Rockstar Games confirmed that GTA VI, if that's what's the next entry in the series is going to be called, has been in the works earlier this year when it announced the release date of GTA V and GTA Online for the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S. Now, in a post detailing a major update coming to the GTA Online experience, the developer said that it's been "steadily moving more development resources" towards the next Grand Theft Auto title over the past few years. The company has done so, because it understands the "need to exceed players' expectations," but it has had to make changes to how it supports Red Dead Online as a result. 

The biggest change for Red Dead players is that the developer will no longer roll out major themed updates like in previous years. As GameRant explains, that means no more new Specialist Roles, missions and game modes, as well. The company will still build upon existing modes and add new Telegram Missions, which are solo activities players can do to get rewards, this year. But going forward, Rockstar will focus on showcasing previously added Roles and missions during Red Dead Online's monthly events.

Red Dead Online players had complained about the lack of substantial updates in the past and about Rockstar's tendency to prioritize the Grand Theft Auto franchise over its other games. GTA is a massive moneymaker for the developer, though, so it doesn't really come as a surprise that Rockstar has chosen to put all its efforts towards making sure that fans will love GTA VI.

Meta is changing course on its controversial requirement for users of its virtual reality headsets to log in with a Facebook account. Instead, they'll need a new Meta account, which won't need to be linked to Facebook. The company will start rolling out the new account next month for existing and new Meta Quest users. Those with a legacy Oculus account will need to have a Meta account to keep using their headset after January 1st, 2023.

The company stressed that a Meta account is not a social media profile, saying that it "lets you log into your VR devices and view and manage your purchased apps in one place." It noted that future devices will require Meta accounts too.

There is a social aspect to the new account type though, at least for VR headsets. When you create a Meta account, you'll need to create a Meta Horizon profile with the username, avatar, profile photo and so on that you'll use in the company's vision of the metaverse.

Oculus friends will become your followers and you'll automatically follow them back. You can, of course, unfollow people and stop others from following you. You'll still have the option of linking your Meta account to Facebook and Instagram, so you'll be able to chat with friends in the VR version of Messenger or find some buds to play games with. 

While Facebook has a one-account-per-person rule, the company is fine with you having multiple Meta accounts. Perhaps you'll have one for virtual meetings and another for hanging out with friends.

The new accounts will offer privacy controls, including the option to make your profile private and manually approve follower requests. Users aged between 13 and 17 will have private profiles by default.

This is an important shift for Meta as it continues to place more focus on its vision of the metaverse. However, Meta is said to have scaled back its metaverse ambitions in the last few months, having reportedly killed off some Reality Labs projects and put a planned dual-camera smartwatch on hold. 

Still, there are at least some positives of Meta divorcing VR from its social media apps. Folks who are interested in Meta Quest but want nothing to do with Facebook will no longer need an account for the latter.

Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that allows two accounts to co-author a tweet. The company is calling it a “CoTweet,” which it’s now testing with “select” accounts in the United States, Canada and Korea.

With a CoTweet, two accounts can be linked as the author of a single tweet, which will appear on both accounts’ timelines. Much like the collabs feature introduced by Instagram last year, CoTweets seem to be geared more toward brands and creators than the typical Twitter users.

“CoTweets help authors share the spotlight, unlock opportunities for engaging new audiences, and enhance their established partnerships,” Twitter explains on its website. The feature was first spotted earlier this year by reverse engineer and developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared some details about it back in February.

Now, Twitter has expanded the test, at least for now. A Twitter spokesperson said that CoTweets is currently a “temporary experiment,” but didn’t indicate if, or when, the feature may be more widely available. “We’re testing CoTweets for a limited time to learn how people and brands may use this feature to grow and reach new audiences, and strengthen their collaborations with other accounts,” the spokesperson said.

The following article contains really significant spoilers for ‘A Quality of Mercy.’

We’re living in the age of the prequel, with studios exploiting every scrap of existing material where there’s an audience already in place to enjoy it. But the low-hanging fruit and easy cash a prequel promises severely limits the storytelling opportunities for those properties. Obi-Wan Kenobi can’t die (or do anything of consequence) during his own prestige miniseries since his fate was preordained in 1977. Ewan McGregor has to age into Sir Alec Guinness and die at Darth Vader’s hand, and that’s that. Sure, there are some things creative teams can play fast and loose with, but the big things – the ones that permeate the culture at large – are set in stone.

Ever since Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was announced, it was blighted by this same hard stop, one dictated back in November 1966. Movies aside, until 2018, Christopher Pike was little more than a pub trivia answer to the question “Who was the first captain of the Enterprise?” (It’ll provoke an argument between the folks who just about remember Jeffrey Hunter was there before William Shatner, while the folks who know Robert April was first sit smugly on the sidelines.) But Pike’s fate wasn’t necessarily immutable until the second season of Discovery reaffirmed that he was going to get his radiation dose. But that didn’t matter until the fans, production team and executives found that they liked Anson Mount, and could easily watch a whole series of pre-Kirk adventures with him on the Enterprise.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the creative team looked for a way to prolong the series beyond its narrative end point. The show has already dangled a few ways that Pike could survive the incident, and made it clear that there are still seven years left to go. Seven years being the old-fashioned point where a TV show could make it in syndication, and the duration that all three Silver Age Trek series reached. Strange New Worlds could just as easily slow its timeline down and spend five, seven, ten or seventeen seasons filling the next six years of Pike’s life or find a way to remove such an arbitrary deadline.

And yet, the show’s season finale “A Quality of Mercy” decides to take advantage of the limits imposed upon it, making it clear to both Pike, and us, that there are no get outs. We begin at a base on the edge of the Romulan neutral zone, where the son of Commander Hansen will, when he grows up, be one of the cadets who dies in the radiation leak. Pike decides that it’s only logical to dissuade the kid from joining Starfleet and, therefore, save his life, but as he’s writing a letter to the boy to warn him of his fate, an older Pike appears in his quarters. And we know he’s older, because he’s wearing one of Robert Fletcher’s gorgeous 2278-era Starfleet uniforms, albeit restyled to suit the nu-Trek era.

Sadly, Admiral Pike isn’t here to congratulate his younger self on a job well done, but warn him of the consequences of futzing with time. Thanks to a Klingon Time Crystal from Boreth, Pike gets All Good Things-ed into his own future, six months after the radiation leak. If your fan antennae started tingling at the date, it’s because Pike is running the Enterprise in 2266, during the first season of classic Star Trek. In fact, it’s worse than that, because he’s been thrust straight into the episode of “Balance of Terror”, except he has to win the way his way instead of Kirk’s. As Pike says, the only way to discover why this future is terrible, is to live it.

(“Balance of Terror” is widely regarded to be one of the top three best episodes from the classic series. It’s the one where the Enterprise plays a tense game of cat-and-mouse with a new Romulan warbird equipped with a cloaking device and a powerful weapon capable of shredding starships in one shot.)

Now, if there’s one thing this episode does better than, well, most of nu-Trek, it’s the fact that all of the characters make smart choices. Pike, thrown into the future, instantly confides in Spock and when he’s met with resistance, immediately recommends a mind-meld. Caught up to speed, Spock becomes Pike’s co-confidant in the altered future, helping him to work out what exactly he needs to do here.

Pike’s survival has caused plenty of things to change in the timeline: James Kirk is the captain of the USS Farragut, which has survived in this version of the future. And, mercifully, the ship is in the vicinity, meaning that Kirk and Pike get to work together to solve the problem of the rogue Romulan Warbird with its devastating new weapon. Meanwhile, the beats from “Balance of Terror” get replayed – with Ortegas replacing Lt. Stiles as the on-bridge racist with angry eyes pointed at Spock.

Understandably, given the conflicts between Pike’s folksy diplomacy and Kirk’s more action-y approach, nobody wins. The Romulans get a signal out to the fleet, who realize that the Federation is weak enough to wage total war upon. In many ways, this episode serves up its own indictment of Pike, showing that his don’t-shoot-first approach has a limit. (And it also puts some clearer water between Pike and Kirk, since one was the replacement for the other back in the ‘60s.) Naturally, the episode ends with Pike opting to return to his own time and understand that he can’t simply back out of his preordained fate.

This is the second episode of Strange New Worlds co-written by the polarizing Akiva Goldsman, and many of his hallmarks are on full show here. There’s the misplaced reverence for franchise iconography, Great Man Of History mythologizing (this time with Spock) and a face off between two copy-and-paste CGI space fleets. Even so, given the risk of what this episode could have been, especially threading a new narrative through one of the sacred texts of the original series, this worked pretty well. (Given Goldsman’s previous Trek work, I’m giving all of the credit to showrunner and co-writer Henry Alonso Myers here.)

I can’t really give much comment on Paul Wesley’s performance as Kirk here, since he’s handed the most poisoned of chalices. William Shatner, even at his worst, never played Kirk as big as the stereotype has become, and Chris Pine’s performance dialed down Kirk’s bookish, warrior-poet side. Go too far on either side and it’ll become an impression, especially since he’s only got around 10 minutes of screentime in the whole episode. That’s why he essentially plays Kirk as someone who is both stalwart but also endlessly looking for a third option, emphasizing his inventiveness.

The episode ends with a twist – somehow, Number One’s past has been revealed (like when she just told everyone who would listen in "Ghosts of Illyria"), and she’s arrested by Starfleet. Pike nearly breaks a security guard’s hand preventing the arrest but is talked down by Una on the pad before he declares that things aren’t over. I’ll be very curious to see how this particular storyline gets resolved, especially considering my perpetual wondering about Rebecca Romijn’s absence from the show. The fact that Paul Wesley was tipped to recur in season two might suggest Kirk’s coming on board as her replacement, but that feels a bit too excessive in its fan service. 

Fundamentally, however, Strange New Worlds wraps up its first season with something that’s better than it had any right to be. As I wrote back at the beginning, the first five episodes all have something good going on, but often trip over their own shoelaces. Ever since “Spock Amok”, however, the show has started to find its feet, with less awkward dialogue, a more relaxed groove and the courage to go for high camp and comedy just as regularly as it does high drama. Every episode in the back half of the first season has been better than its immediate predecessor, even if there’s some very obvious kinks that still need to be worked out. Whisper it, friends, but, Strange New Worlds might actually be good?

The otherworldly dust has settled on season four of Stranger Things, which just wrapped up with a blockbuster pair of episodes. While The Duffer Brothers, who created the show, have one more season of the Netflix megahit to make, they're looking ahead to future projects.

Matt and Ross Duffer have set up a new production company as part of their partnership with Netflix. Fittingly enough, it's called Upside Down Pictures. The studio, which will be run by Ozark and Orphan Black producer Hilary Leavitt, will “aim to create the kind of stories that inspired the Duffers growing up — stories that take place at that beautiful crossroads where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, where big spectacle co-exists with intimate character work, where heart wins out over cynicism,” Netflix said.

The company and the Duffers also revealed some of the projects they have in the pipeline. For one thing, they're working on a stage play set in the world of Stranger Things. Emmy- and Tony-award winner Stephen Daldry, known for his work on The Crown and Billy Elliot, will direct the play. A live-action Stranger Things spin-off series is also in the works.

Intriguingly, Netflix is taking another stab at adapting the classic manga and anime series Death Note with the help of the Duffers. Unlike the poorly received 2017 movie, this will be a live-action show.

Also in the works under the wing of Upside Down Pictures are a series from Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and an adaption of Stephen King and Peter Straub‘s The Talisman. The production company and Netflix have teamed up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Paramount Television for the latter series.

Stranger Things is easily one of Netflix's biggest successes. Fans have already collectively viewed more than a billion hours of Stranger Things 4 alone. After Squid Game, it's only the second season of a Netflix show to hit that milestone within 28 days of release.

As such, it's not too much of a surprise that Netflix wants to expand the Duffers' remit to (hopefully) work their magic on more shows and movies. The company is having a rough year and is in desperate need of more big hits to draw in new subscribers and keep existing ones on board.

If you have fond memories of older Ubisoft games with online components from the early 2010s, you might want to check in on them soon. That's because on September 1st 2022, Ubisoft is dropping support for online services in 15 different games including Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

In a post on Ubisoft's website, the company says it's decommissioning online services in some of its older games in order to "focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles." Depending on the title, gamers will no longer be able to access multiplayer modes or even download and install additional content (DLC). 

Affected games are spread across various platforms including the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, HTC Vive, Oculus and Wii U, with notable titles including Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, the 2012 release of Assassin's Creed 3, Anno 2070 and more. And in some cases like Space Junkies, which is a multiplayer-only title, the game will be completely unplayable. Meanwhile, for others such as Ghost Recon Future Soldier, you'll need to put your console in offline mode just to play the solo campaign. 

While most of the games enjoyed 10 to 12 years of support since their release, it's still a bit sad to see Ubisoft drop support for online services for some of its most iconic franchises — especially in titles where DLC will no longer be accessible. For a full list of games that are being decommissioned on September 1st, please visit the company's help page here for more information. 

Stranger Things 4 has become the most popular English-language series on Netflix with the premiere of its last two episodes. The streaming giant has revealed that the show has racked up 1.15 billion hours of viewing time within the first 28 days of each part's release. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the first seven episodes had a viewing time of 930.32 million hours within 28 days of the show's debut. Meanwhile, episodes 8 and 9 reached 221 million hours viewed in the week of June 27th to July 3rd. 

That makes the series second only to Squid Game, which crossed 1.65 billion hours viewed within its first 28 days of release and which currently holds the title for the most-viewed show in Netflix history. It even has the potential to overtake the Korean hit, seeing as it has only been a few days since the last two episodes came out. 

Netflix, however, has yet to reveal whether Stranger Things 4's popularity has had a significant impact on its subscriber numbers. In 2021, the company said it posted its best subscriber growth of the year during the third quarter, thanks in part to Squid Game. But in April this year, Netflix admitted that it lost about 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 due to several issues, such as stiffer competition and account sharing. The company said back then that it's taking steps to turn things around, but we'll have to wait for its next earnings report to find out whether Eleven and the rest of the Hawkins crew were of any help. 

Publisher Dragami Games has announced a remake of Lollipop Chainsaw, which will arrive next year. The 2012 original was a cult hit. It's a hack-and-slash title from the minds of producer Yoshimi Yasuda, creative director Goichi "Suda51" Suda (of No More Heroes fame) and Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, who was a writer on the game.

Lollipop Chainsaw focuses on Juliet Starling, a cheerleader who battles zombies in a California high school. Surprisingly enough, Juliet wields a chainsaw that she can use in various ways (including ranged attacks). She can also collect lollipops to restore her health. Juliet is accompanied on her quest by the disembodied head of her boyfriend. A serious game this is not. 

Dragami Games is led by Yasuda. who will also produce the remake. The development team includes some other folks who previously worked on Lollipop Chainsaw. As IGN notes, some aspects will be different in the remake. Yasuda said the new version will take advantage of current-gen console hardware to deliver "a more realistic approach to the graphics." It will have new music as well, due to licensing issues.

Dragami acquired the intellectual property of Lollipop Chainsaw and other titles from original publisher Kadokawa Games (Dragami recently split off from the latter). "Unfortunately, various factors resulted in things making it so that fans can no longer easily play Lollipop Chainsaw, and it has been some time since players have not been able to access the game on current consoles," Yasuda wrote in a statement on Twitter. "We, the original development staff on Lollipop Chainsaw, think of the game as very precious to us, and did not want to leave it in limbo, where players who want to play it cannot."

The music of Crosby, Stills and Nash is once again available to stream on Spotify. In February, the supergroup left the platform to protest Spotify’s inaction against Joe Rogan, who was accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation through his podcast. According to Billboard, the trio plan to donate their Spotify earnings to COVID-19 charities for “at least a month.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash were among a handful of musicians who left Spotify in response to Rogan’s interview with vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone. The exodus, such that it was, began with Neil Young and later came to include Joni Mitchell, as well as author Brené Brown.

In the end, Spotify did not drop Rogan. Instead, the company said it would add a content advisory to any episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. The protest’s effect on Spotify’s bottom line appears to have been minimal, with the company recently reporting that it grew to 422 million monthly users.

Despite the return of Crosby, Stills and Nash to Spotify, don’t expect to see all of the music the trio helped created on the platform. As The Verge point outs, Young’s continued absence from the service means not every song from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is available. For instance, tracks like “Helpless” and “Country Girl” are missing from the band’s 1970 album Déjà Vu, 

Twitch has begun testing a new feature that could introduce you to great streamers you haven't seen before. Channel Switcher shows random channels as a carousel at the bottom of the screen. When you click on any of them, you'll be able to watch a one-minute preview of the streamer's content, enough to give you an idea of what they offer. The previews have no ads either, so you can channel surf undisturbed until you find something to watch. As Twitch explains, the feature will make it easier to figure out if you like a specific channel before committing.

A Twitch spokesperson told The Verge that "only a small percentage of [randomly selected] users who are logged in" will get the chance to test out the feature. The company plans to end the test in July and then analyze its results. While it's unclear if Channel Switcher will get a wide release at this point, the spokesperson told the publication that Twitch intends to roll out future iterations and is thinking of offering it as an opt-in discovery solution. 

Alongside Channel Switcher, Twitch also launched Guest Star, which allows up to five guests to join a host in a stream. It works similar to Clubhouse in that streamers can include other streamers and viewers in their broadcast, but it of course supports video and not just audio conversations.