In little more than a year, Elden Ring has sold approximately 20.5 million copies. That’s according to an investor report spotted by a ResetEra forum user (via Eurogamer). “Repeat sales of existing titles such as Elden Ring were strong, especially overseas, [with] worldwide sales reaching 20.5 million,” Bandai Namco writes in the document. The publisher adds that it expects “a pullback” in repeat sales of the game. However, if Elden Ring can sell a few million more copies, it will land among the best-selling games of all time, a list that includes titles like God of War (2018) and Grand Theft Auto V.

The milestone comes a year after Elden Ring had the best-ever opening for a FromSoftware title. In just 18 days, Bandai Namco sold more than 12 million copies of the action RPG. Pretty good for a game that was expected to sell about 4 million copies in five days. The ongoing strong performance of Elden Ring bodes well for FromSoftware’s next game, Armored Core VI. When it arrives this August, the title will be the first entry in the Armored Core series in nearly a decade.

Meta has patched a Facebook bug that saw the social network send automatic friend requests when users would visit any profile. In a statement the company shared with The Daily Beast on Friday, Meta apologized for the glitch. “We fixed a bug related to a recent app update that caused some Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet. “We’ve stopped this from happening and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Predictably, the glitch generated equal amounts of amusement and confusion. Many quickly pointed out that the technical oversight temporarily made it impossible to “Facebook stalk” other users. More worryingly, some found that Facebook sent friend requests to people they were trying to block. Notably, news of the bug comes after Meta said it would lay off 10,000 employees. Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” will see the company reduce its workforce by at least 21,000 by the end of 2023.

It’s no secret that the Nintendo Switch is showing its age, making it difficult to port games over from more powerful consoles. The latest hurdle for third-party publishers? Hogwarts Legacy developers just announced that the Nintendo Switch version of the open-world wizard simulator is getting another significant delay, all the way until November 14th.

This isn’t the first delay the port’s faced, as it was originally supposed to release in April after being pushed back to July 25th. At that time, all of the last-gen ports got hit with a delay, but the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions have since been released. The title originally launched for PS5, Xbox Series X and PC back in February.

Developers said the Switch delay is so it can provide the “best possible experience” for players. It’ll be interesting to see how the game performs when it eventually launches and what changes are made to accommodate the aging hardware. For those looking for a portable version of Hogwarts Legacy right now, instead of six months from now, the game is verified for the Steam Deck.

Despite some controversy,Hogwarts Legacy has become a bona-fide hit for Avalanche Software and Warner Bros. Games, selling over 15 million copies and generating over $1 billion in revenue.

Twitch has a new clip editor that will make it much, much easier for streamers to promote their content across platforms that put a focus on mobile users. Streamers will find the new editor under the clip manager in their creator dashboard. As TechCrunch notes, clicking "edit and share clip" will open a tool that'll give them an easy way to create vertical video clips. They can choose to create a video that shows one portion of their stream in full or to create a clip that splits the view between their stream and their camera. Either way, they're getting a vertical video they can share. 

There's also a toggle at the bottom of the editor they can switch on to add their channel name to the clip. After they decide on what their video snippet will look like, they can then either download it or share it straight to YouTube Shorts with a title and a description that they'd written. While the feature only comes with YouTube integration right now, Twitch seems to have plans to add quick sharing for other platforms in the future. For now, creators will have to manually upload their videos if they want to promote their streams through Instagram Reels, Snapchat and TikTok. The still entails a bit more work than sharing on YouTube Shorts, but by doing so, they're putting themselves in front of more potential viewers who could end up being loyal subscribers. 

The new vertical clip editor is making its way to all users' clip manager this week. 

Abbey Games has officially revealed that a sequel to its indie god sim Reus is "on the way," almost a full decade after the original came out for Windows PCs. The original game received mostly favorable reviews after it shipped, and the developer sold over one million copies worldwide. Abbey Games founders Maarten Wiedenhof, Manuel Kerssemakers and Adriaan Jansen said: "The original Reus is a decade old, and much has changed in the gaming world. We're excited to bring Reus 2 to this new era, and show what it can bring to all those who want to create their own perfect world!" 

In Reus 2, players will have the ability to create multiple planets as their elemental giant god characters. They can shape those planets however they want to see how the people that live there would react to the unique landscapes that surround them and the challenges they encounter. And by "challenges they encounter," we mean whatever the player decides to put them through. Hey, it's a god sim — players can choose to make it easy for the people living on one planet and then put another planet's population through the wringer. They can even stage an apocalypse and start anew. Aren't you glad we're not living in a simulation? (...Or are we?)

The developer says Reus 2 is still currently in development. It doesn't have a release date yet, but those interested can now add it to their Steam wishlist. 

Watching the Olympics in 2021 was a little complicated, requiring viewers to juggle NBC Broadcasts, the company's Peacock Streaming service and a dedicated NBCOlympics.com website. Today the company announced that watching the Paris games in 2024 will be a lot easier — declaring Peacock the "streaming home" of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

"In a Summer Games first, the service will stream every sport and event, including all 329 medal events." NBC says it will also broadcast at least nine hours of daytime coverage on the network, which will then be made available for streaming on Peacock. The streaming service will also host full-event replays, curated video clips, original commentary and more.

NBC is heralding the coverage as the Olympic Games return to its "true glory, with full stadiums and the world's greatest athletes" since 2018, but the expanded programming is almost certainly a response to backlash over the network's limited coverage of the last summer Olympics. Although the network did make every event available to watch 2021, most of it could only be accessed on NBCOlympics.com, with NBC television and Peacock playing host to limited key events.

With any luck, NBC's new plans will make watching the games easier than ever. You'll have to wait about a year to find out, though: NBC and Peacock will kick off Olympic Games coverage on Friday, July 26 2024.

Folks looking for more sci-fi to sink their teeth into on Apple TV+ after getting hooked on Silo won’t have too much longer to wait. The streaming service has revealed that the second season of Foundation will premiere on July 14th. The show, which is based on a series of Isaac Asimov novels, will return with one episode on that day, and more will follow on a weekly basis.

The season runs for 10 episodes and it's set over a century after the first season's finale. It features "a vengeful queen" who aims to destroy the Galactic Empire from within, Apple said. The Foundation, meanwhile, has moved into its religious phase. It's promoting the Church of Seldon throughout the Outer Reach and bringing about the second crisis — in other words, war with the Empire. Alongside the release date, Apple TV+ has released another visually dazzling trailer:

More AI-generated music mimicking a famous artist has made the rounds — while making lots of money for the scammer passing it off as genuine. A collection of fake Frank Ocean songs sold for a reported $13,000 CAD ($9,722 in US dollars) last month on a music-leaking forum devoted to the Grammy-winning singer, according toVice. If the story sounds familiar, it’s essentially a recycling of last month’s AI Drake / The Weeknd fiasco.

As generative AI takes the world by storm — Google just devoted most of its I/O 2023 keynote to it — people eager to make a quick buck through unscrupulous means are seizing the moment before copyright laws catch up. It’s also caused headaches for Spotify, which recently pulled not just Fake Drake but tens of thousands of other AI-generated tracks after receiving complaints from Universal Music.

The scammer, who used the handle mourningassasin, told Vice they hired someone to make “around nine” Ocean songs using “very high-quality vocal snippets” of the Thinkin Bout You singer’s voice. The user posted a clip from one of the fake tracks to a leaked-music forum and claims to have quickly convinced its users of its authenticity. “Instantly, I noticed everyone started to believe it,” mourningassasin said. The fact that Ocean hasn’t released a new album since 2016 and recently teased an upcoming follow-up to Blond may have added to the eagerness to believe the songs were real.

The scammer claims multiple people expressed interest in private messages, offering to “pay big money for it.” They reportedly fetched $3,000 to $4,000 for each song in mid to late April. The user has since been banned from the leaked-music forum, which may be having an existential crisis as AI-generated music makes it easier than ever to produce convincing knockoffs. “This situation has put a major dent in our server’s credibility, and will result in distrust from any new and unverified seller throughout these communities,” said the owner of a Discord server where the fake tracks gained traction.

AI-generated music has been in the spotlight lately, between a track that seemingly featured vocals from Drake and The Weeknd gaining traction to Spotify reportedly removing thousands of songs over concerns that people were using them to game the system. Now, Google is wading further into that space as the company is opening up access to its text-to-music AI, which is called MusicLM.

Google detailed the system back in January when it published research on MusicLM. At the time, the company said it didn't have any plans to offer the public access to MusicLM due to ethical concerns related to copyrighted material, some of which the AI copied directly into the songs it generated. 

The generative AI landscape has shifted dramatically this year, however, and now Google feels comfortable enough to let the public try MusicLM. "We’ve been working with musicians like Dan Deacon and hosting workshops to see how this technology can empower the creative process," Google Research product manager Hema Manickavasagam and Google Labs product manager Kristin Yim wrote in a blog post. 

As TechCrunch points out, the current public version of MusicLM doesn't allow users to generate music with specific artists or vocals. That could help Google to avoid copyright issues and stop users from generating fake "unreleased songs" from popular artists and selling them for thousands of dollars.

You can now sign up to try MusicLM through AI Test Kitchen on the web, Android and iOS. Google suggests that you can try prompts based on mood, genre and instruments, such as “soulful jazz for a dinner party” or "two nylon string guitars playing in flamenco style." The experimental AI will generate two tracks and you can identify your favorite by selecting a trophy icon. Google says doing so will help it to improve the model.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2023 right here.

Search is, a quarter century since its launch, arguably still Google's most impactful and familiar creation — a way in this day and age to sort through the chafe of unsourced nonsense on Twitter or Facebook and hopefully finding vetted, trusted information quickly. With that context it mind, Google announced an absolutely puzzling new feature today for its flagship product at its 2023 IO conference: the Perspectives tab. 

Perspectives, according to the company, is a means to "exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms." In addition to the Perspectives tab, a carousel of the same results "may" appear in some search results — a standalone module graphically resembling the Top Stories module. 

In its announcement, Google mentioned the Perspectives initiative is happening in tandem with its quest to "transform" search through AI. What role AI will play in sourcing content for Perspectives is still unknown, but automating content selection and providing a sheen of authenticity to it has had its hiccups for Google in the past. The Popular On Twitter module has surfaced misinformation about breaking news events like mass shootings in the past, and it's nearly certain Perspectives will hit many of the same snags. Google was also among the tech companies grilled by Congress in 2021 over its role in the spread of fake news, an issue which again, Perspectives seems poised to exacerbate.  

This shift towards potentially dubious sources seems to not simply be the result of trawling forums and tweets for a new glut of hits for search results, but a considered strategy away from legacy sources of information. The company claims Perspectives will coincide with changes in "how we rank results in Search overall, with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience." Has anyone at Google been on a forum or social media website? Unique expertise is almost universally in short supply. 

Perspectives launches "in the coming weeks." God help us all. 

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2023 right here.