GM previewed its 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV today, adding the two-row mid-size crossover [in a variety of trims, including the SS performance model,] to its growing lineup of all-electric cars. As far as SUVs go, the Chevy Blazer hasn’t ever been the most eye-catching or highest rated. But the new Blazer EV could stand out as a solid, reasonably priced electric mid-sized SUV in a market filled with (way too many) options. The vehicles include a 11.5 kW AC charging module for at-home charging and charging capability of up to 190 kilowatts. Roughly 10 minutes of charging will add up to 78 miles of range. 

The 2024 Blazer EVs take things in a dramatically different direction than older models of the Blazer, at least design-wise. The exterior is a tad more aggressive and futuristic than older models of the Blazer. The RS model features 21-inch wheels and a black grille and accents and the SS features a black roof, ultra-thin 22-inch wheels. Depending on the size of the battery pack, the RS has a maximum range of 320 miles, while the SS can run for 290 miles. The SS model can produce up to 557 horsepower and has a high-performance mode known WOW (Wide Open Watts) mode that can enable 0-60 mph times of less than 4 seconds. Both the RS and SS models feature heated front and rear outboard seating (though on the RS it’s an additional charge) and a flat-bottom steering wheel and sculpted vents.

The most bare-bones option of the bunch, the LT (with two different trim levels), comes with 18-inch wheels and a monochromatic coat. The 2LT delivers an estimated range of 293 miles, while the 1LT can go for 247 miles on a single charge.  

The vehicles are all equipped with a 17.7-inch-diagonal screen and Chevy's infotainment system. To top it off, the Blazer EV is built on GM’s Ultium EV platform, which kind of serves as a unified battery system for all of GM’s electric vehicles. The automaker believes that using just one battery — the Ultium — for all of its EVs will cut down production costs and allow it to easily convert to an all-electric lineup by 2035.

The new cars will arrive next year: The 2LT and RS will debut in the summer of 2023, and are priced starting around $47,595 and $51,995, respectively. The SS will arrive later next year, and starts at $65,995. Finally, the 1LT will debut sometime in the first quarter of 2024 and start at $44,995.

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of payment card issuers accuses Apple of illegally profiting from Apple Pay and breaking antitrust laws. Iowa's Affinity Credit Union is listed as the plaintiff in the complaint, filed today in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit alleges that by restricting contactless payments on iOS devices to Apple Pay and charging payment card issuers fees to use the mobile wallet, the iPhone maker is engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

While Android users have options for contactless mobile wallets, iOS users can only use tap-to-pay technology through Apple Pay. In other words, while iPhone users can download the Google Pay app, they can’t use it to make contactless payments in stores. Android doesn’t charge payment card issuers for use of any supported mobile wallet. But it’s a different story for Apple Pay, which charges card issuers a 0.15% fee on credit transactions and half of a cent on debit transactions. These fees have brought in up to $1 billion annually for Apple, the lawsuit alleges.

“In the Android ecosystem, where multiple digital wallets compete, there are no issuer fees whatsoever, ” said the complaint. “The upshot is that card issuers pay a reported $1 billion annually in fees on Apple Pay and $0 for accessing functionally identical Android wallets. If Apple faced competition, it could not sustain these substantial fees.”

The suit alleges that by restricting iOS users to only Apple Pay for contactless payments, Apple is blocking competing mobile wallets from the market. Payment card issuers are essentially forced to pay Apple’s transaction fees if they want to offer their service to iPhone users.

Apple is facing a similar challenge over its payment system in the EU, where an antitrust commission in May said that the tech giant is illegally blocking third-party developers from enabling contactless payments. Apple has denied the EU’s allegations, arguing that giving third-party developers access would be a security risk. This is an argument that Apple has used before as a reason why it doesn't open up its platform, such as in the case of third-party app stores.

Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment on the lawsuit and will update if we hear back.

Uber is settling a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the company of overcharging riders with disabilities. The ridesharing company has agreed to pay at least $2.2 million to passengers who were charged wait time fees despite disabilities that required more time to enter a vehicle. The payout includes nearly $1.74 million for over 1,000 riders who complained about the fees and $500,000 for “other harmed individuals.” Uber will also offer credits to more than 65,000 people who've obtained waivers for wait time fees, all of whom will receive double the wait time fees they were charged.

Uber implemented wait time fees in 2016, when it began charging customers extra if a driver waited more than two minutes after arriving at a pickup location. This left people with disabilities paying more than other passengers. The Justice Department alleged that this violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars discrimination by transportation companies.

In a statement to Engadget, Uber said it was "pleased" by the agreement and maintained that it was "always working" to bolster accessibility for users. It encouraged customers to sign up for the waivers.

The agreement requires that Uber continue offering the waiver to all eligible riders for two years. Refunds will also be "easily available" to riders who don't have waivers, the Justice Department added. Uber has promised to advertise the waiver system, which launched in 2021.

This settlement might not satisfy some critics. It indemnifies Uber against future claims linked to wait fees. The company has also faced multiple lawsuits over a lack of ADA-mandated wheelchair-accessible vehicles — the agreement doesn't address those concerns. Even so, this may be a win for riders who've had no choice but to pay a premium due to their disabilities.

Amazon is introducing a new Prime Video interface that will be familiar to anyone who has used Netflix – or, for that matter, any other modern streaming service. To make the Prime Video experience “less busy and overwhelming,” the company has relocated the platform’s main navigation bar to the left side of the screen and arranged the icons into a vertical column. From top to bottom, the six menus are Search, Home, Store, Live TV, Free and My Stuff.

Most of the menus include subcategories to simplify navigation further. For instance, the Home section has subcategories for movies, TV shows and sports. Other Netflix-inspired features include a top 10 list of popular content and poster-style thumbnails that expand to play a preview when you navigate over them.

Amazon

However, the most helpful change Amazon has introduced is a new set of icons that make it easier to know if something is part of Prime Video. A blue checkmark means the TV show or movie you want to watch is included with your subscription. By contrast, a gold shopping bag means you need to either buy or rent the content to view it. 

According to The Verge, Amazon spent 18 months working on the redesign. Ben Smith, vice-president of product for Prime Video and Prime studios, led the project. Notably, he previously worked on Hulu’s 2017 redesign. That effort saw the service try something radically different only for it to return to a more familiar design a few years later.

Amazon

Amazon will begin rolling out the new Prime Video experience starting this week. The redesign will first arrive on Android and compatible streaming devices — including Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV — before landing on iOS and the web later this year. 

The new experience won’t roll out to every device where Prime Video is available, and among the more notable omissions are the third-generation Apple TV and Sony’s PlayStation 3. If either of those are how you watch Prime Video, you won’t lose access to the service as a result — you'll just have to get by without the redesigned interface for the time being.

On the same day it officially became a PlayStation studio, Bungie filed a lawsuit against a Destiny 2 player it accused of persistent cheating and making threats against its employees. The developer claimed Luca Leone violated the game's Limited Software License Agreement (LSLA) on multiple occasions. It's seeking $150,000 in damages and an injunction preventing Leone from “harassing, stalking or otherwise engaging in unwanted or unsolicited contact with Bungie, its employees or Destiny 2 players,” as Kotaku reports.

Bungie said it banned Leone multiple times for using Destiny 2 cheat software while streaming on Twitch. In an attempt to evade the ban, Leone created 13 accounts, each of which constituted a fresh breach of the LSLA, according to the filing. The studio claimed Leone violated the LSLA on other fronts, including by selling Destiny 2 accounts that contain emblems, or non-transferable badges that players can earn. Bungie says these "are prized by many players, especially collectors."

In addition, Bungie claims that Leone has made threats regarding the studio and its employees. According to the suit, Leone tweeted "about his desire to 'burn down' Bungie’s office building and [wrote] that specific Bungie employees were 'not safe' given Leone’s intent to move into their neighborhood."

In May, an image of Destiny 2 community manager Dylan Gafner's employee badge appeared on a Twitter account that's said to belong to Leone. "I just realized I’ll be moving to a place that’s 30 minutes away from dmg,” Leone allegedly wrote, followed by “he is not safe." Bungie notes that "dmg" likely refers to Gafner, who uses the Twitter handle @dmg04.

Leone's purported Twitter account has since been locked. His reported Twitch channel features no content other than a bio reading "[23-year-old] Bungie playtester from Los Angeles." Engadget has contacted Leone for comment.

The filing follows a number of instances of harassment against game developers. Forbes' Paul Tassi wrote that Destiny 2 sandbox design lead Kevin Yanes has all but left Twitter. Players reportedly reacted with fury to Yanes saying an item from the original Destiny will not return. "I dream of a day where videogame developers (from any studio) can openly discuss their work without being harassed," Gafner wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

A few weeks ago, Sony Santa Monica developers received threats and unsolicited photos of genitalia for not revealing the God of War: Ragnarök release date when the studio was reportedly planning to. Sony Santa Monica announced the release timing just a few days later.

This isn't the first time Bungie has targeted players with legal action. Just last month, it sued someone who allegedly uploaded music from the Destiny 2 soundtrack for filing fake DMCA notices against content creators.

EA has announced the cover stars for FIFA 23 and, for the first time in the series, a female player will feature on the Ultimate Edition, which will be available internationally. Chelsea's Sam Kerr is one of the two cover stars, along with Kylian Mbappé of Paris Saint-Germain. This will be the third straight year Mbappé has appeared on FIFA covers.

Kerr is a more than worthy player to showcase on the game's cover. She has been shortlisted for the women's Ballon D'Or every year since the award's inception and finished in third place in last year's voting. Among her many other honors, Kerr has helped Chelsea to win the Women's Super League in each of the three seasons since she joined the club.

EA put women on the cover of its soccer games for the first time with FIFA 16. Steph Catley, Alex Morgan and Christine Sinclair featured on the Australian, US and Canadian covers, respectively. They appeared alongside Lionel Messi, who was the cover star on other editions.

Meanwhile, Eurogamer reports that the Women's Super League, which is the highest-tier of pro women's soccer in England, will make its debut in the FIFA series this year. Until now, FIFA fans have only been able to play as women in the Volta and Pro Clubs modes, as well as in international teams through the kick-off mode.

EA will reveal much more about FIFA 23 when the first trailer debuts at noon ET on Wednesday (you'll be able to watch the video below once it's live). This will be the last annual EA soccer game that bears FIFA branding in its title. The name of the series will become EA Sports FC next year following a messy divorce from FIFA.

Despite the fact that it stars a cat, there’s no extra fluff in Stray. The game takes place under the dome of an artificial sky, in a futuristic city populated by robots and cut off from the natural world, and mechanically, it’s also perfectly contained. Every detail in Stray serves a purpose, whether it’s an environmental cue nudging players toward a specific path or the ability to meow at will, which is adorable, but can also distract enemies in combat scenes.

Stray is a cyberpunk playground where players are rewarded for trusting their instincts, and it offers a beautiful balance of exploration, puzzle solving and soothing cat activities. And somehow along the way, it manages to tell a heart-wrenching human story without any people at all.

Cat people, you’re going to love Stray, but there are also some scenes that are hard to watch. The game begins with a gang of four cats living their best lives in a lush, overgrown industrial park that’s long been abandoned by people. Players are an orange tabby, leaping across huge pipes and steel beams until one slip changes everything. As its friends look on, the cat falls dozens of storeys down a deep, pitch-black hole, landing in a broken heap on the concrete floor of a sewer. The cat is injured, making players walk around limping and woozy for a while before recovering normal mobility. The injury scene is tough to watch and even harder to play, even for a dog person like myself, but it builds an instant emotional connection with the tabby that carries through the entire game.

The bulk of Stray takes place in the neon-lit neighborhoods trapped under the dome and populated by anthropomorphic robots. Players explore while trying to find a way back to their friends in the sunlight, and eventually the cat is equipped with a cute little drone that helps it communicate with the robots and hack certain terminals. The drone, B-12, is attempting to solve a mystery of its own – while traversing the cities, players collect memories from random shining objects, helping B-12 remember where it came from.

Stray’s world was built for humans and bipedal robots, which makes it particularly intriguing to explore as a cat. From a foot off the ground, things like doors are useless, while items like pipes, railings and air conditioning units provide ideal platforms for scaling buildings and navigating the twisting alleyways under the dome. The environmental puzzles take advantage of this cat-level perspective, inviting players to look at the world with different, light-reflective eyes.

BlueTwelve Studio

None of the riddles in Stray are overly complicated, though quite a few of them are clever. The most engaging puzzles ask players to travel back and forth among multiple locations, helping or tricking various robots to get what’s needed, with minimal direction from the game itself. These puzzles are solved by exploring the cities and talking with their inhabitants, naturally building out the lore at the same time. And Stray doesn’t stick with any mechanic for too long, presenting new enemies and fresh situations to solve with each environment.

The path forward in Stray is usually obvious, with yellow paint marking jumpable platforms and large neon arrows often pointing the way. These navigation elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they blend into the richness of the city, only standing out when they’re really needed. This makes progressing in Stray feel completely natural – with the environment constantly directing players along the proper path, the next leap is usually the right one, and this keeps the pace up nicely overall.

There are minimal on-screen instructions in Stray, and most of them have to do with performing housecat activities like scratching rugs, knocking over plants and paint cans, and curling up to sleep. These actions are cute as hell, but they also help move the narrative forward at times. For instance, clawing a couch leg is fun and adorable, but the cat can also scratch at certain doors to make the robots open up, unlocking new rooms of secrets. Meowing, meanwhile, can happen at any time, even during cutscenes or while sleeping, and this is pretty much the best mechanic in the game.

The most common on-screen prompt is a small indicator that clings to the edge of any jumpable surface, whether the cat is climbing up or leaping down. This is the most restrictive mechanic in the game, as it dictates where the cat can move and sometimes cuts off pathways that look viable. There are plenty of moments in the game where I feel stuck for a moment, wanting to jump to a specific area but unable to move without that small white dot telling me I can. This dampens the game’s feeling of freedom and adds hiccups to its overall pacing, but it doesn’t destroy the ability to explore the cities completely. I’d say I’m able to complete 80 percent of the jumps I want to. I also see how this mechanic helps cultivate a sense of cat-like confidence in every scene – it’s impossible to fall off the edge of a walkway, no matter how thin or wobbly, because you can’t leave until that dot shows up on a nearby platform. With invisible walls like these, who needs nine lives?

BlueTwelve Studio

I do, apparently. While players are unable to leap to their doom, it is possible to die in Stray – and I did, more than once. The city under the dome is infested with vicious bacterial blobs that chase the cat relentlessly any time it’s near, creating a handful of dramatic run-and-dodge sequences. If the blobs jump on the cat and stay there for a few seconds, it’s game over and you start at the last checkpoint, which is usually just a minute or so behind. There are also hovering sentinels in the later levels that shoot anything that enters their pool of light, leading to a lot of shadow-slinking and some intense timing puzzles.

Among all of the puzzle-solving, ledge-leaping and blob-dodging, Stray introduces a world of lighthearted dystopia, where robots don’t hate the humans that came before them, and instead attempt to cultivate plants that can survive under the darkness of the dome, just because people would have liked that. The robots themselves have distinct personalities and engaging histories, and as a cat, I was able to soak it all up and carry these stories along my journey.

Compared with most dystopian cyberpunk games, Stray is downright joyful. It’s a perfectly contained adventure game with plenty of fresh ideas, each one pared down to its purest form. Even the meow mechanic.

Stray comes out on July 19th for PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC.

Instagram is making it a little easier for creators to make a living from their merch. The social network has introduced the option to shop through chats. Message a small business and you can ask questions, receive product details and check out (using Meta Pay, naturally) without leaving the conversation. You can buy and customize that must-have shirt without visiting a website or looking for a shoppable post. The feature is available through qualified small businesses in some countries. We've asked Meta for more details.

Chat-based shopping isn't a surprising move. You can already shop through WhatsApp chats in many countries. This expansion could make Instagram chats just as viable for shopping, and might be particularly useful in North America and other regions where WhatsApp doesn't have much clout. If nothing else, this makes Instagram more of a full-service storefront — you might never need to leave the app to address your concerns.

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has ordered the country’s antitrust watchdog to review its decision to force Meta to sell Giphy, reports Bloomberg. “We have agreed to reconsider our decision in light of this finding,” a spokesperson for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) told the outlet, adding the agency hopes to complete the process within three months.

As The Verge notes, the ruling comes after Meta largely lost its appeal against the CMA. The tribunal sided with the watchdog on five of the agency's six claims against the company. However, on the one ruling that went in Meta’s favor, the tribunal said the CMA had failed to properly inform the company of Snapchat’s acquisition of Gfycat, thereby undermining its defense. Now, not only must the CMA reconsider its decision, but it must also allow Meta to comment on an unredacted version of its report.

Meta’s $315 million acquisition of Giphy drew the attention of the CMA shortly after the company announced the deal in May 2020. One month after the announcement, the watchdog began investigating the purchase. By August 2021, it ruled Meta’s ownership of Giphy could allow the company to prevent rivals like TikTok and Snapchat from accessing Giphy’s GIF library. Meta declined to comment on the ruling. The company previously argued that the CMA was acting outside of its jurisdiction because Giphy had no operations in the UK. 

“Today’s ruling found that the CMA’s approach to its investigation was ‘difficult to defend’ and ‘undermines the entirety of the Decision,’" the company said after the Competition Appeal Tribunal's initial ruling. "We look forward to understanding how these serious process flaws will be addressed. We firmly believe our investment would enhance GIPHY’s product for the millions of people, businesses, and partners who use it.”

Crunchyroll is changing prices for users in nearly 100 countries and territories, but not in the way you'd probably expect. Instead of increasing the cost of monthly subscription plans, Crunchyroll is lowering them to offer users "even more value." The move could help the anime-focused streaming service attract more subscribers too.

In the UK, the Mega Fan plan (which allows for offline viewing and up to four simultaneous streams) now costs £6 per month instead of £8. The lower-tier Fan plan is £5, down from £6.50. Users in India will see a far more significant price decrease. Instead of $10 USD per month for a Mega Fan subscription, they'll pay 99 rupees, which converts to around $1.25. Meanwhile, users in Brazil will save around 37.5 percent each month and those in the United Arab Emirates will pay nearly 50 percent less on a monthly basis.

Crunchyroll's announcement includes a full list of countries and territories where it is lowering prices, including European, Caribbean, South American, African and Middle Eastern regions. There are some notable omissions, including the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 

Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T in 2021 and folded content from Funimation into it earlier this year. Given that Crunchyroll is the go-to streaming service for anime fans, it wouldn't have been surprising to see Sony bump up the monthly fees. Instead, it's making Crunchyroll more competitive against the likes of Netflix and Hulu, each of which have anime offerings but have increasedprices over the last year.