For the past few years, toymaker Sentinel’s “Fighting Armor” toyline has transformed Marvel heroes from across the comics into mechanized warriors better than even the actual Marvel Comics crossovers to do so. While its forays into the worlds of Mutantkind have been few and far between, its latest turns an X-Men…
TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform as a royalties spat with Universal Music Group (UMG) rumbles on. UMG recently yanked recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok including tracks from the likes of superstars Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks expected to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week.
The latest step in this saga affects works by artists who have partnered with songwriters who are under contract to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), according to Variety. Due to an issue called split copyrights, if a UMPG-contracted writer has contributed to a song in any way, that track may have to be removed from TikTok. So artists who have collaborated with the likes of Swift, Adele, Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Ice Spice, Elton John, Harry Styles and SZA may see their songs disappearing from TikTok and being muted on videos that currently use them. The move will prevent more artists from plugging their work on the most important platform for promoting music.
According to the BBC, UMG removed around three million songs from TikTok after an agreement over its recording catalog expired. UMG’s deal with TikTok over its publishing catalog (which covers some four million songs) ends later this week, at which point all relevant tracks could vanish from the short-form video service.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-is-muting-more-songs-amid-its-tussle-with-universal-music-161839190.html?src=rss
Ebon Moss-Bachrach discusses how he’ll become The Thing for Fantastic Four. Doug Bradley wants one last outing as Pinhead. Get a look at Krysten Ritter in Orphan Black: Echoes. Rachel Brosnahan teases David Corenswet’s Superman suit in Legacy, plus, Kung Fu Panda 4 riffs on Dune. Spoilers, away!
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub and other adult entertainment sites, for failing to enforce the state’s new age verification laws, first reported by 404 Media on Monday.
It’s another bleak day for the gaming industry as there’s more news of mass layoffs. This time around, its PlayStation that’s gutting its studios. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) says it’s laying off around 900 staff from its PlayStation division, roughly 8 percent of that department’s headcount.
Insomniac (Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us) and Guerrilla (Horizon) are all affected by the cuts. Those studios are behind some of PlayStation’s most important franchises. For instance, within three and a half months, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had sold 10 million units.
Sony’s London Studio, which had been working on a co-op multiplayer game for PlayStation 5, is shutting down entirely, while Firesprite will also lose some staff. In addition, PlayStation will lay off workers from its Technology, Creative, and Support teams.
PlayStation employees in the US who are losing their jobs will be informed today. Sony will adhere to local laws and regulations for carrying out layoffs in other territories — the company says people in all of its global regions will be affected.
“After careful consideration and many leadership discussions over several months, it has become clear changes need to be made to continue to grow the business and develop the company,” outgoing SIE president and CEO Jim Ryan told staff in an email. “We had to step back, look at our business holistically, and move forward focusing on the long-term sustainability of the company and delivering the best experiences possible for our community. The goal is to streamline our resources to ensure our continued success and ability to deliver experiences gamers and creators have come to expect from us.”
Meanwhile, Hermen Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios, said that SIE leadership evaluated its studios and portfolio and looked at projects that are in various stages of development. Some of those projects have now been canceled. Hulst didn’t provide more details, but the projects that have been canned surely include the one that London Studio was working on.
“I want to be clear that the decision to stop work on these projects is not a reflection on the talent or passion of team members,” Hulst wrote in a memo. “Our philosophy has always been to allow creative experimentation. Sometimes, great ideas don’t become great games. Sometimes, a project is started with the best intentions before shifts within the market or industry result in a change of plan.”
Hulst also noted that SIE is re-assessing its approach to delivering the kinds of expensive blockbuster single-player games that PlayStation has become known for over the last decade or so, and balancing that out with its desire to create long-tail multiplayer games. “Delivering the immersive, narrative-driven stories that PlayStation Studios is known for, at the quality bar that we aspire to, requires a re-evaluation of how we operate,” Hulst wrote. “Delivering and sustaining social, online experiences — allowing PlayStation gamers to explore our worlds in different ways — as well as launching games on additional devices such as PC and mobile, requires a different approach and different resources.”
Sony is working on multiple live-service games and had planned to release 10 of them by 2026. At least one of those — The Last of Us Online — was shelved. However, the company has seen some success on the live-service front, with Helldivers 2 becoming one of the biggest hits of the year so far.
However, it emerged this month that Sony doesn’t plan to release any sequels for its major first-party franchises until at least April next year. It’s relying on third-party titles such as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and the Elden Ring expansion to help cover the gaps in its own pipeline. The company also lowered its PS5 sales forecast for the current fiscal year, which ends on March 31. It expects to sell 21 million consoles in fiscal 2023, down from the previous estimate of 25 million.
This slate of layoffs brings the total number of job losses in the games industry so far this year to more than 7,000 (we haven’t even reached March yet). That’s on top of the more than 9,000 people who were laid off from the industry in 2023.
Microsoft conducted sweeping cuts in its gaming division in January, laying off around 1,900 people. Riot Games, Unity, Twitch (which is games-adjacent instead of a gaming company), Supermassive Games, Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive and Sega of America are also among those who have carried out layoffs.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/playstation-is-laying-off-900-staff-across-naughty-dog-insomniac-and-other-studios-145323606.html?src=rss
Imagine splurging $3,500 on a new Apple Vision Pro headset only to discover a few weeks later that your very expensive device now has a crack on the front of the screen—one you’re sure isn’t your fault.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is famous for its electric cars, but the company is also a world leader in robotics. Musk considers Tesla’s AI to be severely underrated—a claim that’s not entirely baseless. While Tesla attracts world-class talent to build robots and artificial intelligence, these areas are much less talked about…
Do you never want to go back into the office again? We created a list that would make anybody’s work-from-home setup so ergonomic, so comfortable, so pretty, and so convenient it will make you want to avoid ever stepping into an office ever again. For those currently , they can instead stare at this list with a…
A reliable way to keep appendages safe from the ravages of the cold is finally here. This month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment meant to prevent limb amputation from severe frostbite, Eicos Sciences’ Aurlumyn. Compared to standard care, the intravenous drug was shown to significantly…
Starting on March 5, GeForce Now users enjoying the service for free will find themselves faced with ads while they’re waiting for their turn to play. NVIDIA has sent out an email to free users, telling them that they’ll experience “up to two minutes of video sponsorship messages before each gaming session while in queue.” It will provide support for the free service, the company said. NVIDIA also believes that the ads will lead to shorter wait times for free users. Company spokesperson Stephanie Ngo has confirmed the change to The Verge.
GeForce Now gamers in the free tier can enjoy one hour of gaming at no cost, but they get cut off and have to wait in queue every time their hour-long gaming session is done. The most avid gamers who don’t want to pay for GeForce Now’s $10 Priority or $20 Ultimate subscription tiers will have to sit through ads multiple times. That said, the ads only show up in queue and not in the middle of a user’s playtime, so they’re not intrusive in the way Netflix’s or Amazon Prime Videos’ ads are.
NVIDIA recently became the third most valuable company in the United States, overtaking Alphabet, and the fourth overall worldwide. The company is now valued at $1.83 trillion and has an 80 percent share in the high-end chip market, thanks to the AI boom over the past year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nvidia-geforce-now-gets-pre-roll-ads-for-free-users-125754649.html?src=rss
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