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During the Xbox Games Extended Showcase, it emerged that several more indie titles are bound for Game Pass. One of them is Neon White, which was one of Engadget's favorite games of 2022. It debuted on PC and Nintendo Switch last June before landing on PlayStation in December. There's no Xbox release date as yet, but as soon as Neon White lands on Microsoft's consoles, Game Pass subscribers can try it at no extra cost.

Neon White is a fast-paced platformer that could help you to live out whatever dreams you have of being a speedrunner. You'll need to take out every demon on a level before you can reach the exit. Chances are you'll want to do that as quickly as possible to achieve the best time possible and beat your friends on the leaderboard. Oh, there are dating sim elements too. It's a strange, stylish game, but what else would you really expect from publisher Annapurna Interactive?

Microsoft revealed during its second showcase of the week that nine more indies are coming to Game Pass on their respective launch days through the ID@Xbox program. Little Kitty Big City, an adorable narrative puzzle game in which you'll help a lost cat get home, is coming to Xbox, Switch and PC early next year (a demo will be available during Steam Next Fest later this month). Another Crab’s Treasure, a charming Soulslike, is also coming to those three platforms early next year.

Techtonica is a first-person factory automation game, while The Wandering Village is a city-building sim that plays out on the back of an enormous, roaming creature. The other indies that Microsoft said are bound for Game Pass are the turn-based RPG Sea of Stars, social simulation adventure Mineko’s Night Market, handmade narrative title Harold Halibut, hospital management game Galacticare and narrative adventure The Bookwalker.

Phasmophobia, like Among Us and Animal Crossing, was a staple of pandemic-era gaming — the co-op ghost hunts were a way to connect when real-life meetings were much scarier. If you missed out or just have fond memories, then, you'll be glad to hear that Kinetic Games is releasing the title on PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR2 and Xbox Series X/S in early access this August. The living room version has cross-platform support, so you shouldn't have to venture into spooky houses without some help.

The premise remains the same. You and up to three other players are tasked with producing evidence of ghosts using familiar pseudoscience tools like thermometers, EMF readers and Ouija boards. The more you discover, the more you can sell to ghost removal teams. The catch, of course, is that these aren't friendly apparitions. They may go on the hunt and kill players, especially as your team's sanity declines. It's not uncommon to see the last surviving player make a panicked run for the exit.

The console launch is coming almost three years after the PC debut. As with Among Us, its heyday has passed. There's still a sizeable fan base, though (over 10,800 average daily players on Steam as of this writing), and the availability on other platforms could both expand the audience and give PC gamers more help with their paranormal investigations.

Moderators from popular Reddit communities say they plan to extend their blackout protests indefinitely. Many of the subreddits protesting the company’s API changes were initially scheduled to participate only from Monday to Wednesday this week. But the vow to extend the demonstration came after CEO Steve Huffman reportedly sent a memo to staff saying Reddit would “get through it” while opining that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” In response to Huffman doubling down, a user wrote, “Let them fuck around and find out.”

Moderators from well-trafficked subreddits, including r/awww, r/music, r/videos, r/futurology, r/apple and r/NBA (among many others) chimed in to commit to an indefinite protest. The blackout is in response to Reddit taking a page from Elon Musk’s Twitter playbook, hiking API prices to astronomical levels ahead of its planned IPO. The move essentially kills all third-party Reddit clients — including the popular Apollo iOS app — leaving Reddit’s own app as users’ only option. In a moderators' thread (spotted byThe Verge) promoting the extension, u/SpicyThunder335 described Reddit’s app as “widely regarded as poor quality, not handicap-accessible, and very difficult to use for moderation.”

Volunteer mods responded to the proposed extension with enthusiasm. For example, u/britinsb commented, “The 48 hours was just the ‘proof of concept.’ The fact [Huffman] is so dismissive of coordinated action by 20,000+ mods and 10,000 subreddits just shows how badly out of touch he is. Now for the real pain.”

Meanwhile, u/strolls suggested taking more drastic measures. “I've been thinking that maybe we should stop moderating — remove only NSFW images, but allow spammers and shitposters to turn Reddit to trash.” When another user pointed out that Reddit could use that as justification for removing those mods and replacing them with lackeys, a now-deleted user replied, “Let them do it then honestly. They currently have roughly 30k mods protesting that have been doing free labor for them [for] decades, keeping these subreddits usable. It's not that simple and will only further affect the site's image with any possible IPO attempt. Twitter fucked around with their paid staff and dropped to a third of pre-purchase valuation. Reddit can learn as well.”

In the same thread, u/SpicyThunder335 suggested common-sense measures for communities with a more urgent need to stay online. “For example, r/StopDrinking represents a valuable resource for communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns.” They suggested subtler protests for those forums, including a stickied announcement or weekly gesture of support.

Have you ever struggled to bring together four folks for an Overwatch team? Tried to figure out how you and your friends can play Destiny 2 simultaneously? 

Can you imagine assembling 33 players for a 25-minute raid? 33 Immortals plans to do exactly that.

Channeling the animation style of retro cartoons (and a little Banner Saga), 33 Immortals is a massively substantially multiplayer roguelike top-down action game, from the creators of Spiritfarer. At a session following this week’s Xbox Showcase at Summer Game Fest, five fellow spirits and I tried to escape hell. 

In this early build of the game, there were two character types in play: a swordsman who could deal heavy close-range damage and an archer who could send up to three arrows toward enemies before having to reload. I got to play as the latter. Alongside the standard attacks, I could hold the action button to charge up a heavier piercing shot. The archer, when he reloads, recalls his fired arrows back to him, meaning strategic placement can effectively double the damage dealt.

All the characters also have a dash move, while trigger buttons open your world map, emote wheel and co-op powers. These co-op powers will vary depending on your character type and often demand careful planning to pull them off. Pressing the RB trigger displays a trio of circles on the ground; two of your fellow immortals need to activate the empty circles in order to trigger the attack. For me, this rained arrows on a wide area of the map, but for the swordsman, it launched a wide-ranged healing spell.

Thunder Lotus

With plenty of enemies on-screen, especially in the more challenging portal dungeons, it’s a lot of fun just chaotically spamming attacks, helping the rest of your team finish off mid-bosses, or picking off easier foes at a distance before they coordinate their attacks.

If the sword and bow options sound a little limiting, don’t worry: 33 Immortals will offer up plenty of different character types to play with. With seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues, we’ll likely get to play around with seven different warriors. Outside of co-op powers and quirks, the button layouts don’t change among characters, making it easier to try out every option. To add a little more complexity, you can gather up in-game currency from monsters you kill, exchanging them for healing or trinkets to boost attack speed, defense and more.

And you’ll likely have to try, try and try again. Each raid is built to be around 25 minutes long, and you'll want to keep as many players alive (and online) as possible so you'll be able to fell the boss at the end. More players will mean it’ll take less time to shave the health bar of bigger enemies, as the game apparently isn’t built to scale with how many characters are playing. More immortals is always better.

By the way, you’re not quite immortal as a fighter, either. After taking too much damage, you’ll fall and reappear as an ethereal spirit, not able to do anything but float around until another raider can resurrect you – something that proved to be particularly frustrating in the middle of difficult fights. Naturally, it’s just better if you fight more cautiously, heal your allies and… don’t die.

33 Immortals is inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. You're rebelling against God’s final judgment that your soul is damned, and there's a fun twist in the way God delivers his anger when you beat one of his dungeons. As you step out of the portal, the ground around you will get immolated in holy fire, and you’ll have to dodge this and spawning enemies until God chills a little.

While this was an early demo, latency was a struggle for my machine, but the team has plenty of time to stabilize – and offer demos that are not in the middle of a hectic Xbox showcase. I’m excited to play a roguelike as part of a mob, and I'm curious to see what the other character types will be.

33 Immortals is coming to Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2024.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

If you go to Reddit right now, your favorite subreddit might not be available. More than 8,000 communities on the platform have gone private to protest Reddit's API policy changes. Moderators of many of those subreddits said they'd open up access to their communities again on Wednesday, while others are prepared to prolong their protests indefinitely. Either way, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman doesn't seem too worried.

According to The Verge, Huffman told staff to block out the noise from the collective action. He noted in a memo that there hadn't been "any significant revenue impact" as yet and said Reddit would "get through it." 

Reddit was down for many users for a while on Monday, soon after the protest started. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues," the company told Engadget at the time.

Huffman wrote that while Reddit anticipated the protest, "it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us." He noted that some Reddit employees "have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout." Huffman thanked them for their efforts and said that Reddit had to stay the course.

“There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” he reportedly wrote. “We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”

In April, Reddit said it would start charging for API access. Third-party developers have used the API to make thousands of apps that hook into Reddit, including moderation tools. Reddit users are concerned that the changes will significantly harm the community. We're already starting to see that play out to a certain extent.

Apollo and RIF, two popular third-party apps that redditors use to access Reddit, will shut down on June 30th, just before the API pricing changes come into force. The creator of Apollo estimated that maintaining the app would cost him around $20 million per year. Huffman addressed the issue in his memo.

"While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others," Huffman wrote. "And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia."

Meanwhile, Huffman warned staff about wearing Reddit-branded apparel in public for the time being. "Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations," he wrote.

"Basically, we're not planning a distinct sequel at all."

Dan Greenawalt, GM of the Forza series, has been working on Motorsport games for two decades, but his remarks in a post-Xbox Showcase briefing on Sunday suggest this next release could be the last in the series. Forza Motorsport is the eighth title in Turn 10 Studios' driving sim franchise, and the first new entry in almost half a decade.

Forza has been one of Microsoft’s most reliable first-party properties. Ignoring Playground Games' spinoff Horizon series, the original Xbox had one Forza title, the Xbox 360 had three, and the Xbox One had three. Barring a few launch hiccups, every title has been well-reviewed and the franchise as a whole has sold millions. We’re now in the third year of this console generation, and there’s been no Motorsport game for fans to play.

A lot’s changed since Forza Motorsport 7 arrived in September 2017. The “day one with Game Pass” paradigm shift started with Sea Of Thieves in 2018, and has since become Microsoft’s entire business model. Now, Microsoft measures success more like a social network (or a tech news publication), focusing on monthly active users and playtime, rather than sales.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Forza Motorsport is set up more like a service game than a traditional AAA title.

While many of the modes that Forza players expect, especially the online multiplayer component, are being reworked and improved, Turn 10 is betting that its new career mode will keep players coming back week after week. At Summer Game Fest, the game’s creative director Chris Esaki talked a group of journalists through this new career-mode loop and the shift in philosophy for the series.

Esaki described Forza Horizon as “a whole new take on falling in love with cars.” We saw a career mode event called the Builders Cup, which began with a narrated showcase of a trio of cars. After picking one to roll with, you then head into “open practice,” where you get to know the car. These sessions are packed full of stats and challenges; you earn Car Experience Points (CXP) for every corner you take, and the closer to perfection you are the more CXP you’ll get. CXP is specific to each car, and is used to upgrade parts and customize vehicle performance.

After open practice, you head into a race, where there’s a new “challenge the grid” system that lets you essentially bet against your racing talent. You choose where on the grid to start and how fast your AI opponents are, with higher rewards as the difficulty scales up. After competing in the race itself, you’ll earn money for new vehicles as well as more of the car-specific CXP. Then it’s onto the next open practice, more tuning and customization, and more races.

Esaki calls this loop “level, build, dominate.” He sees it as a way to get players interested in a broad swathe of cars, rather than having them head straight to a Ferrari or Bugatti. That might sound like the ethos of another popular racing sim, but while there are definitely elements of Gran Turismo 7’s cups and café challenges in here, the Builders Cup feels both more contained and more repeatable. It’s all by design: Similar to recent Forza Horizon games, players can expect a big content update monthly, which then rolls out week-by-week.

We’ll likely hear much more about Forza Motorsport in the lead up to its release on October 10th, and I’m interested to try out the new simulation features, like a massively overhauled physics system and improved opponent AI. For now, though, the pitch seems solid. I’m a huge fan of Gran Turismo 7, but if you don’t enjoy online sim racing and the toxicity that comes with it, its single-player experience is fairly threadbare. In contrast, Turn 10 seems to have developed Forza Motorsport as a game that will last forever, with new experiences every week designed to satiate gamers’ desire for fresh races and Microsoft’s desire for monthly active users.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

OpenAI warned Microsoft early this year about rushing the integration of GPT-4 into Bing without further training, according to The Wall Street Journal. Although Microsoft forged ahead anyway, the alert proved prescient as early users noticed “unhinged” behavior in the Bing AI tool. (The most memorable examples included arguing, plotting ways to break out of its restrictions and trying to convince a New York Times tech columnist to leave his marriage and elope with Bing instead.) In addition, the new report details “conflict and confusion” behind the curtains of the companies’ convenient but potentially fragile alliance.

Rather than buying OpenAI outright, Microsoft invested in a 49-percent stake in the artificial intelligence startup, a strategy designed to help it avoid antitrust scrutiny. The arrangement gave Microsoft early access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to boost its Bing search engine. In addition, it’s adding OpenAI-powered CoPilot to Office and other software products as rival Google scrambles to catch up. Meanwhile, OpenAI gets the financial investment and Microsoft’s servers for hosting.

The WSJ describes the arrangement as an “open relationship” where Microsoft maintains significant influence without complete control. For example, although the agreement limits OpenAI’s search-engine customers, it’s still free to work with Microsoft’s rivals. That can place the two companies in precarious situations like their sales teams making overlapping pitches to the same customers. In addition, Microsoft employees have reportedly complained about diminished in-house AI spending and a lack of direct access to OpenAI’s models for its researchers and engineers.

JASON REDMOND via Getty Images

Microsoft employees were also reportedly surprised at how quickly OpenAI launched ChatGPT. The startup opened its chatbot to the public last November on its way to setting the record for the fastest-growing app user base. Microsoft didn’t launch Bing GPT integration until February — after ChatGPT was already well on its way to becoming a household name.

Even with Bing’s shaky AI launch, it’s hard to argue Microsoft hasn’t benefited immensely from the partnership. The search engine saw an early 15-percent traffic boost after adding GPT integration, while the Bing mobile app was downloaded 750,000 times, including a peak of 150,000 daily installs, during its first week. The fact that Bing has become a buzzed-about product — after years of being mocked as Google’s also-ran competitor — is quite an accomplishment in itself. “When we grow, it helps [OpenAI], and when they grow, it helps us,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said in April.

Still, some analysts view the partnership as potentially problematic over time. “What puts them in more of a collision course is both sides need to make money,” said Oren Etzioni, board member and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The conflict is they’ll both be trying to make money with similar products.”

A Swedish regulator has fined Spotify SEK 58 million ($5.4 million) after determining that the company had violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The issue concerns how Spotify handles users' personal data and its customers' access to the information.

Advocacy group Noyb, which is led by privacy campaigner Max Schrems, filed a complaint against Spotify and other major tech companies in early 2019. In the complaint, Noyb asserted that, among other issues, Spotify didn't provide all personal data to users upon request and that it didn't disclose the reasons for processing such information.

The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) found that while Spotify gives users personal data that it processes upon request, it "does not inform clearly enough about how this data is used by the company." It said that Spotify should be more transparent "about how and for what purposes individuals' personal data is handled." The lack of clarity meant that "it has been difficult for individuals to understand how their personal data is processed and to check whether the handling of their personal data is lawful," the IMY added.

The regulator said it considered the issues to be "a low level of seriousness" and noted Spotify, has taken steps to resolve them. The IMY determined the fine based on those factors along with Spotify's revenue and number of users. It noted that it made the decision with the help of other EU data protection authorities, given that Spotify has users in many countries.

"Spotify offers all users comprehensive information about how personal data is processed," the company, which is based in Sweden, told TechCrunch in a statement. It said the regulator "found only minor areas of our process they believe need improvement. However, we don’t agree with the decision and plan to file an appeal.

Google's Pixel Watch is a relatively new addition to the market compared to its competitors, so it has some catching up to do features-wise. To that end, Google has announced a new update for the Pixel Watch that will allow for blood oxygen tracking. While you sleep, your watch will monitor your nighttime oxygen saturation and notify you of any changes. The Samsung Galaxy Watch, Apple Watch and Google-owned Fitbit trackers all offer blood oxygen tracking. 

Some of Fitbit's features were integrated into the Pixel Watch at launch — though not always smoothly. In Engadget's original review of the Pixel Watch, we noticed a regular delay (between hours and days) in the availability of recent health data, like walks and sleep time. It's unclear if the same issue will persist with this latest feature. 

The addition of blood oxygen tracking comes alongside a series of new updates for the Pixel Watch and Pixel Phone. On the health side of things, the Pixel Watch will also monitor your heart rate and send you alerts if it becomes abnormal. The Pixel Watch will also have Google Assistant available in a greater number of languages and locations, three new Spotify tiles and the option to purchase Brushed Silver or Matte Black Metal Link Bands — each $200. New features for Google Pixel Phones include improved emergency sharing, emoji wallpapers and the option to export recordings to Google Docs. 

All updates should be available now, except the new Metal Link Band colors, which will roll out in the next few days. If the rumors are true, the Google Pixel Watch 2 will launch this fall — hopefully bringing even more new features.

Google just added a bunch of new features for Pixel smartphone owners in a system update. First of all, there’s a major improvement to the car crash detection feature, as it now not only contacts emergency services but automatically shares real-time location information with emergency contacts. To that end, the update also makes it easier to start emergency sharing or schedule a safety check by allowing for voice controls.

The recording feature got a major update here, with a new ability to export transcripts into Google Docs and generate labels based on who’s speaking so you can easily find the clip you want later. The photo timer also got a refresh, letting you initiate self-timed photos by raising your palm to start a countdown. This only works for Pixel 6 phones and newer.

If you have the well-reviewed Pixel 7 Pro, there’s an update to macro focus as the feature can now handle both still photography and video for detailed footage of a beetle climbing a flower or whatever. For all Pixel phone owners, Google Assistant is getting a glow up, with an array of new voice options and new language options. It also wouldn’t be a system update without some kind of emoji tomfoolery, so there’s new emoji wallpapers that let you mix and match images with patterns and colors to create unique backgrounds. The update brings even more wallpaper goodness via dynamic cinematic (3D) options. 

Pixel Watch owners were not left out in the cold here, as there’s a new heart rate tool that tracks the upper and lower limits of your threshold, an auto-pause tool and the long-awaited blood oxygen tracker. These features are dropping now but it could take a few days, or weeks, before the update reaches your device.