The Verge’s entertainment section collects the latest news from the worlds of pop culture, music, movies, television, and video games. Whether you want to know what to watch on Netflix or how to make the most of your streaming service budget, the entertainment section acts a reliable source. There’s simply too much to read, watch, hear, and play. Let us be your tour guide.
Video generators like Sora rely on a monoculture that no longer exists — and their creations are straight-up trash.
Video generators like Sora rely on a monoculture that no longer exists — and their creations are straight-up trash.
Stopping to watch the race from outside the track can get you fined, but as long as you keep moving, security can’t do anything about it. Most of the view is obstructed along the pedestrian areas. One of the few exceptions is apair of escalators at Spring Mountain andLas Vegas Blvd, which are closer than any of the seats and at one of the best turns.
Doors are a weird andnotoriously tough nut to crack for game devs. Tom Forsyth, formerly of Valve,shared a story about how he discovered a game-breaking bug less than five minutes intoHalf Life 2 while building a VR port in 2013. The crazy part was that the bug persisted even when they built the original source for the desktop, instead of VR. It’s a wild tale of math, CPU instruction sets, and game physics. Grab a drink and go read the full thread onMastodon.
As part of thesettlement with Universal, Udio hasamended its terms of service, and users canno longer download their outputs. This hasAI music makers furious, and with good reason. Unfortunately, they have little recourse, as the contract they sign when creating a Udio account includes a waiver of the right to bring a class action. This should alarm customers ofrival services likeSuno, which is also in the crosshairs of the major labels.
Dave Baszucki went ontheHard Fork podcast to talk about child safety on Roblox after its recent news that age estimation will be requiredto chat starting next year, and the conversation got pretty adversarial. Worth reading or listening to in full.
[The New York Times]
Over one yearafter its release on PS5 and PC, theSilent Hill 2 remake has finally made its way to Xbox Series X | S consoles. To celebrate its release, Konami is makingSilent Hill 2 available on Xbox and PS5 for $34.99 instead of $69.99 for a limited time, with a similar discount coming to PC next week.
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[Konami Digital Entertainment]
It’s a roguelike deckbuilder / dungeon crawler game calledVampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors and it’s set to launch next year. It’s “hopefully the first in a series of spin-offs,”Vampire Survivors creatorLuca Galante tellsXbox Wire.
Honestly, that’s insulting.
According toCircana analyst Matt Piscatella:
Battlefield 6 delivered blockbuster US sales in October. Battlefield 6 debuted as the best-selling game of the year, became the best-selling title in franchise history, and produced the highest single month tracked full game dollar sales total of any video game in three years.
EA is alsotouting it as the “best selling shooter game of the year.” The game was one of EA’smost important launches in years.
Amazon MGM Studios hasgreenlit a newStargate series for Prime Video, with Martin Gero as writer and showrunner. Gero formerly wrote, produced, and directed episodes of all three of the originalStargate series. The Prime Video series is the second attempt to revive the franchise after theStargate: Origins mini-series in 2018.
Thedigital movie rental shop is slated to debut in early December. Letterboxd describes it as “curated shelves instead of just scrolling lists endlessly without being able to make up your mind on what to watch.”
[Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine]
TheAI music company just announced that it raised$250 million in its latest funding round, and its valuation soared from about $500 million last year to nearly $2.5 billion. That money might be going right back out the door, though, as allthree major labels — Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group — arecurrently suingSuno.
[Wall Street Journal]
I want to know if Steam’s coming to Team Open or not. Paying 20-30 percent to a giant gatekeeper who intentionally structures their services so that, like, Steamworks users can’t talk to Fortnite users and so on, isn’t a very exciting prospect for the future right now.
Astoday’s Epic and Unity partnership shows, Epicis willing to work with its biggest competition — but I have my doubts that Valve will make the changes Epic wants anytime soon.
0Just in time for the holiday season — and, naturally,Epic’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sale, which is now live many days ahead of the actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
[Epic Games]
0Aspyr has shadow dropped Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition on both Nintendo Switch consoles. For the first time, you’ll be able to play the 2013 game that rebooted theTomb Raider franchise on the Nintendo Switch family of systems.
But if modern Lara with her modern video game conventions aren’t your thing, Aspyr has also releasedremastered versions of the classicTomb Raider gamesas well.
Rebecca Heineman, pioneering game developer and trans LGBTQ+ advocate,has passed away. She was a founder or co-founder of many video game studios including Interplay Productions, and worked on a number of projects includingThe Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate,Dragon Wars,Baldur’s Gate, and much more.
Heineman was profiled inNetflix’s video game documentaryHigh Score for winning the Atari NationalSpace Invaders Championship in 1980, making the United State’s first ever esports champion a trans woman.
The new trailer forAmazon MGM’s adaptation of Alex Weir’s novelProject Hail Mary teases a bit more of the catastrophe that’s imperiling Earth, but it’s mostly about the friendship that’s going to develop between astronaut Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an alien that looks like a pile of rocks.
Here’s a couple of facts for you, apropos of nothing: it has been less than a decade sinceMoana hit US theaters, and not even 12 months sinceMoana 2 followed it. And yet,here we are.
sam flynn:
The live-action remakes will continue until morale improves
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After launching it in betaearlier this month, Valve hasofficially launched a new feature that lets you keep downloading games even when you turn the display off. I’ve wanted something like this since I first got a Steam Deck more than three years ago.
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After Riot Games closed down the studio behind theMinecraft-likeHytaleearlier this year, the team behind the game hasacquired it back from Riot, rehired developers, and is vowing to fund it for “the next 10 years” as an independent studio.
[Hytale]
The concept ofa live-actionMoanaadaptation feels pretty premature until you remember thatthe original animated movie came out almost a decade ago. The new movie hits theaters on July 10, 2026.
The Game Awards’ Game of the Year nomineesare out:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,Death Stranding 2: On the Beach,Donkey Kong Bananza,Hades II,Hollow Knight: Silksong, andKingdom Come: Deliverance II.Expedition 33 got 12 nominations, the most“in TGA history.“
The show takes place on December 11th.
