One of the best games of 2020 is leaving Game Pass. As of August 31st, Supergiant’s Hades won’t be available through Microsoft’s subscription gaming service anymore. If you haven’t played it yet, Hades is nothing short of a gem. It’s an action RPG made by the team behind Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. Few games offer an experience as cohesive as Hades. The art, music, story and gameplay elements all come together to elevate one another. Hades can also be tough-as-nails but it never feels unfair.

It’s one of a few games leaving Game Pass on the 31st. Other notable titles on their way out include Myst, Spiritfarer, Two Point Hospital and What Remains of Edith Finch. In August, there aren’t many noteworthy games coming in to replace those titles, but if Hades scratched a love for ancient Greek mythology, you’ll want to check out Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising. It’s an open-world action RPG with an irreverent sense of humor. 

Like Blizzard, Rockstar and Ubisoft, Sony may soon require you to download a launcher before you can play its games on PC. Digging through the Windows version of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered, VGC verified code referencing a PlayStation PC launcher. The discovery follows the recent revelation that Sony likely plans to add PlayStation Network integration to its PC titles.

If Sony moves forward with the launcher, it’s unclear if the company also plans to make its games exclusive to the software. At the moment, you can buy all of Sony’s PC titles through both Steam and the Epic Games Store. Different publishers employ different strategies. For instance, Blizzard games are only available to download through the Battle.Net app. Other companies such as EA and Rockstar allow you to buy and download their games through Steam and the Epic Games Store, but you must also install their software for verification purposes. Even if Sony were to go the latter route, it’s almost certain its launcher would include a storefront. In that way, the company could avoid giving Valve and Epic a cut of some of its PC sales.

President Joe Biden has signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The sweeping $750 billion legislation includes $369 billion in investments toward climate and clean energy programs. Following months of infighting, House and Senate Democrats passed the bill along party lines last week after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia struck a compromise deal on Biden's Build Better Back framework. According to one estimate by Princeton University’s Zero Lab, the bill could reduce US greenhouse emissions by about 6.3 billion tons through 2032. The $369 billion set aside by the bill represents the most significant investment to combat climate change in US history. 

"This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever, and it's going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting all of the climate goals we set out when we ran," Biden said before signing the bill. "It includes ensuring that we create clean energy opportunities in frontline and fenceline communities that have been smothered by the legacy of population and fight environmental injustice that has been going on for so long." 

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One of the world’s largest airlines has placed a big bet on supersonic jet startup Boom. On Tuesday, American Airlines announced that it had recently agreed to buy 20 Overture aircraft from Boom, with the option to purchase an additional 40 planes if all goes well. The deal is one of the strongest shows of support for Boom yet, surpassing the potential 50-jet commitment United Airlines made last year. That’s all for a startup that has yet to build a working passenger jet.

At the start of the year, Boom announced it would build a manufacturing facility at North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad International Airport. The company expects to begin construction on its “Overture Superfactory” later this year, with production to follow in 2024 – though the plant’s first completed jet won’t fly until sometime in 2026. Still, that hasn’t stopped Boom from being bullish about Overture’s prospects. The company envisions the Mach 1.7 jet completing flights between Newark and London in under four hours and San Francisco to Tokyo in approximately six hours. The company also claims Overture will be a “net-zero carbon” aircraft thanks to its ability to fly on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuels.

Following an eleventh-hour delay earlier this year, the Nintendo Switch version of Life is Strange: Remastered Collection will arrive on September 27th. The bundle – now titled the “Arcadia Bay Collection” on Switch — brings together enhanced versions of the first two entries in the episodic adventure series.

2015’s Life is Strange stars Max Caulfield, a teen who finds she has the ability to rewind time after returning to her hometown of fictional Arcadia Bay, Oregon. At the center of the game is Max’s relationship with her childhood friend Chloe Price, played by voice actor Ashly Burch. In Life is Strange’s 2017’s prequel, Before the Storm, Chloe returns as the protagonist of the story.

While many people love the series, the Remastered Collection has earned few fans. On console and PC, the release was mired by technical issues that made the games look worse than their originals. Square Enix went on to release multiple patches for the remasters, all of which are included in the new Switch bundle. Life is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection will be available in both digital and retail versions. You can also play the remasters on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia and PC.

Less than two months before Brazil’s 2022 election, a report from international NGO Global Witness found Facebook parent company Meta “appallingly” failed to detect false political ads. The organization tested Facebook’s ability to catch election-related misinformation by submitting 10 ads.

Five of the advertisements featured blatantly false information about the election. For instance, some mentioned the wrong election date and methods citizens could use to cast their votes. The other five ads sought to discredit Brazil’s electoral process, including the electronic voting system the country has used since 1996. Of the 10 ads, Facebook only rejected one initially but later approved it without any further action from Global Witness.

In addition to their content, the ads had other red flags Global Witness contends Meta should have caught. To start, the non-profit did not verify the account it used to submit the advertisements through the company’s ad authorizations process. “This is a safeguard that Meta has in place to prevent election interference, but we were easily able to bypass this,” Global Witness said.

Additionally, the organization submitted the ads from London and Nairobi. In doing so, it did not need to use a VPN or local payment system to mask its identity. Moreover, the ads did not feature a “paid for by” disclaimer, which Meta notes all “social issue” advertisements in Brazil must include by June 22, 2022.

“What’s quite clear from the results of this investigation and others is that their content moderation capabilities and the integrity systems that they deploy in order to mitigate some of the risk during election periods, it’s just not working,” Jon Lloyd, senior advisor at Global Witness, told The Associated Press.

Meta did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. A Meta spokesperson told The Associated Press it has “prepared extensively” for Brazil’s upcoming election. “We’ve launched tools that promote reliable information and label election-related posts, established a direct channel for the Superior Electoral Court (Brazil’s electoral authority) to send us potentially-harmful content for review, and continue closely collaborating with Brazilian authorities and researchers,” the company said.

This isn’t the first time Global Witness has found Facebook’s election safeguards wanting. Earlier this year, the non-profit conducted a similar investigation ahead of Kenya’s recent election and reached many of the same conclusions. Then, as now, Global Witness called on Meta to strengthen and increase its content moderation and integrity systems.

Motional’s driverless Ioniq 5 is entering service earlier than expected. On Tuesday, the company and Lyft announced that the vehicle is ready to begin offering rides to the public, starting with residents and visitors to Las Vegas. With today’s announcement, the Ioniq 5 is the first fully electric autonomous vehicle to join Lyft’s network. 

In Las Vegas, Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, had been testing autonomous vehicles without safety drivers since 2020. With its public launch, the Ioniq 5 is fully integrated into Lyft’s software. When the car arrives to pick you up, you can unlock the doors through the Lyft app. Inside, you’ll also find a dedicated passenger display and you can contact a remote agent at any time – you know, in case the car ever needs to be rescued from a traffic situation it doesn’t understand.

"Launching Motional’s all-electric Ioniq 5 on Lyft’s network in Las Vegas represents tremendous progress in our vision to make an electric, autonomous, and shared future a reality for people everywhere," said Lyft CEO Logan Green. "Building an experience that Lyft riders love is core to advancing this technology, and today's launch provides riders access to Motional’s autonomous technology in a way that will feel seamless, familiar, and personalized, all on a network they already trust."

Lyft plans to bring fully driverless cars to multiple US cities in 2023 and beyond. However, it's unclear where the company will deploy the vehicles next. Lyft and Motional will need approval from local regulators before they can start offering rides to the public.

Dell is releasing two new Alienware-branded monitors this fall. Before you ask, they don’t feature QD-OLED panels like the drool-worthy AW3423DW. The more interesting of the two new monitors is the 27-inch AW2723DF. It features an LG Nano IPS panel with a 2560 x 1440 resolution, a native 240Hz refresh rate and a claimed 1ms gray to gray response time.

A factory overclock lets you push the refresh rate to 280Hz for games like Valorant and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For more immersive gaming, the monitor comes with support for AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and NVIDIA G-Sync. It doesn’t feature local dimming, but for what it’s worth, HDR performance was good enough for the AW2723DF to earn VESA’s DisplayHDR 600 badge.

Dell

Alienware is billing the AW2723DF as the perfect monitor for gamers who do content creation on the side. The AW2723DF’s screen covers 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. A toggle found in the monitor’s OSD menu allows you to switch to sRGB when doing work for the web. As with most Dell-made monitors, the AW2723DF won’t leave you wanting for ports. On top of the usual DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 connections, the monitor features multiple USB 3.2 Gen 1 inputs, as well as a headphone jack and audio output. All that’s missing is an HDMI 2.1 connection for console gaming. New to the Alienware design is a retractable headset hanger. The stand offers swivel, pivot, tilt and height adjustment. You can also VESA mount the AW2723DF if you want to use it with a monitor arm.

For the competitive gaming crowd, there’s the AW2523HF. It comes with a 25-inch LG IPS panel that features a Full HD resolution, 360Hz refresh rate and up to 0.5ms gray to gray response time. The screen covers 99 percent of the sRGB color gamut and is FreeSync Premium Pro certified. Like its sibling, the AW2523HF features a retractable hanger for storing your gaming headset. The AW2523HF also comes with a hexagonal stand instead of the V-shaped one that you find on most Alienware monitors. Dell says the design gives the AW2523HF a smaller footprint.

Dell

Of the two monitors, the AW2523HF will arrive first. It will go on sale on September 7th for $450. Meanwhile, the AW2723DF will cost $650 when it hits store shelves on October 6th.

Apple may be planning to bring ads to more of its first-party apps. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company has conducted internal tests of a version of Maps that features search ads. Apple already employs similar advertisements within the App Store.

Developers can pay the company to get their software to show up at the top of the search results page when you input specific terms. Gurman suggests search ads in Maps would work in much the same way. For instance, a Japanese restaurant could pay Apple for their business to show up higher in local listings when people use search terms like “sushi.” Gurman believes Apple could implement similar ads in its Podcasts and Books apps. He says the company could begin offering an ad-supported tier through Apple TV+.

Gurman attributes the potential push to Todd Teresi, the vice president in charge of the company’s advertising division. Teresi recently began reporting directly to services chief Eddy Cue and has reportedly talked of greatly expanding his team’s impact. The division generates about $4 billion in annual revenue. Teresi’s ambition is to increase that number to the double digits. That would require a significant expansion of Apple’s current advertising efforts.

A wider advertising push would be an about-face for a company that has, at least externally, positioned itself as a champion of user privacy. With the release of iOS 14.5, Apple introduced a feature called App Tracking Transparency. The prompt allows you to prevent apps from logging your activity across other apps and websites. In 2022, it’s estimated the policy will cost Facebook parent company Meta approximately $13 billion in lost revenue. When Apple announced ATT at WWDC 2020, the company publicly said it designed the feature to protect user privacy. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal, which said the company pursued a revenue-sharing agreement with Facebook, suggests its motivations with ATT may have not been so altruistic.

Peloton may soon allow users of competing fitness equipment to stream its workouts to their bikes and treadmills. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Barry McCarthy said the company is “rethinking” its digital strategy. As a first step, Peloton could adopt a freemium model that would see the company begin offering some features and workouts found in its mobile and TV app for free. Currently, the software costs $13 per month after a 30-day trial.

In the future, people with stationary bikes or treadmills from companies like Bowflex, Echelon and NordicTrack could also stream Peloton's content to their equipment’s display. McCarthy didn’t say how deeply the company's software would integrate with competing models. For instance, it’s not clear if you would see in-workout metrics like you do on a Peloton bike or treadmill.

McCarthy also told Bloomberg Peloton plans to redesign its bikes to make it possible for customers to assemble them at home. At the moment, the company has a professional come to your house or apartment to help with setup. “We’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s a real thing,” he said. “We’ll continue to cost-reduce the hardware and we will engineer it so that you can assemble it, so that we can ship it via FedEx.”

The moves come as Peloton struggles to regain profitability. Following a $757 million net loss in the first three months of 2022, the company raised prices and laid off 784 employees (after it previously cut 2,800 jobs). The idea that Peloton would let you access its software on competing hardware would have seemed unthinkable only a year ago, but with its very survival now on the line, it’s doing what it has to do to stay afloat.