Posts with «consumer discretionary» label

Valve finally opens up reservations for its $89 Steam Deck dock

If you've been waiting for Valve to release its delayed Steam Deck dock instead of opting for a third-party version, there's some good news: the company has opened up pre-orders. The Steam Deck Docking Station, as the unit is officially known, costs $89.

While you can hook the Steam Deck up to an external display directly, the dock should make life a little easier if you want to play games on a bigger screen. You can simply use it as a charging station as well. 

The dock has three USB-A 3.1 Gen1 ports, but you can connect peripherals to your Steam Deck wirelessly too. It has a gigabit Ethernet port, which could help you to download games faster. As for connecting your Steam Deck to external displays, the dock has DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports. There's a passthrough USB-C charging port too.

Valve

The unit ships with the same power supply that comes with the Steam Deck — it won't enhance the Steam Deck's performance when it's docked. Even so, you don't actually need to plug a charger into the Dock. It can run off the Steam Deck's battery, but in that case the USB ports will have reduced throughput to conserve power.

Valve will provide ongoing support and make improvements to the Docking Station through software updates. A firmware installation wizard may pop up when you slot in your Steam Deck.

In June, Valve said it had to delay the dock indefinitely due to supply chain issues. Those who are pre-ordering may be able to get their hands on the device as soon as this quarter.

Meanwhile, the Steam Deck itself no longer needs a reservation in some regions. At least in the US and Canada, you can now simply order a Steam Deck from Valve. The expected shipment date is between one and two weeks. Over the last few months, Valve has been able to significantly ramp up production capacity and said it would be able to fulfill all reservations by the end of the year. It looks like the company is well ahead of that schedule. 

On another note, I received my Steam Deck just as I started writing this story and, oh, look at that. It's suddenly lunch time. What a coincidence.

'Need for Speed Unbound' revives the racing series on December 2nd

The Need for Speed series hasn't been heard from since 2019's so-so Need for Speed Heat, but Criterion and EA are ready to bring it back — and they're tinkering with the formula once again. They've revealedNeed for Speed Unbound, a follow-up to the fantasy racer that melds elements of street art (such as cel-shaded graphics and graffiti flourishes) with realistic-looking cars and a gameplay system that promises "true consequence[s]" for your decisions. And did we mention that A$AP Rocky plays a prominent role?

You play a new racer who has to rise to the top of a street racing league to recover a "priceless" car stolen from a family auto shop. A$AP Rocky will lead the Takeover Scene, a "precision driving" mode that rewards style. His music (along with other hip-hop artists) will soundtrack the experience, and the trailer hints that you might even get to drive his custom Mercedes 190E.

Unbound will include familiar Need for Speed mechanics like police "heat," but you'll also get nitrous-fueled speed boosts in return for stylish driving. To no one's surprise, you'll have virtual currency-based customization that extends to elements like clothing and license plates. Free updates will include new features, modes and raw content.

The new title will be available December 2nd for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Sorry, you're high and dry if you hoped for a PS4 or Xbox One release. The bigger question is whether or not Unbound will accomplish what Heat didn't — that is, restore some of the excitement from Need for Speed's glory days.

Apple Watch Ultra review: A big smartwatch with some little quirks

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I frequently get lost. Even in the middle of well laid-out Manhattan, my friends cannot trust me with directions. So while the idea of wandering in the wilderness with nothing but the stars and a compass to guide me is alluring, I’ve never dared to actually do it. When Apple launched the Watch Ultra and showed off its navigation and compass-based features, I was intrigued. And though I’m not a fan of underwater activities, I was still impressed to learn about the diver-specific features.

But Apple didn’t just design the Watch Ultra for explorers and divers. It also built some special features for endurance athletes, like dual-frequency GPS for more accurate route tracking and pace calculations. The Watch Ultra is packed to the brim with tools for various outdoor use cases, but are all the bells and whistles worth its $800 price?

Design

My immediate thought when I first saw the Watch Ultra was “This is the Cat phone of smartwatches.” It’s a monster truck of a watch. Not only does it have a bigger screen than most wearables on the market, it’s also heavier. The Watch Ultra weighs a whopping 61.3 grams (2.16 ounces), which is almost 20 grams (0.7 ounces) more than Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. Meanwhile, the stainless steel 45mm Series 8, which is the next heaviest Apple Watch, comes in at 51.5 grams (1.81 ounces).

But despite sporting a 49mm screen, the Watch Ultra actually feels less clunky than Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, which uses a 45mm titanium case. I found the Watch 5 Pro uncomfortable compared to the Ultra. This is most likely because Samsung’s lugs and band curve in a way that makes it feel like a cuff. Even if you swapped out the band for something thinner, the curve is built into the frame and hugs your wrist like a vice grip.

Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Ultra’s underside is just like those on the Series 8 and SE. It’s mostly flat with slightly curved edges, and you attach straps by sliding them into a groove. I used the company’s ocean band when I first started testing the Ultra, and its “tubular geometry” (Apple’s words, not mine) is supposed to help it stretch over wetsuits while resisting water.

The bright yellow version I received is eye-catching and feels like a series of small rubber straws glued together. It makes a statement and is a conversation starter, but it wasn’t stretchy enough to simply pry off my wrist. Personally, I prefer the alpine loop strap. It still isn’t very stretchy, but it has a lower profile than the ocean band and is adjustable enough to fit my wrist perfectly. Finally, you can choose to get your Watch Ultra with the Trail Band, which is a more typical strap with velcro attachment and a pull tab that makes it easier to adjust. If none of these appeal to you, the good news is you can also use one of the bands for the standard watches instead.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Regardless of the band you pick, the Watch Ultra’s case is, to use the technical term, a chonkster. For my relatively small wrist, it looks overwhelming and covers pretty much the entire width of my arm. On others with larger wrists, though, the Ultra looked comparable to a regular timepiece.

I don’t mind that it’s chunky, but some of the Ultra’s other design elements were frustrating. Apple added a titanium guard to the side to protect the digital crown from accidental rotations, which makes sense since the crown is also about 30 percent bigger than the Series 8 and has coarser grooves. The company did this to make the dial easier to rotate with gloves on, and it also raised the side button for the same reason.

When I tried using these controls with a pair of thick work gloves on, they were indeed easy to maneuver. But they frequently got triggered by accident, causing a lot of frustration.

On the Watch Ultra’s left side sits an orange Action button and a speaker grill. The titanium case extends straight up to surround the sides of the sapphire crystal screen, which is flat instead of slightly curved like the Series 8 or SE. This gives it a weird shape, but only if you look at it from the side. From the top down, the Ultra looks just like a 45mm Series 8.

Hiking with the Watch Ultra

To get a better sense of the Watch Ultra as a companion for outdoor adventurers, I went on a moderate hike in New Jersey’s South Mountain reservation without a map. I was accompanied by our video producer Brian, who had a 3.2-mile trail downloaded to his phone on AllTrails, but that was for backup purposes only. I was hiking blind.

I activated the Backtrack feature on the Watch Ultra and created a Waypoint at the parking lot just before we embarked on the trail. I also started a hiking workout to help monitor the time and distance we’d covered.

Even with a map as a failsafe, we got lost a few times. On one of those occasions, we only realized we were going the wrong way when I noticed that the watch was showing us going in a straight line. Brian heard me say that, recalled that we should have made a pretty sharp left turn a little while ago and pulled up his map to confirm. Would we have gotten hopelessly lost had I not been checking the Watch Ultra? Probably not. We would have noticed we weren’t where we were supposed to be at some point. But the device saved us some time and kept us on the right track.

Midway through the hike, we tested the new Siren feature that uses the Ultra’s two onboard speakers that Apple said make it 40 percent louder than the Series 8. The company said one of the speakers was specifically designed to also function as an emergency siren, playing a pattern of beeps and alarms to alert your companions or nearby emergency responders to your location.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I asked Brian to walk away before I went and hid behind a tree. Then I played the siren and did my best to stay out of sight. Brian found me within five minutes. Granted, I didn’t go very far, and there weren’t huge trees with thick trunks. Brian said that the siren initially sounded like a bird, and indeed, the first few sounds the watch plays are a series of shrill chirps. But they give way to wailing patterns and the morse code beeps for SOS, so people eventually won’t mistake them for anything natural.

The siren seemed plenty loud to me, but from Brian’s perspective, it got somewhat lost in the sound of leaves rustling and a nearby gurgling stream. Obviously, the closer Brian got to me, the clearer he heard the siren. But don’t count on the Watch Ultra to draw rescuers to your exact location from a mile away.

During our hike, we came across a cute little creek and wanted to mark it in case we decided to come back. Since I had set the Watch Ultra’s action button to set a waypoint, I pressed it once to drop a pin, and the system prompted me to label the spot. I didn’t have to start from scratch — the watch had already filled in a suggested name, and I could use the onscreen keyboard to edit it. With the Ultra’s roomy screen, by the way, typing is surprisingly less cumbersome than on smaller wearables.

Thanks to its increased brightness of up to 2,000 nits, the Watch Ultra’s screen is easy to see in direct sunlight. A lot of this also has to do with Apple’s interface, which mostly uses bold, colorful fonts against a dark background.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Though I found it convenient to quickly set a waypoint with the Action button, I often accidentally pressed it when trying to push the digital crown. My thumb would naturally rest along the side of the case while my index finger reached for the dial, which frequently caused both buttons to be pushed at once. This meant that I kept getting the screen for creating a waypoint instead of going to the home page, for instance.

It was more annoying after I had set the action button to start a workout. The number of two-second hikes that are now in my activity history are testament to how easy it is to hit the action button. Over time, I learned to place my thumb where the strap connects to the case. But if you’re really struggling you can always set the action button to do nothing (though that would defeat its entire purpose altogether).

When we were nearing the end of our trail, Brian and I decided to use the waypoint we had created for the parking lot to find the exit. It was slightly confusing to find the page that would show us the directions — we had to rotate the crown while in the Compass app to zoom in and out of different views. The Orienteering view, which appears after you twist the dial all the way in, shows the route you’ve been taking and your waypoints. Tapping one of these flags brings up a list of your saved sites and you can choose one to navigate to. The Watch Ultra will show how far away you are from the spot, as well as in what general direction (left or right) you should head.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I followed the onscreen instructions towards the parking area, which the Watch said was just 400 feet away. I’ll confess: At this point I could already tell where the car was, so it was hilarious when, hundreds of feet away from the vehicle, the Watch buzzed to tell me I had arrived.

The GPS wasn’t super accurate, but I wasn’t expecting it to bring me within inches of the car. I also took this opportunity to check on the Backtrack feature to see if the Watch Ultra could reliably bring me back through the trail we had completed.

Once again, I found the interface confusing. Tapping the footsteps symbol on the bottom right of the Compass app brought up options to retrace or delete the steps I had saved. When I tapped retrace steps, it took awhile for me to realize which direction to turn and how to follow the orange line on the screen. I finally caught on when I started walking back in the direction I had come from, and saw some progress on the watch. In general, I find the Waypoint feature more useful than Backtrack, as it creates a more direct path to where I want to go, as opposed to making me retrace my entire journey.

We didn’t trek into the night, but had it gotten dark, we could have also used the Night mode version of the Wayfinder watch face. This changes the interface so all onscreen elements are in red while the background is black, which makes it easier for you to see in the dark.

Regular health and fitness tracking

In pretty much every other respect, the Watch Ultra behaves exactly like a typical Apple Watch. It’ll still automatically track your outdoor runs and walks. Although, thanks to its improved dual-frequency GPS runners should be able to get more accurate results even in cities dense with high-rises.

I’m not a big runner, but I can imagine how helpful it must be to set the Action button to launch a workout and program subsequent presses to mark laps and segments or change sports. But since most of my exercises involve weights, the watch’s oversized hardware actually got in my way.

In fact, the most frustrating thing about using the Watch Ultra as my daily driver has surprisingly been during my daily workouts. In the past, when testing the Series 8 and Samsung’s watches, I bragged about never needing to flip the screens inside my wrist to prevent damaging them when racking weights.

I can’t say the same about the Watch Ultra, though, and not because I’m worried about cracking the display. It’s because whenever I was doing burpees, planks or mountain climbers, my wrist would keep pressing into the dial and cause the Ultra to stop tracking my workout. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve screeched obscenities at the watch midway through a HIIT class, causing my classmates to look around in confusion. Eventually, I gave up and started turning the watch inside my wrist before each class — it’s that or lose time during each session I track. Thankfully, in spite of this minor inconvenience, I was still able to lose 4 percent body fat during a six-week challenge and gain 2.8 pounds of muscle. (Yes, this is a not-so-humble brag.)

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Because the Watch Ultra is humongous, wearing it to bed is understandably less comfortable than the smaller Series 8 or SE. I definitely felt it weighing my wrist down, which made it harder to fall asleep. Like the Series 8, the Ultra has an onboard skin temperature sensor that allows for retroactive ovulation tracking. You’ll need to set up a sleep schedule and focus before the Watch will log your rest.

You’ll also find other watchOS 9 features like medication logging, as well as crash detection via the onboard high-g accelerometer, and you can set the Action button to turn the screen into a flashlight, which is easier to find in the dark than a phone.

Performance and battery life

Though I was concerned about the Watch Ultra’s battery drain during our hike, in daily use the device lasted longer than expected. I usually got almost three days out of it before having to recharge, and that’s with it tracking my daily walks and workouts, as well as controlling my soundtrack. That more than lines up with Apple’s promised 36-hour runtime, and I never worried about running out of juice.

I did completely forget to check the battery level one day and found myself working at a cafe with just 20 percent left. I enabled Low Power Mode, which turned off the Always On Display and features like background heart rate measurements, heart rate notifications, irregular rhythm alerts and blood oxygen measurements. It also disabled the Wi-Fi and cellular connections, which led to notifications being delayed.

With this on, Apple said you can get up to 60 hours on a charge. Since I only enabled Low Power Mode at 4:30pm with 17 percent left, I wasn’t expecting the watch to last another day. But, four hours after I turned it on, the Watch Ultra still had 14 percent of juice.

Wrap-up

The Apple Watch Ultra might be the ultimate smartwatch. Sure, it doesn’t have the same long-lasting battery as some Garmin or Fitbit wearables, and it lacks some of the exercise-tracking features those two offer like rep-tracking or recovery stats. Those looking to track their sleep might prefer the lower profile of the Series 8 or SE. People who don’t dive, hike, bike or run outside regularly also don’t need to spend the extra cash on the Ultra — the Series 8 is more than capable as a daily fitness tracker. But with a durable build, helpful tools for specialized use cases and watchOS’ general capability as a mainstream smartwatch platform, the Watch Ultra is a powerful companion that most outdoor enthusiasts can rely on.

'Dead Space' remake trailer shows a twist on familiar gameplay

Motive and EA have finally shared a gameplay trailer for their long-expectedDead Space remake. To an extent, the clip shows what you'd expect. It's a familiar retelling of Isaac Clarke's horror-filled mission to the mining ship USG Ishimura, but with much-improved visuals and sounds that make better use of modern hardware. You're still severing the limbs of Necromorphs and floating through zero-gravity segments, just with eerie volumetric lighting and more realistic, context-sensitive sounds.

It's not quite a rehash, thankfully. Isaac is no longer silent like he was in the 2008 original, and there's a better feel for a story that involves the battle for sanity and discovering the fate of Isaac's girlfriend Nicole. To some extent, the remake is an opportunity to refine Dead Space rather than simply profiting from a well-known name.

The revived Dead Space will be released January 27th, 2023 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. While it isn't a brand new game like fans might want, this preview suggests Motive is at least delivering what you'd expect from a remake: a modernization of graphics and gameplay that's still true to the experience that drew people in the first time around.

CD Projekt Red is working on a 'Cyberpunk 2077' follow-up and several new Witcher games

CD Projekt Red may be much busier than you expect. The developer has shared a long-term roadmap that elaborates and expands on its plans. To start, a project codenamed "Orion" is effectively a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 that will "further develop the potential" of the sci-fi franchise. It's in development by CDPR's teams in Boston and Vancouver.

And while it's no secret that there's a new Unreal Engine 5-based The Witcher game in the works (it entered pre-production this spring), it's really just the start of a new trilogy. You might not have to wait long to see the story reach its conclusion, either. CDPR hopes to release all three games within a six-year span, with the first (codenamed "Polaris") serving as a technology foundation for the remaining two.

Other titles include "Sirius," a The Witcher spinoff with solo and multiplayer elements aimed at a "broader audience." It's developed by The Flame and the Flood studio The Molasses Flood. Another project, "Canis Majoris," is a "full-fledged" Witcher universe game built by an outside developer using UE5. And no, CDPR won't be stuck making Cyberpunk and Witcher games for all eternity. "Hadar" will be new, from-scratch universe. It's still in the extremely early stages of development (conceptual work only began in 2021), so it's likely years away.

Regardless of what you play, you should expect online gameplay to become a staple feature. In its roadmap presentation, CDPR said "most" of its new games will have a multiplayer component. The company was shy on what this will entail.

CDPR isn't shy about the reasons for the expansion. The wider catalog and cooperation with outside developers will help it "reach new consumers" while maintaining three lasting franchises. If all goes well, a producer best known for rare, single player-focused releases will offer a steady stream of games that help it become more of a household name akin to Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft — in size, if hopefully not in quality.

There’s an apparent PS5 jailbreak, but only for old firmware

Almost two years after the PlayStation 5 went on sale, it seems that modders have found a way to jailbreak the console, albeit with some significant limitations. As IGN notes, a modder known as SpecterDev revealed the apparent jailbreak, which is described as an experimental IPV6 kernel exploit that takes advantage of a WebKit vulnerability.

It appears the jailbreak will only work on PS5 systems that run firmware version 4.03 or earlier. If you have updated your PS5 since last October, you're probably not going to be able to try the exploit. Even then, it seems that trying to install the jailbreak only works around a third of the time.

As for what you can actually do with a jailbroken PS5 right now, you'll gain access to the system's debug menu. You might be able to install games from outside of the PlayStation Store as well, but it's not possible to run sideloaded software. 

It's... beautiful.

The PlayStation 5 has been jailbroken. pic.twitter.com/54fvBGoQGw

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) October 3, 2022

Modder Lance McDonald tried the jailbreak and was able to install the PS4 demo P.T., Hideo Kojima's famed, delisted teaser for the canceled Silent Hills. (PS4 units with P.T. installed often pop up on eBay.) However, McDonald wasn't able to start playing the game. While the exploit offers read/write access to the PS5, there's currently no way to execute sideloaded files. P.T. isn't backward compatible on PS5 in any case.

As it stands, it doesn't seem likely that this jailbreak will be in widespread use anytime soon, due to its limitations and the fact that Sony could ban modders' accounts. On top of that, there's the risk of bricking the console at a time when it still isn't super easy to buy one. Still, this could give other hackers and modders a foundation on which to build more robust jailbreaking tools.

Tesla built 365,923 electric vehicles in Q3, up 42 percent from Q2

After pandemic-related disruptions in Q2, Tesla ramped up its manufacturing capacity again last quarter, leading the company to make a record number of deliveries between July 1st and September 30th. The company built 365,923 electric vehicles during the period. That marks a year over-year production increase of nearly 54 percent, as Tesla manufactured 237,823 cars in Q3 2021. Production was also up by 41.5 percent from Q2 2022, when the automaker built 258,580 vehicles.

The company produced 19,935 Model S and Model X cars in Q3 and delivered 18,672. For the Model 3 and Model Y, those figures were 345,988 and 345,988, respectively. In total, Tesla says it was able to deliver 343,830 vehicles in Q3, the most it has delivered in any quarter to date. However, that was below expectations, according to Reuters. On average, analysts anticipated that Tesla would deliver 359,162 EVs during the quarter.

Tesla built around 20,000 more vehicles that it was able to deliver during Q3. "As our production volumes continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly challenging to secure vehicle transportation capacity and at a reasonable cost during these peak logistics weeks," Tesla said in a statement.

CEO Elon Musk noted last year that Tesla sees a significant increase in deliveries at the end of every quarter. That's because the Shanghai Gigafactory, which recently built its 1 millionth car, manufactures EVs bound for Europe and other countries in the first half of each quarter, "then cars for far away parts of China, then cars for nearby parts of China," Musk said.

"In Q3, we began transitioning to a more even regional mix of vehicle builds each week, which led to an increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter," Tesla said. "These cars have been ordered and will be delivered to customers upon arrival at their destination."

The number of cars Tesla manufactured and delivered dropped dramatically in Q2 2022. It was forced to suspend work at the Shanghai factory in March due to a COVID-19 outbreak in China. Production at the plant has resumed, while recently opened Gigafactories in Berlin and Texas have helped the company significantly improve its manufacturing numbers. We'll learn more about what the uptick in production and deliveries means for Tesla's bottom line when the company announces its Q3 financial results on October 19th.

The Morning After: Google is shutting down Stadia, its game streaming service

Despite denials until mid-2022, Stadia is winding down. The technically impressive game streaming service, which delivered current-gen games through smartphones, PCs, tablets and even Chromecast, is the latest victim of Google’s long list of service casualties. Google said the service "hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected." That’s entirely true. Google closed its internal game development studios early last year, and the company sadly failed to turn things around, even as rumors swirled that Stadia wasn’t long for this world. It’s a shame, as the service worked incredibly well, especially at the nascent beginnings of cloud gaming.

The good news is if you invested in the standalone games, Google "will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store." This was outlined by Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison in a blog here.

If you subscribed to Stadia Pro and built up a catalog of games, there are no reimbursements. You’ll be able to play your games until January, but it’ll serve as a reminder that streaming services, if they go, can leave you with nothing. Except maybe a Chromecast.

– Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

James Webb and Hubble captures pictures of NASA’s spacecraft−asteroid collision

The first time both telescopes observed the same celestial target at the same time.

NASA made history this week when it slammed its DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft into an asteroid nearly seven million miles away. Now, we can see the test from afar, thanks to the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes. JWST and Hubble picked up different wavelengths of light (infrared and visible, respectively), and NASA says that observing data from multiple wavelengths will help scientists figure out if big chunks of material left Dimorphos' surface or if it was mostly fine dust. This is an important aspect of the test: The ultimate aim is to develop a system that can divert incoming asteroids away from Earth. Like 1998’s Armageddon, just with less Bruce Willis and Aerosmith.

Continue reading.

Sonos Sub Mini review

The practical sub we’ve been waiting for.

Engadget

Finally, after only 10 years, Sonos has launched the Sub Mini, and at $429, it’s relatively affordable. It’s perfectly sized for apartments and small rooms, and it’s a simple upgrade to your Sonos Beam or Ray. Finally, you have a viable, moveable way of beefing up your sound, which isn’t obscenely expensive. Check out our full review.

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Meta's new Make-a-Video AI can generate quick movie clips from text prompts

Even more complicated AI-generated art.

Meta unveiled its Make-a-Scene text-to-image generating AI in July, which, like Dall-E and Midjourney, can create fantastical depictions based on written prompts. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Make-a-Scene's more animated contemporary, Make-a-Video. Functionally, Video works the same as Scene – combining natural language processing and generative neural networks to convert non-visual prompts into images – it's just pulling content into a different format.

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Teenage Engineering's PO-80 Record Factory both cuts and plays vinyl

Why not both?

Teenage Engineering

The Swedish brand, best known for electronic music toys and tools, has released the decidedly more analogue PO-80 Record Factory. As the name implies, it can cut vinyl records as well as play them back. The orange and white design is cute, as is the simplicity. You just need to plug an audio device into the 3.5mm jack and start recording. You're limited to monophonic sound, and you won't be cutting more than a single with a B-side. The Record Factory is available for $149.

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Musk's texts with Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal detail tumultuous Twitter negotiations

Dorsey asked Musk to join Twitter's board long before he tried to buy the company.

A tranche of Elon Musk’s private messages has been made public as part of his ongoing lawsuit with Twitter. The messages, revealed in a court filing Thursday, shed new light on Musk’s behind-the-scenes negotiations with Twitter’s leadership, discussions with former CEO Jack Dorsey, and how Musk talks with CEO Parag Agrawal quickly soured. The messages include the moment Musk tells Agrawal he wants to acquire Twitter and take it private, rather than join the board, as well as Agrawal confronting Musk about an April 9th tweet questioning if "Twitter is dying."

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PS5 launch title 'Sackboy: A Big Adventure' is coming to PC on October 27th

Sackboy: A Big Adventure has joined the rapidly expanding list of PlayStation games that Sony is bringing to PC. The PS5 launch title (which is also available on PS4) will pop up on Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 27th.

Sony says the PC version will support 4K resolution, have a targeted framerate of 120 FPS and offer variable refresh rates. You'll be able to explore Craftworld in an ultra-wide format as there's support for a range of screen ratios, including 21:9. Those with recent NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs should get a performance boost as well via DLSS2. There's also haptic feedback and dynamic trigger support if you use a DualSense controller. Alternatively, you can play with a mouse and keyboard.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure won't require an ultra powerful gaming rig. You will need at least an Intel Core i5-6400 or AMD FX-6300 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R7 265 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 60GB of storage.

It's shaping up to be a busy fall for PlayStation on the PC gaming front. The Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves collection will hit Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 19th. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is also slated to land on PC by the end of the year.

Google is (unsurprisingly) shutting down Stadia in January

Despite claims to the contrary as recently as July, Google is shutting down its Stadia games streaming service after all. The company says players will have access to their games library and be able to play them until January 18, 2023. Sadly, Stadia will join the long, long list of products that have been killed by Google.

Those who have invested money into Stadia will be fully reimbursed. "We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store," Google wrote in a blog post. "We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center."

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