You could be going on heists, stealing cars and competing in races in Grand Theft Auto VI sometime next year. Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, has shared its projections for the future along with its yearly earnings report. And apparently, it's gearing up to release projects that it believes will take its "company to even greater levels of success." The company expects the titles it's releasing in the fiscal year 2025 to help it achieve $8 billion in net bookings, or the net amount of products and services sold. While it didn't explicitly name those titles, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has historically been one of Take-Two's biggest moneymakers. 

As IGN notes, Take-Two's net bookings for the previous fiscal year reached $5.3 billion, and it's thanks to the company's Zynga acquisition. Before that, it was earning around $3 billion a year. An almost $3 billion jump in net bookings is massive, and unless Take-Two is making another huge acquisition, GTA is the franchise that would enable it to achieve that goal. IGN asked Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick whether we're going to see GTA 6 as soon as next year, but the executive refused to confirm or deny it. 

Part of the company's press release reads:

"Looking ahead, Fiscal 2025 is a highly anticipated year for our Company. For the last several years, we have been preparing our business to release an incredibly robust pipeline of projects that we believe will take our company to even greater levels of success. In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow. We expect to sustain this momentum by delivering even higher levels of operating results in Fiscal 2026 and beyond."

Take-Two's fiscal year 2025 starts in April 2024 and ends on March 31st, 2025. Even if the Rockstar doesn't release GTA 6 in 2024, it could still be coming out in the first three months the year after. Bottom line: We don't have to wait that long for the game to arrive. Since 90 videos of GTA 6 gameplay footage leaked late last year, you probably already know what you can expect. The clips, which Rockstar confirmed as legit, showed two playable protagonists, including a female character named Lucia, committing crimes in a fictionalized version of Miami.

Skynet. Ultron. HAL-9000. These are but a few artificial intelligence systems that have gone rogue in films. Whether The Creator can produce a fictional AI that would make a mark on popular culture remains to be seen, but it is another movie that pits humanity against artificial intelligence. Its official website says the movie is about Joshua, an ex-special forces agent recruited to hunt down the Creator. That's the architect behind the advanced AI that was developed to protect humanity only to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. 

The Creator apparently also developed a weapon with the power to end all war and all of humanity, and Joshua and his team were tasked to destroy it. They then discovered that the world-ending weapon is an AI in the form of a young child. Of course, Joshua couldn't kill it and ended up taking it places and letting it do kid things like playing with other children. Is it evil or not? We don't know at this point. The trailer released by 20th Century Studios, New Regency and Entertainment One only shows the AI as a playful, inquisitive child. 

The film was directed and conceptualized by Gareth Edwards, the same director behind Rogue One. John David Washington (Tenet) plays Joshua, the protagonist grieving the disappearance of his wife played by Gemma Chan. Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson and Allison Janney also play roles in the movie, which will arrive in theaters on September 29th.

In December 2022, former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of taking bribes from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in return for sensitive account information on dissidents using the website. Now, the sister of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured for operating a Twitter account critical of Saudi Arabia, has filed a lawsuit accusing Twitter of breaking the law for letting its employees reveal his identity. 

Areej al-Sadhan filed the complaint on her and her brother's behalf under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. Her brother, Abdulrahman, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. In her complaint, Areej accuses Twitter of giving her brother's "identifying information to the government of Saudi Arabia, which blatantly violates its terms and conditions." She continued: "This puts every Twitter user at risk. As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and — through a sham trial — sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account." The Saudi government has apparently denied Abdulrahman contact with his family, who has no idea whether he's still alive. 

Abouammo and another former Twitter employee named Ali Alzabarah accessed confidential Twitter user data 30,892 times in 2015, the lawsuit states. They then allegedly handed Saudi Arabia identifying information for 6,000 Twitter user accounts, including names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses and session IP histories associated with user accounts. 

While Twitter will likely defend itself by saying that it didn't approve or wasn't aware of Saudi's espionage activities, the lawsuit also states that US intelligence agencies warned the company about Alzabarah giving Saudi Arabia user information in late 2015. Six months after the warning, Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter's CEO back then, met with Mohammed bin Salman "despite knowing full well [Saudi Arabia's] malign activities and various crimes," the complaint reads. 

As The Washington Post notes, Twitter faced two other lawsuits related to Saudi's spying activities on its website. However, one was dismissed after it failed to establish a connection between the 2015 leak of information and the hacking of the plaintiff's phone three years later, which had led to his family and friends getting imprisoned. Saudi also isn't the only country conducting espionage on the website. Twitter's former security chief turned whistleblower, Peiter Zatko, revealed last year that the company was also previously warned that it had Chinese intelligence agents on its payroll. 

Montana’s TikTok ban is now official. Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill banning the app in the state, one month after it was passed by the state’s legislature. The law is scheduled to take effect in 2024, though legal challenges could potentially delay that timeline.

The law prohibits the company from operating in the state and requires app stores to block users in Montana from downloading TikTok. The app’s users won’t face repercussions for using the service, but app stores and TikTok face daily fines of $10,000 for violating the law.

The statewide ban, and the expected legal challenge to it, offers a preview into how future attempts to ban the app could play out around the country. In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said the Montana law “unlawfully” violates the First Amendment rights of its users.

“Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state,” the spokesperson said. “We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”

Like other officials who have proposed bans or restrictions on TikTok, Montana lawmakers have claimed that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance, a Chinese company, puts the personal data of US users at risk. The company has long denied that it would turn over such data to the Chinese government, and has invested more than $1 billion into Project Texas to address data security concerns raised by US regulators.

But officials have reportedly said those efforts don’t go far enough, and the US government is now trying to force ByteDance to sell TikTok. If it doesn’t, TikTok will face a nationwide ban and, likely, another massive legal fight.

We’re starting to get a clearer picture of how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has changed the platform. According to new data from Pew Research, a “majority” of US Twitter users have “taken a break” from the platform over the last year, and many of the site’s “most active” users are tweeting less often than they used to.

“Six-in-ten Americans who have used Twitter in the past 12 months say they have taken a break from the platform for a period of several weeks or more during that span,” Pew writes in a report based on a survey of 10,701 Twitter users. In a separate report, Pew also studied the “actual behavior” of 1,002 of Twitter’s “most active” users and found “a noticeable posting decline in the months after” Musk’s acquisition. “These users’ average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition,” Pew noted.

Together, these stats suggest that engagement on Twitter has declined since Musk’s takeover, at least among formerly active users. That’s particularly notable because, as Pew notes, the vast majority of Twitter users are lurkers, not posters. Twenty percent of Twitter users send 98 percent of all tweets.

At the same time, it seems many of Twitter’s most active users haven’t given up on the platform entirely. According to Pew, only 25 percent of “highly active” users said they are “not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.”

Pew didn’t poll Twitter users on the reasons for their pullback from Twitter, or if Musk’s actions were directly responsible for the shift. It also doesn’t take into account how many new users may have joined Twitter in the last year. But the new numbers offer new insight into the growing ranks of Twitter quitters who may be spending more time on alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky since Musk’s takeover,

Unsurprisingly, Pew also found that Musk himself has become even more of a main character on Twitter over the last year. “On average, adult Twitter users in the U.S. mentioned Musk in a tweet just once between Jan. 1 and April 13, 2022, before he announced his intention to acquire the platform,” the report says. “Since then, however, references to Musk have become much more common on the site. These users tweeted about him an average of three times between April 14 and Oct. 26, 2022 – while Musk was in the process of acquiring the platform – and an average of six times in the months after the sale was finalized.”

The reports come as Musk has named a new CEO in former NBCU executive Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino, who is slated to start in the coming weeks, is expected to draw on her ad industry experience to try to win back advertisers, many of whom have fled following controversial policy changes by Musk. Whether she'll be able to win back the much sought-after “highly active tweeters,” though, is unclear. With Musk remaining as CTO and executive chairman, he’s likely to continue to be Twitter’s most influential — and controversial — user for the foreseeable future.

Electric cars have certainly gone mainstream over the past decade or so, with many auto manufacturers shifting at least some of their production over to battery-powered cars. But going from gas to electric in other forms of transportation hasn’t really taken off in quite the same way.

BMW is looking to change that – sort of. In collaboration with TYDE, which typically builds luxury yachts, the duo has come up with a fully-electric boat. The company used its yacht racing technology (yep, you read that right!) to build this boat. However, this is not a yacht – it’s a single-deck boat that appears to seat maybe a dozen people. The boat has a top speed of 30 knots, or about 34 miles per hour. In comparison, Jaguar’s gas–powered boat that set the speed record back in 2018 clocked 77 knots or about 88 miles per hour.

To add another oddity into the mix, Hans Zimmer (known for composing the score for The Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean and many others), developed the onboard soundtrack for the boat. It does make you wonder if the sound system is capable of playing anything but Hans Zimmer scores, but sadly the press release doesn’t say. According to that press release, the onboard sound system supports Dolby Atmos, to deliver “superb sound quality,” though that likely won’t matter with the amount of environmental noise that typically accompanies you when on water (especially with the boat’s semi-open design).

But at the end of the day, even though it’s an odd partnership all around, it’s good news that one more vehicle isn’t burning gasoline and is instead being powered by renewable energy. Whether or not this will make an impact on the broader boating industry? That’s a whole other can of worms.

Astronomers have found a planet they believe is blanketed by active volcanoes. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature, a multi-national team of scientists said they discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet they believe may have water on part of its surface. The boringly named LP 791-18 d (sadly, no one thought to call it Mustafar) is located about 90 light-years from Earth in the Crater constellation. LP 791-18 d orbits a red dwarf it is tidally locked to, meaning the planet doesn’t have a day and night cycle like Earth. Instead, one part of LP 791-18 d is constantly scorched by sunlight, while the other is always in darkness.

“The day side would probably be too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface. But the amount of volcanic activity we suspect occurs all over the planet could sustain an atmosphere, which may allow water to condense on the night side,” Björn Benneke, one of the astronomers who studied the planet, told NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The LP 791-18 system contains at least two other planets, called LP 791-18 b and c. The latter is two-and-a-half times larger than Earth and more than seven times its mass. It also affects the orbit of LP 791-18 d, making it travel along an elliptical path around the system’s sun. That path means LP 791-18 d is deformed every time it completes an orbit. “These deformations can create enough internal friction to substantially heat the planet’s interior and produce volcanic activity at its surface,” according to NASA.

“A big question in astrobiology, the field that broadly studies the origins of life on Earth and beyond, is if tectonic or volcanic activity is necessary for life,” study co-author Jessie Christiansen said. “In addition to potentially providing an atmosphere, these processes could churn up materials that would otherwise sink down and get trapped in the crust, including those we think are important for life, like carbon.”

NASA, ESA and CSA already plan to turn the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared imaging instruments on LP 791-18 c. The team that discovered LP 791-18 d thinks the exoplanet would make for an “exceptional candidate for atmospheric studies by the mission.” Notably, the retired Spitzer Space Telescope helped spot LP 791-18 d before NASA decommissioned it in 2020. This week, the US Space Force awarded a $250,000 grant to explore the feasibility of bringing the telescope out of retirement.

Analogue’s universally compatible TurboGrafx-16 console, the Duo, will finally be available for preorders later this week, on May 19th. The company made the reveal on Twitter and also noted that preorders begin sharply at 8AM PDT. These kinds of niche gaming consoles tend to sell out of preorders quickly, so set your alarm.

There’s a spot of bad news to go along with the announcement. The Analogue Duo was first revealed all the way back in 2020 and was set to launch for $200. The updated price tag is now $250.

For the price, you do get an all-in-one system that promises to play every single TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine title, thanks to dual media readers that play both the originally manufactured cartridges and the compact discs that came later. The console even runs games that require the Arcade RAM add-on that comprised the unsuccessful SuperGrafx console that was only released in Japan.

The Duo includes some modern bells and whistles, like an HDMI port, 1080p resolution, an SD card slot, two USB ports for wired controllers and Bluetooth for wireless accessories. The console doesn’t come with a controller, though it works with plenty of budget-friendly offerings by 8BitDo and others.

To the uninitiated, the TurboGrafx-16, called the PC Engine in Japan, was a competitor to the NES and SNES that saw some success in its home country but only modest sales in the US. Despite never reaching the heights of Sega and Nintendo, the console holds a place in the hearts of retro gamers, thanks to a robust library of hundreds of titles.

Just like all Analogue consoles, the Duo isn’t an emulation machine, as it features near-identical internal components that integrate with physical media. The company has made popular recreations of many iconic consoles, including the Pocket device that plays games from nearly every retro portable console.

Four years after the last in-person edition, a full-on version of BlizzCon has been scheduled for later this year. Blizzard's fan convention will take place at its long-standing Anaheim Convention Center home on November 3rd and 4th. More details will be revealed next month, including ticket information, though hotel blocks are already open. As always, some of the panels will be livestreamed, including the opening ceremony.

A lot has changed since BlizzCon 2019. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything, and BlizzCon has beenonhiatus (save for a virtual edition that took place in early 2021) ever since. 

In the interim, Blizzard has faced accusations of fostering a toxic work culture. BlizzCon is saddled with its own baggage and the company has yet to detail the safety policies that will be in place at this year's event. Reports also suggest there may be an exodus of Blizzard developers due to the publisher's return to office policy.

Nevertheless, the studio will surely have news and updates to share for its various franchises at BlizzCon, including Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo. BlizzCon will likely host some esports events as well.

Nicolas Cage will soon appear in Dead by Daylight. The actor will bring his delightful eccentricity and Billy Mays-style beard to the multiplayer survival game, developer Behavior Interactive announced on Twitter. “There is nothing more powerful than imagination,” Cage says in the appropriately campy teaser. “It can shape the fabric of reality, transforming everything you may think you know.”

Cage will play himself in the role of a Survivor, according toEurogamer. “After countless awards and over one hundred movies shot across the globe, Nicolas Cage had seen it all and done it all — or so he thought,” a brief announcement reads. “While on set filming the role of a lifetime, his performance summoned The Entity, a malevolent being of incomprehensible power. The actor soon found himself cast in otherworldly Fog, forced to Survive a host of terrifying Killers deadlier than even the most scathing film critic.”

It’s the latest quirky / campy addition to the popular horror game, following a K-Pop star, Freddy Kreuger, Leatherface, Evil Dead’s Ash Williams and a pro-surveillance tech executive. (It even has a dating-sim add-on for some reason.) The game’s developers, who describe Cage’s appearance as “the performance of a lifetime,” say we’ll hear more about the Oscar winner’s contribution on July 5th.