It's getting to be that time of year again. Summer Game Fest officially kicks off on June 5 and will go until June 8. The Live Kickoff show will once again be hosted by Geoff Keighley and takes place on June 5 at 5PM ET. This is where we'll see all of those juicy reveals and trailers.
The opening event will be streamed globally on just about every digital platform, including YouTube, Twitch, X and even Steam. Those in the Los Angeles area will be able to pick up tickets for the live show sometime in the Spring.
The kickoff event is just the beginning. There's something called Play Days, which is an expo in downtown LA produced by iam8bit. This invite-only event promises "immersive exhibits and hands-on experiences from the industry's leading publishers and developers." Coverage of this will be shared across digital and social platforms.
There is, of course, another Day of the Devs livestream scheduled for immediately after the kickoff. Day of the Devs: SGF Edition should provide us with even more trailers and reveals, this time for indie games.
Finally, there's a "thought leadership event" on June 8 that's primarily for developers and publishers. Game Business Live "brings together top industry voices on one stage for insightful discussions on key changes, challenges and opportunities shaping the global video game industry."
We'll be covering the event live and will have all of those trailers ready to go. After all, that's pretty much the main reason people watch these things.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/summer-game-fest-runs-from-june-5-8-193054418.html?src=rss
Nothing has been slow-dripping news about the upcoming Phone 4a for a few days now, with a promise to reveal the handset on March 5. However, the company jumped the gun a bit and just posted an actual photo of the hardware. It looks pretty nifty, even if we don't have any real-deal specs just yet.
The image shows the handset from behind, displaying the company's trademark transparent design. The picture also features the redesigned Glyph Bar, which was first teased last week. This is a light-based notification system that features individually controlled mini-LEDs that light up in various ways to notify the user of missed calls and stuff like that. You can spot it next to the camera bump.
That's about all we know right now, though there are plenty of industry rumors. It's been reported that the Nothing Phone 4a will feature a Snapdragon 7-series chip and that the reveal will be accompanied by a Pro model with a more powerful camera. The Nothing Phone 3a was also launched alongside the 3a Pro.
We loved the 3a and 3a Pro, calling both "an easy recommendation." Let's hope this carries through for the 4a. Also, you didn't miss a release of the actual Nothing Phone 4. The company likes to release the a-series handsets before the flagship. Past as prologue, we'll likely see that one in early summer.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/nothing-reveals-the-phone-4a-ahead-of-schedule-181905011.html?src=rss
Anime fans rejoice, as there's a newNeon Genesis Evangelion series on the horizon. This was announced during a 30th anniversary event held in Japan. The bad news? Franchise creator Hideaki Anno won't be writing the scripts.
However, his replacement will be Yoko Taro, the guy who created the video game NieR. He also wears a giant and rather unsettling moon mask for some reason. The NieR franchise is known for rich and complex lore, with a story spanning thousands of years that occasionally dips into a parallel universe.
Wikimedia Commons
Evangelion veteran Kazuya Tsurumaki will be on hand to direct episodes, which is nice for long-time fans. He directed the Rebuild of Evangelion films and the recent Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX anime. Composer Keiichi Okabe, from the NieR franchise, is scoring the new show. The new series will be produced by Studio Khara and Cloverworks.
While we know a fair bit about who's behind the scenes of the upcoming show, we don't know anything about the plot. We don't know if it's yet another remake of the original story, a sequel or some kind of spin-off like the chibi-inspired Petit Eva: Evangelion@School. There's a trailer, but it's light on details.
New "Neon Genesis Evangelion" ANIME SERIES NEW TRAILER
Written by Yoko Taro Directors: Kazuya Tsurumaki & Toko Yatabe Music: Keiichi Okabe Animation Production: CloverWorks x Khara pic.twitter.com/jnJZ12XSRb
With Taro on board, it could really go in any direction. It's worth remembering, after all, that NieR is actually a spin-off of a PS2 game called Drakengard. In one of the multiple endings of that game, a final boss is transported from a fantasy realm to modern-day Tokyo. Slaying this beast releases a virus that plagues humankind, which is what eventually leads to the post-apocalyptic setting of NieR. This is sort of like if the events of a Dragon Quest game somehow led to the world of Resident Evil.
If there's anyone who can breathe fresh life into the Evangelion franchise, it's Taro. Did I mention he wears a gigantic moon mask? Also, this isn't his first time penning TV scripts. He co-wrote the NieR: Automata anime spinoff.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a-new-evangelion-series-is-coming-from-studio-khara-and-yoko-taro-creator-of-nier-170916543.html?src=rss
A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that lasted 13 hours was reportedly caused by one of its own AI tools, according to reporting by Financial Times. This happened in December after engineers deployed the Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, say four people familiar with the matter.
Kiro is an agentic tool, meaning it can take autonomous actions on behalf of users. In this case, the bot reportedly determined that it needed to "delete and recreate the environment." This is what allegedly led to the lengthy outage that primarily impacted China.
Amazon says it was merely a "coincidence that AI tools were involved" and that "the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action." The company blamed the outage on "user error, not AI error." It said that by default the Kiro tool “requests authorization before taking any action” but that the staffer involved in the December incident had "broader permissions than expected — a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue."
Multiple Amazon employees spoke to Financial Times and noted that this was "at least" the second occasion in recent months in which the company's AI tools were at the center of a service disruption. "The outages were small but entirely foreseeable," said one senior AWS employee.
A builder shares why their workflow finally clicked.
Instead of jumping straight to code, the IDE pushed them to start with specs. ✔️ Clear requirements. ✔️ Acceptance criteria. ✔️ Traceable tasks.
The company launched Kiro in July and has since pushed employees into using the tool. Leadership set an 80 percent weekly use goal and has been closely tracking adoption rates. Amazon also sells access to the agentic tool for a monthly subscription fee.
However, Amazon disagrees with the characterization of certain products and services being unavailable as an outage. In response to the Financial Times report, the company shared the following statement, which it also published on its news blog:
We want to address the inaccuracies in the Financial Times' reporting yesterday. The brief service interruption they reported on was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI as the story claims.
The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer—which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role—the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action. We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool—AI-powered or not—we think it is important to learn from these experiences. The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.
For more than two decades, Amazon has achieved high operational excellence with our Correction of Error (COE) process. We review these together so that we can learn from any incident, irrespective of customer impact, to address issues before their potential impact grows larger.
Update, February 21 2026, 11:58AM ET: This story has been updated to include Amazon's full statement in response to the Financial Times report.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/13-hour-aws-outage-reportedly-caused-by-amazons-own-ai-tools-170930190.html?src=rss
Meta is shutting down the standalone Messenger website, according to a company help page. The website will disappear in April, though web users will still be able to send and receive messages within Facebook.
"After messenger.com goes away, you will be automatically redirected to use facebook.com/messages for messaging on a computer," the help page reads. "You can continue your conversations there or on the Messenger mobile app."
Users will be able to restore their chat history after switching to the app by entering a PIN number. This is the same PIN that was used to initially create a backup on Messenger. It can be reset for those who simply don't have the bandwidth to remember yet another six-digit code.
This comes just a few months after Meta shut down Messenger's standalone desktop apps. At that time, Meta directed existing users to Facebook to continue using the service and not the dedicated Messenger website. In other words, the writing has likely been on the wall since October.
Messenger has had a long and storied history. The platform first launched as Facebook Chat all the way back in 2008. Facebook Messenger became a standalone app in 2011. The company has long-tried to make Messenger a thing outside of Facebook. It removed messaging capabilities from the main Facebook app in 2014 and began directing users to the Messenger app. Meta began reintegrating Messenger back into the Facebook app in 2023 and now here we are.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/meta-is-shuttering-messengers-standalone-website-which-is-a-thing-that-exists-191808134.html?src=rss
Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has indicated that the company's controversial Search Party feature might not always be just for lost dogs, according to emails obtained by 404 Media. A creepy surveillance tool being used to surveil. Who could have predicted that?
"I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission," Siminoff wrote in an email to staffers. "You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started."
The Ring<->Flock partnership is even worse than imagined, it was setup to be a AI powered mass surveillance system from the start. See this email from the Ring Founder, Jamie Siminoff (https://t.co/kLbZdR6Is1) pic.twitter.com/W9TFQpriRh
The words "zero out crime in neighborhoods" are particularly troubling. It is, however, worth noting that this is just an email and doesn't necessarily indicate a plan by the company. Siminoff wrote the email back in October when Search Party first launched, which was months before the public backlash started. He did end the thread by noting he couldn't "wait to show everyone else all the exciting things we are building over the years to come."
One of those things could be the recently-launched "Familiar Faces" tool, which uses facial recognition to identify people that wander into the frame of a Ring camera. It seems to me that a combination of the Search Party tech, which uses the combined might of connected Ring cameras, with the Familiar Faces tech could make for a very powerful surveillance tool that excels at finding specific individuals.
Siminoff also suggested in an earlier email to staffers that Ring technology could have been used to catch Charlie Kirk's killer by leveraging the company's Community Requests feature. This is a tool that allows cops to ask camera owners for footage, thanks to a partnership with the police tech company Axon.
Ring had planned an expansion of this program via a partnership with a surveillance company called Flock Safety. The companies canceled this partnership after a Super Bowl ad spotlighting the Search Party tool triggered public outcry. Ring didn't cite public sentiment for this decision, rather saying the integration would require "significantly more time and resources than anticipated."
Ring has responded to 404 Media's reporting, saying in an email that Search Party "does not process human biometrics or track people" and that "sharing has always been the camera owner's choice." This response did not provide any information as to what the future will hold for the company's toolset.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/ring-could-be-planning-to-expand-search-party-feature-beyond-dogs-175805706.html?src=rss
Why the delay? Developer Sad Cat Studios notes that the game is "technically finished" but the team needs a few more weeks for polish. The company says it wants the day-one release to be "polished, stable and true to the vision" of the original concept. This is something to be commended, in my opinion, given the sad stateof many game launchesin recent years.
This is just the latest delay for the game. However, previous delays have been for a very good reason. The development team had to relocate from Belarus to Cyprus after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Replaced is an absolutely gorgeous-looking 2.5D platformer set in a dystopian alternative 1980s America. You play as an AI unwillingly trapped in a human body. There looks to be plenty of cinematic action, with a blurb promising a combination of "precise melee strikes with satisfying ranged attacks."
The game will be available for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG and the Microsoft Store. It'll also be a day-one Xbox Game Pass release.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cyberpunk-platformer-replaced-has-once-again-been-delayed-190621246.html?src=rss
Everyone loves shiny new products, so what can we expect to see at Apple's first launch event of 2026? We don't know anything for certain, but we have plenty of educated guesses that have been sourced from industry reports and speculation from analysts.
Editor's Note (on March 2 at 9:45AM ET): Apple has officially announced the iPhone 17e and iPad Air (M4). It's expected to continue to unveil new hardware in the following days, per the rest of this article.
Budget-friendly MacBook
There have been rumors swirling that Apple is preparing to launch a cheaper alternative to the MacBook Air. Bloombergreported on this all the way back in November. Industry rumors indicate that Apple will be stuffing this laptop with an iPhone processor, the A18 Pro, to keep the price down.
Worth pointing out the three colors from the invite are light green, blue and yellow -- which just so happen to be the colors Apple has tested the low-cost MacBook with, as I wrote yesterday. Coincidence? We shall see. https://t.co/1FFVkfw9JZpic.twitter.com/ssKDDzdJsw
It's also been suggested that this laptop will only include 8GB of RAM, which kind of flies against the company's recent stance to outfit all Macs with at least 16GB of RAM. However, that would certainly help with the cost. You might have heard about a little thing called AI that chomp chomps on all RAM it can find.
TechRadar has reported that this could be Apple's biggest laptop launch in years, with potential initial shipments hitting 8 million units. The price is likely to be somewhere in the $699 to $799 range, which is pretty nifty. However, I'd still go for an Air at $999. They are absolute workhorses.
MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and Max chips
It's likely that Apple will release more powerful MacBook Pro models this year and the timing seems to match up. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has suggested a March launch and the event is on March 4.
The company has already released a MacBook Pro with an M5 chip, but both the M5 Pro and Max are likely on the horizon. We could be getting new laptops outfitted with these chips in various display sizes.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
There have also been reports that both of the higher-end M5 chips are getting a redesign to help improve heat dissipation and reduce defective chip rates. Additionally, the new chiplet design would allow the M5 Pro and Max to raise the total number of CPU and GPU cores. The Max is expected to have more cores than the Pro.
This idea is helped along by the fact that MacBook Pro M4 Max orders are currently delayed. This is typically the case with an outgoing model as stock dries up to make room for new releases. Also, the Pro and Max variants typically get announced in the Fall, so we are due.
New iPads
Rumors have been circulating that we are about to get new iPads, including an update to the base model and the Air. The standard model, which would be the 12th-gen release, is expected to upgrade the A16 chip to an A18. This should also allow for the integration of Apple Intelligence tools, if that's your bag.
As for specs, Mark Gurman has suggested that it'll be getting an upgrade to the A19 chip, which is nice. Also, it could be getting MagSafe support. That sounds like an iterative upgrade, but the price is expected to remain steady at $599.
Other Possibilities
The following stuff is less likely, though certainly possible. There have been rumors that Apple is currently preparing a revamped Studio Display and Mac Studio desktop. The reports suggest a release sometime in the first half of the year, and March is right in the middle of that timeframe.
It's also possible that the company will reveal an upgrade to the MacBook Air with the M5 chip. Reports indicate that this is unlikely to happen during this event, but it is worth noting that the M4 Air came out in March of last year. In other words, it's a toss up.
The inclusion of Shanghai essentially rules out Siri, as expected, given the delays. https://t.co/mgNLR4qCYy
What's not a toss up? You shouldn't expect anything regarding the long-anticipated Siri refresh. This looks to be a hardware event, so any software updates will likely have to wait until WWDC this summer. In any event, Engadget will be on hand to report on all of Apple's new products.
Update, March 2 2026, 9:45AM ET: This story has been updated to add an Editor's Note with the latest news from Apple this week.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/what-to-expect-at-apples-product-launch-event-on-march-4-173612816.html?src=rss
Netflix is streaming its very first live MMA fight on May 16. The combatants are one-time phenom Ronda Rousey and one-time actor Gina Carano. Both women have retired from the sport. Rousey left in 2016 and Carano left all the way back in 2009. In any event, they are both back for one night only.
The featherweight bout will take place inside a hexagon cage and will stream globally. It's likely Netflix had to choose two retired fighters because current stars are under contracts with various promotional entities. This fight is co-hosted by Most Valuable Productions, a promotional company started by Jake Paul.
If you're unfamiliar with the aforementioned fighters, Rousey is a UFC champion and Olympic medalist who has a fantastic 12-2 record in MMA. Carano is a pioneer in the sport, starting her career all the way back in 2006.
She also played Cara Dune in The Mandalorian before getting into hot water after social media posts that mocked mask wearing during the pandemic, alleged voter fraud during the 2020 election and denigrated transgender people. However, it really came to a head when she doubled down on her comments, likening the social media blowback conservatives receive to what Jewish people experienced during the holocaust. That's when she was fired from the hit Star Wars show.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-is-streaming-its-first-mma-fight-on-may-16-165702479.html?src=rss
This provides several benefits for the end user. It lets people switch seamlessly between watching and listening, in addition to offering a horizontal full display option. It'll also make both video and audio streams available to download for offline viewing. This wasn't possible with the previous streaming method, which pulled content from an RSS-like feed. RSS is still available as a distribution option, but HLS definitely brings some advantages
The technology integrates picture-in-picture for multitasking on products like the iPad. Finally, the updated app will automatically adjust the picture quality to ensure smooth playback in various network conditions, including both Wi-Fi and cellular.
The update will be available on most platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and the web. It's in beta right now, but the company plans a major rollout this spring as part of the upcoming 26.4 operating systems.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apples-podcasts-app-now-supports-http-live-streaming-video-technology-182605460.html?src=rss
