Dead by Daylight's next chapter isn't too far away and it's another crossover rather than an original creation. Behaviour Interactive likes to keep fans on their toes with some unexpected partnerships and the latest one is no exception. This time around, Dungeons and Dragons is entering the fog. It's a bit of a surprising turn as D&D isn't normally associated with horror, but there's enough connective tissue for it to make sense.
Behaviour revealed the crossover in a short teaser trailer with no further details about what to expect. It remains to be seen what the chapter will bring in terms of a killer, survivor and/or map. But you won't have to wait too long to find out.
The Dead by Daylight anniversary stream will take place on May 14, starting at 11AM ET (for what it's worth, a new player test build will go live that day). You can tune in to find out more details about the Dungeons and Dragons chapter as well as what's ahead for Dead by Daylight as a whole in the coming months. Perhaps we'll find out a bit more about the spinoff games that are in the works. And given Behaviour's track record, it may just have some other surprises in store...
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/dungeons-and-dragons-is-coming-to-dead-by-daylight-161537165.html?src=rss
The Strong National Museum of Play has revealed this year's inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Asteroids, Myst, Resident Evil, SimCity and Ultima have made the cut. While that means the likes of Guitar Hero, Metroid and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater miss out from the slate of finalists, it would be hard to make a case against any of the five inductees.
Games are selected for the hall of fame based on a number of criteria, including cultural impact and their influence on the industry. Asteroids absolutely fits the bill. The 1979 game was an enormous hit. Atari sold more than 70,000 arcade units, making Asteroids its best-selling coin-op machine. The home version on the Atari 2600 was very popular too. While the vector graphics were rudimentary, that didn't take away from the immensely satisfying gameplay loop of blowing up a ton of space rocks.
Slow-paced puzzle game Myst was also a big hit in the '90s, selling more than 6 million copies. Resident Evil is probably the most relevant name on the list for modern audiences. The series is still going strong nearly three decades after the original 1996 game popularized the survival horror genre.
Back in 1989, Maxis released a city builder game called SimCity. Its intricate systems of urban design and problem management spurred a bunch of sequels and inspired the creators of other real-time strategy games, such as Command & Conquer and Age of Empires. As for Ultima: The First Age of Darkness, that 1981 game is one of the foundations of the role-playing genre. The developers of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are among those who've cited it as an influence, as GamesBeatnotes.
These five games are joining a whole bunch of other notable names in the World Video Game Hall of Fame, including last year's inducteesThe Last of Us, Wii Sports, Barbie Fashion Designer and Computer Space. The inductees are on permanent display at The Strong in Rochester, New York.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/asteroids-and-resident-evil-join-the-world-video-game-hall-of-fame-154647663.html?src=rss
Most headphones don't last forever, especially wireless ones as the battery life will inevitably dwindle. If you're ready for an upgrade and you're willing to splash a little cash, Apple's AirPods Max are worth considering. Those headphones are currently on sale at Amazon. The price has dropped by $100 to $450, putting it at just $20 above the lowest price we've seen for the cans to date. The offer applies to all colorways.
The price was one of our major drawbacks when we reviewed the AirPods Max back in 2020 so the sale mitigates that a bit. We gave the headphones a score of 84, with the audio quality and aesthetics proving to be major plus points.
We felt that the AirPods Max had great balanced sound and capable active noise cancellation (ANC). With both spatial audio and ANC enabled, we had no trouble getting 20 hours of use out of the headphones on a single charge, just as Apple pledged.
Given that it's been a few years since the AirPods Max debuted and the fact Apple is in the midst of switching out the Lightning charging port for a USB-C one across all of its devices, a new version of the headphones may be on the way. That may result in Apple bringing the price of the original model down even further to clear out the stock. That said, if you don't want to wait, this is a solid deal on a good set of headphones, particularly if you're already entrenched in the Apple ecosystem.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-airpods-max-are-100-off-and-close-to-a-record-low-143019278.html?src=rss
Your cable streaming bill may be getting more expensive once again. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is reportedly planning another price increase for Max. Bloomberg didn't reveal how much WBD is expected to jack up the subscription by. The cheapest ad-free plan is currently $16 per month after a $1 increase in early 2023. WBD is said to be aiming for $1 billion in earnings from Max and Discovery+ next year.
We could find out about any Max price increase as soon as Thursday. That's when WBD will report its earnings for the first three months of the year.
The price increase may be on the way as part of WBD's seemingly never-ending cost-cutting drive. As part of that, more layoffs may be in the pipeline. Over the last year, the company has fired more than 2,000 people and eliminated their positions.
Zazlav has reduced WBD's debt load by around $10 billion so far, according to Bloomberg. However, his decisions have infuriated creatives and many fans, such as those who are clamoring for the company to release the highly regarded live-action Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme instead of canning it for a tax rebate.
Coincidentally, Variety on Wednesday published a list of media and tech CEOs' pay packages for 2023. Zazlav's compensation is said to have shot up by 26.5 percent to $49.7 million. That's around 290 times what the median WBD employee makes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ugh-max-subscription-prices-might-be-going-up-again-181332420.html?src=rss
FTX has filed a plan with a bankruptcy court to pay back creditors who held cryptocurrency at the embattled exchange. The vast majority of customers are set to get their money back with interest, though they (and the debtors) missed out on major gains in the crypto market since FTX’s dramatic collapse in November 2022 — the price of Bitcoin has more than tripled since then.
FTX aims to fully pay back non-governmental creditors based on the value of their claims as determined by the bankruptcy court. That means 98 percent of creditors (those who have up to $50,000 in claims) will get 118 percent of the amount of their allowed claims. Other creditors will get their money back, plus what FTX describes as billions of dollars in compensation “for the time value of their investments.”
Government creditors are in line for payouts with a nine percent interest rate. The Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice are among the stakeholders with which FTX has agreed settlements.
The company suggests that, if its plan of reorganization is rubber stamped, it would be able to resolve disputes with private and government stakeholders “without costly and protracted litigation.” All told, FTX says that it will be able to distribute between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion in cash.
But, you may be wondering, where exactly is all this money coming from? After all, when FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 17 months ago, it held just 0.1 percent of the Bitcoin and 1.2 percent of the Ethereum that its customers thought it had.
FTX said it was able to monetize “an extraordinarily diverse collection of assets, most of which were proprietary investments held by the Alamedaor FTX Ventures businesses, or litigation claims.” As TechCrunch reports, the assets that FTX CEO John J. Ray III and his team tracked down included around $8 billion in real estate, political donations and venture capital investments.
The company filed the updated plan of reorganization just a few weeks after co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was found guilty in November of charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ftx-plans-to-refund-defrauded-customers-with-interest-143555536.html?src=rss
It's been a busy day of Apple news thanks to some new iPads, but the company has plenty of other M-series devices, including the iMac. Apple slotted M3 chips into its desktop computers late last year, and now the base version of the 2023 iMac is cheaper than ever. Thanks to a coupon at Amazon (make sure to clip it!), you can snap up an iMac with an M3 chip, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage for $1,149. The deal is available for the silver, pink, green and blue versions of the system.
A word of warning: while this is a decent deal on the surface, we do feel that the specs of the base 2023 iMac aren't quite up to scratch. It's difficult in this day and age to earnestly recommend a computer with just 8GB of RAM as apps become more and more demanding. That's why the iMac didn't score higher than 86 in our review.
On the plus side, the M3 chipset is very fast and the iMac's display remains terrific. Although this is a desktop system, it's lightweight, so it's not too difficult to move from one room to another or prop it up on something — the inability to adjust the screen vertically is a little disappointing.
There are some caveats to keep in mind here, but if you're looking for a nice, pretty new computer for relatively basic tasks (you're not going to be doing much gaming or video editing on a system with these specs) and don't mind splashing some cash, then this iMac might do the trick for you.
Beats might have some newaudio gear to blab about, but its older models are nothing to sniff at, especially when you can score solid deals on them. Take, for instance, the Beats Fit Pro. Those true wireless earbuds have dropped by $40 to $160. That matches the Black Friday price and it's just $10 more than the all-time low.
The Beats Fit Pro are our pick for the best workout headphones as well as our top choice for headphones for running. They're rated for IPX4 water resistance, which is always welcome to have while you're working up a sweat. They're comfortable to wear and have solid battery life (six hours plus an extra 21 hours from the charging case).
None of that would matter if the Beats Fit Pro sounded terrible, but they deliver great sound quality with the help of Adaptive EQ. Spatial audio is always a nice feature to have, while the active noise cancellation and transparency modes are solid. Multipoint connectivity is a plus too.
On the downside, we thought that the charging case felt cheap with a poor build quality. We also found it too easy to accidentally press the onboard controls. Still, if you're looking for a pair of earbuds for your workouts, you can't get much better than the Beats Fit Pro right now.
Elsewhere, the Beats Studio Pro are also on sale. At $180, they're effectively half off and just $10 more than the record low of $170.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-beats-fit-pro-wireless-earbuds-are-on-sale-for-160-right-now-190035110.html?src=rss
"By the end of this calendar year, we will be adding an ESPN tile to Disney+, giving all US subscribers access to select live games and studio programming within the Disney+ app," Iger said. "We see this as a first step to bringing ESPN to Disney+ viewers, as we ready the launch of our enhanced standalone ESPN streaming service in the fall of 2025." Iger also noted that ESPN+ subscribers will also be able to access content from that service through the new Disney+ tile, so Disney bundle subscribers will more or less have everything in one app.
Iger didn't reveal exactly what sports Disney would make available to everyone on Disney+, but made it clear that it would only bring a “modest” amount of programming over from ESPN. The company is also working with Fox Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery on another sports streaming service that's slated to arrive later this year and will include games from the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA.
Meanwhile, Disney+ just had its first profitable quarter in its four and a half years of existence. The service had been expected to lose $100 million in the first three months of 2024, but it actually posted a $47 million profit — surely aided by Taylor Swift's Eras Tour concert film debuting on the platform in March.
However, Disney's streaming business as a whole (which also includes Hulu and ESPN+) lost $18 million during the quarter. That's still a vast improvement over the $659 million that side of the business lost a year earlier as Disney edges toward overall profitability in streaming.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/disney-will-start-showing-some-live-sports-from-espn-this-year-173524610.html?src=rss
Apple refreshed its iPads in a major way today with new launches in both the iPad Pro and iPad Air lineups. Both have significant hardware updates, but somehow the iPad Pro now weighs less than all of its Air equivalents.
The 11-inch iPad Pro is 0.98 pounds (444 grams for the Wi-Fi model and 446 grams with cellular), while the same size version of the iPad Air is 1.02 pounds (462 grams with no difference between the Wi-Fi and cellular models).
The weight difference is more evident in the 13-inch tablets — the iPad Air comes in that size for the first time. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at 1.28 pounds (or 579 grams) for the Wi-Fi model, with the cellular version coming in three grams heavier. Meanwhile, though the Wi-Fi and LTE variants of the 13-inch iPad Air are only one gram apart, they both weigh 1.36 pounds, which is noticeably heavier than the iPad Pro.
Apple says the latest iPad Pro is the thinnest product it has made, with a switch to dual OLED panels helping make the tablet more slender than ever. On the flip side, that makes the name of the iPad Air a little janky at this point.
Sure, it's just a name and it doesn't matter that much. But at 1.03 pounds, the original Air was nearly half a pound lighter than the iPad 4. The latest model is essentially the same weight, but it's now heavier and chonkier than the iPad Pro, making Apple's premium tablets literally lighter than Air.
Follow all of the news live from Apple's 'Let Loose' event right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-m4-ipad-pro-is-literally-lighter-than-air-164942372.html?src=rss
Another Apple event is in the books and, as expected, the Let Loose showcase was all about iPad. We now have our first Apple device powered by an M4 chip in the iPad Pro, with the company surprisingly choosing to debut it there rather than in a Mac. There's also an upgraded iPad Air that's available in two sizes: 11 inches and 13 inches.
There are some accessory updates too, which isn't a big shock given that an Apple Pencil was prominent in the event's teaser image. So, without further ado, here's a rundown of everything Apple announced at its blessedly brief Let Loose event.
iPad Pro
It had been expected for a while that any updated iPad Pro would have an M3 chip, but Apple decided to upend the expectations of many by instead slotting the brand new M4 into its highest-end tablet. Apple says the new device delivers 50 percent faster performance than the M2 iPad Pro.
Rendering performance is said to be four times faster than on the M2 Pro as well. For the first time on an iPad, Apple is bringing support for dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the Pro with the M4.
There are some power efficiencies here too. Apple says the M4 can deliver the same performance as an M2 using half the power. So, if you're using the tablet for tasks that aren't too strenuous, it stands to reason that the battery should last for longer.
The other major upgrade for the iPad Pro is new display tech called Tandem OLED. As the name suggests, it uses two OLED panels layered on top of each other. That means this tablet should have richer colors and deeper blacks on what Apple is calling the Ultra Retina XDR display. Apple says the brightness levels max out at 1000 nits for standard and HDR, and 1600 nits for HDR.
Despite the dual layer, the OLED panels are still thinner than an LCD display. To that end, Apple says the iPad Pro is now somehow thinner than an iPod nano (RIP, you beautiful thing), making it the company's most slender product ever. There's a nano-textured glass option for the first time on an iPad Pro too, but only if you opt for at least 1TB of storage.
One other notable change is that the Ultra Wide 12MP front-facing camera is now on the landscape edge. The Magic Keyboard users out there may be pleased about that tweak.
The new iPad Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch, each with 256GB of storage. Add $200 to each of you want 5G cellular connectivity via eSIM.
We've already had a hands-on with the iPad Pro and, at first glance, the display seems like the show stealer.
M4
We have to chat a bit about what's powering the iPad Pro: the all-new M4 chipset. The Pro is the first Apple product to use the M4, even before any Mac.
The M4 has a new CPU with up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores. There's a 10-core GPU as well. Notably, the chipset's neural engine is focused on machine learning and AI. Apple says the neural engine is capable of 38 trillion operations per second — it's 60 times faster than the first neural engine that debuted in the A11 chip. AI features that the M4 will power on the iPad Pro will include real-time Live Captions, the ability to isolate subjects and remove backgrounds in videos in Final Cut Pro and automatic musical notation in StaffPad.
Odds are high that we'll start seeing Macs with the M4 pop up later this year, which might put folks off from buying the M3 MacBook Air Apple started selling just a couple of months ago (though the company says the MBA is now the best-selling 13-inch and 15-inch laptop on the planet).
The main reason for Apple skipping a silicon generation with the iPad Pro is likely to start a transition into AI hardware ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Expect the company to talk much more about what it plans to do with AI across all its products next month.
iPad Air
Apple
The iPad Air was well overdue for an update after being stuck with an aging M1 chipset for over two years. The latest model (or models) boast an M2 chipset. Still recent enough to make it a notable upgrade from the previous Air while keeping the more powerful iPad Pro distinct.
As I mentioned, the iPad Air now comes in two sizes, the existing 11-inch form factor and the new, larger 13-inch variant. That makes the Air the most cost-effective large screen iPad as things stand. Oh, and the front-facing camera is also positioned on the longer edge of the Air now. Thanks, Apple.
The company has doubled the base storage from the previous generation to 128GB. The 11-inch model starts at $599 and the new 13-inch Air is $799. For 5G cellular connectivity, you'll need to pay $150 extra. As with pretty much everything else Apple showed off today, the new iPad Air will drop next Wednesday.
We've also had some hands-on time with the new iPad Air. With the combination of the price and the various hardware updates, Apple could be onto another winner here.
Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard
Apple
There's a new Apple Pencil around town and it has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, including haptic feedback. The Apple Pencil Pro supports a new squeeze gesture too. If you rotate the barrel, you can change the orientation of brush and pen tools, just as you would with a pen and paper.
Find My support for the first time in an Apple Pencil is very welcome, considering how easy it is too lose the dang thing if you don't store it securely on the side of your iPad.
The Apple Pencil Pro costs $129. Preorders are open today and it ships on May 15.
Apple
Meanwhile, there's a new Magic Keyboard that's only compatible with the iPad Pro. This one is made from aluminum to give it a more premium feel and perhaps help users believe that the iPad Pro is the laptop replacement Apple has long envisioned its tablets being.
The latest version has a larger trackpad with haptic feedback, while there's a row of function keys, à la a more traditional keyboard.
The new Magic Keyboard also ships next week. If you want one for the 11-inch iPad Pro, it'll run you $300, while the larger variant is $350.
Follow all of the news live from Apple's 'Let Loose' event right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/everything-announced-at-apples-let-loose-ipad-event-161005007.html?src=rss