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Microsoft is rolling out Reading Coach as a standalone app, which will expand its tools for educators in Microsoft Teams. The new app will be part of its Reading Progress suite designed to help students improve literacy in the classroom and at home. The tool will use artificial intelligence to provide users with personalized feedback on how to improve reading scores as well as specific suggestions for how to improve things like pronunciation. It will be free to any users that have a Microsoft account.

With prolonged use, the AI tool will flag specific words that a reader frequently mispronounces or misunderstands during reading sessions. To keep students engaged, the program will also ask a reader to choose prompts that can change a storyline as they progress.

Microsoft says teachers can integrate its program in classrooms through learning platforms starting in the Spring. But the tool is available to educators this month in preview. Teachers will be able to track how student’s feel about assignments using the Reflect tool within the program. This kind of feedback might help an educator determine what assignments students feel most excited about and which lessons might not be working. Beyond tracking student performance, the new features for Microsoft’s Teams for Education suite will help teachers generate content for lessons, such as passages and assignments for a student to engage with.

Microsoft also introduced new features for its Teams for Education app, which is designed to help educators tailor content for digital learning platforms. The Classwork tool will use AI to emphasize particular messages in an assignment’s instructions, according to an educator's particular goals for that lesson. The Assignments tool will use AI to streamline the rubric generating process. Outlines can be tailored by a teacher based on grade level, evaluation scale or other factors.

As promised, Xbox offered the first details on MachineGames' Indiana Jones project during its Developer Direct stream on Thursday. It also confirmed the game's title — Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — and revealed that it's coming to Xbox Series X/S, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming later this year.

No prizes for those who guessed that it's an action-adventure game that will see Indy try to stop some bad guys who are in pursuit of a mysterious power. The story takes place in 1937, between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The McGuffin powerful force in question is connected to something called The Great Circle — a perfect circle around the globe that links human-built ancient sites of "great spiritual significance." 

The first gameplay trailer shows Indy from a first-person perspective as he explores the pyramids of Egypt, traverses snowy mountain tops, sneaks around enemy strongholds and generally tries to stay alive in the face of mortal doom. He also uses his whip to trip up a bad guy (who lets out a Wilhelm scream in the process), punches some Nazis in the face and leaps from one airborne biplane to another. 

In cutscenes and some platforming sequences, the camera will pull back to let you get a better look at the legendary archaeologist. The game uses Harrison Ford's likeness, but video game stalwart Troy Baker provides the character's voice.

It's early days but MachineGames, with the help of Bethesda's Todd Howard as executive producer, seems to have gotten the look, feel and sound of an Indiana Jones adventure just about right. We'll find out just how well they've pulled off that tough task when the game comes out later this year, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has just become one of my most anticipated games.

Amazon tells Engadget it’s letting go of about five percent of staff in its Buy with Prime division. Launched in 2022, Buy with Prime extends the membership’s perks to third-party merchants selling and shipping goods on other sites. CNBC first reported the cuts on Thursday.

An Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email to Engadget that the cuts were part of a standard review of its business needs. “We regularly review the structure of our teams and make adjustments based on the needs of the business and, following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles on our Buy with Prime team,” the spokesperson said.

Amazon hasn’t stated how many staff are in the division, but a source with knowledge of the matter tells Engadget about 30 employees are affected by the cuts.

Amazon

Amazon says Buy with Prime is still a central focus. “Buy with Prime is a top priority for Amazon, with strong adoption from merchants and positive feedback from customers, and we will continue investing significant resources in Buy with Prime to build on that momentum,” the spokesperson wrote to Engadget. “We’re grateful to these employees for their contributions, and we’re focused on supporting them in their next steps.”

The company spokesperson tells Engadget laid-off workers will receive at least 50 days of pay and benefits and be eligible for a severance package. In addition, the company says it’s working to find new roles within Amazon for downsized staff.

Although the number is much smaller this time, the layoffs add to the more than 27,000 workers Amazon has laid off since late 2022 (part of a brutal year-plus of job cuts in the broader tech world). The most recent round, earlier this month, hit Prime Video, MGM Studios, Audible and Twitch. Amazon posted record profits in 2023.

Meta is reorganizing its AI teams as it joins the growing ranks of companies trying to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Mark Zuckerberg, who has been increasingly focused on the company’s AI research, said the change would help the company “accelerate” its research and, eventually, improve the metaverse.

Meta currently has two teams pursuing AI research: the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, started in 2013, and a team solely focused on generative AI experiences for users of its apps. With the change, Zuckerberg said, the company would bring the two “closer together” as it looks to expand both groups. Meta’s CEO didn’t say how many workers it might add to its AI efforts, but the expansion is notable considering the company has shed more than 20,000 jobs since 2022.

In a video posted to Threads, Zuckerberg said the changes would “support our long-term goals of building general intelligence, open sourcing it responsibly, and making it available and useful to everyone in all of our daily lives.” The change is also the latest way that Zuckerberg is trying to position Meta as a leading AI company in an increasingly crowded field of buzzy generative AI companies and projects.

Creating AGI, a type of AI often compared to human-level intelligence, has become a particular fascination for many of these companies, including Elon Musk’s x.ai, OpenAI and Google. Now, Zuckerberg is throwing Meta’s vast resources at the effort. “We're building a massive amount of infrastructure,” Zuckerberg wrote. “At the end of this year, we'll have ~350k Nvidia H100s — and overall ~600k H100s H100 equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs.”

At the same time, Zuckerberg made it clear he has no plans on giving up on the metaverse, which he says will also benefit from AI advancements. “The two major parts of our vision — AI and the metaverse — are connected,” he wrote.

Linking the company’s AI work to the metaverse isn’t a new strategy for Zuckerberg, who spent much of last year’s Connect event hyping generative AI. Still, it could be a risky one. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is still not widely understood, or especially popular. But Zuckerberg seems to think that may change as the company improves its smart glasses and the AI embedded in them. “By the end of the decade, I think lots of people will talk to AIs frequently throughout the day using smart glasses like what we're building with Ray Ban Meta,” he said.

We finally have a release date for Ninja Theory's Hellblade sequel: May 21, 2024. It's been over four years since Senua's Saga was announced at the 2019 Game Awards alongside Microsoft's (then next-gen) Xbox Series X console. 

The first game in the series, Senua's Sacrifice, focused on the main character's journey to the realm of the dead, and her battle with mental health issues. Saga will focus on Senua tracking down the Vikings who have been raiding her home town. Expect more "perception puzzles led by her experiences of psychosis," along with some pretty standard video game combat, but this time, in Iceland!

As you'd expect for a first-party title, Senua's Saga will arrive on Microsoft's Game Pass service for Xbox consoles and PC on day one. For those without Game Pass, it'll be a digital-only release priced at $50. PC users will be able to buy it on either the Xbox store or Steam. 

Avowed, the fantasy roleplaying game from Outer Worlds studio Obsidian Entertainment, is due to hit Xbox and PC in the fall. This is a slight update from the game's original release window, which was just "2024." Specifically, Avowed will hit Xbox Series X/S, PC via Xbox and Steam, and it'll be available through Game Pass on day one.

Avowed is an expansive first-person RPG with old-school fantasy vibes. Players will set off on a journey across the Living Lands, on a mission for the kingdom of Aedyr. A plague is spreading across the island of the Living Lands and players have been sent to investigate what's going on — along the way, they'll discover how they're personally tied to the region and its mysteries.

The game supports multiple play styles, allowing players to approach combat and conversations in their own ways. The world is filled with magic, monsters, firearms, swords and shields, and companions will join the party along the way. If you liked Skyrim, you'll probably like Avowed.

Obsidian is known for creating Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Pentiment, Outer Worlds, and other mainstream games. Microsoft purchased the studio in 2018.

AI-generated content can be found everywhere online, including your Google News feed. A report from 404 Media revealed that Google is boosting websites filled with AI-generated articles ripped from other outlets. While this isn’t a total surprise, the revelation is disappointing. Google News used to be a place you’d find the latest and most accurate information on most topics. But just because something makes it to Google News doesn’t necessarily mean the information is reliable.

404 Media cited several examples of AI-written articles getting past Google. One example involved a “news site” called Worldtimetodays, that recently published an article about Star Wars. An analysis of the article showed it was highly similar to one published earlier by Distractify. The Worldtimetodays article included the same author photo along with some odd phrasings, as you’d expect with AI. The ripped article read “Let’s be honest, war of stars fans,” instead of Star Wars fans. The site also had articles that were barely rewritten from Heavy, without bothering to replace Heavy’s watermarked images.

As AI advances and becomes even more accessible, we will likely continue to see mass output of plagiarized articles and unreliable information on Google News. Because as of right now, it’s clear Google may not be ready to fully audit the articles populating its news feed. The company told 404 Media that while it tries to filter spam on Google News, it isn’t overly concerned whether an article is written by humans or AI. A Google representative said it’s more about the quality of the content.

“Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam, and we take action as appropriate under our policies,” the statement read.

Google went on to reiterate that websites are considered for Google News automatically, and new websites may not be immediately detected by the system. The company added that its goal is to reward “original content that demonstrates things such as expertise and trustworthiness,” but it looks like it’s missing the mark by letting these AI-generated articles through in the first place.

Just like death and taxes, you can usually rely on a Call of Duty game to top the sales charts each year. The various entries in Activision’s warfare simulation franchise have mostly done just that, going all the way back to 2009. This year’s a bit different. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III has fallen to second place, as reported by media research firm Circana.

According to the list, Hogwarts Legacy topped the charts for 2023, selling around 22 million copies. This is despite the not insignificant controversy the game generated, both by its association with franchise creator JK Rowling — who has leveraged her celebrity position to espouse anti-trans views — but also tropes within the game itself which some (but not all) saw as drawing from antisemitic caricatures. Still, fans had been waiting for a high-quality AAA game set at the wizarding school for decades and Hogwarts Legacy delivered on the promise of a true open-world Harry Potter title. The sales obviously reflect that.

As a matter of fact, there have been only two other occasions in which Call of Duty was knocked from first place. Those were the years in which Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) were released. Both Rockstar titles absolutely dominated the conversation upon launch, becoming bona-fide cultural touchstones. Hogwarts Legacy, while very good, hasn’t approached that level of buzz, so maybe this data illustrates that players are finally getting sick of Call of Duty, or maybe it's just that Modern Warfare III wasn’t a particularly inspiring entry.

There’s also the Hyrule-sized elephant in the room. Circana’s list puts The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as the number five top seller of 2023, but Nintendo keeps its eShop numbers close to the vest, so the list only includes digital sales data up to September. In other words, there’s around four months of sales data missing here, which we won’t get until the company releases quarterly revenue information at the end of the month.

It’s possible that Tears of the Kingdom will end up on top when all is said and done: it's sales figures (19.5 million copies) are a mere 2.5 million units away from dethroning Hogwarts Legacy, and that's without the four months of sales that include the holiday season.

Circana

Other top sellers include Madden NFL 24 at number three and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at number four. Interestingly, 2022’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 actually took the number seven spot. Finally, there’s the game that will sell forever and ever until the heat death of the universe. Mario Kart 8 came in at number 19, but also without digital data from September onward.

Rock Band 4’s weekly DLC drops are coming to an end. Harmonix said Wednesday the upcoming batch of new songs on January 25 will be the game’s last. Although all other live services will remain active, the developer plans to give full attention to the Rock Band-like Fortnite Festival, a rhythm game inside Epic’s digital world.

Product manager Daniel Sussman waxed nostalgic about Rock Band 4’s impressive eight-year run of new song drops each week. “Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment — over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks,” he wrote in an announcement blog post. “That’s wild.”

Sussman says Harmonix is committed to protecting its licensing, promising that purchased content will remain available. He adds that all the game’s other live services, including Rivals and online play, will continue as usual. There just won’t be any more new music for the rhythm game, which arrived in 2015 with 65 tracks.

Epic Games

Fortnite Festival, launched in December, is a rock god stage in the popular battle royale title. It has the advantage of being free: You don’t have to pay a couple of bucks to fulfill your dreams of jamming out to “Seven Nation Army,” The Cranberries’ “Zombie” or Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison.”

Rock Band 4 instrument support is on its way to Epic’s virtual stage. “If you are a fan of the rhythm game category, Fortnite Festival is the place to be; and with support for RB4 instruments coming, this is not the time to hang up your guitars just yet…”

Harmonix is tight-lipped about its final tracks, but it promises thematic relevance. “We deliberated long and hard about how to frame the last blast of RB DLC of this era,” Sussman explained. “The last two weeks will feature some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment. We thank you for your commitment to and passion for this wonderful game.”

Behaviour Interactive is the latest notable game developer to lay off workers. The Dead by Daylight studio confirmed to Game Developer that the cuts affected less than three percent of the total workforce. Kotaku first reported on the layoffs, stating that they took place earlier this month and affected around 45 people across several departments. It initially appeared that the layoffs were limited to Behaviour's Montreal headquarters, but the publisher hasn't confirmed whether that's the case.

"Recently, changing market conditions necessitated adjusting the scope of several Behaviour projects," Behaviour told the publications in a statement. "In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects. Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us. These departures represented less than three percent of our total workforce."

Behaviour bought several studios last year, including ones in the UK and the Netherlands as part of a deeper expansion into Europe. While much of the company's focus is on Dead by Daylight (a new Alan Wake-focused chapter will arrive later this month), it has been working on other projects, such as last year's Meet Your Maker.

According to estimates, more than 9,000 workers in the video games industry were laid off in 2023. We're just 18 days into 2024, and there have already been more than 3,000 layoffs at gaming and gaming-adjacent companies (including Twitch and Discord). Unity alone is reducing its headcount by around 1,800 — a quarter of its workforce.