malleable, conductive, harmless to ingest, noncorroding, and captivating to look at.A big part of gold’s value is predicated on its scarcity. But the... Continue reading…

A new season of Fortnite is almost here, and alongside it, developer Epic is introducing a monthly subscription service called Fortnite Crew. For $11.99 each month Fortnite players will get 1,000 Vbucks (Fortnite’s in-game currency), an exclusive character skin and gear, and access to the current season’s battle pass. You can get a look at the first character offering in the image above.In essence, the new offering serves as a higher tier for those looking to spend some cash on Fortnite. Previously, this function was served by the battle pass, which costs 950 Vbucks (around $10) but lasts for several months. Fortnite Crew is much more expensive but also offers more — including the enticement of exclusivity. Epic says that the cosmetics... Continue reading…

Microsoft and Sony are often considered direct rivals in the game space, competing for players through new consoles and exclusive games. Brand loyalty and “console wars” for some players dictates whether they’ll grab a PlayStation or Xbox. Extreme fans have even escalated their affinity for one over the other into harassment. But Microsoft’s real threat isn’t Sony, Nintendo, or any other company, says Microsoft’s head of gaming Phil Spencer. “We’re in the entertainment business. The biggest competitor we have is apathy over the products and services, games that we build,” he says.Speaking to The Verge, Spencer says he finds toxic brand loyalty to be distasteful and despises the idea that companies like Microsoft “have to see others... Continue reading…

An interview on Decoder with Nilay Patel Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Series S wasn’t exactly a well kept secret, but the company’s decision to create a second next-gen Xbox to go up against the PS5 wasn’t an easy one. Ultimately, Microsoft’s decision to build two next-gen consoles came down to the company’s desire to reach a broader audience than Sony was targeting.The Xbox Series S lacks the raw horsepower found in the larger Xbox Series X or the PS5. That’s left many wondering why Microsoft created two very different next-gen Xbox consoles, while Sony has focused on a single powerful PS5. Some Microsoft employees were even questioning the decision, and the company’s Xbox chief has revealed to The Verge that “the best argument against doing [two next-gen consoles] was Sony.”In an... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Projekt Melody briefly disappeared from Twitch due to a copyright dispute over her body Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok is adding a new feature that will help people who have epilepsy to avoid potentially dangerous photosensitive content. The short video platform already warns creators if their uploads contain effects that could trigger photosensitive epilepsy, but now anyone who encounters an example in their feed will get an alert that allows them to opt out of viewing such content in the future. There’ll also be a toggle in the app’s accessibility settings.The Epilepsy Foundation of America says that 1 in 26 people in the US will develop epilepsy at some point, with a tenth of people being affected by seizures. Video content that involves flashing lights and colors can trigger seizures, so it’s important for people to be able to control what... Continue reading…

Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images Elon Musk has passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Tesla CEO’s net worth now sits at around $128 billion, after increasing by $100 billion this year. There is a sizable gap between Musk and the number one spot, which is currently held by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who has a reported net worth of around $182 billion. In January, Musk ranked 35th on the list, Bloomberg reports.For an idea of how the wealth of these men compares to the average American household, check out this amazing data visualization produced earlier this year in which every pixel represents $1,000.Musk’s rapid ascent up the list has mainly been driven by Tesla’s share price.... Continue reading…

Image: stacksmashing Intrepid developers have done the expected and necessary: Doom now runs on Nintendo’s recently released Game & Watch portable. The Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. was designed to run three games, but successfully porting Doom shows it can handle others if you have a lot of patience (via Hackaday).This version of Doom is not perfect, of course. In order to get the game to run even at the slower speed shown in the video below, sound had to be disabled and textures had to be simplified to fit the game on the small portable. And getting that far wasn’t easy: programmers stacksmashing and Konrad Beckmann had to trick the Game & Watch to offload its firmware by injecting code into the external storage accessed by the Game & Watch’s tiny... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter began showing a warning if you tried to retweet a tweet that had been labeled for potentially including misleading information. Twitter is now planning to expand that warning functionality to when you try to like a labeled tweet, the company announced on Monday. The functionality is rolling out on the web and iOS globally this week, and it will come to Android in the coming weeks, Twitter tells The Verge.Adding a warning decreased quote tweets of misleading information by 29 percent, the company said. It seems Twitter is hoping this new warning shown before likes of labeled tweets will reduce the amount of likes on labeled content.