Image: Mojang Studios Two of the bestselling games of all time are joining forces for some very strange downloadable content in Minecraft. It involves visiting the “Tetris universe” inside of the game... which has taught me that there is something called the Tetris universe. Notably, the new Minecraft DLC is a form of dungeon crawler that also involves playing Tetris to find lost Tetriminos, those falling blocks that come in an assortment of iconic shapes. (This also isn’t the first time the two games have crossed over, though the previous collab wasn’t quite so weird.)I’m not sure I fully understand it, so here’s the synopsis from Mojang Studios:It’s your job to find the Tetriminos and bring them back. So how do you do that? The grid of blocks remaining... Continue reading…

Image: Sega For almost 20 years, Nintendo and Sega have released Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games to coincide with the international sporting event. But now, according to a report in Eurogamer, that tradition is at an end. In 2020, the IOC made the decision to not renew the game’s licensing deal, ending a run of games that’s covered most Summer and Winter Olympic Games since 2007. “Basically the IOC wanted to bring [the licensing] back to themselves internally and look at other partners so they would get more money,” Lee Cocker, a developer who worked on the Mario & Sonic franchise, told Eurogamer. Strangely though, those “other partners” are NFTs and esports — products that are not currently known for their money-making possibilities. To... Continue reading…

Image: Android Headlines The Pixel Watch 3 looks like it will have a larger screen than the Watch 2, thanks to thinner bezels. Leaked marketing materials shared by Android Headlines suggest that the 41mm Pixel Watch 3 will offer 10 percent more screen than the Watch 2 in the same amount of space. The Pixel Watch 3 could also have a brighter display — up to 2,000 nits, double the peak brightness of the Pixel 2 — as well as 20 percent faster charging. The spec sheet, if legitimate, confirms the previously leaked 45mm Watch and states that both sizes will have up to 24 hours of battery life with always-on display enabled or up to 36 hours with a new Battery Saver mode.This could mean that the Pixel Watch 3 won’t use the “hybrid interface” rolled out in Wear OS 4,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon laptops had the summer all to themselves, but that’s coming to an end. AMD is now shipping its Ryzen AI chips — and Intel has just announced it’ll “launch” its next generation of Core Ultra laptop chips, codename Lunar Lake, on a September 3rd livestream. It sounds like they won’t be available quite that soon, but the full reveal should be just five weeks away.As we’ve discussed, Lunar Lake is an utterly overhauled chip that ditches the entire idea of plugging swappable memory sticks into your laptop, not to mention several of Intel’s previous ideas about how to achieve the best battery life and performance — plus a tripled NPU if you happen to have generative AI applications you’d like to run locally.But... Continue reading…

Image: Meta Meta has shut down its AI chatbots that let you have conversations with alter-ego versions of celebrities, as reported by The Information. The celebrity chatbots were a big part of Meta’s announcements at its Connect event last September, now, you can’t talk with them anymore. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tom Brady (@tombrady)The shutdown follows Meta’s Monday rollout of AI Studio, a tool that lets creators in the US make AI chatbots of themselves. Based on a statement, the company seems to be favoring this direction rather than the more handcrafted celebrity bots.“You can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities,” Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney says to The Verge.... Continue reading…

Player data from a single match on Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map. | Image: Activision Activision is sharing an open-source dataset pulled from Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map for researchers to study and to help support AI model training. “This first-of-its-kind data set release for Call of Duty, now available in OpenUSD, contains the near-complete geometry of Caldera as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymized time samples showing how players move around the map,” Activision writes in a blog post. According to Michael Vance, an Activision SVP and fellow software engineer, it’s one of “the largest production-validated open data set releases from the gaming industry in terms of complexity of geometry and instance counts.” It’s also one of the largest publicly available OpenUSD (a file format for 3D... Continue reading…

Image: Ring On Monday evening, Amazon Web Services sent a notice about issues in the US-EAST-1 region of its server networks, which supports many of the internet’s services. So far, the only problem we’ve seen that appears to be linked to the issues is an outage affecting Amazon-owned Ring, with owners of the security cameras and doorbells reporting that features like history, events, and Neighbors are unavailable.At 1:20AM ET, Ring’s status page was updated to announce the incident had been resolved, with a note at the bottom of the page saying the issues had affected Ring.com, Ring Protect (Video Recording), Live Calls (Doorbell Dings & Motions), Video On Demand, and Partner Integration. The Ring outage began starting at 6:40PM ET on Tuesday.... Continue reading…

There’s a custom case for this and everything. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s advertising for its Galaxy Z Flip series typically revolves around Gen Z photo shoots and showing off specific features like interpreter mode. But today, the company has taken quite a turn by highlighting the foldable phone’s use as... a policing tool. In a post on Samsung’s newsroom titled “Samsung Technology Is Helping Police Authorities Protect the Public’s Safety,” we learn that two police departments in Missouri participated in a pilot program that led them to integrate the Z Flip into their daily operations. “This included their use as a body-worn camera to promote transparency, marking the first time that police have used a foldable device in this way,” the article says. Eventually, two other departments joined in. T... Continue reading…

The new AMD Zen 5 CPUs are poised to deliver significant performance advantages over competing Intel processors. This means that if you're building a new PC for gaming, productivity, or both, a Ryzen 9000 CPU like the Ryzen 7 9700X is a powerful choice. Naturally, a CPU like this deserves a good graphics card. Read on to see our picks for the best GPUs for your AMD Ryzen 7 9700X build.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon, not third-party sellers, is responsible for properly recalling hazardous items that were sold on its marketplace, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) decided on Tuesday. The CPSC says Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products. Even though Amazon stopped selling those products and attempted to alert their buyers, the CPSC decided Amazon needs to follow approved recall procedures designed to keep the public from using, giving away, or reselling dangerous items. (When the CPSC helps a company recall a product, it doesn’t just warn buyers; it warns everyone.)The Amazon products, sold between 2018 and 2021, include faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hairdryers that pose an... Continue reading…

The Verge Microsoft just posted the fourth and final quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $64.7 billion in revenue and a net income of $22 billion during Q4. Revenue is up 15 percent, and net income has increased by 10 percent.Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud revenues, which include the company’s server products and cloud services, were $28.5 billion overall and up 19 percent year over year. Revenues from this part of Microsoft’s business now make up nearly 45 percent of all revenue. While cloud revenue is strong once again, Microsoft’s consumer devices push continues to dip. Xbox hardware revenue is down again, and Surface revenue has now declined for seven consecutive quarters in a row. Photo by... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AMD just announced its second quarter 2024 earnings today, and the highlight was this: nearly half the company’s sales are now data center products — not chips for personal computers, not game consoles, not embedded chips for industry or vehicles. The company’s data center business has doubled in a single year, and this quarter’s growth was primarily due to a single chip: the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator, which competes with Nvidia’s infamously influential H100 AI chip. The AMD chip just did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter, according to CEO Lisa Su, up from its previous milestone of $1 billion cumulatively since its December 2023 debut. (AMD says its Epyc server CPUs also contributed.) Image: AMD A... Continue reading…