With the death of E3 nearly complete, Summer Game Fest has become the go-to summer event for gamers to get hyped about. But this year’s Summer Game Fest, while it featured games that included a wide range of genres and a great diversity of characters, did not feature a single woman onstage.

Throughout the almost two-hour showcase, host Geoff Keighley brought up a number of personalities to interview onstage. He had industry veteran Ed Boon up to talk about Mortal Kombat 1. Nic Cage made an appearance to talk more about his Dead by Daylight character. Bryan Intihar came on stage to reveal the release date for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. But not once was a woman given that opportunity.

The lack of inclusion is particularly jarring because a great many of the games included in the showcase itself featured female main characters. I’m particularly jazzed about Lysfangha The Time Shift Warrior, an action RPG featuring a woman of color who can make duplicates of herself to help her fight.

Immortals of Aveum stars Gina THEE Torres of Firefly and Suits fame. Alan Wake 2’s presentation had a woman prowling in the dark fending off supernatural threats. For an industry that struggles with diversity but has taken great steps to be inclusive in terms of who is both on the game screen and behind it, it doesn’t send the best message when one of the biggest events of the year fails to spotlight the women, trans, and non-binary people who make these games a possibility.

To be clear, this is not only on Mr. Keighley. While he does have a responsibility to ensure his show reflects the diversity of its audience, it’s also on the developers featured in these presentations to put their marginalized employees forward for opportunities like this.

Representation matters. It’s just that simple. We know games are being made by a wealth of people, and we need to see them because it signals to the people watching that they, too, have the capability to do what they love.

Mr. Keighley, you can feature women in your shows. You’ve done it before, and I’d even argue that it’s easy, too. Right after Summer Games Fest ended, the Day of the Devs showcase began, and I didn’t have to wait long at all to see someone who looked like me.

Meta is bringing AI-generated stickers to Messenger as part of a slew of related features it’s working on for its social apps.

During a companywide meeting today that The Verge listened to, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of AI, told employees that the company will leverage its image generation model to let users create stickers based on text prompts. Employees will begin testing the feature internally before it’s made available to the public.

“With AI-generated stickers, our users can have infinitely more options for self-expression, cultural representations, and even trend relevance,” Al-Dahle says. “Of course, stickers are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Al-Dahle adds that the company is also “working on AI models that are going to transform any image you want in any way you want.” That includes doing things like “changing the aspect ratio of your picture” or turning a picture of a corgi “into a painting.” Today’s meeting also gave us our first look at Instagram’s Twitter competitor and revealed what CEO Mark Zuckerberg really thinks about the Apple Vision Pro.

Meta first hinted at using generative AI in its products when Zuckerberg announced that the company now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by AI, including “experiences” with text in Messenger and WhatsApp. In April, Zuckerberg told investors that Meta wants to bring “AI agents to billions of people” and reiterated his goals to launch generative AI features inside WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram.

The company is also delving deeper into AI with its LLaMA language model and recently announced a new open-source AI model that combines text, audio, visual, movement, thermal, and depth data.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the sequel to the remake of the beloved RPG, finally has a release window. It’ll be coming to the PS5 in early 2024. The announcement was made as part of Summer Game Fest.

In a trailer, we got a major new look at the upcoming game. Cloud and crew wandered grassy fields, visited what looked to be Cosmo Canyon, and took on some fearsome enemies. Even Yuffie, who first came back in Final Fantasy VII Remake’s DLC, showed up in the trailer. The game will be available on two discs, according to the trailer.

The second chapter of the elaborate remake project was unveiled last year, following the launch of Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020. Over the last few days, Square Enix has been teasing big news about the game through a series of tweets, confirming things like new characters, what sounds like a more open world, and more music. The day of the release date announcement, the company hinted that “more information will be revealed soon.”

Of course, Rebirth isn’t the only major Final Fantasy release coming. Final Fantasy XVI, which takes the series in a much darker, Game of Thrones-inspired direction, is launching very soon: it hits the PS5 on June 22nd.

It looks like Epic Games is doing a little rewilding on the Fortnite island. Ahead of the battle royale game’s next season — Chapter 4: Season 3, if you’re counting — the developer gave a brief taste of what to expect through a trailer that debuted at Summer Game Fest. The new season is called “Wilds,” and it introduces a new jungle biome to the map. The change shouldn’t be too much of a surprise; Epic has been teasing the wild theme over the past week. Oh, also, Optimus Prime is in the game now.

While we don’t have much to go on in terms of gameplay changes or other additions — though it looks like you can ride the raptors now — it won’t be too long now before we learn everything. The new season debuts on June 9th.

“Wilds” follows a pretty eventful cyberpunk-themed season that kicked off in March and included collaborations with Coachella, Star Wars, Attack on Titan, Spider-Man, and Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, alongside some big changes to its creator economy. Despite its age, the game doesn’t really seem to be slowing down much.

Marvel Snap is one of the best collectible card games this side of vanilla Hearthstone, and it’s getting a new feature players have been asking for since the release of Battle Mode. During Summer Game Fest, Marvel Snap frontman Ben Brode announced the all-new Conquest mode would be launching on June 13th.

“For our most competitive, high-skilled players, we wanted to give them the ultimate challenge with Conquest,” he said in a press release. “Players can now find out who truly is the best of the best and worthy of ultimate Marvel Snap glory!”

Conquest mode is kind of like a competitive ladder standard in other digital card games, and it makes use of Snap’s Battle Mode game format. Players start at the lowest tier, called the Proving Grounds. Wins at that level earn players a “silver ticket” they can use to enter the silver tier. Wins at the silver level unlock a gold ticket and so forth until you hit infinite. A single loss will end a player’s climb, requiring a new ticket that can be either earned or purchased with Snap’s premium gold currency. It’s not quite a standard competitive ladder, as losses bust you back down to square one, but the higher you get, the more wins are required to advance to the next tier, and each win awards “medals” that can be used to purchase goodies in a special shop. Even better, participation in Conquest mode doesn’t impact your overall season rank, so you can use it to test out new decks worry-free — something the Snap community has long asked for.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a Twitter Spaces conversation Thursday to announce the automaker is adopting Tesla’s electric vehicle charging standard, also known as the North American Charging Standard (NCAS). The deal will make available thousands of Tesla Superchargers to owners of GM electric vehicles.

“This is the most exciting time as we look at the transition to EVs,” Barra says on the call. Barra agrees with Musk that NACS is a better charger and should be the North American standard.

GM’s announcement and corresponding surprise Twitter call mirrors Ford CEO Jim Farley’s announcement last month that his company would adopt Tesla charging standard as well. Farley had joined Musk on a Twitter Space and expressed a real buddy-buddy persona with the rival CEO. Barra is similarly cozying up with Musk with the new announcement.

Tesla’s Supercharger network has been an exclusive benefit for Tesla owners for a long time, but the automaker had just begun opening some stations up for other EVs in both Europe and in the US. Tesla’s move to open chargers in the US using “Magic Dock” adapters allows the automaker to dip into the Biden administration’s pool of incentives out of a $7.5 billion plan to expand EVs and charging networks nationwide.

The sheer scale of Tesla’s Supercharger network eclipses other car manufacturers’ cobbled together agreements to provide their customers charging, including GM. Similar to Ford’s BlueOval (formally FordPass) network, GM has an “Ultium Charge 360” network consisting of Blink, Chargepoint, and others. Now GM will soon be able to use thousands of Superchargers.

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You wait for ages for a Matter-compatible smart lock, and then three come along at once. Aqara’s $189.99 Smart Lock U100, which was announced at CES, is available starting today. It’s compatible with Apple Home Key through HomeKit and has beta support for Matter through an Aqara hub. SwitchBot is updating its SwitchBot 2 Hub this week to add Matter support to its smart lock, and just last month, Yale added a Matter module to its $229.99 Assure SL smart lock.

Plus, Apple announced on Monday that Home Key is coming to Matter locks on its platform with iOS 17, meaning they won’t need HomeKit certification to use the feature.

Matter is a new smart home standard designed to make it easier to buy smart devices and have them work with everything in your home. Smart locks were among the first device types supported when Matter launched last November, but it took until now for Matter smart locks to actually appear.

With Matter, a smart lock should easily connect to one or more smart home platforms that support it, including Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. Amazon Alexa only supports a few Matter device types right now; smart locks and bridges aren’t included but should be soon.

Matter also means you can share the lock across platforms without needing to download additional apps, set up accounts, or link services through the cloud. This lets you use the same lock in Apple Home and Google Home, should you want, as well as control it with both voice assistants.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Aqara’s U100 is the first smart lock to work with Matter and Home Key

Aqara’s new smart lock is a full replacement battery-powered deadbolt lock that works over Bluetooth out of the box and can be unlocked with a fingerprint, keypad code, regular key, or NFC tag. It’s one of only three locks that work with Apple Home Key, which puts your door key into your Apple Wallet so you can unlock it the same way you use Apple Pay, by just tapping your iPhone or Apple Watch on it.

At $189.99, the U100 is by far the least expensive Apple HomeKey lock; the Schlage Encode Plus is $320, and the Level Lock Plus is $329.

The lock needs a Bluetooth connection to an Apple Home Hub or a Zigbee connection to an Aqara hub for out-of-home control and to connect to other smart home platforms. Aqara’s hubs work with Google Home, Alexa, and Apple Home and can connect with SmartThings via Matter. (The Aqara M2 hub supports Matter.) It can also connect with Google Home and Apple Home via Matter, but Matter doesn’t allow for touch-to-unlock yet, so you’ll need to use Aqara’s HomeKit compatibility to use Home Key.

Home Key will come to Matter locks in iOS17

Apple’s announcement that it will support touch-to-unlock for Matter locks in iOS17 wouldn’t affect the Aqara lock, as it already works through HomeKit. But it does mean that any locks that are Home Key hardware compatible will be able to use Home Key in Apple Home through Matter without HomeKit certification.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

One such lock this could apply to in the future is the SwitchBot Lock. According to SwitchBot’s PR manager, Sean Tan, the SwitchBot app is being updated this week to bring Matter support to the SwitchBot Lock, enabled through its new hub SwitchBot Hub 2. The lock has NFC capability and already works with Alexa and Google Home through the hub; the Matter update brings support for Apple Home and SmartThings (and another way to connect to Google Home).

Level’s Plus lock already supports Home Key, but it's feasible that its non-Plus, NFC-capable versions, which start at $249, could work with Home Key through Matter at some point. However, it's not clear if this would require an additional hardware update or not. Level has said its locks are Thread and Matter capable but has yet to announce when it plans to upgrade them to Matter.

Image: Yale

The other Matter lock you can now buy is the Yale Assure Lock SL, which comes with the new Matter Smart Module for $229.99. You have to buy the module and the lock together; you can’t just get the module and add it to your existing Assure SL, although Yale says that will be an option at some point.

The Assure SL with Matter is a Thread lock that only works with Matter, which means it needs a Matter controller from your ecosystem of choice and a Thread border router to work. For example, an Apple HomePod for Apple Home or a Google Home Mini and an Eero mesh Wi-Fi router for Google Home.

However, the Yale lock can only be controlled through a Matter-compatible app — it won’t work with Yale’s app as it doesn’t have Bluetooth. It’s also Yale’s older model — not its new sleeker, slimmer Assure Lock 2. Yale says it still plans to release the Assure Lock 2 with Matter, and that model will work with the Yale app and Matter controller apps. Neither Yale lock has Home Key support currently.

Why the wait?

Smart locks were among the first devices to be announced as part of Matter, so why are we only now getting a trickle of options? Yale says it’s due to shifting goalposts. “We’ve been working on Matter for our original Assure and Assure Lock 2 lines simultaneously, but due to the standard’s increased complexity, we found that we can implement Matter faster with Assure Lock SL,” Garrett Lovejoy of Yale told The Verge. “Based on where the Matter standard is today, it is a more limited experience. ... Knowing the Matter experience will evolve over time, we decided to release this initial offering at this time to serve Matter early adopters.”

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Yale isn’t the only lock manufacturer to cite issues with Matter as a reason for the slower-than-expected rollout of Matter products. When it released its Thread-enabled Schlage Encode Plus with Home Key, Schlage said it had the hardware on board to support Matter. However, it later reversed course, saying it would not upgrade the lock due to changes in the Matter spec and the slow adoption by the platforms (as noted, Alexa still doesn’t support smart locks). Instead, Schlage said it would release a new product line to support Matter, but we’ve seen no indication of that.

This makes Yale’s Assure SL the first Matter smart lock to work exclusively over the Thread protocol. Thread should address one of the biggest issues with smart door locks; replacing the batteries every three to six months. Thread is designed to drain less power than Wi-Fi, be more responsive, and work further away from a Wi-Fi router thanks to Thread’s meshing capability.

While it took half a year, we now have options for Matter smart locks and, along with lighting, sensors, plugs, and thermostats, are beginning to see a more fully featured Matter smart home arrive.

After relentless teasing, showcases, and extended gameplay trailers, we now know when we can play Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. During Summer Game Fest, game director Bryan Intihar made an appearance to share the last bit of the game we haven’t seen — a release date. On October 23rd, players can suit up as Miles and Peter to take down Kraven the Hunter and Venom in Spider-Man 2.

Also during the presentation, Intihar shared a bit more about one of the game’s villains, Kraven the Hunter. Intihar said that Kraven was unlike any character they’ve ever featured because he’s not superpowered or uses magic; he’s simply the best at what he does. Kraven’s coming to New York for his “greatest hunt,” with Intihar alluding that it’s not only Peter or Miles that he’s stalking.

Intihar also teased that the person in the iconic black symbiote is not Eddie Brock but someone else and that we’ll have to wait for the game’s October 23rd release date to find out.

Horror legend nerd John Carpenter is helping make a new game called John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando. Based on a brief trailer, it looks like you’ll be taking on hordes of zombies in a first-person shooter — fortunately, there were a lot of cars featured in the trailer that were used to fend off the enemies.

Carpenter is known for his work on some iconic horror franchises, including Halloween and The Thing. But he’s also a big gaming nerd — in a recent interview with AV Club, he said that he’s “addicted” to Fallout 76, “loved” Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and thought that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was “pretty damn good.” Hopefully he takes the best of what he loves from his favorite games and infuses that into Toxic Commando.

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is set to launch in 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC. The game is being developed by Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment.

After a long period of relative quiet, Alan Wake 2 now seems to be everywhere. The latest: a lengthy clip of gameplay was shown off at this year’s Summer Game Fest live keynote, which shows just how much of a survival horror experience this sequel will really be.

This fresh look at the game comes not long after developer Remedy Entertainment revealed a new trailer at Sony’s big PlayStation Showcase at the end of May. If you missed it, here’s that clip:

Alan Wake 2 was first revealed at the Game Awards in 2021 as the long-awaited sequel to a game that first launched back in 2010. In the intervening time, Remedy released a number of acclaimed titles, including the supernatural thriller Control, which is getting a sequel and multiplayer spinoff.

As for Alan Wake 2, the sequel will introduce a new playable character alongside the titular lead. Here’s the basic premise:

Alan Wake 2 pushes players into a psychological horror story from the perspective of two playable characters. Saga Anderson risks her life to solve a deadly mystery of murders in the Pacific Northwest while Alan Wake attempts to rewrite his reality to escape the depths of the Dark Place, a nightmare version of New York City.

The game launches on October 17th on the PC, PS5, and Xbox — though it won’t be available to buy on a disc.

2D side-scrolling Sonic is back, and this time, he’s bringing his friends (and a very old enemy).

I have remained fixed at Sega’s headquarters, demanding daily that it release Sonic Mania 2. And while my efforts have not yet been recognized, it seems like Sega’s giving me the next best thing. Announced during Summer Game Fest, Sonic Superstars looks like a beautiful mix of 3D graphics and classic 2D Sonic side-scrolling.

Sonic Superstars’ trailer came as a true and wonderful surprise. We’re greeted with 2D, 16-bit Sonic running through Green Hills before passing a barrier transforming him into 3D. Sonic Superstars will let you play as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and (!!!!) Amy, which will no doubt please her fans whose crops have been dry since the Sonic Advance days. Sonic Superstars offers new powers, including one that allows Sonic to wall-run and features the return of the classic special stage from Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic Superstars has a four-player co-op and will let you battle a long-forgotten enemy from the Game Gear days — Nack the Weasel (or Fang the Sniper if you’re an Archie Comics fan.)

Sonic Superstars looks like it’ll be the beautiful compromise between Sonic’s 3D and 2D fans, and I cannot wait for it to launch sometime in fall 2023.

Things didn’t go the way I thought they would, but then again, what sort of gadget would be equipped for something like this?

Like the rest of New York City, I looked outside my window yesterday and thought I’d been transported to the apocalypse. It’d been cloudy when I went on my morning run, but it hadn’t been orange. It’s then that I noticed all the notifications I’d silenced working heads-down that morning — texts from family and friends about Canadian wildfires, air quality indexes, and so, so, so many memes.

One text read, “Hey Vee, when are you gonna break out the Dyson Zone?”

When I reviewed the Zone in April, the air purification aspect seemed more science fiction than real life. My biggest enemies had been stinky car exhaust fumes, the NYC subway system, and maybe some overzealous pollen. To me, the $949 Zone had felt like a proof-of-concept gadget seeking to solve some faraway problem — either in the future or in distant locales with worse daily air quality. But here was a chance to briefly ignore the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s recommendations and venture outside with the Zone on and really put the air purifying features to the test. And if you’ve already seen the TikTok, you know that things didn’t go exactly as I’d expected.

Define “good” in this dystopian hellscape

A quick note: I don’t recommend anyone strap on a futuristic pair of headphones that double as a wearable air purifier and stride out into hazardous conditions. My spouse wouldn’t let me out without an N95 mask, and my editor reminded me that under no conditions was I to put my safety on the line for Content. Also, my mini-test was exactly that. A mini-test, and it wouldn’t pass muster for scientific rigor because I was out there for all of 20 minutes and had no other sensors to compare data from. My goal was to get out there quickly, see what the Zone told me, and get a taste of a future where people theoretically wear devices like this on days when orange smog blocks out the sun.

So yes, I did flip when, after a few minutes of walking, I opened the MyDyson app to see the “Air Quality (NO2) around me” metric was in the green. It was, the graph said, Good. Surely not. The air still smelled like someone was burning 1,000 cigarettes, even as I kept pinching down the bridge of my N95 mask for a better fit. I walked around my neighborhood a few times, gaping at the graph even as I could hear the Zone’s fans whirring loudly.

I was baffled, and frankly, sensorily overwhelmed. The Zone, which is primarily a pair of noise-canceling headphones, did a good job of dampening the wailing sirens from fire trucks echoing across the river in Manhattan. But you could still hear them if you’re not playing music. (And it really felt wrong to put on some jaunty tunes at that time.) Even so, it’s also amazing — not in a good way — how quickly you can become used to absurd circumstances. Once I had a chance to gather a quarter of my wits, I remembered that the Zone only live tracks nitrogen dioxide.

Dyson determines air quality based on the concentration of nitrogen dioxide and “other oxidizing gases.” The filters in the cans are supposed to capture ultrafine particles, odors, and nitrogen dioxide in city fumes. The EPA says that NO2 pollution in the air largely stems from emissions from cars, trucks, buses, power plants, and off-roading equipment. The apocalyptic soup I was in was wildfire smoke. And that is a potent cocktail of particulate matter, carbon dioxide, water vapor, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and other trace minerals. When they spread and damage man-made structures, it adds other chemicals and gases to the mix.

Screenshot: Victoria Song

Screenshot: Victoria Song / The Verge

The only thing the Zone was telling me was that, in the area around me, the concentration of nitrogen dioxide was not at a harmful level. It was not saying the air as a whole was of good quality.

But shouldn’t Dyson provide that context? Technically, it does. At the top of the app, you can see a banner that tells you PM2.5 and PM10 ratings. PM2.5 consists of microscopic particles measuring less than 2.5 microns, while PM10 refers to slightly bigger particles under 10 microns. The former often comes from burning fuels and organic compounds, while the latter can be found in dust, pollen, and mold. Both are inhalable and can cause adverse health effects. As far as wildfires go, these are more useful metrics in gauging air pollution along with the Air Quality Index (AQI).

If you swipe down, you’ll see a larger readout of the data average for your region. That included a big readout of “Very Unhealthy” and, in smaller numbers underneath, the AQI. If you look at that, you can at least put two and two together that no, in fact, the air quality was shite.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

I have some concerns here. I consider myself a reasonable, level-headed person, and most people in my life would agree. I was aware of all the above before stepping out into the orange haze. This nuanced information flew straight out of my brain and into the polluted smoke as soon as I started walking around. I’ve never experienced wildfire smoke before! It smelled terrible! I kept thinking I was walking around in a video game — and judging by the looks I got from other masked-up New Yorkers, I’m pretty sure they also thought I was some kind of video game or anime character. Those were the things running through my head first — not the science of particulates, filtration systems, and app design.

It’s my job to poke around through apps to read educational text and look things up. I doubt the average person would stand around in conditions like yesterday and think, “Wait, let me swipe to see the more detailed environmental information Dyson has provided.” They’re going to look at the big graph with the moving green line and think, “This is fake news.”

So does it work for wildfires?

Dyson claims that the Zone can filter out particles as small as 0.1 micron, which is theoretically smaller than the PM2.5 and PM10 particulates. I have no way to test the accuracy of that claim, but I can tell you the visor does not form a seal around your nose and mouth.

Against my better judgment, I did walk around for a few minutes with my N95 mask off, the fans going at full blast, and as little space as possible between the visor and my mouth and nose. Did I feel a cool blast of noticeably cleaner-smelling air in my face? Yes. Was it refreshing? A little, yeah. Did I also smell and breathe in the horrible hellscape around me? Also yes. With the N95 mask on, however, I didn’t feel as if that cleaner air pocket got through at all.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Speaking purely from a practicality standpoint, it does not make sense, then, to buy the $949 Zone thinking it will help you the next time — and I’m sure there’ll be a next time — the sky turns orange. Again, this is a pair of headphones that can filter nitrogen dioxide when you’re walking around a “normal” level of “everyday” city pollution. Provided you don’t care that people might stare at the futuristic design or that the air filtering kills battery life. I did not walk out yesterday with a full battery charge, but I had about 50 percent when I walked out into the smoke. It didn’t last more than 20 minutes with the filtering on.

There’s some consumer-level schadenfreude to be had from this experience. “Oh man, look at the expensive futuristic gadget that doesn’t even 100 percent protect you!” In a time of economic turbulence and horrible news cycles, there’s catharsis in laughing at tech companies. Apple’s new Vision Pro has the same fundamental problem. You want people to pay how much for a thing that does... what again? Have you seen inflation pricing, skyrocketing mortgage rates, and mass layoffs this past year?

But unlike the Vision Pro, you could argue that Dyson is thinking about a more urgent problem that needs solving now. I don’t think a $949 device that’s mostly a pair of headphones is the answer to what we’re going to do about worsening air pollution. I do think, however, that the Zone as a concept is onto something. It is not the only smart mask out here addressing terrible air quality, but it happens to be the one most people are intrigued by. The smog-filled cities of science fiction are no longer quite a dystopia. They’re here, now, and perhaps it’s time more companies started thinking of what to do about it.

One of Meta’s top executives showed employees a preview of the company’s upcoming Twitter competitor during a companywide meeting today that was watched by The Verge. You can see some of the screenshots above.

The new standalone app will be based on Instagram and integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol. That will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon.

The forthcoming app, which, in the meeting today, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox called “our response to Twitter,” will use Instagram’s account system to automatically populate a user’s information. The internal codename for the app is “Project 92,” and its public name could be Threads, based on internal documents also seen by The Verge.

“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon distribution,” Cox said, throwing direct shade at Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, to cheers from the audience. He said the company’s goal for the app was “safety, ease of use, reliability” and making sure that creators have a “stable place to build and grow their audiences.”

Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime, and was in discussions with other big names, including Oprah and the Dalai Lama. He said Meta will be making the app available “as soon as we can.”

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I’ll have more from inside Meta’s big all-hands meeting in tomorrow’s issue of my Command Line newsletter. You can sign up below to have it delivered directly to your inbox:

Despite the name, Summer Game Fest isn’t entirely about games — case in point, we got a brand-new trailer for The Witcher’s third season. The clip shows off just about everything the series is known for: bloody battles, terrifying monsters, fiery magic, and Geralt looking very awkward at a social affair. And, of course, he spends lots of time talking about how neutral he is.

Season 3 of The Witcher starts streaming on Netflix on June 29th — or at least, some of it does. Just like Stranger Things before it, the latest season of the fantasy show will be split into two parts. Volume one will debut in June, while the second volume will premiere in July.

Netflix has steadily been expanding its Witcher universe since the first season debuted in 2019. We’ve had a second season, an animated film, a live-action prequel series starring Michelle Yeoh, and now, a third season so big it’s being split in half. And while star Henry Cavill will be replaced by Liam Hemsworth starting with season 4, it doesn’t appear the franchise will slow down one bit — it’s already been renewed for season 5.

Meanwhile, the Witcher games have cemented their place as some of the bestsellers in the medium.

So, look. I understand that Apple just put out some fancy ski goggles, and now everybody and their mother is proclaiming the end of the physical screen as we know it. But like that one guy at the back of your college seminar, I would like to offer a quick counterpoint. It’s called MicroLED. Specifically, I would like to discuss the Asus ProArt Cinema PQ07, a gadget that I spent far too long staring at in Asus’ show floor booth at Computex 2023.

What is the ProArt Cinema PQ07, you may ask? Thank you for asking. It’s a 135-inch MicroLED display. MicroLED is not to be confused with Mini LED — wherein LEDs are arranged into local dimming zones — which is very common on modern televisions. MicroLEDs, by contrast, try to beat OLED at its own game. They are microscopic in size, and each pixel is formed from a cluster of them. The result is a panel with significantly better brightness and contrast than you see from even the fanciest OLED screens today. (There’s also, crucially, less risk of burn-in.)

This is a technology Samsung has shown off before in a sort of show-off-y capacity (remember that gigantic Wall thing?), and both Samsung and Sony have released a few luxury MicroLED displays that are God knows how expensive. Apple has said it plans to build MicroLED into its Apple Watch watchfaces, but that’s still a few years out. Outside of those cases, the technology has seen pretty limited rollout. The PQ07 is the first MicroLED display that Asus has attempted, and this was my first time seeing it in person.

Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge

The best way I can describe this technology is that it makes the surrounding area look insufferably dull. When I first walked past the demo unit on the show floor, it was displaying a picture of a grassy field at night with a tree in the middle and a sharp multicolor sky. The colors are bright, deep, and vibrant, in a way that these meager photos I took here couldn’t even hope to do justice. The blacks were intense, and the reds and yellows seemed to pop out of the screen.

From there, I watched it display a number of different dynamic outdoor scenes, and there were no discernible pixels. I could not tear my eyes away. When I did, the Computex show floor just looked sad. And it’s making me hope that, by some miracle, we see MicroLED become more accessible and more widely available in the coming years. Because playing games on this thing would be next level. It makes reality look better than it actually is. And if gaming is an escape, MicroLED could be the ultimate tool.

In terms of boring specs, the PQ07 is a 4K HDR panel. It has 0.7815 pixel pitch, 2,000 nits of peak brightness, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and it covers 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. It looks and seems like it should be a television, but it does not have TV functionality, as far as I know, so I guess it’s technically a display.

What would you actually use this for? Eh, I’m sure there are things. Like, Asus listed some stuff when I asked at the booth. Virtual production, broadcasting, flight simulator, live streaming, conference, public signage, and home cinema is what I have written down. You know, all that stuff I need to do in my house all the time.

Asus has not announced pricing yet, of course. Maybe it’ll be $14. Then, I’ll be able to buy one for each wall of my living room. Fingers crossed.

Ubisoft just revealed new details about a Prince of Persia game — and no, it wasn’t the long-delayed Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake. At Summer Game Fest 2023, Ubisoft kicked off the show with a new side-scrolling action-platformer, called Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

“Dash into a stylish and thrilling action-adventure platformer game set in a mythological Persian world where the boundaries of time and space are yours to manipulate,” according to the game’s website. You’ll be able to access “time powers” for fighting and platforming, and the game will have different biomes that have their own “identity, wonders, and dangers.”

Based on the game’s reveal trailer, it looks like really fluid to play — my only experience with the series is the original Sands of Time, and The Lost Crown seems to carry over much of what that game feel so good. (And it will have to tide us over for a bit, since the Sands of Time remake was just rebooted.)

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is set to release on January 18th, 2024 for Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Ubisoft will be revealing more about the game on June 12th at its Ubisoft Forward show.

During Keigh3, we got our first gory glimpse of gameplay from the latest Mortal Kombat.

There was a lot of blood and a lot of gory fatalities so you’re gonna have to watch the trailer on YouTube. From the trailer, it also looks like the game’s story might touch on some of the themes that were featured in the recent movie. Series creator Ed Boon also made an appearance to talk more about the game’s new feature — Kameo fighters.

Kameo fighters essentially work kinda like assists in Marvel vs. Capcom or DragonBall Fighter Z. Kameo fighters pop in and out of the fight extending kombos (sorry) and are pulled from a different roster specially made for them. We didn’t get a full list of the Kameo fighters but at first blush it looks like Sonya Blade, Jax, Kano, Sub-Zero, and Scorpion will be available.

Mortal Kombat 1, which is confusingly the 12th mainline entry and the 29th game in the series overall, was announced last month as a part of the game’s 30th-anniversary celebration. We know little of the game’s story, only that time has been rewound — again. From the game’s FAQ, we know that Mortal Kombat 1 will feature the franchise’s most iconic characters. There’ll be Raiden, Liu Kang, Kitana, Johnny Cage, and basically anyone who’s been around long enough to have been represented in the game by a real human being. The extended gameplay trailer showed that we’re also getting more some of the newer characters — like hot zaddy Kenshi — and I can’t wait for all the a-little-bit-too-gory ways we’ll get to finish them.

Mortal Kombat 1 launches on September 19th.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem phased by Apple’s introduction of the Vision Pro.

In a companywide meeting with Meta employees today that The Verge watched, the CEO said Apple’s device didn’t present any major breakthroughs in technology that Meta hadn’t “already explored” and that its vision for how people will use the device is “not the one that I want.” He also pointed to the fact that Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 headset will be much cheaper, at $499 compared to the Vision Pro’s $3,499 price tag, giving Meta the opening to reach a wider user base.

“I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important,” Zuckerberg told employees, who were gathered at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters for its first all hands since 2020. Zuckerberg said that the Quest is about “people interacting in new ways and feeling closer” while also “about being active and doing things.”

“By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said of Apple’s WWDC keynote earlier this week. “I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”

Zuckerberg may be breathing easy now, but Meta has certainly been on edge up until Apple’s announcement. It rushed out its Quest 3 announcement just days before even though the device isn’t shipping until the fall. Meta has been trying to position itself as a leader in the virtual and augmented reality space for a long time and is plowing billions of dollars a year into the effort, causing concern among some investors. The introduction of Apple’s headset marks a major competitive threat.

Meta has found early success in VR gaming and fitness, but it’s struggled trying to reach the higher end and general computing market that Apple is going after, with last year’s Quest Pro largely being seen as a flop.

You can read Zuckerberg’s full remarks about Apple’s headset below:

Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.

From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.

But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.

More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.

I’ll have more from inside Meta’s big all-hands meeting in tomorrow’s issue of my Command Line newsletter. You can sign up below to have it delivered directly to your inbox:

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State lawmakers in Louisiana passed a new bill Tuesday banning minors from creating their own social media accounts.

The bill, HB61, would ban “interactive computer services” from allowing people under 18 to sign up for their own accounts without parental consent. The bill’s definition of online services is extremely broad, seemingly barring minors from creating social media accounts on sites like Instagram, accessing popular online games like Roblox and Fortnite, or even registering for an email address. The bill also goes as far as allowing parents to cancel the terms of service contracts their children entered into when signing up for existing accounts.

As of publication, it’s unclear how the state plans to enforce these new rules, but it calls on state entities to review the bill and provide feedback before it would go into effect.

The Louisiana State Legislature passed the bill unanimously on Tuesday, sending it to Gov. John Bel Edwards’ desk for final approval. The ban would go into effect August 1st of next year if he chooses to sign it.

“We are hopeful that Governor Edwards will veto this bill. It violates First Amendment rights, takes away parental rights for their families and requires massive data collection on all Louisiana citizens,” NetChoice vice president and general counsel Carl Szabo said in a statement Thursday.

Louisiana is just one of a handful of states that have passed tough regulations for children online over the last year. In March, Utah passed a measure requiring minors to obtain the consent of a guardian before using social media. In April, Arkansas passed a similar bill. Some states like California have taken a less restrictive path, requiring tech companies to turn on their highest privacy settings by default for young users.

Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas have also considered similar legislation.

Like the Louisiana and Utah bills, many of these measures would force social media companies to verify the age of users before allowing them to create accounts, oftentimes requiring people to submit a photo ID. The Louisiana bill does not explicitly require sites to implement an age verification program.

Members of the US Congress have also introduced similar measures under new pressure from the White House. In April, a group of senators put out the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a bill that would ban kids under 13 from social media and establish a nationwide age verification pilot program.

For years, civil rights groups, tech companies, and the government have tried to find ways to check a user’s age while protecting the privacy of other parts of their lives. Groups like Fight for the Future have also argued that under-18 social media bans could put children from marginalized backgrounds at risk, removing their access to beneficial resources online.

“It’s true that Big Tech’s advertising model hurts kids and teens,” Fight for the Future said in a call for people to tell their elected officials not to pass online age restrictions. “But age-gating all social media, for anyone under 18?That won’t solve the problem, and it’s a direct attack on millions of young people’s First Amendment rights.”

Mercedes-Benz is the first company to receive approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to sell or lease vehicles with an automated driving system to the public, according to the agency.

The DMV issued an autonomous vehicle permit to the company, authorizing Mercedes-Benz to sell vehicles with its Drive Pilot highway driving feature for use on public roads. Drive Pilot is described as a Level 3 system, in which the car does all the driving but the human driver needs to stand by to take control at a moment’s notice.

Drive Pilot is similar to “hands-free” highway driving systems like GM’s Super Cruise, Ford’s BlueCruise, and Tesla’s Autopilot, in so far as it allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel and feet off the pedals under certain conditions. But unlike Level 2 systems, in which drivers are required to keep their eyes on the road, Mercedes’ Level 3 system has a few more allowances.

For example, the driver must keep their face visible to the vehicle’s in-car cameras at all times but can also turn their head to talk to a passenger or play a game on the vehicle’s infotainment screen. (Tetris, for example.)

But Drive Pilot is not a fully autonomous system. Drivers can’t nap in the car or ride in the backseat without anyone behind the steering wheel. The system will disengage if you even attempt to cover your face, blocking access to the in-car cameras. Mercedes says that Drive Pilot will only operate at speeds up to 40 mph on “suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density” — which seems to suggest it will only be available in heavy, stop-and-go traffic.

It will be interesting to see how Mercedes drivers respond to the limits set out in the permit from the DMV. The agency says:

This permit excludes operation on city or county streets, in construction zones, during heavy rain or heavy fog, on flooded roads and during weather conditions that are determined to impact performance of DRIVE PILOT. Vehicle owners must watch a mandatory video explaining the capabilities of the system and how to engage and disengage the technology before Mercedes-Benz will activate DRIVE PILOT in the vehicle.

In addition to cameras and radar, the system relies on data from a lidar sensor to construct a 3D model of its surrounding environment, as well as microphones to detect approaching emergency vehicles.

Earlier this year, Mercedes self-certified in the state of Nevada that Drive Pilot meets the state’s minimal risk requirements. But today’s announcement represents the first time that a regulating agency has taken a close look at the technology and given it the green light.

To be sure, Level 3 systems are not without their risks. Most autonomous vehicle operators, including Waymo and Cruise, have said they think Level 3 is too dangerous, preferring to work exclusively on Level 4 technology. The reason is the need for drivers to stay attentive despite the vehicle performing most of the driving tasks.

Research suggests that the hand-off between the driver and the system can be affected by driver complacency, which can cost a person crucial seconds before regaining control of the vehicle.