Two decades after the release of Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the first and only South Park movie to date, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone will produce 14 direct-to-streaming films for Paramount+ as part of a new deal the two signed with ViacomCBS to keep the show on Comedy Central through 2027. According to Bloomberg, the agreement is worth more than $900 million over six years, easily eclipsing the approximately $500 million AT&T subsidiary WarnerMedia spent in 2019 to secure exclusive streaming rights to the show for HBO Max.

Parker and Stone haven't made a movie together since 2004's Team America: World Police. The first two films included in their ViacomCBS deal will debut later this year. Stone told Bloomberg he and Parker plan to expand the world of South Park by using the movies as an opportunity to introduce new characters and concepts.

What the deal doesn't include is streaming rights to the South Park TV series. As mentioned above, Viacom licensed those to WarnerMedia in 2019, and that agreement is still in place. However, the $900 million investment in the brand does suggest the company will attempt to bring the series to Paramount+ eventually. 

ViacomCBS executive Chris McCarthy hinted as much in the press release announcing today's news. "Matt and Trey are world-class creatives who brilliantly use their outrageous humor to skewer the absurdities of our culture and we are excited to expand and deepen our long relationship with them to help fuel Paramount+ and Comedy Central," he said. "Franchising marquee content like South Park and developing new IP with tremendous talent like Matt and Trey, is at the heart of our strategy to continue growing Paramount+."

Last year, Yelp added a COVID-19 section to its app to help businesses communicate to customers how they were operating through the early stages of the pandemic. With the delta variant complicating things, the company is introducing two new labels shops and restaurants can add to their listings.

Now, they can say if customers need proof of vaccination to enter their establishment and whether their staff is fully vaccinated. As a Yelp user, you’ll have the option to filter for shops and restaurants that include those labels. That said, they’re optional, and only the owner of the business can decide to add them.

Yelp

As it has done in the past when introducing other labels, Yelp says it will “proactively” monitor the pages of businesses that add those attributes to their listing. The company’s content guidelines require that someone write a review of a business based on their first-hand experience of it. But that hasn’t stopped some people from using the platform to express how they feel about things like vaccines. 

In response, the company has placed alerts on pages from businesses that have attracted attention for their stance on how to best protect the health and safety of their employees and customers from the coronavirus. Since the start of 2021, Yelp has issued about 100 of those alerts, leading to the removal of approximately 4,500 reviews.

TikTok is no stranger to other companies copying the format of its signature short-form videos, but it may now do the same with Stories. Per a tweet shared by social media consultant and former TheNext Web writer Matt Navarra, the company has introduced posts that disappear after 24 hours. TikTok told Variety it's currently testing the feature with a small subset of users outside of the US and emphasized they may not become a permanent fixture within the app.

"We're always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience," a spokesperson for the company told Engadget. "Currently we're experimenting with ways to give creators additional formats to bring their creative ideas to life for the TikTok community."

Snapchat was the first app to feature Stories before the format was widely copied by everyone from Facebook to LinkedIn. Twitter also tried to make the feature work on its platform with Fleets, but that experiment ended earlier this week. Much like its rivals, TikTok may feel it needs to add Stories to stay relevant, particularly with companies like YouTube investing millions to replicate its success.

Amazon has delayed New World mere weeks before its previously announced August 31st release date. It will now arrive about a month later, on September 28th, so that Amazon Game Studios can spend an extra few weeks polishing, fixing bugs and improving stability. The company says it decided to delay New World again following player feedback it collected during the MMO's recent closed beta.

"This was not an easy decision to make. We know this isn't the first time we've changed our launch date in pursuit of quality, and that it can be disappointing to wait a bit longer." Amazon Game Studios said on Twitter. "But we want to be sure we deliver you the highest quality game possible at launch."

For those of you still keeping track, this is New World's fourth delay. When Amazon first announced the game, it said it would come out in May 2020. Its release date initially slipped to August 25th, 2020, before Amazon announced a month later it was pushing the game back to spring 2021. At the start of the year, it then delayed the game to its most recently planned August 31st release date.

To say there's a lot of pressure on Amazon Game Studios to deliver a hit for its parent company would be an understatement. Amazon announced the game's first major delay after taking the unusual step of rolling back the availability of Crucible, its first AAA title. It later ended the development of that game. Before taking over as CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy told employees he was committed to the studio. "Though we haven't consistently succeeded yet in Amazon Game Studios, I believe we will if we hang in there," he said in an email. Now it's on the New World team to prove that confidence was well-earned.

The 2021 New York Auto Show has been canceled. Much like last year, organizers postponed the annual spring event to August to try and avoid the worst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, they say now their hand has been forced due to a growing number of hospital cases involving the COVID-19 delta variant and increasingly stringent measures put in place by state and local officials to curb its spread.

“As custodians of the 121-year-old New York Auto Show, we are committed to providing a safe environment for everyone including attendees, exhibitors, and the thousands of men and women who put the show together,” said Mark Schienberg, the president of the New York Auto Show. “Over the past few weeks, and especially within the last few days, circumstances have changed making it more difficult to create an event at the high standard that we and our clients expect.”

At the moment, it’s unclear what this cancelation will mean for vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe that were set to debut at the show. Organizers say they “firmly believe” the event will only return in 2022 but do so during its usual spring timeframe.

The next time you rent a Bird scooter, don’t try speeding past a school or any other area with a lot of pedestrians. The company has introduced Community Safety Zones, a feature that uses geofencing to cap the speeds of its scooters in certain areas automatically.

When traveling through a Community Safety Zone, the company’s scooters won’t go faster than 8 miles per hour. You’ll see the zones mapped out in the Bird app, and the software will display a message when you enter one to explain why your vehicle is slowing down.

The company is piloting the feature in Miami, Marseille and Madrid. Over the coming weeks, Bird says it will work with public officials to implement the geofenced zones in all of the more than 250 cities where it operates globally. Initially, the zones will center on schools, though they could also include areas around parks and shopping malls in the future.

Community Safety Zones represent part of an ongoing safety push from Bird. In July, the company introduced Safe Start, which prompts users to type in a keyword when they want to rent a scooter between 10PM and 4AM local time. Bird is using Safe Start to verify whether a potential customer is sober enough to handle one of its vehicles. 

Since last fall, Sony’s Ghost of Tsushima has included a free cooperative multiplayer mode called Legends. As long as you owned a copy of the game, you had access to it. However, much like Rockstar did with Red Dead Online, Sony now plans to offer a standalone version of Legends.

Available starting on September 3rd, the company will sell this release of the mode for $19.99. Aside from some in-game cosmetics you can only earn by playing through Ghost of Tsushima’s single-player story, everything that’s included in the version that comes with the full game is also present here, and you can play with those who own the entire experience. That first point is important because Sucker Punch has various free updates planned for Legends, the most notable of which is a new mode called Rivals that comes out on the same day as the standalone release.

Taking a page from Destiny 2’s Gambit mode, Rivals pits two teams of two individuals against waves of enemies. As you defeat foes, you’ll earn a resource called “Magatama,” which you can use to delay the opposing team by doing things like casting curses on them. Once you’ve spent enough Magatama, you will unlock a final wave. Defeat that, and you’ll have won the match. 

Sucker Punch has other updates for Legends planned, including a variety of quality-of-life tweaks. Starting on September 10th, the studio also plans to release content each week until October 1st. Players can look forward to new Survival mode maps and a more challenging version of last year’s raid. 

If you decide you want to play through Ghost of Tsushima’s single-player story after experiencing Legends by itself, you can purchase an upgrade to the Director’s Cut, which includes the full story and a new island to explore, for $40 on PS4 or $50 on PS5.

A harassment and discrimination lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) isn’t the only legal battle Activision Blizzard has to worry about anymore. Ahead of the company’s Q2 earnings call on Tuesday, a firm called Rosen Law filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors who traded in Activision Blizzard securities between August 4th, 2016 and July 27th, 2021.

The firm, the same one that’s behind a similar lawsuit against CD Projekt RED over the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, accuses Activision Blizzard of intentionally failing to disclose its ongoing problems with sexual harassment and discrimination. In doing so, Rosen Law alleges the company put itself at greater risk of regulatory legal scrutiny and enforcement. The suit names Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, as well as several other executives, as defendants and seeks to recover damages for investors under federal securities laws.

The suit comes on the same day the company announced J. Allen Brack was “stepping down” from his role as president of Blizzard Entertainment. In its lawsuit, the State of California accuses Brack of taking “no effective remedial measures” to curb the “bro culture” that enabled individuals like Alex Afrasiabi to harass the company’s female employees. Taking his place are Jen Oneal and former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra, who will oversee the studio as co-leaders.

With the start of a new school year quickly approaching, Apple is once again expanding the availability of its contactless student IDs. Following an initial rollout in 2018 and subsequent expansions since, the software is making its way to Canada for the first time.

In 2021, the University of New Brunswick and Sheridan College outside of Toronto will allow students to add their ID cards to Apple Wallet and use their iPhones and Apple Watches to access facilities and pay for food and other items and services across campus. In the US, “many more” schools, including Auburn University, Northern Arizona University, University of Maine and New Mexico State University, will adopt the software this fall.

It will likely take many more years before every school offers digital student ID cards, but the technology is clearly becoming more ubiquitous. In April, Apple said it saw more students use their mobile IDs to make purchases and access campus facilities than their plastic counterparts for the first time since it launched the software. In the fall, the University of Alabama, one of the early adopters of the tech, will exclusively issue mobile IDs to students with the necessary hardware, marking a first for the platform.

When Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, takes off next month, Netflix will chronicle the historic mission with a documentary series. Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space will stream in five parts, with the first two episodes debuting on September 6th. In that way, it will be the first docuseries from the streaming giant to chronicle an event in near real-time.

Early episodes will detail, among other things, the astronaut training Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman and his crewmates had to undertake ahead of the flight. Meanwhile, the final feature-length episode will recount the mission’s flight to space and eventual return to Earth and include footage from inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The finale doesn’t have a release date yet, but Netflix expects to start streaming it sometime in late September.

The production involves parts of the team behind ESPN’s The Last Dance Michael Jordan documentary, including director Jason Hehir. Alongside the series, Netflix will release A StoryBots Space Adventure, a hybrid live-action and animation special that will feature the Inspiration4 crew answering questions from kids about their flight. The special will debut on September 14th, one day before the Inspiration4 mission is scheduled to lift off.