Spotify is trying another method to get people more engaged with the platform while tapping into the power of social recommendations. It's prompting some users in Vietnam to record a playlist reaction with their voice. This clip will be shared as a podcast episode.

Those who see the prompt, which a Reddit user spotted, can create a voice reaction in one go or piecemeal with shorter clips by pausing the recording. They can edit their captures and add background music. They'll be able to link to the playlist before posting their episode.

Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch that it's running the test, though it didn't reveal how it will moderate the recordings or whether it plans to roll out the feature more broadly. Theoretically, this could lead to people dabbling in audio creation for the first time, but whether people actually want to hit the record button to react to a playlist remains to be seen.

Spotify has been testing an in-app podcast recording option off and on for years. In a recent trial that took place in New Zealand, it published podcast episodes that a user recorded to that person's profile. That seems a smart way for the company to take advantage of friend connections on Spotify — a playlist recommendation from a buddy is perhaps more effective than one suggested by the algorithm. Recording a reaction podcast to offer a recommendation seems unnecessary, though.

The major cost-cutting drive at Warner Bros. Discovery is continuing, as the company is reportedly laying off around 70 workers across HBO and HBO Max. Most of the cuts are on the side of the streaming service, according to Deadline.

The layoffs account for around 14 percent of staffers across the two divisions. HBO Max's nonfiction team is being downsized, which isn't surprising given the influx of reality and documentary programming from the Discovery side of the business. Leadership may believe it's redundant for HBO Max to have its own reality division. As Variety notes, kids' programming will be less of a priority for HBO Max too, as there have been cuts to the live-action family originals department.

Although there had been rumors that the ax would fall on many HBO Max originals as part of budget cuts and a changing strategies, that's not exactly that case, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The publication notes that leadership at the streaming service is expanding its lineup of originals, albeit with fewer non-fiction and live-action family projects. No projects were canceled as part of today's layoffs.

Warner Bros. Discovery recently cannedBatgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt, movies that were lined up as HBO Max exclusives. According to reports, the company shelved the films in favor of tax breaks.

In addition, HBO Max's casting and international teams have been downsized. The team that handles acquisitions of third-party content has been affected too. Meanwhile, layoffs are said to be expected in other Warner Bros. Discovery divisions. Engadget has contacted HBO Max for comment.

WarnerMedia and Discovery merged in April to form Warner Bros. Discovery. An effort to slash costs got underway quickly, with the company announcing it would shut down CNN+ only a few weeks after that streaming service launched. Next year, the company will merge HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single platform. It's not yet clear what the unified streaming service will be called, though it may retain the HBO Max name or, according to one report, it could simply be named "Max."

Disney's D23 Expo takes place in just a few weeks and one panel that will be worth paying attention to is all about games. It takes place at 4PM ET on September 9th and it will feature several Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century projects.

The first Disney and Marvel Games Showcase will include new game announcements. It will also offer a look at something new for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, as well as updates on upcoming titles Disney Dreamlight Valley and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. On top of all that, we'll get an early peek at a Marvel action-adventure title that's in the works at Amy Hennig’s studio, Skydance New Media.

The showcase will stream live on the D23, Disney and Marvel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as on Marvel's Twitch channel. After the showcase, D23 attendees will be able to view a presentation that features developer interviews and special guests.

If you've been in the market for a large smart display, it might be worth taking a look at Amazon's Echo Show 15, which is currently on sale. You can snap one up for $190, which is $60 off the regular price of $250. That's a discount of 24 percent.

Amazon released the device last year and we gave it a score of 78 in our review. We admired the large, bright screen and the picture frame design. We found the widgets (which include ones for headlines, weather, calendar, sticky notes, recipe suggestions and package delivery tracking) to be handy. However, the camera and audio quality were lacking. Though the Echo Show 15 is designed to be wall mounted, Amazon's decision to sell desktop stands separately rather than bundling one in as standard is also disappointing.

Since this is an Amazon smart display, you can of course use it to control compatible smart home devices. Echo Show 15 supports a variety of video and audio streaming services, and it can link to compatible Echo speakers for richer audio. You might also use the display to show pictures from Amazon Photos or Facebook.

Meanwhile, family members can have their own profiles. They can use voice ID and the visual ID face-recognition system to access personalized content such as reminders, appointments and music they listened to recently.

Elsewhere, the Echo Show 5 is also on sale. It currently costs just $40, which is $45 off the standard price. As the name suggests, this is a model with a much smaller screen than the Echo Show 15 (5.5 inches, compared with 15.6 inches), which perhaps makes it a good fit for a nightstand. To that end, it supports an Alexa routine that can gradually turn on connected smart lights and play music or the news to help you get your day started.

Weta Workshop is venturing back to Middle-earth. It's working on a new Lord of the Rings game alongside publisher Private Division. The game is in early development and few details have been announced, though the two sides hope to release it in Private Division parent Take-Two’s 2024 fiscal year, which ends in March 2024.

Under its deal with Middle-earth Enterprises, Weta Workshop has "the broadest creative license to interpret the underlying lore of the books," according to a press release. “It’s a privilege to create a new game set in Middle-earth, especially one that’s so different from what fans have played previously,” Weta Workshop's head of interactive Amie Wolken said. “As fans ourselves, we’re excited for gamers to explore Middle-earth in a way they never have before, and introduce new fans to the magic of The Lord of the Rings.”

There have been dozens of Lord of the Rings games over the years, so it will be interesting to see what kind of fresh spin Weta Workshop is planning. Of course, Weta Workshop has a ton of experience in this domain. It worked on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies as well as The Hobbit trilogy. The special effects powerhouse, which set up a gaming division in 2014, is also collaborating with Amazon on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Private Division, meanwhile, has recently published games like The Outer Worlds, OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome (which is out this week).

This is not the only Lord of the Rings game that's in the pipeline. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum had been expected to arrive in early September, but Daedalic Entertainment and Nacon recently delayed it "by a few months."

There have been rumblings for a while that a remake of Alone in the Dark was in the works and THQ Nordic confirmed at its summer showcase that the rumors are (sort of) true. It’s bringing a “reimagining” of the 1992 classic to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and PC, though didn't reveal when to expect it.

The Lovecraftian original is widely considered the first 3D survival horror game (it earned a Guinness World Record stating as much), but there hasn't been an Alone in the Dark title since 2015. This will also be THQ Nordic's first entry since it bought the series from Atari in 2018.

The single-player reimagining from developer Pieces Interactive will feature an original story from Mikael Hedberg, the writer of Soma and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and creature designs from long-term Guillermo del Toro collaborator Guy Davis. The game will include characters, places and themes from the ’90s trilogy. It's still set in the American South in the 1920s and features the first game's protagonists, Emily Hartwood and Edward Carnby, as playable characters. However, THQ Nordic says all the enemies will be brand new.

Beyond Alone in the Dark, the publisher had plenty more to show off during the stream, such as fresh looks at SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake, Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed and AEW Fight Forever. Other new reveals included real-time strategy game Tempest Rising; an open-world arcade racer called Wreckreation; and Space for Sale, in which you build homes on procedurally generated planets and sell them to alien clients.

Try as it might, Hogwarts Legacy developer Avalanche Software can't magically make its creation arrive any sooner. In fact, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has once again delayed the game, which at least now has a firm release date. It will hit PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on February 10th. The Switch release date will be announced sometime soon, indicating that version faces a further delay.

"The team is excited for you to play, but we need a little more time to deliver the best possible game experience," a tweet on the Hogwarts Legacy Twitter account reads. The game was announced at the tail end of 2020 with a release expected the following year. Warner Bros. pushed back Hogwarts Legacy to 2022 and later said it would arrive sometime this holiday season. However, it has delayed the game once more.

Hogwarts Legacy is an action RPG that takes place in the Harry Potter universe, though it's set long before The Boy Who Lived, well, lived. As a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, you'll craft potions, learn spells, tame wild creatures and (ugh) attend classes. Shockingly enough, you'll need to take what you learned and use it to fend off your enemies.

One thing that will help bolster adoption of cloud gaming is by making it as easy as possible to fire up a game. To that end, Google is testing a way to start playing something with a single click from search results, even if it's not on the company's own Stadia platform.

The test, which was spotted by Bryant Chappel of The Nerf Report, not only enables folks to directly launch a game on Stadia, but it works with Xbox Cloud Gaming, NVIDIA GeForce Now and Amazon Luna as well. If you’re enrolled in the test and search for a game on one of those platforms (such as Destiny 2 or Halo Infinite), you may see a Play button in the information panel. Clicking that will either start up the game or take you to a landing page on the respective streaming platform.

The Verge and 9to5 Google saw the feature in action too. The latter noted the search results can show if a game has a timed trial on Stadia or if it’s available for free or as part of a premium subscription.

It's not incredibly surprising to see Google testing out such functionality. For several years, it has shown folks where they can stream movies and TV shows in search results. For instance, if you have a Netflix subscription and search for Stranger Things on Google, you'll be able to start watching the show with a single click. 

In hindsight, it's a little odd that Google hasn't offered this feature for Stadia from the jump in order to promote its cloud gaming service. On the other hand, Stadia's store didn't have a search function for a year and a half, which offered further evidence that the platform isn't exactly one of Google's highest priorities. However, Stadia is not shutting down and Google is slowly adding more features to it.

It's been a brutal year for Peloton and the company is enacting more major changes in a bid to get back on track. On the consumer front, Peloton is reversing price cuts to two of its core pieces of fitness equipment. The Bike+ is going back up from $1,995 to $2,495 in the US.

The Tread, meanwhile, will be more expensive than before Peloton reduced prices in April to focus on subscription revenues. The Tread will go up by $800 in the US to $3,495. At the start of this year, the machine cost $2,895. The company is also increasing the prices of the products in Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia.

Lowering the prices in the first place “cheapened at least the perception of the brand,” CEO Barry McCarthy told Bloomberg. “So this is a return to historical positioning.” He added that, "I probably wouldn’t have messed with the prices at all if I had been confronted with different inventory states back when we lowered the pricing.” The company isn't changing the price of the original Bike or the Peloton Guide system for now.

Meanwhile, in its third publicly disclosed round of layoffs this year, Peloton is cutting another 784 jobs across its distribution and customer service teams. It will close 16 warehouses in North America and solely use third-party companies for deliveries and setting up equipment in people's homes. Shutting down in-house distribution and closing warehouses will lead to the loss of 532 jobs.

The company will also use third-parties to augment its customer support team, which will be slashed roughly in half with the loss of 252 positions. Those job cuts are on top of around 570 employees Peloton laid off in Taiwan last month as it transitions away from in-house manufacturing. In February, Peloton culled around 2,800 jobs and brought in McCarthy as the new CEO. However, the company still plans to hire in certain areas, such as software development.

On top of all of that, Peloton plans to start closing its retail showrooms next year. It remains to be seen how many will be closed, though it operates 86 in the US and Canada. The company will require office-based workers to return to its offices as of November.

McCarthy told employees in a memo (which was provided to Bloomberg) that changes were necessary to help make the company cash-flow positive once more. “We have to make our revenues stop shrinking and start growing again,” he wrote. “Cash is oxygen. Oxygen is life.”

Peloton posted a huge loss of $757.1 million for the first three months of 2022 due to a decline in revenue and soaring operating costs. It saw a major boom in business soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it believed that demand would continue after the planet opened back up and it built too many units of its fitness gear before slowing down production earlier this year. 

We'll soon have a clearer picture of the current state of the business. Peloton will post its earnings results for the April-June quarter (Q4 of its fiscal year) on August 25th.

An alleged developer of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixing service has been arrested in the Netherlands. The Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), a government agency that investigates financial crimes, said the 29-year-old man is suspected of "involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies." The suspect was due to appear before a judge today.

The FIOD started investigating Tornado Cash in June and its Financial Advanced Cyber Team suspects that the platform has been used to conceal the flow of criminal funds on a large scale, including illicit gains from crypto hacks and scams. The agency found that, since the platform launched in 2019, at least $1 billion of crypto of "criminal origin" has been funneled through Tornado Cash, with the service's creator believed to "have made large-scale profits from these transactions."

Earlier this week, the US government sanctioned Tornado Cash, a move that prohibits anyone in the country from carrying out any transactions on the service. The Treasury Department claimed that over $7 billion worth of crypto has been laundered through Tornado Cash, including $455 million stolen by North Korea's state-backed Lazarus Group hacking collective.