It's been quite a day for Reddit. Thousands of communities have temporarily closed shop to protest changes the company is making to its API, which is impacting several third-party apps. On top of that, the platform suffered a "major outage" across its desktop and mobile websites, as well as the mobile apps. 

"We're aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible," read a message on the Reddit status page as of 10:58AM ET. By 11:30AM, the site was loading again. 

"A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue," Reddit told Engadget in a statement.

A bot was tracking all of the subreddits that were going private as part of the protests. As you might expect, the bot was out of commission while Reddit was down, but it's up and running again.

Reddit said in April that it would start charging for access to its API, which third-party developers have used in thousands of apps that tie into the platform, such as moderation tools. While the primary target of the API changes may have been companies that are scraping Reddit for content to train language learning models for generative AI systems, the move has been a significant blow for those making third-party clients that many redditors prefer to the company's own website or apps.

After claiming that he would have to pay $20 million to keep operating Apollo for Reddit as is, Christian Selig ultimately decided to shut down the app. Apollo will close its doors on June 30th. RIF, another popular third-party Reddit app, will shut down on the same day.

This story is developing; refresh for updates.

It’s nearly time for the big Ubisoft Forward Summer Game Fest showcase event, so expect plenty of announcements, trailers, demos and more. With E3 deflating like a sad balloon, this is likely the year’s biggest gaming conference for incredible reveals. The showcase starts at 1:00 PM ET, with a pre-show at 12:45, and there are a bunch of ways to watch live. Ubisoft is hosting its own YouTube stream and Twitch feed for the event, in addition to streams available via the festival itself.

So what’s on the agenda? The publisher has already confirmed that it’ll be releasing information regarding Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a new The Crew racing title and a game adaptation of a little-known film series called Avatar. Ubisoft is extremely prolific, however, and is always working on a diverse array of games. Titles like the oft-delayed pirate sim Skull and Bones could make an appearance, and the same goes for Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland and the company’s forthcoming multiplayer shooter XDefiant.

The company already announced a Prince of Persia sidescrolling spin-off on the first day of SGF, so more gameplay footage might drop during the event. Those looking for additional information about the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake will have to keep waiting, as Ubisoft recently said that it would not be showing any new footage at the Forward event.

Ubisoft has not announced how long its showcase will run, but similar events have come in at around the 90 minute mark. As always, Engadget has staffers on location to report on the most jaw-dropping announcements, so keep the site open for updates.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

I’m worried about Saga Anderson. She’s a seasoned FBI agent investigating a string of ritualistic deaths around Cauldron Lake, and she’s a little too impressed by all the supernatural gore she encounters. At one point, she’s talking to her partner about the cult activity they’ve seen – the dismembered body parts and necromancy and murderous villagers roaming the forests – and she says, “this place just keeps getting crazier… but this is exciting.”

A few scenes later, she’s shoving a heart through a portal to another realm and inviting a witch to show her “the terror.”

So, yeah, I’m nervous about Saga’s fate in Alan Wake II – and that only makes me more excited for the full game. I saw a 30-minute hands-off preview of Alan Wake II at Summer Game Fest, set in the second chapter. By this time, Saga has made her peace with the paranormal darkness of the case she’s investigating; she’s already pulled a manuscript page out of a corpse’s chest cavity and followed its instructions to Cauldron Lake, the setting of the original game.

Alan Wake came out 13 years ago, and the timeline in the sequel has also progressed 13 years. The writer Alan Wake has been missing that whole time, and Saga is hunting the ghost of FBI agent Robert Nightingale, who was killed at the end of the first game. In chapter two, Saga and her partner are deep in the Pacific Northwest woods. The preview shows off gorgeous lighting, character models and environments, plus satisfying-looking gunplay and flashlight-play.

Dialogue scenes between Saga and her partner aren’t rushed, establishing the narrative and letting it breathe, and there are a few moments where players can choose how to respond. The two agents split up and there are a series of simple puzzles for Saga to solve, like collecting a fuse or finding the right numbers to crack a lock, all while a sense of dread constantly builds in the background. The preview provides some serious early Resident Evil vibes — Alan Wake II is a survival-horror experience, while the original was an action-thriller.

As Saga attempts to solve the mysteries around her, she can jump into her Mind Place (no, not Mind Palace) to organize clues and connect the dots. Her Mind Place looks like the living room of a ’90s conspiracy theorist, with photos and notes connected by red string along one wood-paneled wall. This is where Saga can manipulate the evidence she’s found, placing clues near each other to see if they’re related, unlocking the path forward. If she gets stuck, she can go to the desk in the center of the room and commune with her subjects, asking them for answers based on the clues she’s gathered; this is called Profiling. Saga can enter her Mind Place at any time.

Remedy Entertainment

There are a few jump-scares in the preview, where the screen quickly cuts to a screaming face or an enemy suddenly bursts through a doorway, but they’re well placed and not overdone. Saga feels capable and curious – maybe a little too curious for her own good, but we’ll have to see how that plays out in the full game. At the end of the preview, Alan suddenly appears in the woods with Saga, screaming about dark forces and confused by how long he’s been missing.

The big innovation in Alan Wake II is the ability to swap between Saga and Alan himself, playing as both characters throughout the game. Chapter one begins with Saga in the driver’s seat, and after that players can choose to play as her or Alan at the beginning of each new section. A Remedy spokesperson said developers are still fine-tuning the swap mechanic; they don’t necessarily want to give players the ability to change characters every five minutes, for the sake of the narrative flow, but they still want to provide real instances of meaningful choice.

Remedy Entertainment

Alan Wake II is a contained single-player experience and it doesn’t have a bunch of side quests, according to Remedy. There are a few errands to complete and secrets to find parallel to the main story, but this is first-and-foremost a linear, narrative-driven game. 

There were plenty of sequels at the Summer Game Fest showcase, and Alan Wake II stands out in this crowded field. The preview showcased a clear vision: Alan Wake II retains the themes of the original game, but introduces a fresh perspective with the protagonist, mechanics and genre. It feels like Remedy knows the story it's trying to tell — even if Alan and Saga don't.

Alan Wake II is due to hit PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 on October 17th.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

The UK's AI oversight will include chances to directly study some companies' technology. In a speech at London Tech Week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak revealed that Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic have pledged to provide "early or priority access" to AI models for the sake of research and safety. This will ideally improve inspections of these models and help the government recognize the "opportunities and risks," Sunak says.

It's not clear just what data the tech firms will share with the UK government. We've asked Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for comment.

The announcement comes weeks after officials said they would conduct an initial assessment of AI model accountability, safety, transparency and other ethical concerns. The country's Competition and Markets Authority is expected to play a key role. The UK has also committed to spending an initial £100 million (about $125.5 million) to create a Foundation Model Taskforce that will develop "sovereign" AI meant to grow the British economy while minimizing ethical and technical problems.

Industry leaders and experts have called for a temporary halt to AI development over worries creators are pressing forward without enough consideration for safety. Generative AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude have been praised for their potential, but have also raised concerns about inaccuracies, misinformation and abuses like cheating. The UK's move theoretically limits these issues and catches problematic models before they've done much damage.

This doesn't necessarily give the UK complete access to these models and the underlying code. Likewise, there are no guarantees the government will catch every major issue. The access may provide relevant insights, though. If nothing else, the effort promises increased transparency for AI at a time when the long-term impact of these systems isn't entirely clear.

When I saw the announcement trailer for Immortals of Aveum in the winter of 2022, I was surprised by my own interest in the game. Immortals came from an unproven studio founded four years prior by Bret Robbins, a AAA creative director who most recently built a trio of Call of Duty titles: Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WWII. Ascendant Studios, his independent venture, was partnering with EA on its debut game, a first-person shooter in a militaristic fantasy world. On the surface, it didn’t sound like something I’d be drawn to.

But Immortals of Aveum caught my eye. Its cinematics were beautiful and the trailer showcased frenetic combat with bright beams of magic, all while actors Gina Torres (Firefly) and Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) narrated an epic story of rebellion, political sabotage and dragons. From a first-person perspective, the protagonist’s hand movements were quick and sharp, and they looked like a satisfying build-up to powerful attacks.

With a few months of hindsight, I remain interested in Immortals of Aveum and I think I’ve figured out why. There aren’t a ton of first-person action games that rely on mechanics other than guns — Dishonored, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hexen come to mind, but it’s a small field overall. That might be one reason Immortals of Aveum stands out as something fresh, but it’s also nice to see a new, AAA-level game that’s single-player and narrative-driven with a contained campaign, rather than an open world of live-service features. Learning more about Ascendant helped, too: Robbins was also the creative director of the original Dead Space and his team included former Telltale Games members, lending weight to the assertation that Immortals of Aveum would center a dense storyline.

I played a demo of Immortals of Aveum at Summer Game Fest 2023, and it was gorgeous. Its cinematics were particularly impressive: The motion capture was smooth and the character models were finely detailed, with delicate eye markings and layers of gear. The clarity of the cutscenes made it easier to get lost in the dialogue and the ravaged fantasy world of Aveum, even in a short period of time.

Gameplaywise, I had access to the blue type of magic, which granted me two abilities: a whip that pulled enemies toward me, and a burst of balled-up energy, spammable as fast as my finger could press R2. I also used the Animate ability on a giant rock hand, using a telekinesis-type power to manipulate its fingers and bridge a gap between two cliffside landings. Playing with a gamepad on PC, I found the mechanics to be almost too smooth, with my reticle often sliding beyond my intended targets, but this is something I think I’d get used to after 30 minutes longer with the game. Even with the hyper-lubricated controls, I appreciated the lack of a noticeable aim assist.

EA

I didn’t encounter the sheer number of enemies that Ascendant has shown off in trailers for Immortals of Aveum; my hordes maxed out at about eight. But by the end of my play time, I felt like I’d started to learn the rhythm of the game’s combat, and I can see it becoming frenzied — in a great way — with the addition of new magical powers. And, sure, some more enemies.

The most jarring part of the demo was actually traversing the terrain — there were plenty of craggy mountainsides and rock walls that looked perfectly climbable by modern action-adventure standards, but they weren’t. Maybe I needed to spend more time learning the intricacies of gap-jumping and ledge-grabbing, but I found my character to be slightly less spry than I wanted, unwilling to fully double-jump or pull himself onto platforms. However, the movement restrictions seemed purposeful, and the game wasn’t sluggish by any means: Immortals of Aveum felt more like a puzzle game than a climbing adventure, with a series of locked stone doors and multicolored gems to throw magic at in specific patterns.

EA

My demo broke once, when a bug prevented a stone door from opening, and a developer had to get me back on track. I was assured that the game will be in full working condition by launch day, in about six weeks.

Ascendant Studios is independent, but it’s marketed as a AAA team and it has about 100 employees. Immortals of Aveum certainly looks like a big-budget game; it’s built in Unreal Engine 5 and heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on July 20th. I remain intrigued; I'm excited to get my hands on a few more magical powers and see where this world of high-fantasy politics leads.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

When Apple announced the 15-inch MacBook Air last week, it was exactly what you’d expect. Apple simply took the design and internals of the M2-powered Air it announced a year ago and stuck it in a bigger case with a bigger screen. Done and done.

As such, I went into this review thinking it would be a simple assignment. “It’s a MacBook Air, but bigger.” But that undersells the actual experience of using the 15-inch MacBook Air. See, for a long time, a 15-inch Mac was my ideal computer, from the days of the first titanium-clad PowerBook G4 through the 15-inch MacBook Pro Apple sold a decade ago. Those laptops were powerful and had a screen big enough to use all day, but they were also compact enough to take anywhere. In recent years, though, Apple really leaned into the “Pro” designation, with the price skyrocketing well above $2,000, making it cost-prohibitive for most people.

But the M2-powered, 15-inch Air brings me back to those days. I could easily see using this laptop as my only computer. Like the 13-inch model, it’s powerful, has long battery life and a high-quality (if not cutting-edge) display. It’s also surprisingly thin and light, another hallmark of the Air lineup. And with a starting price of $1,299, it’s significantly more affordable than any laptop that Apple has offered with this size screen.

There are only a few things that the MacBook Air doesn’t have in common with its smaller sibling. Most obvious is the 15.3-inch display with a 2,880 x 1,864 resolution. That works out to 224 pixels per inch, the same as the 13-inch Air. It’s one of Apple’s “Liquid Retina” displays, which has 500 nits of brightness, support for the P3 “wide color” gamut and a modest 60Hz refresh rate.

It’s missing the niceties you’ll find in the mini LED displays on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro, including a much more dramatic contrast ratio, support for HDR, slightly more pixels per inch and a 120Hz max refresh rate. But Apple’s standard displays are still very nice, and the MacBook Air’s screen is bright, sharp and entirely pleasant to look at for extended periods of time. I use a MacBook Pro as my daily driver, and while I noticed the lower refresh rate at first, I mostly forgot about it after a short while.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

The rest of the differences between the two Air models are minor. The base 15-inch model comes with the 10-core GPU variant of the M2 to power the bigger display’s extra pixels; the 13-inch has an 8-core GPU by default. The other internal specs are similar for both base models: 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. (The model I’m testing has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, a configuration that costs $1,699.)

The 15-inch Air also has a six-speaker sound system with “force-canceling woofers” for improved bass, compared to a four-speaker setup in the smaller model. Apple has been making surprisingly excellent laptop speakers for a few years now, and these also sound very lively and full when playing back music or movies. They’re not nearly as good as the ones in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but that laptop is significantly thicker and heavier than the Air; that extra space surely helps with resonance and bass. But the speakers in the Air still sound lively and fun to listen to. Cranking the volume up to the max reveals the lack of bass, but I was happy to listen to music at mid-range volume all day long.

Beyond those things, the 15-inch Air is just a slightly bigger version of the 13-inch model. It has the same relatively meager port selection: just two USB-C ports, MagSafe for power and a headphone jack. The laptop comes in the same four colors (or, more accurately, shades of gray). The keyboard, large trackpad and Touch ID sensor are all excellent, which is true of all Mac laptops at this point. The butterfly keyboard debacle is fortunately a distant memory.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Unsurprisingly, it sports the same design language that Apple first unveiled with the MacBook Pro refresh a few years ago and then carried over to the Air last year. That means the Air’s formerly iconic wedge shape is gone, replaced with a uniform thickness of less than half an inch, noticeably thinner than the 16-inch MacBook Pro and about identical to the 13-inch Air. Naturally, the 15-inch Air is heavier and bigger in other dimensions, but it still feels extremely thin and also far more portable than either of the MacBook Pro models.

There’s also a notch in the display for the 1080p webcam — again, the same one we’ve seen on other recent MacBooks. It’s much better than the old camera Apple was using until recently, and I don’t mind trading the notch for an improved webcam. The bezels around the display are otherwise nice and thin: not quite as thin as those on the MacBook Pro, but not thick enough for me to give them a second thought.

Performance-wise, the 15-inch Air is also essentially identical to the smaller model. Geekbench 5 scores were almost the same as those we got when testing both the 13-inch Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, both of which also use the M2 chip. The same goes for Cinebench R23 and a few others we tried. It's worth noting that while single-core performance is similar to the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip, multi-core and graphics performance is where the M2 can't quite keep up. That said, for most users, there's plenty of power here. 

Performance-wise, the 15-inch Air is also essentially identical to the smaller model. Geekbench 5 scores were almost the same as those we got when testing both the 13-inch Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, both of which also use the M2 chip.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Beyond the benchmarks, the 15-inch Air is just as capable as the smaller model we reviewed last year — it can handle most computing tasks without breaking a sweat, and despite having no fans, I never really noticed it getting warm. Of course, that changes a bit if you’re running games or doing more intense tasks like video editing. But my workflow, which consists of dozens of tabs open across multiple Safari windows along with apps like Mail, Slack, Music, Trello, Todoist, Bear and Lightroom, didn’t cause any hiccups. To be fair, these aren’t taxing apps, but dipping into Lightroom to edit some large RAW photos didn’t tax the computer either.

My only concern is that this brand-new Air is running a chip that’s already about a year old. It’s so powerful that this shouldn’t be a problem for the Air’s target audience, but it’s still something worth considering. If you’re going to spend more than $1,000 on a laptop that you’ll likely own for years, the ideal situation is to start out with the newest, fastest, most future-proof tech that you can afford. The M2, as capable as it is, has been around for a while already. If you want bleeding-edge Apple silicon you might be better served with a MacBook Pro or waiting for the next Air refresh. But given that Apple just released this computer with the M2 chip inside, it’s fair to say the company is in no hurry to release an M3.

All of the Apple silicon laptops I've tried have had outstanding battery life, and the 15-inch Air is no exception. It exceeded the 18 hours that Apple claims for video playback by about an hour before eventually running out of juice. And while the battery didn't quite last as long during my normal work routine, I still got about 12 hours before I needed a charger. I easily got through the work day and still some power left for some couch browsing and messaging. I think it's safe to say most people can charge overnight and then not worry about plugging in again until their day is over.

One thing to note on battery, though. Apple offers a compact 35W dual-port charger, which is handy if you want to have your computer charger and another cable right at hand. But after using more powerful chargers for the last few years, this one definitely felt pokey — while I was using the Air, it took about two hours to charge from 45 percent to full while in use. Since Apple gives you the option of swapping in a single-port 70W for no extra charge, I'd recommend that if charging speeds are at all important to you. On the other hand, the battery lasts so long that just charging it more slowly overnight, when speed doesn't matter, is also a fine option.

As usual, Apple dropped a lot of hyperbole about how the 15-inch Air compares to the “most popular 15-inch Windows laptop running an Intel i7 chip.” The claims are that the Air is much faster, the screen is better, the battery is longer while the laptop itself is thinner and lighter. Apple is being very deliberate about these claims, but the MacBook Air does stack up well compared to some of the most popular 15-inch laptops available.

Dell’s XPS 15 is one of the best overall laptops out there, and the $1,299 base model has double the RAM and storage of the Air. You can also get one with a discrete graphics card, which can make a big difference in more demanding tasks. But it’s also much thicker, a pound heavier and has a lower-resolution display and webcam. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 5 is probably a closer comparison for the Air – it’s a little bit thicker and heavier, but more svelte than the XPS 15, and has a higher-resolution screen. But it doesn’t have the newest Intel, and the M2 bests the 12th-generation chip that it does offer.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

As you’re surely aware, the 15-inch MacBook Air is little more than a bigger version of the computer that Apple released a year ago. But that’s damming it with faint praise when actually this is one of the best Apple laptops I’ve used in a long time. It does everything the 13-inch MacBook Air does with a noticeably larger screen and only a modest price increase. The only real catch is that I think the RAM and storage in the base model is rather stingy, not an unusual tactic for Apple. The M2 smokes even with only 8GB of RAM, but consider adding more if you want your computer to remain speedy for years to come.

If you travel a lot, or value portability above all else, by all means get the 13-inch model. But if I were in the market for a new laptop right now, I think the 15-inch Air would be at the top of my list. It’s fast, light and extremely pleasant to use. And getting a big screen in a compact package is just icing on the cake.

Samsung has been going all-in with curved monitors lately, and its newest entry is the Odyssey OLED G9. This 1800R curved display is enormous, at 49 inches, and boasts a 32:9 aspect ratio. The company first announced the monitor at this year’s CES, but now it’s finally available for preorders and Samsung is offering a deal to sweeten the pot.

The gigantic OLED panel costs $2,200, but the company will throw in a $250 Samsung gift card to anyone that preorders. This gift card can be used for any Samsung product or service, and you have plenty to choose from. That, sort of, lowers the price to the more palatable sum of $1,950.

For the price, you get a whole lot of monitor. The Odyssey OLED G9 offers dual-quad high definition resolution (5,120 x 1,440), a stark 1800R curvature and the aforementioned 32:9 aspect ratio. There’s a 240Hz refresh rate and a 0.03ms response time, making for smooth gameplay. The panel includes over 8 million self-illuminating pixels and a “near-infinite” color contrast ratio.

The monitor includes built-in speakers, exterior lighting that matches gameplay, a premium metal design and access to Samsung’s Gaming Hub app, as well as a variety of smart TV apps. There are plenty of port options, including HDMI 2.1, Micro HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4 and more. As previously mentioned, preorders start today with an asking price of $2,200.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently declared the chip manufacturing industry to be in an "all-out war," and the latest developments certainly support that statement. Prosecutors in the Suwon District have indicted a former Samsung executive for allegedly stealing semiconductor plant blueprints and technology from the leading chipmaker, BusinessKorea reports. They didn't name the 65-year-old defendant, who also previously served as vice president of another Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, but claimed he stole the information between 2018 and 2019. The leak reportedly cost Samsung about $230 million.

The defendant allegedly planned to build a semiconductor in Xi'an, China, less than a mile from an existing Samsung plant. He hired 200 employees from SK Hynix and Samsung to obtain their trade secrets while also teaming up with an unnamed Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company that pledged $6.2 billion to build the new semiconductor plant — the partnership fell through. However, the defendant was able to secure about $358 million from Chinese investors, which he used to create prototypes in a Chengdu, China-based plant. The plant was reportedly also built using stolen Samsung information, according to prosecutors. 

"It's so serious that it's difficult to compare it in terms of the scale of the crime and the degree of damage with previous individual semiconductor technology leakage cases," the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "It's a grave crime that could deal a heavy blow to our economic security by shaking the foundation of the domestic chip industry at a time of intensifying competition in chip manufacturing." Six co-conspirators, including one Samsung sub-contractor, were indicted alongside the lead defendant. These charges follow continued efforts from China to acquire South Korea's technologies across a range of industries and Korea creating stricter punishments for related offenses.

Meta's Audiocraft research team has just released MusicGen, an open source deep learning language model that can generate new music based on text prompts and even be aligned to an existing song, The Decoder reported. It's much like ChatGPT for audio, letting you describe the style of music you want, drop in an existing tune (optionally) and then clicking "Generate." After a good chunk of time (around 160 seconds in my case), it spits out a short piece of all-new music based on your text prompts and melody. 

The demo on Facebook's Hugging Face AI site lets you describe your music, providing a handful of examples like "an 80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background." You can then "condition" that on a given song up top 30 seconds long, with controls letting select a specific portion of that. Then, you just hit generate and it renders a high-quality sample up to 12 seconds long. 

The team used 20,000 hours of licensed music for training, including 10,000 high quality music tracks from an internal dataset, along with Shutterstock and Pond5 tracks. To make it faster, they used Meta's 32Khz EnCodec audio tokenizer to generate smaller chunks of music that can be processed in parallel. "Unlike existing methods like MusicLM, MusicGen doesn't not require a self-supervised semantic representation [and has] only 50 auto-regressive steps per second of audio," wrote Hugging Face ML Engineer Ahsen Khaliq in a tweet.

Last month, Google released a similar music generator called MusicLM, but MusicGen seems to generate slightly better results. On a sample page, the researchers compare MusicGen's output with MusicLM and two other models, Riffusion and Musai, to prove that point. It can be run locally (a GPU with at least 16GB of RAM is recommended) and available in four model sizes, from small (300 million parameters) to large (3.3 billion parameters) — with the latter having the greatest potential for producing complex music. 

As mentioned, MusicGen is open source and can even be used to generate commercial music (I tried it with "Ode to Joy" and several suggested genres and the results above were... mixed). Still, it's the latest example of the breathtaking speed of AI development over the past half year, with deep learning models threatening to make incursions into yet another genre. 

The Xbox Series S occupies an interesting space in Microsoft’s gaming lineup, given it can play every current-generation title available for the Series X. It may be significantly less powerful, but it’s also smaller and a lot cheaper, making it a “good enough” option for plenty of mainstream and casual gamers. Now, at 2023’s Summer Game Fest, Microsoft is addressing one of users’ biggest bugbears about the machine, which should make it a lot easier to live with.

At the event, the company showed off a new “carbon black” version of the console with 1TB storage, double what’s presently available. It’s a big deal for owners of the all-digital console since, with just 512GB, the current Series S users are often forced to delete downloaded games or buy a pricey expansion card to make room for whatever’s just landed on Game Pass. The new Series S will be available on September 1st, days before Microsoft’s latest blockbuster release, Starfield.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories so far from Summer Game Fest 2023

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'Metaphor: ReFantazio' is a fantasy RPG from the team behind 'Persona 5'

Roguelike ‘33 Immortals’ has 33-player co-op

'Final Fantasy VII Remake: Rebirth' is delayed until early 2024

'Cities Skylines II' will arrive on PC and consoles October 24th

Twitter has reportedly refused to pay its Google Cloud contract

It could have dire consequences for its automated moderation system.

Back in 2018, Twitter signed a billion-dollar deal with Google to host some of its platform on the latter’s cloud servers. Now, with a new owner trying to avoid paying for anything, ever at all, the company has decided to renege on that obligation. Reports say Twitter hasn’t paid Google the latest installment of what’s owed and is now racing to migrate key functionality away from Google Cloud before June 30th, but might not make that deadline. That could put some key Twitter functionality at risk, including the automated moderation platform which combats spam and CSAM.

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Ubisoft's open-world Star Wars game is 'Outlaws'

The company promised to share gameplay footage later today.

Ubisoft / Lucasfilm

Ubisoft's long-awaited open-world Star Wars game will arrive in 2024. The publisher announced Star Wars Outlaws on Sunday during Microsoft's Xbox and Starfield Direct showcase with a cinematic trailer that introduces fans to the game's Han Solo-like protagonist, Key Vess. Ubisoft is billing Outlaws as the first-ever open-world Star Wars game — though it's worth noting many past games in the franchise, including the recently released Jedi: Survivor, feature open-world elements.

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‘Mortal Kombat 1’ made a great first impression at SGF 2023

Yes, that’s its name.

Warner Bros.

One of the biggest reveals from a generally muted Summer Game Fest showcase was footage from Mortal Kombat 1. The 12th mainline game in the series restarts the universe with a once-mortal Liu Kang, now a full-fledged god of fire. Alongside this new world, the title also adds Kameos, summonable allies to fights. Read on for our first impressions of playing the game.

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Netflix's password sharing crackdown seems to be working

An analytics company says nagging users into paying has paid dividends.

We won’t know how successful Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing has been until we’ve seen its next one or two financial releases. But a third-party analytics company believes Netflix’s policy of nagging users into paying up has started to bear fruit. Its data suggests the streamer saw a spike in sign-ups towards the end of May, far outstripping the number of cancelations.

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