Microsoft has revealed when the Xbox 360 store will close its doors. You'll no longer be able to buy games, expansions or anything else on the Xbox 360 console or Marketplace after July 29, 2024. Any original Xbox or Xbox 360 games and DLC that are backwards compatible on the Xbox One or Series X/S will still be available to buy on the newer consoles' storefronts.

The Microsoft Movies & TV app will stop working on the console on the same date, so you won't be able to use it to watch TV shows and films. Any content you have bought from the Xbox 360 store will stay in your library and you can watch it on Windows 10 and 11 devices, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. You can also watch any titles with Movies Anywhere compatibility on that service's app and website.

You can still buy Xbox 360 games and other content through the console's storefront until next July (you should still be able to find second-hand physical copies of games you want to play too). Any games you have in your library will still work on your Xbox 360 after the store shutters, and you'll be able to access many of them on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S through backwards compatibility too. Microsoft notes that it has enhanced many Xbox 360 titles on the Series X/S, adding features such as FPS Boost, Auto HDR and snappier loading times.

Multiplayer features on Xbox 360 games will still be supported as long as publishers and developers keep their titles' servers up and running. You'll be able to save your games and progress to the cloud as well, and pick up where you left off on Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S.

The Xbox 360 is 18 years old this year and (as best I can tell) it's been five years since the last game was released for it. It perhaps doesn't make business sense for Microsoft to keep the store open. However, the store's closure will prevent players from being able to buy many digital-only games, making the move a blow for game preservation.

After fans protested against Sony's plan to shut down the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita stores in 2021, the company relented and kept them open (though it followed through on closing the PSP store). On the other hand, Sony is making players jump through a few extra hoops to buy PS3 and Vita games as neither digital storefront directly accepts credit cards, debit cards or PayPal payments. In 2022, Sony set up a game preservation team.

Google will stop supporting Assistant on smartwatches running Wear OS 2 in the near future. “Google Assistant support on this watch is ending soon," reads a message in the latest version of the Wear OS companion app, as spotted by 9to5 Google. "Please upgrade to a newer watch that supports Google Assistant and runs Wear OS 3 or later.”

The companion app is only needed for devices that use Wear OS 2 or earlier versions of the operating system. There's a dedicated Assistant app for Wear OS 3 devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, Fossil smartwatches and, of course, the Pixel Watch.

This move will impact many older watches dating back to 2020 and earlier, including models from Tag Heuer, Mobvoi, Motorola, Oppo, Xiaomi, Misfit, Casio and LG. Wikipedia has a helpful list of Wear OS devices and the latest version of the operating system that they support. However, since it's Wikipedia, it's worth double checking elsewhere to confirm whether your watch can, in fact, run Wear OS 3.

It's not clear when Google plans to end Assistant support on these older watches. If you rely on Assistant on a Wear OS 2 device, though, you might want to upgrade soon. As it happens, Google is expected to unveil its second Pixel Watch within the next couple of months. The company typically holds a major hardware event every October.

Who's ready for some (bad opinions from the internet while you watch) football? YouTube has revealed some more NFL Sunday Ticket features for the upcoming season. As you watch games, you'll be able to view a live chat and read what other people think about a certain play or call. Live chat and polls will be available on both mobile and TVs.

YouTube users will be able to watch real-time NFL highlights on Shorts. On Sunday afternoons, these highlights will include a red Live ring around the channel's avatar, and clicking on this will take users to the NFL channel's Live tab. There, Sunday Ticket subscribers can decide which game (or games, thanks to the multiview options) to start watching.

One other thing that could be helpful for viewers is key plays, a handy YouTube TV feature that the platform is bringing over to Sunday Ticket. You'll be able to catch up on a game that you couldn't watch or check out big plays before joining the live action. This feature will only be available on TVs this season, which is the first under a multibillion-dollar, seven-year pact that YouTube has with the NFL for Sunday Ticket rights.

Naturally, YouTube is looking to recoup its investment on Sunday Ticket and it's now offering fans more ways to sign up. Starting today, there will be a monthly payment plan option for Sunday Ticket in most states to help fans spread the cost of a subscription over a longer period. It may take a few days before the option is available on YouTube and YouTube TV in your area. 

However, the monthly plan won't be available to folks in Georgia, New York, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Tennessee or New Jersey. Residents of those states will need to pay for a season-long Sunday Ticket subscription (which now starts at $349) up front. Meanwhile, YouTube says student plans will be available sometime in the next week.

Valve has updated Steam's minimum pricing policy for some non-USD currencies, which could impact those who sell games and expansions for less than the equivalent of $5. The company warned publishers and developers that the move could lead to games and DLC using lower pricing being unavailable to purchase in some regions if they don't make adjustments, while they may not be able to offer discounts as deeply as they used to.

According to Valve, the aim of the revised policy is to align minimum pricing with recommended currency conversions the company issued last October. It updated those recommendations "to adjust for some currencies drifting significantly in value over time."

As such, the base price for a game or expansion must be at least the equivalent of 99 cents. The minimum price for a discounted game or DLC is the equivalent of 49 cents. 

Developers and publishers may need to change the pricing of their products in some countries. As Game Developer notes, they'll have to be mindful of how they handle discounts too. Publishers and developers of games that usually cost $4.99 or less will need to make sure they avoid going below the threshold during sales. Valve offers price management and discount tools on Steam to help them navigate such issues.

The move may also impact players who create Steam accounts in different countries to take advantage of regional price differences. While the new thresholds won't necessarily impact blockbuster games, they could make it somewhat less viable for players to change their virtual location to the likes of Turkey and Argentina to pick up a grab bag of indie games and other deeply discounted titles.

Netflix is getting the band back together with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, an anime adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. The company has dropped the first teaser for the eight-episode show, which centers around the titular character and his attempt to win a battle of the bands contest while facing off against the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend.

The anime follows on from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a 2010 film based on the graphic novels. The main cast of Edgar Wright's movie are reprising their roles in the series, including Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers), Kieran Culkin (Wallace Wells), Chris Evans (Lucas Lee) and Brie Larson (“Envy” Adams).

The teaser apes many of the visuals of the movie and graphic novels, such as Scott blocking a flying attack from Matthew Patel with his arm and the rehearsal space of his band, Sex Bob-Omb. You'll also see Ramona dragging Scott through space toward a door with a star on it and the lovebirds sitting next to each other on a swing set. I don't remember seeing any dinosaurs in the film, though.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, the creator of the graphic novel series, is one of the showrunners, while Wright is an executive producer. Abel Gongora of animation studio Science Saru (Star Wars: Visions, Devilman Crybaby) is the director of the show. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off also includes new music from Anamanaguchi, the terrific chiptune band behind the soundtrack of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World video game.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is my favorite movie of the 2010s, and this teaser gets the look and the spirit of the universe spot on. I'm already counting down the days until Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hits Netflix on November 17th.

Only a few months after pulling back the curtain on its Revuelto plug-in hybrid, Lamborghini is just about ready to debut its first fully electric supercar. The automaker offered a glimpse of the vehicle's upper body in a teaser image, albeit in silhouette form.

You won't have to wait long to learn more about this mysterious EV, though. Lamborghini will show off what's expected to be a concept on August 18th, during Monterey Car Week. What we do know is that it will be an all-new fourth model in the lineup and not a version of an existing model with an electric powertrain.

Don't expect this to be the finished product, though. Lambo's first fully electric vehicle could still be years away from production as it only promised to release such a model by 2030. Like many other automakers, Lamborghini is on the path toward full electrification, but it's likely that it will take the brand several more years to reach that point.

Content moderation has been one of the thorniest issues on the internet for decades. It's a difficult subject matter for anyone to tackle, considering the subjectivity that goes hand-in-hand with figuring out what content should be permissible on a given platform. ChatGPT maker OpenAI thinks it can help and it has been putting GPT-4's content moderation skills to the test. It's using the large multimodal model "to build a content moderation system that is scalable, consistent and customizable."

The company wrote in a blog post that GPT-4 can not only help make content moderation decisions, but aid in developing policies and swiftly iterating on policy changes, "reducing the cycle from months to hours." It claims the model can parse the various regulations and nuances in content policies and instantly adapt to any updates. This, OpenAI claims, results in more consistent labeling of content.

"We believe this offers a more positive vision of the future of digital platforms, where AI can help moderate online traffic according to platform-specific policy and relieve the mental burden of a large number of human moderators, " OpenAI's Lilian Weng, Vik Goel and Andrea Vallone wrote. "Anyone with OpenAI API access can implement this approach to create their own AI-assisted moderation system." OpenAI claims GPT-4 moderation tools can help companies carry out around six months of work in about a day.

It's been well-documented that manually reviewing traumatic content can have a significant impact on human moderators' mental health, particularly when it comes to graphic material. In 2020, Meta agreed to pay more than 11,000 moderators at least $1,000 each in compensation for mental health issues that may have stemmed from reviewing material that was posted on Facebook.

Using AI to lift some of the burden from human reviewers could be greatly beneficial. Meta, for one, has been employing AI to help moderators for several years. Yet OpenAI says that, until now, human moderators have received help from "smaller vertical-specific machine learning models. The process is inherently slow and can lead to mental stress on human moderators."

AI models are far from perfect. Major companies have long been using AI in their moderation processes and, with or without the aid of the technology, still get big content decisions wrong. It remains to be seen whether OpenAI's system can avoid many of the major moderation traps we've seen other companies fall into over the years.

In any case, OpenAI agrees that humans still need to be involved in the process. “We’ve continued to have human review to verify some of the model judgements,” Vallone, who works on OpenAI's policy team, told Bloomberg.

"Judgments by language models are vulnerable to undesired biases that might have been introduced into the model during training. As with any AI application, results and output will need to be carefully monitored, validated and refined by maintaining humans in the loop," OpenAI's blog post reads. "By reducing human involvement in some parts of the moderation process that can be handled by language models, human resources can be more focused on addressing the complex edge cases most needed for policy refinement."

Warner Bros. Games revealed back in June that Batman: Arkham Trilogy would arrive on Nintendo Switch sometime this fall, and now we have an exact date. The bundle of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight — along with the expansions for all three games — will land on Switch on October 13th.

Turn Me Up Games (which helped bring Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and It Takes Two to the Switch) handled the ports of the well-regarded series. Batman: Arkham Asylum kicked off the trilogy in 2009 with an original story that pits the Caped Crusader against many of his most formidable foes. The Joker orchestrates a plot to take over Arkham Asylum and Batman also has to deal with Harley Quinn, Bane, Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and Scarecrow.

Batman: Arkham City, the 2011 sequel, expands the scope to a broader area of Gotham and brings in some more classic villains including Mr. Freeze, Two-Face and The Penguin. Rocksteady followed up its previous two games in 2015 with Batman: Arkham Knight, which has a transformable Batmobile you can drive through the open world.

The beefy, brawling combat is a highlight of three games, while the stealth and puzzle mechanics helped provide some variety. If you haven't played these games before and you're a fan of the Dark Knight, they're worth checking out, though it's worth noting that you'll probably find them at a lower price on other platforms, at least for the next few months.

In any case, Batman: Arkham Trilogy (whether you're a newcomer or revisiting the three games) could help you pass the time until Rocksteady's next game, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, finally arrives. Following a poor reception to an extended look at gameplay, Rocksteady and WB Games pushed back that title from May to next February. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was originally supposed to arrive in 2022.

Microsoft is attempting to be more transparent about how it enforces the Xbox community standards. The company is moving to an eight-strike suspension policy, which comes into force today. Every enforcement action will include strikes. The number of strikes that the Xbox Safety team applies to an account will depend on the severity of the infraction. Each strike results in a suspension from Xbox's social features.

Account suspensions scale depending on the number of strikes. After two strikes, the player will be suspended for a day. When a player hits four strikes, Xbox will suspend their account for a week. Hit the full eight strikes and a player will be locked out of multiplayer, messaging, parties, party chat and other Xbox social features for one year. During a suspension, a player can still sign in, play games that don't need Xbox online services, use some apps and make purchases.

Xbox asks players to report any violations of the community standards that they see or hear someone else committing. The safety team assesses reports to figure out if a violation actually happened. If so, they'll determine how many strikes to include in the enforcement action.

Strikes will remain on players' accounts for six months. After strikes expire, they won't count toward a player's total. That said, if the safety team deems a violation of the community standards to be especially severe or egregious, it may issue a permanent ban regardless of the number of strikes on an account.

Players can view their enforcement history, where they can see how many strikes they have and exactly when a suspension will end. They can appeal against eligible enforcement actions too. Xbox will also share data on strikes and enforcement actions in its bi-annual Transparency Report.

Any enforcements applied to an account before today won't have any strikes applied to them. However, players will still have to complete any current suspensions before they regain full access to Xbox services.

Microsoft notes that in 2022, it handed out temporary suspensions to less than one percent of all players, and just a third of those had to endure a second suspension. Still, this is the latest in a string of efforts by the company to make the Xbox community safe and welcoming for everyone. Recently, it started rolling out an Xbox feature that allows users to capture and report abusive or inappropriate voice chat.

WhatsApp is testing the ability to create custom stickers using generative AI. According to WABetaInfo, the feature is available to a small number of testers through the Google Play Beta Program. Meta is said to be preparing to roll out the tool more broadly in the coming weeks.

Those who are part of the test should see a Create button when they open the keyboard in the sticker tab. As with similar tools, you can enter a description of the sticker you'd like to use. The AI will spit out a set of stickers for you to choose from and share in your chats. As WABetaInfo notes, you can report any stickers you deem to be harmful or inappropriate to Meta. 

The stickers are said to be easily recognizable and recipients may be informed when they see one that an AI model whipped up. Engadget has asked Meta for clarification.

We've been seeing generative AI creeping into more and more parts of mainstream apps this year, so it's not exactly surprising to see WhatsApp introducing AI-generated stickers. The tool could make WhatsApp chats feel more personalized and avoid people having to rely on overused stickers, GIFs and meme images without necessarily having to rely on their own design chops. Reports have suggested a similar feature is coming to Instagram and Messenger as well.