The Super Mario Bros. Movie has only been in theaters for a week and a half, but it's been pulverizing box office records faster than Nintendo's mascot can run from left to right. It already had the highest-grossing opening weekend for any video game-based movie in the US and Canada, but the film has proven to be a hit around the globe.

According to Variety, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has raked in north of $508.7 million worldwide. That makes it both the biggest film of 2023 so far as well as the highest-earning video game movie of all time in theaters. The previous record holder was Warcraft, which had a global haul of $439 million.

After the bizarre mess of the 1993 live-action Super Mario. Bros film, Nintendo swore off movie adaptations of its properties for decades. But with the help of Despicable Me studio Illumination and a focus on replicating the widely recognized art style of Mario games in animation, Nintendo has struck gold with the latest film (even if the plot doesn't amount to much).

There's a long way to go before Nintendo, Illumination and Universal, which co-financed and distributed the flick, can truly dream of The Super Mario Bros. Movie becoming one of the biggest animated films of all time. It hasn't broken into the top 50 yet, while the 2019 remake of The Lion King has the top spot with $1.66 billion.

Still, movies and other non-gaming experiences like theme parks will likely form a major part of Nintendo's business going forward. A Mario sequel and films based on other Nintendo properties (a Breath of the Wild adaptation, anyone?) now seem inevitable, as if Illumination founder Chris Meledandri having a seat on the board wasn't clear enough of an indication.

Instagram is rolling out several Reels updates, including a redesigned editing tool. The new-look editor, which Meta says is available worldwide on iOS and Android, pulls together video clips, audio, stickers and text into a single, more streamlined screen. "This makes it easier to align and time elements of your reel to the right moments in a more visual way," Meta wrote in a blog post. The company noted that additional editing tools are on the way as it continues to try to chip away at TikTok's dominance.

Reels creators who are looking to go viral and build their audiences on Instagram will be able to check out the top audio and hashtags on what Meta is calling a "trends destination." The tab is accessible from the dashboard. You'll be able to see how many times others have used a song and either add the audio to your own reel or save it for later.

This should help creators figure out what's popular in Reels at a given time so they can tap into trends. It's fairly easy for TikTok creators to determine what's trending in that app, so this seems like an important update for Instagram.

Instagram

On a related note, Instagram is upgrading the Reels insights page to give creators a deeper sense of how their videos are performing. You'll be able to view the total watch time and average watch time to better understand how viewers are engaging with each reel beyond view counts. If it seems most viewers are dropping off at a certain point in a video, that could help creators learn what their audience is less interested in seeing and make adjustments to their future reels. In addition, you'll get notifications showing the people who started following you from a specific reel.

Meanwhile, Instagram will expand the gifts monetization feature to more countries in the coming weeks, including Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, New Zealand and the UK. In addition, creators will be able to see exactly who tipped them with a gift so they can thank generous fans.

Spotify has some disappointing news for Heardle fans: the company is shutting down the song-guessing game, which it bought last summer. “Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” a message on the Heardle webpage reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.”

Players who want to keep a record of their stats for posterity should take a screenshot, Spotify says. The stats will no longer be available after May 4th.

Heardle emerged early last year in the wake of Wordle's massive success. In turn, it became one of the more prominent and successful Wordle clones. Third-party data suggests that Heardle reached a high of 69 million monthly visitors last March.

The makers of Heardle sold the game to Spotify in July. However, just before that deal was announced, Heardle's monthly visitor numbers had seemingly dipped to 41 million, according to TechCrunch, suggesting that the game's popularity was already tapering off. In comparison, The New York Times, Wordle's owner, says tens of millions of people are still playing that game each week.

When it bought Heardle, Spotify said it saw the game as a music discovery tool. Whether a player successfully guessed each day's song based on the intro or not, they were provided with a link to hear the full track on Spotify. It may be the case that Spotify wasn't seeing a high level of clickthrough rates, so Heardle may ultimately not have helped much in terms of music discovery. Moreover, the game is said to have aped some music discovery functions that are also present in Spotify's app.

It's hard to imagine that Spotify's daily song choices helped matters. Along with many classic tracks, Heardle often featured music that didn't exactly light up the Billboard charts but instead went viral on TikTok. It seems that Spotify didn't quite strike the balance of using Heardle as a music discovery tool while also making each song recognizable enough for fans to identify and keep their streaks going.

In addition, some players were frustrated that Heardle kept going back to the same wells over and over by featuring several songs from one artist over a relatively short time. Within the space of five months last year, Heardle featured six Green Day tracks, despite there being thousands of well-known artists and hit songs to choose from. Far too many Imagine Dragons songs have popped up over the last few months too (one would have been more than enough).

Spotify reportedly didn't have a team dedicated to working on Heardle, so there won't be any layoffs as a result of the game's closure. It's hard to imagine that picking one song each day and maintaining Heardle would have taken a ton of work. Engadget has contacted Spotify for comment.

So long HBO Max, hello… Max? This week, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss Warner Bros. pivot away from the beleaguered HBO Max service, and towards something that unifies HBO and Discovery’s content. Does Max help, or hurt the HBO brand? And does the name even matter when people will always line up for the next Game of Thrones spin-off? Also, we dive into the NVIDIA RTX 4070, a champ of a mid-range GPU, as well as the latest from Elon Musk’s disastrous Twitter reign.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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Topics

• Max (just Max) is replacing HBO Max – 1:34

• NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 review: excellent at 1440p gaming, still pricey at $499 – 21:15

• This week in Twitter mess: NPR and PBS quit Twitter over account labeling, AI project allegedly in the works – 23:03

• Worker morale is low at Meta after layoffs – 27:57

• Lo-fi girl is back, and she made a new synth wave friend – 30:40

• AI Update: Stable Diffusion is already taking illustrator jobs in China – 32:34

• Working on – 35:48

• Pop culture picks – 37:44

Livestream

Credits
Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphic artists: Luke Brooks

For Twitter Blue users in the US, the website’s 280-character limit has been a thing of the past since February when it gave them the ability to post 4,000-character tweets. Now, the company has more than doubled that limit and has launched support for tweets up to 10,000 characters in length. In addition, the website now supports bold and italics text formatting, allowing content creators to use those elements to break up potentially huge blocks of text. Twitter chief Elon Musk first announced that the website is making long-form tweets even longer in early March, almost a month after the initial 4,000-character expansion. 

While a 10,000-character limit sounds excessive for most casual users — that’s around 2,000 words, or a pretty lengthy essay — Twitter likely introduced the capability for people looking to make money off their posts. The company has just rebranded “Super Follows” as “Subscriptions,” allowing users to charge people $3, $5 and $10 a month for exclusive content, including subscriber-only chats in Spaces. Twitter also promised not to take any of their earnings for the next 12 months. 

By increasing the character tweet limit for Blue users, as well as allowing them to post “hours long videos,” Twitter is giving creators more ways to keep their subscribers engaged. At the same time, getting users to spend more time on the website means more opportunities to serve them with ads that would make the company more money. That said, Super Follows never quite took off, and it remains to be seen whether this iteration of the subscription service will fare better.

Twitter creators who want to make money on the platform will now turn to Subscriptions, not Super Follows, in a rebrand announced by Elon Musk. Twitter originally introduced Super Follows in 2021 as a way for creators to charge for exclusive tweets. Now, subscriptions also include long-form content (thanks to those extra-long tweets) as well as “hours long videos,” according to Musk.

But the details of the program seem to be largely unchanged from Super Follows. Creators can charge $2.00, $4.99 or $9.99 a month, with exclusive content including subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces, as well as special badges for paid subscribers. Interestingly, as The Verge, points out, a help page says that “we hope to include newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.” That’s notable given Musk’s recent feud with Substack as well as because he shut down Revue, the newsletter platform Twitter acquired in 2021, soon after taking over as CEO.

Super Follows never seemed to gain much traction, even before Musk took over Twitter. Now, it seems he’s trying to lure creators with more favorable terms, at least initially. He said that Twitter would not be taking an additional cut of creators’ earnings from Subscriptions “for the next 12 months.” Instead, creators can expect 70 percent of their earnings from mobile and about 92 percent from web-based subscriptions, which should account for all revenue after app store and payment processing fees. “We will also help promote your work,” Musk said, though he didn’t elaborate on what that would entail.

Desta: The Memories Between is officially coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC on April 26th. If you haven’t gotten a chance to play the well-regarded roguelike, it's likely because it was previously tied to Netflix as an exclusive title for its burgeoning gaming platform.

Desta was developed by the company ustwo, which also created the mega-popular mobile title Monument Valley and its sequel. Beyond some slight graphical similarities, however, Desta is its own beast. The title combines a roguelike gameplay style with turn-based mechanics, with plenty of quirky surprises. The story involves a twentysomething returning home after their dad’s death. You help neighbors deal with pressing issues by solving puzzles and, well, playing a whole lot of dodgeball. The dodgeball challenges change from run to run, which is why this title is sometimes compared to games like Hades and Into the Breach.

This is the Dream Team Edition of Desta: The Memories Between, so it includes every content update that came down the pike since the original launch last year. This includes new story scenarios, updated abilities and a range of difficulty settings. You can also play as three new characters, including Alba from Alba: A Wild Adventure, another ustwo title.

Purchasing this game for Switch or PC also nets you a digital soundtrack and a 52-page digital artbook. Both the art style and the music are singled-out as positives in reviews, so these perks are likely to draw in pre-existing players. It costs around $20 to pick up on the Nintendo eShop or the Steam Store. 

“We’ve packed this bundle with so many new abilities, characters, game modes and more – I can’t wait for our community to get their hands on it,” wrote Lead Designer Joel Beardshaw in a press release when the port was officially announced in January.

A studio full of video game veterans is about to release its first big project. Ascendant Studios and EA have confirmed they're releasing the magic first person shooter Immortals of Aveum on July 20th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows PCs. You play a new battlemage who's thrust into a never-ending war for control of the world's magic.

This isn't Call of Duty with spells, though, or even a revival of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic. Immortals revolves around a combination system that rewards mixing up different magic types to defeat enemies. You can also draw on magical abilities to create shields or turn the environment against your foes. Ascendant is also promising a narrative-focused experience with an extensive backstory, not to mention recognizable voices like Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) and Gina Torres (Firefly).

Ascendant is part of a wave of indie studios formed by departing leaders at major game developers. It's helmed by Bret Robbins, the creative director from the original Dead Space, who formed Ascendant in 2018 with Immortals in mind. The team also includes former Telltale Games workers as well as people behind well-known games like Spider-Man and Tomb Raider. Like other well-known exiles, Robbins and crew are effectively trying to regain creative control — even if they're still publishing through major brands.

NPR isn't the only public broadcaster to stop tweeting after Twitter applied a "government-funded media" label to its account. PBS has halted its use of the platform too. The organization hasn't posted on its Twitter account since April 8th.

Both PBS and NPR claim the label, which previously read "state-affiliated media," doesn't represent them accurately. Twitter previously reserved such labels for state-run outlets like China's Xinhua News Agency and Russia's RT and Sputnik.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” a PBS spokesperson told Variety. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

Federal funding accounts for around 15 percent of public television system revenue, PBS says. The biggest chunk of revenue, 31 percent, comes from donations from individuals. NPR, meanwhile, says federal funding makes up less than one percent of its average annual budget. The broadcaster says it stopped using Twitter in large part to protect its credibility, suggesting the label implies that the government has editorial influence over it. NPR says it's "a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence."

Twitter also applied the label to the BBC's account. That organization also pushed back against the "government-funded media" descriptor. Following an interview that a BBC reporter conducted with Twitter owner Elon Musk this week, the company updated the label to read “publicly funded media,” a more accurate description of the broadcaster's license fee-based budget.

Turning a radio show or any other live broadcast into a podcast isn't quite as simple as uploading the exact same file somewhere else. Downloading an episode from a radio platform, yanking ads, dropping in ad markers, making other edits and uploading it as a podcast typically takes up to an hour, Spotify said. To take some of the sting out of that process, the company has released a tool that can automatically create podcast episodes from existing broadcasts.

Spotify is using tech from Whooshkaa, a company it bought in 2021, to power the tool. Users of Megaphone, Spotify's podcasting platform for businesses, will have access to it. Several publishers are already using Megaphone to convert radio broadcasts into podcasts, including Fox News Audio. The tech can identify existing ad marker locations, and publishers can replace or reposition them before the podcast episode goes live.

According to data from Pew Research that Spotify cited in its announcement, Gen Z folks prefer to get news through digital mediums, such as podcasts. As such, radio publishers could use this kind of tech to reach new audiences without adding too much more to their workload. Spotify says more than half of Gen Z and millennials in the US use the platform, while it has more than 500 million users globally.

For consumers, the tool will likely bring an even wider selection of podcasts to Spotify. It could give YouTubers and Twitch streamers who host live podcasts an easy way to make their discussions available on Spotify too.