The US Department of Justice says it has disrupted the Blackcat ransomware group. Also called ALPHV or Noberus, the hackers have targeted over 1,000 computer networks and extorted millions of dollars from victims. Bloomberg reports its members were known for speaking Russian. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco wrote in a DOJ news release.

The FBI says it developed a decryption tool, which it has used to help over 500 Blackcat victims recover their data — saving more than $68 million in ransom payments. The agency adds that it has “gained visibility into the Blackcat ransomware group’s computer network” and seized several of its websites.

“With a decryption tool provided by the FBI to hundreds of ransomware victims worldwide, businesses and schools were able to reopen, and health care and emergency services were able to come back online,” Monaco wrote. “We will continue to prioritize disruptions and place victims at the center of our strategy to dismantle the ecosystem fueling cybercrime.”

REUTERS / Reuters

Blackcat’s developers create and update the ransomware software, which “affiliates” deploy in attacks on high-value targets; the developers and attackers then split the profits. Once an affiliate has infiltrated a network, they typically steal sensitive data before encrypting the victim’s system, incapacitating it. They then ask for a ransom. If the victims pay, the hackers say they’ll decrypt the system and abstain from exposing their confidential information. If the targets refuse to pony up, the hackers leave the victims locked out and publish their spicy documents on the dark web.

Blackcat took credit for infiltrating businesses and other US and European organizations. These included hacks on MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Reddit, US critical infrastructure (government facilities, emergency services, defense industrial base companies, critical manufacturing and healthcare facilities), a large UK hospital group and various attacks across the energy sector.

Its members aren’t afraid to think outside the box, either. Last month, Blackcat affiliates reportedly ratcheted the pressure on a hacked company by snitching to the SEC for not reporting their infiltration.

Although this could only be a fleeting upper hand in a long-running game of cat and mouse, the DOJ warns it’s just getting started. “Criminal actors should be aware that the announcement today is just one part of this ongoing effort,” wrote the DOJ’s Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri. “Going forward, we will continue our investigation and pursue those behind Blackcat until they are brought to justice.”

Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 owners can now fix their phones through Samsung's self-repair service. The do-it-yourself program is expanding so that more Galaxy products, including foldables and tablets, are included in the iFixit collaboration. 

Samsung said it will add seven more products this month to its list of devices that are eligible for self-repair – from PCs, smartphones and tablets — including the Galaxy S23 series, Tab S9 series and the Galaxy Book2 Pro series. The program provides users with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) device parts and step-by-step guides that allow for things like screen or battery replacements. The price of fix kits will vary depending on the device. For example, a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Screen and Battery set costs $240.

Samsung’s self-repair program, which first launched in the US last year, will also be offered to customers in an additional 30 countries across Europe. The company says expanding the scope of what’s covered by the program is in line with Samsung’s overall strategy to alleviate e-waste.

Blue Origin is taking another stab at its first launch in 15 months as New Shepard's 24th mission is scheduled to take flight on Tuesday. The company had to scrub a planned launch on Monday due to a ground system issue. Today's launch window opens at 11:37AM ET and the webcast starts 20 minutes beforehand. You can watch the launch below.

The uncrewed science mission has 33 payloads, more than half of which were developed by NASA, Blue Origin says. The other payloads are from K-12 schools, universities and STEAM-centric organizations. The manifest also includes 38,000 student postcards from the Club for the Future initiative.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded New Shepard after an uncrewed launch attempt in September 2022 didn't go as planned. The booster failed after takeoff but it was able to separate successfully from the capsule. Although the capsule made a safe parachute landing, the booster was destroyed when it hit the ground in a designated hazard area.

The year had started so well for robotaxis. Cruise and Waymo came into 2023 riding high on fresh investments from General Motors and Google, respectively, as well as rapidly growing interest from the general public and a downright rabid rate of adoption by city governments. Things were looking up, very up, for the burgeoning self-driving vehicle industry! Then a driverless Crusie taxi accidentally dragged a hit-and-run victim down a San Francisco street for a few dozen feet and everything just sort of went to shit from there. So fragile, these Next Big Things. Let’s take a look back through the year that was to see how autonomous taxi tech might recover from this catastrophe.

Cruise (Out of) Control

Cruise came into this year looking like a nigh-on unstoppable force of transportational change as the core of GM's self-driving efforts. The company received a $1.5 billion investment from the automaker in March 2022 after GM spent $2.1 buying equity ownership for the startup from Softbank Vision Fund. In February the company announced that its test fleet of driverless taxis had traveled a million miles of San Francisco’s streets without a human behind the wheel. The program had only started the previous November.

"When you consider our safety record, the gravity of our team’s achievement comes into sharper focus," Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's EVP of engineering, said in February. "To date, riders have taken tens of thousands of rides in Cruise AVs. In the coming years, millions of people will experience this fully driverless future for themselves."

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt had been installed at his position in December 2021 after GM CEO Mary Barra ousted Dan Ammann from the spot. Vogt spent the following year laying out a grand vision of “zero crashes, zero traffic, and zero emissions,” though, according to a November report from the New York Times, the company “put a priority on the speed of the program over safety” during his tenure, cutting corners on safety in order to get more vehicles on the road. And expand Cruise did, into Houston and Los Angeles most notably, despite a growing number of traffic incidents and accidents left behind by its vehicles.

In April, the company was given permission to operate its driverless vehicles throughout San Francisco, 24/7 as well as pick up paying passengers during daylight hours. Previously, only Cruise employees were allowed to ride in the robotaxis and they could only operate when the sun was out. In August, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-to-1 in favor of allowing Cruise (and Waymo as well) to to pick up paying passengers at all hours.

Not everybody was fully on board with the robotaxi takeover, mind you. In January 2023, San Francisco officials requested the CPUC slow or even halt the expansion of self-driving vehicle services in the city, arguing that the free-for-all growth OK’d by state regulators was becoming an “unreasonable” burden. In fact, barely a week after the CPUC voted in favor of expansion, the California DMV opened an investigation into an altercation between a Cruise taxi and a fire truck. In response, the DMV had Cruise cut its operating fleet in half — down to 50 vehicles during daylight hours and 150 at night — until it had completed its investigation. Then there was the whole “using robotaxis as love hotels” issue in August.

Those mishaps were bad. The events of October 3 and Cruise’s response to the resulting investigation proved unforgivable. As the company initially explained in the above thread, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian, pushing her into the path of the Cruise taxi in the lane to her right. The taxi ran the woman over, despite aggressively braking, and ended up dragging her 20 feet until coming to a stop. EMS crews were able to extract the pedestrian from underneath the taxi using the jaws of life, and rushed her to medical treatment with critical injuries.Though she has not been identified, the pedestrian was reportedly in serious condition as late as October 25.

If that weren’t bad enough, Cruise then allegedly misled regulators about when the taxi engaged its brakes — telling them that the taxi had stopped immediately, not eventually, after slowly traveling another 20 feet down the block. The company then repeatedly delayed in releasing video of the incident to investigators until October 19.

The company’s cover-up efforts puts Cruise in financial jeopardy with the CPUC, which is currently considering fining it as much as $1.5 million for its obfuscating actions. The Commission's decision will be made in early February at an upcoming evidentiary hearing.

More immediately, the accident itself set off a whole slew of investigations, regulatory and internal alike. The Exponent consulting firm was brought in as an independent investigator and promptly dredged up some rather unflattering data regarding the robotaxis’ difficulties with spotting and reacting to the presence of small children. That revelation wasn’t so bad, at least compared to the company’s decision to keep the vehicles on the road even after being informed of the potentially deadly defect.

The California DMV was not amused and, two weeks after the accident occurred, the department suspended Cruise’s license to operate within the state, effectively shuttering its robotaxi operations. That’s a huge blow to GM, which has sunk billions into the startup and was anticipating the robotaxi service to generate as much as $5 billion annually when operations were to begin in 2025. In mid-November, the company recalled all 950 of its autonomous taxis in operation, and even paused robotaxi rides with human safety drivers behind the wheel a week later, as part of a “full safety review.”

Then things got even worse. On November 18, CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation from his position a week after GM installed EVP of Legal and Policy Craig Glidde (who was already a Cruise board member) as Chief Administrative Officer. The following day, company co-founder and Chief Product Officer Daniel Kan also announced his departure.

In response to Vogt's departure, GM promoted Mo Elshenawy from EVP of Engineering to the dual role of President and CTO, leaving the CEO position currently vacant. GM CEO Mary Barra told reporters recently that the company has “a lot of confidence with what the two co-presidents will do,” but will be “leaning in to make sure that it meets our strict requirements from a safety perspective.”

GM suddenly found itself holding the multibillion dollar bag, so it cut off funding near immediately, slashing budgets to the tune of “hundreds of millions” of dollars. As a result, Cruise has since suspended its equity program and begun laying off employees, starting with those in autonomous vehicle operations.

"The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust," Cruise said in a statement. "Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult."

But Cruise isn’t entirely dead yet, as Elshenawy explained in a recent email to staff. The company plans to scale back its self-driving ambitions and relaunch with a renewed focus on the current Chevy Bolt AV robotaxi platform, rather than its custom-built Origin vehicle. As such the company is pausing production on the Origin at least through 2024 but does plan to continue the program at some point in the future.

Waymo Money, Waymo Problems

Waymo entered 2023 in much the same way as Cruise did: riding high on the hype and promise of self-driving vehicle technology. However it is ending the year in a very different place from its biggest competitor.

Google-backed Waymo had received glowing praise from Swiss RE, a leading global reinsurer, regarding the safety of its vehicles versus human drivers the previous September, and had just launched its second Waymo One taxi service area that December, this time in Phoenix, Arizona, running a route between downtown and the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Los Angeles joined Waymo’s stable of cities in February. Much as it was rolled out in San Francisco, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles were initially made available only to riders who were part of the Waymo Research Trusted Tester program in a limited area (in this case, Santa Monica), always outside of rush hour and only in limited numbers.

The following month the company launched a similar effort in Austin, Texas, a town where it had conducted some of its earliest self-driving tests back in 2015. Austin is a hot town to test self-driving vehicles in, on account of a 2017 state law that prevents cities from locally regulating the technology’s use and deployment on their streets.

Things were going so well for Waymo come summer that the company announced it would shift gears, pushing back plans for its self-driving truck idea to instead focus fully on its expanding robotaxi service.

“Given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we’re seeing on the ride-hailing front, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts and investment on ride-hailing,” Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov wrote in a July blog post. "We’re iterating more quickly than ever on our technology by pushing forward state of the art AI/ML, and seeing significant business growth and rider demand in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.”

By August, Waymo announced that Austin would be joining those towns as the fourth city to host its autonomous taxi service, with the program rolling out through the Fall. That same month, Waymo received its driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), enabling the company to begin charging passengers for its robotaxi rides as well as expanding the service to additional customers. Previously, the company could only charge for rides if a human safety driver was behind the wheel. The company acknowledged at the time that demand was “incredibly high” (signups had already reportedly passed 100,000 users) but that it was working to make its fully autonomous trips "available to everyone over time."

“Things are growing… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF,” he continued, noting that the company provides more than 10,000 trips per city each week. Overall, it would have been a pretty great year for Waymo — especially after chief rival, Cruise, effectively imploded over the course of Q4 — had the company’s workforce not been subject to not one, not two, but three rounds of layoffs impacting over 300 employees.

The Road Ahead for Robotaxis

As we head into the new year, Waymo is effectively the only game in town, now that Cruise isn’t a viable commercial entity for the foreseeable future.

Midway through the year, analysts predicted the robotaxi market, valued at just over $1.1 billion in 2022, could rise to anywhere from $45.7 billion in 2030 to $118 billion in 2031 citing, “increasing demand for shared transportation, advancements in vehicle technology, growing interest in fuel-efficient public transportation, and improved infrastructure.”

Those outlooks have been tempered in recent months, at least for short term estimates, with Cruise temporarily out of the picture. Forrester Analytics, for example, now expects drone delivery services to become the dominant self-driving vehicle segment in 2024 as pushback from regulators slows development of robotaxi transit tech.

“Expect a booming year for self-driving forklifts, curbside delivery robots, and drone delivery, driven by the increasing popularity of e-commerce, the need for last-mile delivery solutions, and more sophisticated autonomous technologies,” wrote Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester.

We are, of course, still waiting on those million robotaxis Elon Musk promised us back in 2019.

There's something of a theme running through Teenage Engineering's recent products. That theme is you need more money. The Field range represents the Swedish company’s most exclusive music making gear. So when its website teased a new product with a colorful countdown, the wallets of Teenies everywhere braced for impact. Once that timer hit all zeros, the big reveal turned out to be the EP-133 sampler. Or, to give it its full name, the EP-133 K.O. II 64MB Sampler Composer. The real surprise though, was that it both looked cool and, at $299, was reasonably priced.

Fadergate

The countdown was really just the start. Barely 24 hours after the K.O. II was revealed units started landing in buyers’ hands. Within days, YouTube was awash with first look videos and tutorials. Before our review unit even showed up, several users were complaining that theirs had defective faders. Enough folks were having this problem that it quickly became known as “fadergate.” One brave creator even took their unit apart and, possibly, discovered the cause — the internal pins were bent and not making a connection. I asked Teenage Engineering about the issue and will update this story once I hear back.

Some buyer’s theorized that the issue might be caused by the fact that the K.O. II ships without the caps on its rotaries and fader. They come loose in the box to enable the packaging to be flatter, but the cap for the fader is unusually tight fitting. This led to speculation that the enthusiasm required to push this cap down might be putting too much pressure on components inside, opening up the cruel possibility of users breaking their own devices before they even got to play with them. I used extra caution, along with some needle-nosed tweezers to support the fader as I applied its cap and so far… so good?

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

The K.O. II name tells us that Teenage Engineering considers this something of a sequel to the original PO-33 K.O. Clearly the K.O. II isn’t a Pocket Operator, but its retro desk calculator aesthetic does take subtle design cues from that series. At 12-inches diagonally, it’s in iPad territory size-wise. The K.O. II also runs on AAA batteries (or USB power) which is another nod to the PO series. It’s hard to say how long it’ll run on those batteries and it’ll vary from brand to brand, but I’ve been using some cheap rechargeables for over a week and they seem to be going strong.

Personally, I was never particularly enamored with the Pocket Operators and much prefer the form factor of the K.O. II. It’s still very portable, but feels a bit more “serious.” It’s also just very nice to look at, which is something Teenage Engineering is quite good at. The model number, EP-133, indicates that we might see others in the line, so fingers crossed for giant calculator versions of other instruments, too.

In use

Fader fully checked and batteries in place, the K.O. II springs to life with a flourish of icons across its display. Those icons are actually fixed and not made up of pixels. Teenage Engineering calls it a “Super segment hybrid display” which basically fuses the digital watch part with a bunch of colorful, cute custom icons to let you know when certain modes or features are activated. It reminds me of the old Game & Watch handhelds where you can see where all the icons are and they are simply switched on or off as needed. Some of the icons are pretty abstract but there is a guide on the website to let you know that, for example, the red umbrella means undo.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

Something I like to do with music gear is to see how easy it is to use without reading the manual. This works for all gadgets of course, but with music gear there are common tasks like sequencing, timing adjustment, automation and so on. How you achieve these on a drum machine might be very different to a keys-based synth. Teenage Engineering in particular likes to do things its own way but I was pleasantly surprised with the K.O. II. Within minutes I had managed to figure out basic navigation and how things are organized (sample groups, accessing shift functions, what the fader does and when and so on).

During this blind test I also got to know the K.O. II’s buttons and faders. It was obvious from the launch materials that we weren’t getting rubber MPC-esque pads here but I would describe the ones on the K.O. as keys rather than buttons. Fortunately they are satisfying to click and they’re pressure sensitive so you can give your drum hits different velocities or play notes at different strengths, just be sure to focus on the lower part of the key as that seems to be where the sensor is.

You probably should read the manual though. If for no other reason than it’s likely the prettiest one you’ll use in a while. There’s also a very cute tool for managing your samples which works via desktop browser. For the brave, you can also use this on your phone if you have Android (Chrome, Brave and Opera should all work). On iOS the same browsers can’t access Web MIDI and therefore will not work. (There’s the iOS Web MIDI Browser which crashes when I tried it with an iPhone but it does connect so your mileage may vary.) The K.O. II won’t show up on your PC as either a drive or an audio interface, so the main uses for the USB port are power and sending/receiving MIDI.

The workflow for grabbing sounds is pretty straightforward. If you want to sample from either a PC or phone or other sound-making device then as long as you can connect it to a 3.5mm cable you’re golden. For everything else, you’ll be using the built-in mic, which is surprisingly good. I recorded a few short vocal phrases and other found sounds and they come out well, assuming you’re in a quiet environment.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

Don’t worry though, if you don’t have a bunch of samples yet, the K.O. II comes with a bunch pre-installed, and they’re pretty great. There’s a good mix of drums, bass pads and lead sounds — certainly enough to get you going straight away. You’ll definitely want to add your own though to make your projects unique. The presets use about half of the 64MB of memory, but you can back them up, delete them and free the slots up for your own. Max sample length is 20 seconds (same as on the OP-1 Field).

If 64MB doesn’t sound like a lot, know that it translates to about 11 minutes of samples at the 46kHz/16bit in which the K.O. II records. You can halve that time if you sample in stereo. Even if you go all out, over five minutes of samples should be plenty enough for most songs (we hope). If there’s going to be a bottleneck, it’ll more likely be due to the 12-voice limit. This means the K.O. II can make 12 sounds at once, so if you have six stereo samples playing at one time, you’ll hit that limit. My compositions aren’t interesting enough to hit that threshold, but if you’re a maximalist, then it’s worth keeping in mind.

A common technique to help avoid hitting the voice limit on other devices is resampling — basically merging separate sounds down into one new sample. This is also the technique for baking in any effects and modulation, which, given that the K.O. II can only manage one master effect at any one time makes the lack of resampling all the more obvious. Understandably, it’s possibly the biggest complaint among users I’ve seen so far (after fadergate of course).

There are ways around this, but it would involve recording out into another device and then sampling that back into the K.O. II and no one should have a sampler for their sampler, not in this economy. Teenage Engineering does have a decent track record of adding functionality via firmware updates — the company just added a new effect to the OP-1 Field as I wrote this — so fingers crossed.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

While we’re on the topic of features the K.O. II doesn’t have, there doesn’t appear to be any kind of song mode. There are four sample “groups” that you can think of as tracks (drums, bass, lead and so on). Each of these groups can hold up to 99 patterns and patterns can be up to 99 bars in length. The active patterns across the four groups can be saved as a “scene” and scenes can be triggered consecutively. But, importantly, there’s no way for that to happen automatically right now. This means if you wanted to tease a whole recorded song out of the K.O. II you’ll have to either get clever with MIDI or trigger scenes and patterns manually in real time.

This performative nature might be a burden for songs, but I found it to be a feature in other areas. On top of the master effects you also have 12 “punch in” effects that can be applied — or punched in — by holding down the FX key and then any of the 12 black pads. Each is marked with its effect name (Level, Pitch and so on). These punch-in effects express themselves differently based on the amount of pressure you apply, making it a very expressive experience. The effects on these keys also correspond to modulation tools when used with the fader. So FX+7 adds the “Level” punch-in effect (rhythmic gating) while Fader+7 will assign gain/level to the fader until you choose another modulator such as Attack or Low Pass Filter.

I swear, half of the things you learn about how to use the K.O. II happen by accident. Yes, it’s in the manual, but I discovered you can solo groups by pressing the FX button and the corresponding group. You can also press multiple buttons to “solo” multiple groups or sounds at the same time. With a group or group solo’d you can then apply punch-in effects to create a lot of variations in real time. With so many touches like this, I am starting to assume that Teenage Engineering envisioned the K.O. II as a playful performative device rather than a linear song-making machine.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

I’ve talked before about the sort of “magic” factor that Teenage Engineering sometimes hides into its products. Just small, cute and often a bit hidden features that aren’t necessary but are tons of fun. A common one is the inclusion of FM radio on the OP1/Field and OB 4 etc. Or the video making tool in the app for the OP-Z. There was a brief moment of excitement when I spotted “loop mode from OB-4” on the K.O. II’s product page. The hope being the two devices would interact somehow, but it appears that’s just a way of describing the looping feature that’s been borrowed from the OB-4.

As I write these closing thoughts, the second official firmware update (v1.1.1) has just been released. There’s nothing spicy in here like motion control or sampling the radio, but it’s confirmation of what I mentioned earlier about Teenage Engineering adding features after a product hits the shelves — such as the OP-1 Field’s vocoder synth that landed over six months after release or the fairly substantial 1.2.38 update for the OP-Z which came almost three years into its life.

The K.O. II represents an opportunity for Teenage Engineering to do the unthinkable and create a series of more capable instruments that don’t cost Field-series levels of money. As a sampler, it’s great for beginners or those who love a more performative style. It’s not nearly as detailed and in-depth as something like Roland’s SP 404 or Native Instruments’ Maschine, but it was never going to be a rival to, well, anything really. Fadergate aside, this is a promising product from a company that has tested the loyalty of its fans more than usual in recent years.

This was a year of upheaval in video games. The industry has shapeshifted over the past 12 months, and it’s not all due to Microsoft’s lengthy acquisition of Activision, Blizzard and King. While Xbox executives were defending the legality of a $69 billion deal that would create the third-largest video game studio in the world, smaller companies were firing staff and shutting down entire teams, even amid fervent collective-bargaining efforts. It’s been a wild ride.

In 2023, the main factors molding the video game landscape were consolidation, layoffs and unionization, with each of these phenomena feeding into each other. This past year, the video game industry shrank, even as it grew financially.

Consolidation

When its purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King was legally approved on October 12, 2023, Microsoft became the world’s third-largest video game studio by revenue. As the owner of the Xbox ecosystem, Microsoft was already a massive player in video games, but purchasing a tentpole AAA studio solidified its position in the top three. Activision and Blizzard are the owners of Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Starcraft, but the real meat of this deal comes from King, the mobile division. King operates Candy Crush Saga, a game with 238 million monthly active users, which is more than twice as many as Activision Blizzard’s combined player bases. Candy Crush Saga has generated more than $20 billion in lifetime revenue, and King routinely outperforms Activision and Blizzard in terms of quarterly returns. Mobile gaming remains a huge business, especially in the Chinese market, which represents the largest and most lucrative audience in video games.

Though the $69 billion Activision deal was the biggest in Microsoft’s history — beating its purchase of LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2016 — it wasn’t the company’s first video game acquisition. Microsoft owns nearly 40 developers and it bought a chunk of those in the past five years. The Xbox umbrella covers 343 industries, Arkane Studios, Bethesda, Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, id Software, Infinity Ward, Mojang Studios, Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Tango Gameworks and Turn 10, among dozens more.

Charley Gallay via Getty Images

With these studios at its back, Microsoft is leaning hard into cloud gaming while attempting to build a device-agnostic ecosystem powered by the Xbox brand. These moves are designed to unlock the mobile market even more, putting Xbox games on all devices, everywhere, all the time.

Still, Sony is bigger than Microsoft by revenue. Though Microsoft is often the face of the game-studio acquisition spree, Sony is the owner of 21 development teams, including Bungie, Guerrilla Games, Haven Studios, Housemarque, Insomniac Games, Media Molecule, Naughty Dog and Sucker Punch Productions. Sony has been subtly expanding its roster — more subtly than Microsoft, at least — over the past three years, and it’s also made heavy investments in studios like Epic Games and FromSoftware.

With this lineup, Sony is betting heavily on ongoing games, and it has 12 live-service titles in production right now, on top of Bungie’s Destiny franchise. These include Haven’s Fairgame$ and a multiplayer Horizon title from Guerilla.

“By expanding to PC and mobile, and… also to live services, we have the opportunity to move from a situation of being present in a very narrow segment of the overall gaming software market, to being present pretty much everywhere," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in 2022.

For the companies at the top, total domination is the goal.

Even still, Tencent is bigger than both Sony and Microsoft. Tencent is not a console manufacturer, so it isn’t a household name among most players, but it’s one of the largest companies in the world, and it wields a ridiculous amount of financial power in video games. Tencent owns a portion of Bloober Team, Bohemia Interactive, Don’t Nod, Epic, Paradox Interactive, PlatinumGames, Remedy Entertainment, Roblox and Ubisoft, among others. It has a majority stake in Supercell, Grinding Gear Games, Klei Entertainment, Tequila Works, Techland, Yager Development and others. It fully owns Riot Games, Funcom, Sharkmob, Turtle Rock Studios, and, of course, others. It also runs multiple internal development companies, including the Level Infinite and Tencent Games publishing labels.

Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

Sure, Sony has a stake in Epic, but Tencent’s is bigger. This investment alone means any time you buy a game built on Epic’s Unreal Engine, Tencent (and Sony) is getting a cut. Tencent is the biggest investor in games, with thousands of tendrils across the industry — if you played something this year, Tencent was probably involved.

On a smaller scale, companies like Netflix and Devolver Digital have also dipped their toes in the acquisition pond recently. Devolver started buying studios in 2020, and it now owns Croteam, Dodge Roll, Doinksoft, Firefly Studios, Nerial and System Era Softworks. Annapurna Interactive bought South African studio 24 Bit Games in November. Netflix launched its Games division in 2021, and it’s already purchased four studios, including Oxenfree developer Night School and Alphabear company Spry Fox.

Night School co-founder Sean Krankel told Engadget in June that the move to Netflix was a boon for the studio, providing financial security, a dedicated working space and plenty of marketing support for its projects.

“A small subset of teams are good to go for the next 10 years, but others have these peaks and valleys, and we were somewhere in between,” Krankel said. “We weren't in danger of anything going sideways. But we were at a spot where we're like, it would be cool to tether to somebody who has a similar vision, and somebody that we could work with that would like, de-risk us.”

Netflix

This is the short-term benefit of being bought by a larger company, but there are downsides to relinquishing independence. Having a corporate overseer can result in rigid production timelines, hindering a studio’s ability to pivot, and despite all of the promises otherwise, developers may be forced to adhere to a specific tone, vibe or game-development structure. Owned studios are held accountable by people outside of the actual development of a game, and the bigger the company, the further away its bosses are from the creative process.

The most extreme negative outcomes for an acquired indie studio are, of course, layoffs and closures. We saw a lot of these in 2023.

Layoffs

The post-acquisition power dynamic is playing out in public and in real-time. It’s estimated that more than 9,000 people in video games were laid off this year and the firings affected teams of all sizes. This is a crisis amount of cuts. In 2022, just 1,000 video game jobs were lost, according to layoffstracker.com.

The Embracer Group provides the clearest example of rampant, surprise layoffs in 2023. Embracer has spent the past few years acquiring prominent midsize studios, including Gearbox Software (Borderlands), Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider), Eidos-Montreal (Deus Ex) and Square Enix Montreal (Deus Ex Go). In the past decade, Embracer grew its portfolio to cover more than 100 game studios, including Volition (Saints Row), Coffee Stain (Goat Simulator), Free Radical Design (TimeSplitters) and Zen Studios (Pinball FX). The holding company also secured the rights to The Lord of the Rings in 2022, promising to turn it into “one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.”

Volition

In June 2023, Embracer announced a six-year, $2 billion funding deal had fallen through, and it was going to restructure — meaning, layoffs and studio closures. Since this announcement, Embracer has shut down Volition, Free Radical Design and Campfire Cabal, it divested Goose Byte and it’s fired developers at Saber Interactive. More than 900 people lost their jobs during these moves. Meanwhile, Embracer’s share price rose by 11 points in November.

This wasn’t the only layoff round of the year. Unity lowered its headcount three times in 2023, affecting about 900 jobs. In its quarterly financial results in November, Unity reported a yearly revenue increase of 69 percent and it told investors, “We continued to manage costs well.”

Sony cut 100 jobs at Bungie, a company it bought for $3.6 billion in 2022. According to developers that are still there, Sony executives are attempting to use this upheaval to wrest more control of the studio from Bungie founders and leaders.

Epic Games fired roughly 830 people this year, or 16 percent of its staff. This included significant job cuts at Mediatonic, the studio behind Fall Guys that Epic purchased in 2021.

Mediatonic

“For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn,” CEO Tim Sweeney wrote about the layoffs. He continued, “I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”

Electronic Arts was one of the first video game companies to institute significant layoffs this year, with a reduction of 6 percent of its workforce, or about 800 employees, in March. EA later cut jobs at Dirt and F1 studio Codemasters, which it purchased in 2021 for $1.2 billion. EA culled an estimated 1,130 jobs in 2023.

CD Projekt RED and Sega each laid off about 100 people in the past 12 months, while Ubisoft fired an estimated 255 employees. Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs across its businesses early in the year, and that included about 100 people at Halo studio 343 industries.

343 industries

These are just some of the biggest names in layoffs in 2023. Looking back on the carnage, it feels like a warning — as consolidation efforts increase, more game studios will be controlled by just a handful of companies, and they’ll be vulnerable to moves like mass layoffs and closures. We’re laying the foundation for the future of video games right now and consolidation only makes the industry smaller and more generic, as accountants, investors and shareholders push for low-risk concepts, rather than innovation and change.

What will rampant consolidation mean for all of these acquired studios in five years’ time? What will it mean when these teams aren’t shiny, new investments any longer, and the people at the top are ready to get lean again? Remember that many of the shuttered studios listed above were purchased within the past three years.

Being acquired is a cost-benefit analysis for smaller studios, where the benefits are immediate and the costs are potential. It’s easy to say that won’t happen to us. But it can happen, and it does, and as consolidation increases, bulk layoffs are only going to occur more often.

Unions

Unionization is one approach that can help protect the livelihoods of people in the video game industry, and there was progress on this front in 2023. Developers at multiple studios now have union support, from small indies to AAA powerhouses.

Microsoft is currently the home of the industry’s largest union, with representation for more than 300 quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax is the parent company of Bethesda, id Software and Arkane, and Microsoft purchased the whole caboodle for $7.5 billion in 2021. Microsoft formally recognized the ZeniMax union this January and the parties started negotiating in April. In December, Microsoft announced it would hire 77 contract workers as full-time employees under the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union. The deal guaranteed a pay raise, paid holidays and sick leave, and a copy of Starfield, the game they helped ship.

Bethesda Softworks

“We are now stronger at the bargaining table and are working to secure a fair contract for all workers — direct employees and contractors," ZeniMax union member Chris Lusco said. "We are all a part of ZeniMax Studio’s success and we all deserve our fair share. We hope to set a new precedent for workers across Microsoft and the entire gaming industry so that all workers, regardless of their employment status, are able to improve their working conditions through collective bargaining."

Meanwhile, executives at Microsoft’s newest acquisition, Activision Blizzard, spent the past few years stalling internal unionization efforts. However, QA employees at Raven Software, a subsidiary of Activision, successfully voted to unionize in May 2022. Microsoft has vowed to respect organization attempts now that Activision-Blizzard-King is under its control.

Other companies with unions established in the past two years include Avalanche Studios, Anemone Hug, CD Projekt RED, Experis Game Solutions, Keywords Studios, Sega of America, Tender Claws and Workinman Interactive.

Some holiday misery for Apple: It will soon pause sales of its latest Apple Watches in the US due to an International Trade Commission (ITC) ban. The company will suspend sales online this week and at Apple retail locations after December 24. Ho ho ho.

It’s all down to a patent dispute over the wearables’ blood oxygen sensor. Cast your minds back: Medical tech company Masimo sued Apple in 2021 for alleged violations of light-based blood-oxygen monitoring patents. In October, the ITC upheld a judge’s ruling from earlier this year that the Apple Watch did violate Masimo’s patents. The ITC’s order blocks all Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 imports to the US after December 25.

The case went to the White House for a 60-day Presidential Review Period. Although President Biden has one more week to decide whether to veto the ITC ruling, Apple has pre-emptively complied with the commission’s decision.

President Biden reportedly owns an Apple Watch – but also a load of other watches too.

— Mat Smith

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Our top gadgets of 2023

The ones we bought.

Engadget

We test and review tons of gadgets every year, and (for some reason) we also buy a lot of things for ourselves. This year, those purchases included coffee-making upgrades, fancy keyboards and even pricey digital pianos. But there are plenty of other things we’ve bought and loved this year that have yet to make it on the site. Here, our staff looks back at the things that were worth the money.

Continue reading.

A new picture of Uranus looks like a sci-fi portal

The Webb telescope’s NIRCam filters are to thank for this.

NASA / ESA / CSA

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has a treat to celebrate the upcoming second anniversary of its launch: an image of the icy planet Uranus. The picture, resembling a glowing blue marble rippling in a black ocean, was funneled through the telescope’s infrared filters to capture wavelengths we wouldn’t see with the naked eye.

Yeah, it looks like the CBS logo.

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US lawmakers call for DOJ probe into Apple’s blocking of Beeper’s iMessage app

They asked an assistant attorney general to determine whether Apple violated antitrust laws.

More socks for Apple’s legal department this Christmas. A bipartisan group of US senators and representatives have urged the Department of Justice to investigate whether Apple violated antitrust laws by attempting to block Beeper Mini’s access to iMessage. Senators have asked an assistant attorney general to look into Apple’s “potentially anticompetitive conduct.”

Hopefully, senators will have learned lessons from the other times they’ve tried to grill technology companies without the technical expertise for their questions to make sense.

Continue reading.

Meta's Oversight Board has published its decision for its first-ever expedited review, which only took 12 days instead of weeks, focusing on content surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. The Board overturned the company's original decision to remove two pieces of content from both sides of the conflict. Since it supported Meta's subsequent move to restore the posts on Facebook and Instagram, no further action is expected from the company. However, the Board's review cast a spotlight on how Meta's reliance on automated tools could prevent people from sharing important information. In this particular case, the Board noted that "it increased the likelihood of removing valuable posts informing the world about human suffering on both sides of the conflict in the Middle East."

For its first expedited review, the Oversight Board chose to investigate two particular appeals that represent what the users in the affected region have been submitting since the October 7th attacks. One of them is a video posted on Facebook of a woman begging her captors not to kill her when she was taken hostage during the initial terrorist attacks on Israel. The other video posted on Instagram shows the aftermath of a strike on the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza during Israel’s ground offensive. It showed dead and injured Palestinians, children included.

The Board’s review found that the two videos were mistakenly removed after Meta adjusted its automated tools to be more aggressive in policing content following the October 7 attacks. For instance, the Al-Shifa Hospital video takedown and the rejection of a user appeal to get it reinstated were both made without human intervention. Both videos were later restored with warning screens stating that such content is allowed for the purpose of news reporting and raising awareness. The Board commented that Meta “should have moved more quickly to adapt its policy given the fast-moving circumstances, and the high costs to freedom and access to information for removing this kind of content…” It also raised concerns that the company's rapidly changing approach to moderation could give it an appearance of arbitrariness and could put its policies in question.

That said, the Board found that Meta demoted the content it reinstated with warnning screens. It excluded them from being recommended to other Facebook and Instagram users even after the company determined that they were intended to raise awareness. To note, a number of users had reported being shadowbanned in October after posting content about the conditions in Gaza.

The Board also called attention to how Meta only allowed hostage-taking content from the October 7th attacks to be posted by users from its cross-check lists between October 20 and November 16. These lists are typically made up of high-profile users exempted from the company’s automated moderation system. The Board said Meta’s decision highlights its concerns about the program, specifically its “unequal treatment of users [and] lack of transparent criteria for inclusion.” It said that the company needs “to ensure greater representation of users whose content is likely to be important from a human-rights perspective on Meta’s cross-check lists.”

“We welcome the Oversight Board’s decision today on this case. Both expression and safety are important to us and the people who use our services. The board overturned Meta’s original decision to take this content down but approved of the subsequent decision to restore the content with a warning screen. Meta previously reinstated this content so no further action will be taken on it,” the company told Engadget in a statement. “As explained in our Help Center, some categories of content are not eligible for recommendations and the board disagrees with Meta barring the content in this case from recommendation surfaces. There will be no further updates to this case, as the board did not make any recommendations as part of their decision.”

On top of fighting (and losing to) Epic Games over Play Store antitrust concerns, Google has been fighting a similar lawsuit filed by 36 states and the District of Columbia in 2021. A settlement for that suit was announced in September, but a judge still had to confirm the terms. Now, Google has announced that it will pay a $700 million fine and make what amounts to fairly minor changes to the Play Store. 

Of that sum, Google will distribute $630 million to consumers who may have overpaid for apps or in-app purchases on Google Play (after taxes, lawyers’ fees, etc.). That covers around 102 million people, according to The Washington Post. It will also pay $70 million into a "fund that will be used by the states," according to Google's blog. 

The other major change is that Google must allow developers to steer consumers toward sideloading to avoid Google's Play Store fees on subscriptions and the like. It'll do that via updated "language that informs users about these potential risks of downloading apps directly from the web for the first time." However, these actions will be time limited to seven years for the sideloading and five years for the updated language, according to settlement's wording spotted by The Verge. 

Google will also include language stating that "OEMs can continue to provide users with options out of the box to use Play or another app store." Starting with Android 14, third-party stores will be allowed to handle future app updates, including automatic installs. It's also expanding user choice billing that will allow Android apps and games to offer their own payment system in the US. "Developers are also able to show different pricing options within the app when a user makes a digital purchase," Google states. 

The company will only be required to make these changes for five or six years maximum (seven years for alternate means to download apps). In other words, it could feasibly cut off access to sideloading or third-party app stores after that point, or make it harder for the average consumer to find the option. 

Another big thing missing is exterior payment links. "Google is not required to allow developers to include links that take a User outside an app distributed through Google Play to make a purchase," the settlement agreement reads. 

The settlement sum represents a miniscule portion of Google's turnover and the other terms are relatively minor changes over what it already does. It also doesn't include Epic Games, which won its own lawsuit against Google earlier this month (Google has vowed to appeal). A court still needs to formally approve the states' settlement.  

Google also argued at its Epic trial that consumers were able to get games by sideloading and other means, but that failed to sway the jury. When the settlement with the states was announced in September, Epic CEO Tim Sweeny said that if it "left the Google tax in place" his company would fight on. "Consumers only benefit if antitrust enforcement not only opens up markets, but also restores price competition," he said at the time.

On December 12, Rhysida, a ransomware group, announced it had taken 1.67 terabytes of data — over 1.3 million files — from Sony's Insomniac Games and requested $2 million. Now, the one-week deadline for Insomniac Games to pay Rhysida has passed, and the group has made good on its threat to release the stolen information, Cyber Daily reports.

The data includes internal HR documents, screenshots of employees' Slack conversations, and more, but the main focus is the yet-to-be-released Wolverine video game. The released files contain details about level design, characters and actual screenshots from the game. There's also a signed publishing agreement between Sony and Marvel that lays out three upcoming X-Men games, the first being Wolverine, with the other two still unnamed. However, it details that Sony — which plans to spend $120 million per game — must release Wolverine by September 1, 2025, with the others due by the end of 2029 and 2033, respectively. 

Rhysida claims that it took the group only 20 to 25 minutes to get the domain administrator and that money was their sole motivation. "We knew that developers making games like this would be an easy target," a Rhysida spokesperson told Cyber Daily. "Sony has launched an investigation, but it would be better in the backyard."

Notably, Rhysida's initial ransom notice allowed anyone to bid on the data, not just Insomniac Games, and it appears some of it was bought. The ransomware group stated that any unsold data was released — but only 98 percent of stolen information is publicly available. Rhysida stipulated that any data purchased must not be resold, but who knows if the new owners will follow that rule.

Rhysida only targeted Insomniac Games within Sony, but in May, a separate attack gained access to 6,800 current and former employees' personal data. The attack, which ransomware group CLOP took credit for, became public knowledge in October.