Possibility Space, an independent game studio with employees distributed across the globe, was abruptly shut down today by its CEO Jeff Strain, former employees revealed on Twitter. The studio launched in 2021 with the goal of creating a AAA title, and it had also hired industry notables like Waypoint's Austin Walker and Ubisoft designer Liz England. Its closure follows the shutdown of Crop Circle Games last month, another studio owned by Strain's Prytania Media, which he co-founded with his wife Annie Delisi Strain.

In an e-mail obtained by Polygon report Nicole Carpenter, Strain said he was "stunned" to learn that confidential information about the studio's major title, code-named Project Vonnegut, was shared with Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach. Strain claims that an unnamed publishing "expressed low confidence" about funding the studio any further, which led to a mutual agreement to cancel the title. Subsequently, he decided to shut down the studio entirely.

Possibility Space isn't the first studio to have game details leaked to press, and it's unclear why that information was damning enough to lose publisher funding (and don't forget, this is only Strain's version of events). 

Last month, Annie Delisi Strain also issued a similarly baffling e-mail (via IGN) where she blamed Crop Circle Game's closure on economic downturn, but additionally revealed that she was diagnosed with multiple-sclerosis. She claimed, without evidence, that Kotaku's Gach could potentially publish her health details without consulting her: "I stepped down as CEO this winter on a medical leave and while I don't know the content of Mr. Gach's article, I have no assurances that my personal health struggles as a rare female game industry CEO will not be covered in his article."

Late last year, over 100 employees of Avalanche Studios, the makers of Just Cause, announced an intent to unionize. The workers have officially ironed out a collective bargaining agreement with the Swedish labor unions Unionen and Engineers of Sweden. The agreement goes into effect during the second quarter of 2025.

While specifics of the agreement remain unknown, Avalanche said that it “will help standardize frameworks around essential areas such as salaries, benefits, employee influence, and career support.” The company says it’s working closely with both unions to ensure a smooth implementation of these frameworks.

Avalanche was founded in Sweden, but has since become a global entity. With this in mind, the move to unionize only impacts workers located in Sweden, which amounts to around 100 people. The company employs more than 500 workers globally.

Despite that caveat, this is still another high-profile move toward improving the rights of workers in the gaming industry. Avalanche joins several other companies that recently organized under collective labor contracts. Sega of America workers overwhelmingly voted to unionize last year, a move that impacted 200 employees. Over 300 ZeniMax Studios quality assurance workers voted to unionize last year, and parent company Microsoft didn’t stand in the way. Activision, another Microsoft company, boasts a union with over 600 members, which is the largest one in the entire industry.

This is all good news for workers, but there’s also a dark cloud floating around the industry. There have been a boatload of layoffs throughout the past several months. As a matter of fact, over 6,000 people lost their jobs in January alone. Impacted workers hail from many of the companies mentioned above, like Sega of America, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax.

As for Avalanche, it’s continuing work on the forthcoming Xbox exclusive Contraband. The game’s been in the pipeline since 2021 and it looks to be an open-world co-op adventure set in the 1970s.

Google, the search giant that brought in more than $73 billion in profit last year, is protesting a California bill that would require it and other platforms to pay media outlets. The company announced that it was beginning a “short-term test” that will block links to local California news sources for a “small percentage” of users in the state.

The move is in response to the California Journalism Preservation Act, a bill that would require Google, Meta and other platforms to pay California publishers fees in exchange for links. The proposed law, which passed the state Assembly last year, amounts to a “link tax,” according to Google VP of News Partnerships Jaffer Zaidi.

“If passed, CJPA may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers,” Zaidi writes. But though the bill has yet to become law, Google is opting to give publishers and users in California a taste of what those changes could look like.

The company says it will temporarily test blocking links to California news sources that would be covered under the law in order “to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.” Zaidi didn’t say how large the test would be or how long it would last. Google is also halting all its spending on California newsrooms, including “new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing program for news organizations, and planned expansions of the Google News Initiative.”

Google isn’t the first company to use hardball tactics in the face of new laws that aim to force tech companies to pay for journalism. Meta pulled news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada after a similar law passed and has threatened to do the same in California. (Meta did eventually cut deals to pay publishers in Australia after a 2021 law went into effect, but said last month it would end those partnerships.)

Google has a mixed track record on the issue, It pulled its News service out of Spain for seven years in protest of local copyright laws that would have required licensing fees. But the company signed deals worth about $150 million to pay Australian publishers. It also eventually backed off threats to pull news from search results in Canada, and forked over about $74 million. That may sound like a lot, but those amounts are still just a tiny fraction of the $10 - $12 billion that researchers estimate Google should be paying publishers.

Roku has disclosed a second data breach in as many months. While it was looking into a previous incident in which 15,000 accounts were affected, the company learned that another 576,000 accounts had been compromised.

In both incidents, Roku believes that the attackers used a method called credential stuffing. "It is likely that login credentials used in these attacks were taken from another source, like another online account, where the affected users may have used the same credentials," the company says.

Roku added that, in fewer than 400 cases, attackers used victims' Roku accounts to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku devices using stored payment methods. However, the hackers did not gain access to full credit card numbers or other payment information.

The company has reset the passwords for all affected accounts and informed users who have been impacted. The company is also turning on two-factor authentication for its more than 80 million active accounts. The next time you log in, you'll get a verification email. You'll need to click a link in the email before you can access your account. Meanwhile, Roku says it's refunding or reversing charges in the cases where the hackers bought subscriptions or hardware.

While the impact of this latest breach doesn't seem too disastrous, it's a good reminder that you should have a strong, unique password for every single one of your accounts. A password manager makes it much easier to have robust login credentials, as you'll only need to remember one main password or log in using biometric data.

Ubisoft’s online-only racing game The Crew stopped being operable on April 1. Some users are reporting, however, that things have gone a bit further. They say that the company actually reached into Ubisoft Connect accounts and revoked the license to access the game, according to reports by Game Rant and others.

Some of these users liken this move to theft, as they had purchased the game with their own money and received no warning that Ubisoft would be deleting the license. When attempting to launch the game, these players say they received a message stating that access was no longer possible.

On its face, this sounds pretty bad. People paid for something that was snatched away. However, there’s one major caveat. The Crew is an online-only racing game, so there really isn’t anything to do without the servers. Those servers went down on April 1 and the game was delisted from digital store fronts. Also, this move only impacts the original game. The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest are both still going.

When Ubisoft announced that the servers would be taken offline, it offered refunds to those who recently purchased the The Crew. The game’s been around a decade, so this refund likely didn’t apply to the vast majority of players. Some of these people said they had planned to set up private servers to play the game, an option that is now impossible.

This isn’t the biggest deal in the world, being as how The Crew is not operable, but it does highlight a major problem with the purchase and use of digital goods. We pay money for these products. We think we own them, but we don’t own a damned thing. Read the terms of service from Ubisoft or any other major games publisher for proof of that. Philippe Tremblay, Ubisoft's director of subscriptions, recently told Gamesindustry.biz that players will become “comfortable with not owning” their games. I’m not so sure we’ll ever be comfortable with the idea that stuff we paid for can disappear on a dime, even if it becomes standard practice.

Many major tech companies, particularly those that operate in the TV hardware business, have dipped their toes into original content. Although it's had its own free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels for a while, TCL is late to that party. Not for much longer though, as the company is set to release its first special, a short romance movie, on TCLtv+ this summer. There's just one slight hitch: TCL is using generative AI to make original content for its platform, and early signs do not bode well.

The company has released the first trailer for Next Stop Paris, which it's calling "the first AI-powered love story." TCL used human writers, as well as actors for motion capture and voice performances. While it has artists in the US, Canada, UK and Poland working on the project, it relied heavily on generative AI.

“I am excited by this opportunity to differentiate us with original programming. AIGC [artificial intelligence generated content] for us is the beginning," Chris Regina, TCL's chief content officer, told Broadcasting+Cable. "It’s a new approach and it makes sense coming from a tech and hardware company that that’s where we’re going to start.”

The plot of Next Stop Paris, such as it is, sees a young woman going on her honeymoon to Paris alone after her fiancé ran off with someone in their wedding party. She meets a stranger on the train and the pair explore the French capital together.

TCL is hoping that original content can help draw viewers to TCLtv+ and help build a brand identity for the company. While it's not entirely fair to judge a film based on a trailer, the Next Stop Paris clip gives a terrible first impression for both the project and TCLtv+.

The look of the characters changes throughout, from a moderately realistic style to the hyperrealism we often see from the likes of Midjourney, and they project all of the emotion of a pair of dead fish. Lip syncing is almost non-existent and the characters walk in a very unnatural way. 

The trailer feels like the worst kind of fever dream. Saying this looks like garbage would be an insult to garbage. If "content is king," as Regina put it, Next Stop Paris looks like a pauper.

The Hallmark Channel gets a lot of flak for its romance movies and romcoms, but at least there's an earnestness and high level of care behind the network's output, which does a lot to fill a gap in the theatrical slate. TCL is trying to muscle into that space too.

"There's an audience there that's watching our service and we see a hole in the marketplace with theatrical rom-coms not as prevalent," Regina said. "They're a guilty pleasure. You get under a blanket and watch in front of your TV set. So that's the driver." On top of that, TCL plans to make its original content shoppable and have AI-generated "characters in our shows that can be brand ambassadors and influencers for advertisers."

Thankfully, TCL isn't only working on AI-generated guff. "We are looking at doing traditional content. So movies, scripted shows, unscripted content, specials," Regina, who wrote Next Stop Paris with TCL chief creative officer Daniel Smith, said. "The next thing we have brewing isn't AI at all." That's good, because whatever's next can't look much worse than Next Stop Paris.

Another week is coming to a close, which means it's time for another roundup of good discounts on good tech. This week's highlights include the return of the best price we've seen for Apple's M2 MacBook Air, which is down to $849. No, this isn't the latest and greatest MacBook, and yes, a Bloomberg report this week said that Apple may debut a new M4 chip later in 2024. If you need a new laptop right now, though, the M2 model gets you most of the way to the newer M3 version for a good bit less cash. Beyond that, we've also found all-time lows for the 10th-gen iPad, Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K and a Nintendo Switch Lite bundle, among others. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still buy today. 

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Playdate, otherwise known as The Only Handheld That Actually Fits In My Tiny Hands, is almost perfect. It's a small yellow machine with a black-and-white screen and a crank on one side, and it's the home of fantastic, outlandish video games. The Playdate Catalog has more than 100 titles and there are hundreds more on sites like itch.io, created by new developers and established indies like Bennett Foddy, Lucas Pope and Keita Takahashi. Two years after its launch, Playdate is thriving. Panic, the company behind the device, said it's sold more than 70,000 units.

The one thing Playdate is missing is the Stereo Dock, a device that Panic announced back in 2021 and has been "coming soon" ever since. The Stereo Dock is a charging station, Bluetooth speaker, pen holder and stand for Playdate, and it looks like an adorable little tube TV when it's all put together. The Dock connects with Playdate magnetically and charges it wirelessly.

At least, it will do these things when it actually comes out. Playdate Project Lead Greg Maletic told Engadget that Panic is still working on the Stereo Dock, and the hold-up is due to unexpected issues in its factory pipeline. There should be an official update in the coming months. Here's what Maletic said:

"We apologize to everyone with a Playdate who has been waiting patiently for the Stereo Dock; it’s been a trickier project than we anticipated and we had a few false starts. We thought we'd save some time on that project by having our factory do the software for the Stereo Dock, but we've learned that you don't always necessarily want that in some cases. The Stereo Dock is very much alive, we have the physical prototypes to prove it! We expect to have a formal update on when you can buy one later this year."

This isn't the first delay in Playdate's history. Panic had to postpone the handheld's release in November 2021 because of a serious battery issue that forced the company to swap suppliers last minute. Playdate shipments started rolling out about four months behind schedule, in April 2022. It was well worth the wait, according to most reviewers.

It's been two years to the month since Playdate came out, and we just published a re-review looking at the platform's growth and how this cranky yellow square has become a hub for innovation in game development. Read that right here.

8BitDo makes some of our favorite third-party game controllers. The gamepads work with a variety of devices (now including the Apple Vision Pro) and they’re well-built. Right now, you can pick up a bundle of an 8BitDo Ultimate Controller and charging dock for $56 on Amazon. That's 20 percent off and close to a record low. It’s the best price we’ve seen so far this year.

If you're a Prime member and you're signed in, you'll see that the controller is sold by 8BitDo directly. Otherwise, you'll see the peripheral for the same price, but a third-party seller is flogging it instead.

Along with other devices, the Ultimate Controller is compatible with Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck over Bluetooth or a 2.4g adapter. To connect wirelessly to a Windows PC, you'll need to use the adapter. 

You can use a PC or mobile app to customize the sensitivity of the joysticks, triggers and vibrations, as well as to remap the buttons, add macros and create settings profiles that are saved to the controller. Other features include Hall effect sensing joysticks that will likely be more resistant to wear and drift than many other joysticks, a pair of back paddle buttons and motion controls.

While 8BitDo says that you'll get up to 22 hours of use out of a single charge, having a dedicated dock to plunk the Ultimate Controller into is handy. In a neat touch, the controller automatically turns off or on when you dock or undock it, respectively.

Overall, the Ultimate Controller is a great, flexible gamepad (for one thing, it's one of the few third-party controllers that can wake a Switch from sleep mode). After six months of using the peripheral, Engadget Senior Commerce Writer Jeff Dunn called it a "comfortable and versatile pro-style pad that should stay alive over the long haul" and "my endgame controller for both Switch and PC."

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Sometimes even the most die-hard coffee enthusiasts just want a quick cup of joe. Unfortunately, that often leaves people with sipping less-than-satisfactory java from traditional drip brewers. But now after years of customer requests, Fellow is finally releasing a machine that it claims can deliver a pour-over experience at the touch of a button. And after seeing it in action, there’s a lot to like.

Starting at $365, the Aiden certainly isn’t cheap. That said, compared to the $500 grinders and pricey accessories that so many aficionados lust after, this might seem like a bargain to some. But the big difference between the Aiden and traditional coffee machines is that unlike a typical drip-based brewer, it features an adjustable showerhead that mimics the process of a traditional pour-over. Fellow also uses a thick film Ferro Techniek heating element which is said to deliver exact water temperatures (down to a single degree and up to 210F). When combined with the ability to adjust things like bloom time, the amount of water used and more, you get a ton of control over the brewing process. Fellow even includes two different baskets: a single-serve option that delivers a slightly more nuanced product or a batch filter to accommodate big crowds (up to 10 cups at a time).

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

The Aiden also features a guided brew process that walks you through various settings, though you can always create your own profiles or download instructions directly from participating roasters via a QR code and Fellow’s free companion app. That said, I appreciate that if you don’t want to break out your phone just to make a cup of coffee, you can still set programs, start a brew and input data directly into the machine via its bright color LCD screen and large control dial.

But the best thing about the Aiden is how easy and convenient it is to use. It features a 1.5L reservoir and its heating element is completely silent so you can brew a cup in the morning without disturbing the peace. Once you have your favorite brews dialed in, starting a batch is as simple as dumping in some grounds and hitting start (and adding water to the tank if you haven’t done that already). The machine will remind you when you need to run a clean cycle or descale it. Because its showerhead is super precise, if you schedule it to run in the morning before you wake up, it will be ready exactly when you tell it. Not a minute too early or late. There’s even a cold brew setting that will slowly drip water through the grounds throughout the day (and of course you can set how long or short this takes) instead of relying on a prolonged immersion like you would otherwise.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

However, one feature the Aiden doesn’t have is a keep warm function, but that’s because most coffee lovers tend to stay away from machines with built-in hotplates that can result in scorched joe. Instead, Fellow relies on a thermal double-walled carafe to keep things warm until you can get to it (which probably won’t be long if you’re in need of caffeine).

Finally, while your tastes may vary, I like the Aiden’s minimalist design. It’s short enough that it should fit under most kitchen cabinets and its sleek lines and boxy shape make it a cinch to clean. And while I only got to sample a single cup, the Scandinavian light roast I tried retained a lot of the subtle vanilla and hickory notes that would normally be stamped out by traditional drip brewers.

That said, it’s important to remember that the Aiden isn’t meant to replace your V60 or Aeropress or whatever your preferred brewing method is. It’s simply meant to provide a higher quality joe than what your standard drip brewer can make for situations where you don't have the time or energy to make a cup yourself. From what I’ve seen so far, it does just that.

Pre-sale for the Aiden is live today, with shipments expected to begin sometime this September. Additionally, anyone who pre-orders will get a bag of coffee each from Onyx Coffee Lab, La Cabra and Verve Coffee Roasters specifically designed for this machine along with scannable brewing profiles.