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Your local store might only need a smartphone to accept your payments. PayPal is rolling out tap to pay on Android for Venmo and Zettle businesses in the US. Shops can accept Apple Pay, Google Pay and other contactless services or cards, including digital wallets, without requiring a card reader. You might not have to bring out your wallet, in other words. Setup takes just minutes, PayPal claims.

Initial setup is free. Tap to pay will roll out to all Venmo businesses in the country over the "coming months," PayPal says, but would-be clients can sign up for early access now. The approach is already available for all PayPal Zettle users in the US. The company adds that Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available for some American users, and should reach all of them "soon."

The incentive for PayPal is clear. TechCrunchnotes Venmo and Zettle take 2.29 percent plus nine cents for every transaction. If a store relies on either brand's tap to pay for many of their sales, they stand to profit even if the customers themselves never use those services. You can already use Venmo as a customer in major stores like Starbucks — this theoretically gives PayPal more of a stake in the entire retail process.

As with Square, Apple's Tap to Pay on iPhone and similar offerings, PayPal's approach potentially makes contactless payment more accessible. It lowers the costs of entry, and lets small businesses take your preferred payment method wherever they happen to be, such as outdoors or at a convention. That, in turn, could reduce the need for cash and conventional credit or debit cards. It's just a question of whether or not the tech and its costs gain enough traction among retailers.

If Vizio's TV interface has felt stale as of late, don't worry — it's getting a makeover. The company is rolling out a redesigned home screen that it hopes will make it easier to find content. The revamp is meant to be more intuitive, with new navigation features, menus and settings. There's also a reworked on-screen keyboard to help you search faster.

Discovery is likewise a major focus. The updated home screen incudes recommendations as well as parental guidance and Rotten Tomatoes scores. Genre pages help you dig into a given category faster. There's more customization, too, with a personalized "app row" that lets you flag favorites with one remote click. You'll get recommendations on a per-app basis, and a My Watchlist section pools together movies and shows from multiple apps.

Vizio hasn't detailed just which TV models are receiving the new home screen, or when the rollout will be complete. We've asked the company for more details. There's no guarantee older sets will get the upgrade, then, but you won't necessarily need to buy new hardware.

Interface updates aren't new to TVs, but there is a tendency in the industry to limit major revamps to new or very recent TV sets. LG didn't bring 2018's webOS 4 to webOS 3 TVs released just a year earlier, for example. If Vizio delivers the new home screen to more than its latest sets, it's providing better aftermarket support than some of its larger competitors.

Google has denied "extremely inaccurate claims" that it may have violated its own rules and misled advertisers over ad viewership on third-party websites. 

Through the Google Video Partners network and TrueView (an ad product that's also used on YouTube), the company handles placement of video ads on external websites and apps. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google tells brands that their ads will be on "high-quality" sites, appear before the main content of a video and run with audio on. It also says that advertisers won't pay if users skip the ads. However, a third-party analytics company suggested in a report that Google fails to live up to these standards around 80 percent of the time.

Adalytics said the ads often appear on lower-quality websites, such as those with misinformation or pirated content, and that they can be positioned in small video players on the side or bottom of the screen, away from the main "in-stream" content. Some of the ads run without any audio, according to the report, while in other cases, there were was "little to no video content in between consecutive TrueView ads." Adalytics says other ads autoplayed without the viewer engaging with them.

In some instances, the company notes, the skip button that typically appears after five seconds was obscured, forcing viewers to watch the whole ad. That's "a direct violation of Google’s quality standards for TrueView ads," Adalytics says, and it may have contributed to artificially inflated ad metrics, leading to advertisers paying more.

Adalytics reviewed ad campaigns for more than 1,100 brands between 2020 and this year. It says customers that might have bought "muted, auto-playing, mis-declared TrueView skippable in-stream inventory include" the US government, the European Parliament, Disney+, HP, Samsung, Sephora, TikTok, Microsoft and General Motors. As it happens, some other Google divisions (Google Career Certificates and Google Workspace Domains) are on the list.

Media buyers Adalytics shared the report with accused Google of conducting "ad fraud" and suggested brands weren't getting what they paid for. Others have demanded a refund. The "misalignment" could have cost brands billions in advertising dollars, Adalytics said. One "major consumer goods brand" found that 20 percent of a $75,000-plus campaign budget was directed toward YouTube channels, with the remainder spent on ads that ran on third-party destinations such as investing.com and Candy Crush Saga.

Google has firmly rejected the report's findings. The company's global video solutions chief, Marvin Renaud, asserted in a blog post that Adalytics "used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies." An "overwhelming majority of video ad campaigns" run on YouTube, Renaud claimed, with brands having the option to opt out at any time from running their ads on Google Video Partners-affiliated apps and websites.

Even so, over 90 percent of Google Video Partners "are visible to people across the web," Renaud argued. "We use real-time ad quality signals to determine if people are present and paying attention that help us decide whether to serve a video ad in a Google Video Partner site or app."

In addition, Renaud wrote, Google rigorously enforces policies that prohibit third-party sites from using deceptive or disruptive techniques to generate advertising revenue, such as placing ads in hidden browser windows. Renaud added that, last year, Google stopped running ads on more than 143,000 websites it deemed to violate its rules.

The Adalytics claims come as Alphabet faces close scrutiny over its advertising practices. The Department of Justice sued the company earlier this year in an attempt to break up its ad business. This month, the European Union said in a preliminary finding that the only remedy it could see for Google to address its antitrust concerns would be to sell off part of the advertising empire.

Layers of Fear was Bloober Team’s final psychological horror game. The studio didn’t advertise this fact, but behind the scenes, a switch flipped weeks ago: When the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection came out on June 15th, it marked the end of a phase that was known internally as Bloober Team 2.0.

“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games,” studio co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget. “Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”

Bloober is not abandoning horror as a whole, but it is shifting focus. Over the past decade, the studio cemented itself as a powerhouse in the realm of psychological horror games, releasing the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, all of which generated terror through narrative and environmental cues (otherwise known as “vibes”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games have jokingly been called “walking simulators,” a description that Babieno didn’t deny.

“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” Babieno said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”

Going forward, developers at Bloober will rely on action and player input to generate disquiet, and they hope that this nudge in creative direction will drastically expand the studio’s audience. This mechanics-first ethos was actually implemented internally in 2019, when Bloober began building the remake of Silent Hill 2 for Konami.

“We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” Babieno said. “We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”

Silent Hill 2 will be the public’s first taste of Bloober’s redirection — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering the implications of fresh design philosophies, let’s take a look at how Bloober Team 2.0 became a major name on the global horror scene in just a few years.

Babieno co-founded the studio that would become Bloober Team in 2006, after selling his marketing research company in Poland. His ultimate goal was to be a storyteller: He initially considered entering the film industry, but it was too expensive, so he pivoted to games. The studio started with around 15 employees, and they focused on building contract games and other quasi-soulless experiences.

“We crafted some smaller titles on our end, but we never were really good,” Babieno said. “We tried to catch everything on the market and we were just following the crowd. And you know, if you’re following trends, if you’re following what’s fashionable, you can’t be good.”

Everything changed for Bloober Team in 2015. Though many of us may have blocked this fact from our memories, Bloober is the studio that built Basement Crawl, the worst-reviewed launch game on PlayStation 4. Basement Crawl was essentially a busted Bomberman clone when it came out in 2014, and it was shredded in reviews, settling at a rating of 27 on Metacritic. However, since it was one of just a few games to launch alongside the PS4, it sold well enough. Bloober tried to make things right by releasing Brawl in 2015, a free game that addressed many of the complaints players had with Basement Crawl.

Bloober Team

After the release of Brawl, Bloober underwent an internal reckoning. Babieno sat down with his team and had an honest conversation about the studio’s identity and future.

“It looks like we still don't know how to make something good, and we have a game which has 27 percent on Metacritic, so maybe we should change,” Babieno remembered thinking. “Our decision was, OK, we need to focus on creating something we will be proud of. So that's why we went back to the roots and decided we would like to deliver horror games.”

Horror has a special, blood-soaked place in Babieno’s heart. He grew up devouring books, films and games with unsettling themes, including works from Stephen King, Graham Masterton and the Silent Hill team at Konami. Fear spoke to him, and as a creator, he saw how it functioned as a shortcut to deep human emotion and universal experiences.

Babieno took his team’s plan to their investors and laid it all out: “We sat with our funders and told them, guys, we need some money, but we have a pretty good idea for the next 10 years. We would like to become one of the really good psychological horror game developers.” The investors said yes. Bloober Team 2.0 was born.

Layers of Fear came out in 2016 and was a breakout hit, followed by a succession of well-received psychological horror games, including Observer and Blair Witch. But that was just the public side of things: As Bloober was rebranding and cementing itself as a pillar of psychological horror, Babieno was secretly trying to convince Konami to let Bloober make a Silent Hill game.

Babieno first approached Konami in 2015 with a proposal to make a Silent Hill spin-off game, something completely new in the series. The conversation stayed alive for four years, and finally in 2019, Konami invited Babieno to Japan for a meeting.

“Almost the whole management board came to the meeting, and they requested us to prepare a pitch for a Silent Hill 2 remake,” Babieno said. “And whoa. We were so afraid to touch it. We understood from the first day of the conversation that we will have half of the world which will love us and half of the world which will hate us. We are touching something sacred.”

Other studios were in the running to handle Konami’s secret Silent Hill 2 remake, but Bloober got the gig. Konami made the official announcement in October 2022.

Which brings us back to today. The studio just released Layers of Fear, a complete series remastering done in Unreal Engine 5. With this collection, it’s closing the door early on the 10-year plan it laid out for Bloober 2.0 in 2015. A hard pivot worked out well for Bloober once before; it makes some sense to try that again.

Silent Hill 2 will be the first title out of Bloober Team 3.0, the studio focused on action-first, mass-market horror games. This is a small but significant shift in Babieno’s direction, but he — and Bloober as a whole — is still obsessed with fear.

“We are in a very specific moment in history because we have a lot of crises,” Babieno said. He described horror games as a type of catharsis for everyday terror, a safe place where people can dissect their own reactions to intense stimuli and reckon with real-world emotions. He mentioned the pervasive threat of climate change and global economic crises; he pointed out that Bloober is based in Poland, which has a front-row seat to the carnage of the war in Ukraine.

He continued, “As human beings, we would like to be prepared for something that is unexpected. Those fears are around us … we would like to deliver games that allow us to deal with our fears.”

Meanwhile, Bloober Team has grown to roughly 230 employees, and one of Babieno’s greatest personal fears is letting them down or having to lay anyone off. As of 2023, Bloober doesn’t do layoffs; in the past three years, he said just five people have left the company. Babieno isn’t actively growing Bloober at the moment and he isn’t looking for a buyer, even as the industry’s biggest publishers are buying talented indie studios left and right. From Babieno’s perspective, Bloober works best as an independent company building AAA-quality games — horror games, to be exact.

“I would like to stay independent because only then will we be able to make something new, something fresh and creative,” he said. “I don’t want to create games by watching an Excel spreadsheet. I would like to deliver some new milestones of horror, our niche.”

It seems a whole lot of people still enjoy the dulcet mews of chocobos and the ever-present Cid, as Final Fantasy XVIhas sold over three million units since launching on June 22. This new darker take on the series is a PS5 console exclusive, making these sales figures even more impressive. For comparison’s sake, Final Fantasy XVsold five million copies during its launch week back in 2016, but that was a multi-platform title available for both PS4 and Xbox One.

Square Enix says that this three million figure represents both digital and physical sales throughout the globe. This falls slightly short of the recent FF7 remake, which sold 3.5 million units during its first three days of availability. Again, the remake was available on multiple consoles. It’s also worth noting that the PS4 never had availability issues like the PS5, so the install base was much highers (though that’s slowly changing.)

All of these numbers pale in comparison to Nintendo’s crown jewel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which sold a massive 10 million copies in just three days. However, JRPGs have typically struggled with reaching sales numbers in line with open-world adventures, particularly in the West.

Positive reviews and word of mouth likely led to the impressive sales numbers for Final Fantasy XVI. We praised the gorgeous environments, spectacular bosses and nuanced combat system in our review of the title.

Although Big Tech is still (sometimes clumsily) figuring out generative AI’s ethics and implications, the genie is out of the bottle, and the technology is already integrating into the workforce. From that perspective, Microsoft announced a new program today to train workers on AI. The initiative will offer free coursework through LinkedIn, including certification. It’s somewhat ironic since the appeal of generative AI is that it’s dead simple to use: It automates content creation using everyday language. But the courses could still provide tips for composing the most effective prompts while showing beginners the ropes, giving them a chance to keep pace with our rapidly changing world.

Microsoft’s AI Skills Initiative, part of the company’s Skills for Jobs program, will include free courses created by (Microsoft subsidiary) LinkedIn, offering learners “the first Professional Certificate on Generative AI in the online learning market.” Microsoft says the courses will cover introductory AI concepts and “responsible AI frameworks,” culminating in certification. It’s launching in English only, but the company says it will add Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese “over the coming months.”

In addition, the company is launching a trainer toolkit for educators with “downloadable, bite-sized content for trainers” and a separate AI course for teachers and other trainers.

Microsoft also announced an open grant program for AI with an eye on boosting historically marginalized populations. The Generative AI Skills Grant Challenge is a collaboration between data.org, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab and GitHub. It aims to “explore, develop, and implement how nonprofit, social enterprise and research or academic institutions can train and empower the workforce to use generative AI.” Grant recipients will receive financial support, group learning opportunities, data training / guidance and access to Microsoft events and cloud-computing resources. The grant program is accepting applications now with an August 15th deadline. You can learn more and apply here.

Google is about to make it a lot easier for you to buy and rent movies across streamers — for better or worse for your wallet. The company has announced it's adding a Shop tab on Android TV, where you can browse, purchase and store movies.

Though it looks a bit similar, the Shop tab differs from the Android TV's Discover tab in a few ways. Both pages show content from a variety of streaming platforms, but the Discover tab displays recommendations based on your viewing habits, whether or not the titles cost anything to watch. On the other hand, the Shop tab only features content you can, well, shop. Instead of having to click through each app individually, you can see all the movies that are available to rent or buy across the streamers you subscribe to.

The Shop Tab also has a Library section that displays every title you've purchased with your Google account on Google TV devices and its mobile app, Android TV devices and YouTube. Speaking of the Google TV mobile app, you can log in to it on your phone or tablet to download content from your Library for offline access later on. The wait to access this new feature shouldn't be long, as Google reports that the Shop tab will roll out across the US and 23 other countries over the next few weeks.

A Samsung Galaxy S23 FE may be on the way after the company declined to offer a mid-range entry point for its previous-gen flagship smartphone lineup. Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka @OnLeaks), who has a solid track record, has provided a first look at renders of the Galaxy S23 FE.

The leaked images suggest Samsung's device will have a triple-camera array. Unusually for a mid-range smartphone, the sensors may include a telephoto lens. The Galaxy S23 FE is said to have a screen size of around 6.4 inches, with a 120Hz AMOLED panel and an under-display fingerprint reader.

Details about the internals are less clear at this point, as The Verge notes. Rumors have pointed to the Galaxy S23 FE running on a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset from 2022 in some markets and the Exynos 2200 elsewhere. It could have 6GB and 8GB RAM options and 128GB or 256GB of storage.

The Galaxy S23 FE should arrive by the end of 2023, according to Hemmerstoffer. We may not have to wait too much longer to find out about it either, as Samsung will run its second Unpacked event of the year in July.

Steve Hemmerstoffer/Smartprix

OnePlus might be the next company to jump into the foldable phone space, and it could have a few ways to stand out. Well-known tipster OnLeaks and MySmartPriceclaim to have specs for the OnePlus Fold (aka OnePlus V Fold), a book-style foldable, and it will apparently deliver top-end performance. It will reportedly revolve around a 7.8-inch "2K" folding screen as well as a 6.3-inch external display (both 120Hz), and would come with a speedy Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip as well as 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You'd see 48-megapixel regular and ultra-wide cameras on the back, a 64MP telephoto sensor, a 32MP front cam for the external screen and a 20MP selfie shooter when the phone is open.

The 4,800mAh battery wouldn't be exceptional, and you'd have to be content with 'just' 67W fast wired charging instead of the 100W from the OnePlus 11. And yes, the brand's signature alert slider would make the cut despite the relatively novel form factor.

OnePlus is rumored to be launching the Fold this August, or about a month after Samsung is unofficially expected to debut the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5. There's no word on pricing, but the claimed hardware could make it expensive.

The foldable phone category is still relatively small, with North Americans largely having to choose between the Galaxy Z line, Google's Pixel Fold and Motorola's Razr+. With OnePlus entering the arena, though, there are signs the field is heating up. That's good news for customers, as it might lead to more aggressive pricing and new entrants that were previously content to sit on the sidelines.

It makes sense that a majority of EVs are crossovers. It's a market segment that does well. Sure, they're essentially raised hatchbacks, but they offer enough cargo space and seating for a couple or small family. On the other hand, if you have a large brood or need to transport a lot of supplies, gear, or groceries, the electrification of a three-row vehicle has been slow. Fortunately, the Kia EV9 is here with seating for up to seven and a cavernous cargo space.

We had a chance to take the Korean-spec EV9 for a first drive in Korea and while the suspension was a bit softer than what we're used to in the United States and there's a good chance that the acceleration will be tweaked to deliver more zip, it delivered the electric vehicle experience we expect from the automaker.

With a targeted range of up to 300 miles and DC fast charging that Kia says will take the 99.8kWh capacity battery from 10 percent to 80 percent in about 24 minutes, the automaker has something that should appeal to families looking for a road trip SUV. For more details on the EV9 and how it fared on the road, check out the video below.