The CSA, Thread Group, and Wi-Fi Alliance say they’re working together to fix the problems that have plagued the smart home standard in its first two years. In this exclusive interview, I ask them how and when.
“If the Galaxy Ring cost $250, I’d say Samsung was a diabolical genius company. But at $400, it’s asking a lot for what amounts to a secondary device for your smartwatch,” is how Victoria ultimately felt about the Samsung Galaxy Ring in her review. Well, it’s not exactly $250, but a deal on the health-tracking wearable that brings it down to $279.99 ($120 off) at Amazon is close enough.
You’ll find that price across all three of its colors (black, gold, and silver) in several sizes, some of which you’ll have to sign in and add to your cart in order to see. Available ring sizes range from 5 to 15, and while a blind purchase might be safe if you already know your ring size, we recommend using the $10 sizing kit to help you dial it in.
Sadly, that kit is temporarily out of stock at Amazon as of this writing, otherwise you’d be able to recoup the full cost as a credit usable toward the ring. The kit is in stock at Best Buy, however, which bundles a $10 gift card to offset the cost and also currently offers $120 off the Galaxy Ring with a My Best Buy Plus ($49.99 a year) and My Best Buy Total ($179.99 a year) membership.
The Galaxy Ring’s normal $400 price is $50 more expensive than the base Oura Ring 4, but unlike the latter, it doesn’t require a subscription, which makes this deal a bit sweeter. You’ll need a Galaxy smartphone for the best experience, though, as the IP68 water-resistant wearable offers rather basic but standard activity and sleep tracking features without it. It can measure your blood oxygen level, skin temperature, heart rate, and tracks your steps and workouts. But a phone with Galaxy AI can use the metrics to generate insights about your quality of sleep, workout results, and even an Energy Score that attempts to quantify your fatigue levels.
We found these features sufficiently accurate and in line with the competition, but the tips aren’t always the most helpful, and you can get better accuracy from a Galaxy Watch. Using the ring and watch in tandem would result in 30 percent longer battery life for the Galaxy Ring’s six to seven-hour runtime, we’ve found, as the ecosystem prefers the Watch’s readings where possible.
Other features require a Galaxy smartphone, too, such as pinch gestures for smartphone actions and the ability to trigger the ring’s lights with Samsung Find. That means you should probably go with another ring if you don’t use a Samsung phone.
Law professor Kate Klonick explains what Big Tech’s Trump appeasement is really about.
Comcast is launching a $70 per month “Sports & News TV” streaming bundle featuring live games from the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and NCAA. The package, which marks the latest attempt to build out the sports streaming industry, is available to Xfinity Internet subscribers and lets you tune into over 50 news and sports channels, including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, and CNN.
It also comes with a subscription to Peacock, 300 hours of cloud DVR storage, and more than 100 free streaming channels. Though you don’t need Xfinity’s X1 TV box to access the bundle, Comcast says using one will give you access to features like multiview, “enhanced” 4K, and Odds Zone, which displays odds from DraftKings and FanDuel. You can also find the Sports & News TV package from the Xfinity Stream app on mobile and smart TV platforms like Apple TV and Roku.
Additionally, Comcast notes that you can combine the sports streaming subscription with some of the company’s other packages, like the $9.95 per month More Sports & Entertainment package, which comes with channels like NFL RedZone, MLB Network, NBA TV, and NHL Network.
DirecTV similarly launched a $69.99 per month MySports streaming package last week, which — unlike Comcast’s bundle — doesn’t have local CBS content yet and is only available in select cities for now.
These new sports-focused packages could help fill the gap left by Venu, the scrapped live sports streaming service led by ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Fubo is also set to combine with Hulu + Live TV after reaching a settlement with Disney over the launch of Venu. In the absence of a dedicated sports streaming subscription, viewers without cable are left piecing together live games across various services, including Paramount Plus, Peacock, Apple TV Plus, and Max.
Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
A busy January of gaming news continues. Last week it was the reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2, and now it’s a showcase of upcoming Xbox games. Microsoft’s latest Developer Direct takes place today, and it’s meant to provide a “deep dive” look at some of the biggest upcoming games for Xbox. That includes Doom: The Dark Ages (which might release in May, according to leaks) as well South of Midnight and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Most exciting, though, is the promise of a mystery game. We don’t know what it is — hence the mystery — but the tease suggests it’s something big. For context, the highlight of last year’s Developer Direct was a gameplay deep dive for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. We’ll be covering the news as it happens, but if you want to tune in live, here are all the details. (You can also just watch via the embed at the top of this article.)
The event itself takes place on January 23rd at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. And it’s streaming on pretty much all of the Xbox and Bethesda channels:
The latest batch of new Pokémon TCG Pocket cards finally has a concrete release date, but it seems like you won’t be able to trade them right off the bat.
The Pokémon Company announced today that Space-Time Smackdown, Pokémon TCG Pocket’s latest expansion, is set to debut at the end of the month right after the game’s trading feature launches on January 29th. While cards from the last set could all be obtained from a single type of pack, Space-Time Smackdown — which includes a number of monsters from Pokémon Diamond / Pearl / Platinum — will come from packs featuring the legendary Pokémon Dialga and Palkia.
Along with Space-Time Smackdown’s announcement, TCPi also revealed a bit more about how the trading mechanic will involve two new types of in-game currencies — trade houseglasses and trade tokens. It seems as if there will be cooldown periods as well as a cost if you want to swap cards from Pocket’s Genetic Apex and Mythical Island sets with other players. But there will definitely be some waiting involved for people hoping to trade Space-Time Smackdown, which will not be tradeable until a later date after it drops on January 30th.
The Nvidia RTX 5090 FE barely fit my 12.7-liter small form factor case, but using it was a dream.
In 2022, I wrote that GPUs were headed in the wrong direction — their price, size, and power consumption were off the charts. And while I still believe that’s true, I can now confirm Nvidia has at least made one phenomenal exception in the size category: the two-slot “Founder’s Edition” of its RTX 5090 graphics card, on sale January 30th.
The last time Nvidia made a two-slot flagship graphics card, it was the 2021 RTX 3080 Ti FE — the 3090, 4080 and 4090 were gigantic by comparison.
So, while my colleague Tom Warren was busy writing his full review of the new 5090 using the best gaming CPU, I wedged one of the $2,000 cards into my own aging mini desktop. I wanted to see whether the surprisingly small flagship GPU was truly ready for small form factor (SFF) cases — or, whether my beloved 12.7-liter Ncase M1 chassis is well and truly obsolete.
To my surprise, it worked: all I needed was a new power supply to turn my backpack-sized daily driver into one of the most powerful gaming PCs in the world. At 4K resolution, I’m typically seeing more than double the framerate I get with an RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition, one of the last cards that could comfortably fit in the Ncase M1, to give you some idea.
But I’m not going to suggest you do the same! For starters, we’re talking about a two thousand dollar graphics card and a one thousand watt power supply — which I actually saw consuming up to one whole kilowatt (as measured by my trusty Kill A Watt at the wall) in my Cyberpunk 2077 tests. With an RTX 3080, my system consumed over 200 fewer watts. Not that I minded having a space heater on these cold January days!
But I literally had to wedge the 5090 into my Ncase M1 to make it fit, and even remove and reattach the video card’s bracket inside my case. And even then I couldn’t fully seal my desktop because the GPU’s new 12V-2x6 power connector occupies a chunk of space where my case’s side panel is supposed to go. You’ll want an SFF-ready case with more clearance than I have.
Still, leaving my desktop’s guts exposed was a small price to pay to toy with this much power! It’s enough to play games at 4K at their maximum settings, save for full ray tracing (aka path tracing). It’s even got enough horsepower to turn on path tracing, too, if you combine it with dynamic upscaling and/or fake frame generating tech.
I normally play Helldivers 2 on an old 3060 Ti graphics card I bought for just $400, where I’m forced to rely on those tricks just to get smooth 4K-ish gameplay. It was quite nice, if expected, to finally max out that game on the 5090 instead.
What I didn’t expect: my aging, space-constrained AMD 5800X desktop delivered the same performance as Tom’s open-air testing rig in quite a few of our 4K gaming benchmarks. I knew it was possible, but it goes to show that Nvidia’s fancy two-slot “double flow through” cooler really is suitable for SFF PCs.
It depends on whether your games are CPU limited, of course, as my older PC does have a slower CPU — and most of today’s games tend to be at least somewhat CPU limited at 1440p resolution, where Tom’s system often pulled far ahead by 20 to 60 percent.
Facing down the alien swarms and flying particles in Returnal, for example, Tom pulled 201 frames per second at 1440p while my diminutive desktop managed just 169fps; in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, the most CPU-limited game we’re testing, my bottlenecked system averaged just 123fps to Tom’s 200fps.
But that’s still over 120fps on max settings, more than enough for butter-smooth sessions of these single-player games! And if I were to pair my tiny tower with a 4K TV in my living room instead of a 1440p monitor, as many SFF PC builders might like to do, I’d have a blast — my 4K results always averaged over 60fps, and were often within just a few FPS of Tom’s open bench.
And again, I’m typically seeing the RTX 5090 delivering more than twice the horsepower of an RTX 3080, making it quite the upgrade for SFF fans with deep pockets. That’s not necessarily something to celebrate, though: the $2,000 RTX 5090 admittedly costs more than twice as much as a $700 RTX 3080 did at its 2020 launch, and will be out of reach for most gamers even if shortages and scalpers don’t rear their ugly heads.
When it comes down to it, I think the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is a damn cool piece of kit. It makes me want to quote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off because it is so choice. It’s a noteworthy exception to the very annoying trend of GPUs expanding in every direction. But at $2,000, 575 watts of power by its lonesome, and with no other Nvidia board partner offering anything nearly as compact, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The next-gen GPU battle begins with Nvidia alone at the top.
After months of teases, Cadillac officially announced the Lyriq-V as a 615-horsepower, high-performance electric SUV that will go on record as the “quickest” vehicle ever produced by the luxury automaker.
With that much horsepower, and 650 pound-feet of torque, Cadillac says the Lyriq-V is able to leap from zero to 60mph in just 3.3 seconds — besting the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing’s acceleration by a tenth of a second. That may not sound like much, but when you consider that the CT5-V Blackwing is lauded as one of the most expertly engineered American cars ever made, and when you realize that the CT5-V Blackwing is likely the last of its kind, you start to see the significance of the Lyriq-V’s performance specs.
Of course, there’s some fine print to consider. That acceleration time is measured on a closed course, using the Lyriq-V’s Velocity Max that’s also available on Cadillac’s forthcoming EV lineup that includes the Vistiq, Optiq, and Escalade IQ. And it includes a metric called “Initial Vehicle Movement,” which is when the vehicle starts moving rather than when the green light goes off.
And yes, there are plenty of EVs that can accelerate to 60mph in under three seconds. But I don’t think Cadillac was out to shatter any records with the Lyriq-V. It wanted to make a car that “fits perfectly” into people’s lives, as Cadillac boss John Roth says.
To that end, the Lyriq-V looks like it takes a lot of what worked with the original Lyriq and made it more powerful. Its 102kWh battery will help propel this V-Series for an estimated 285 miles of range. It gains around 75 miles of range in about 10 minutes when plugged into a DC fast charger or about 19 miles per hour when sipping from a 240-volt Level 2 charger. And it will ship with a CCS port for charging, rather than the Tesla-backed NACS standard.
The Lyriq-V perches on 22-inch wheels with Brembo brake calipers. The handling is “comfortable, yet spirited,” with 5-link independent suspension and continuous damping control for stiffer shock absorbers.
And now we come to the part where I inform you that, yes, the Lyriq-V features a “unique sound experience” that simulates an engine growl. Cadillac is the latest automaker to resort to faux exhaust noises piped through external speakers to comfort car buyers who may be feeling a bit hesitant about leaving the warm bosom of the internal combustion engine.
Another unique feature is a button on the steering wheel for V-Mode, which is “a suite of traction management features specifically engineered to increase vehicle agility.” And like the original Lyriq — but unlike GM’s other electric vehicles — the Lyriq-V will support phone mirroring through Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The electric V-Series has been in the works for a while now. Cadillac first introduced the concept of an electrified V with the introduction of three V-Series.R hybrid race cars at the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and FIA World Endurance Championship races in 2023.
It then first teased a fully electric Lyriq-V in March 2024 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the inaugural launch of the V-Series at the Sebring International Raceway in March 2004. That year saw the introduction of the 2004 Cadillac CTS-V, signaling the automaker’s intention to compete with other performance luxury subbrands like BMW M and Mercedes AMG.
Thanks to their quick, seamless acceleration and aerodynamic shapes, electric vehicles are a great fit in the performance segment. Indeed, BMW, Mercedes, and Audi all have performance-geared EVs for sale — or at least have outlined plans to sell them. Cadillac would be the latest to add its own spin on plug-in power.
Starting at $79,990 (including destination charges), the 2026 Lyriq-V is expected to start production at GM’s Spring Hill, Tennessee, factory in early 2025.
Paramount Plus’ new Star Trek film is the sound of scene chewing in space, which is to say, it’s pretty damn fun.
Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s iconic play, is being reimagined as an interactive video game with a neo-noir vibe — and it’s being developed in part by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The game, titled Lili, is a “screen life thriller video game” where you’ll have access to a modern-day Lady Macbeth’s personal devices, according to a press release.
“Players will be immersed in a stylized, neo-noir vision of modern Iran, where surveillance and authoritarianism are part of daily life,” the release says. “The gameplay will feature a blend of live-action cinema within an interactive game format, giving players the chance to immerse themselves in the world of Lady Macbeth and make choices that influence her destiny.” It sounds kind of like a version of Macbeth inspired by Sam Barlow’s interactive thrillers.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is making the game in collaboration with iNK Stories, a New York-based indie studio and publisher that also made 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. It stars Zar Amir as “Lady Macbeth (Lili),” per the press release.
Lili is set to release “later in 2025.”
Tumbler has finally launched Tumblr TV as a new tab at the top of its app, the company said today in a brief set of update notes spotted by TechCrunch. Tumblr TV first debuted as a GIF-finding feature in 2015, but now it includes video content as well.
Screenshot: Tumblr TV
According to Tumblr, “New users will have this tab enabled by default in the third position, while existing users will have it available in the Dashboard Tabs configuration, if not already enabled.”
When you tap the Tumblr TV tab, you’ll see a grid of videos and GIFs. Once you tap one, you can like, comment, repost, or share it, and when you’re ready to see something else, you can swipe up to move on.
In my very brief testing, it’s still very GIF-heavy despite the inclusion of video and a swipe interface similar to other short-form video apps.
It could be tempting to compare Tumblr TV to TikTok, especially in light of its recent shutdown, but right now, it’s more like scrolling a group text full of GIFs.
Earthblade, the next game from the developers of Celeste, has been canceled. The fantasy-inspired game got its first trailer in late 2022, and the game would have let you explore a “free-roaming, dynamically-loading map,” Extremely OK Games’ Maddy Thorson said at the time. But the team decided to cancel the game in December after a team conflict and because of the pressure of trying to follow up on Celeste, Thorson says in a post detailing what happened.
The “disagreement” was between Thorson and Noel Berry (Thorson refers to the two of them as “us”) and Pedro Medeiros over “the IP rights of Celeste,” Thorson says. “We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways,” and Medeiros is currently working on a game called Neverway. “Losing Pedro wasn’t the only factor in cancelling the game, but it did prompt us to take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” Thorson says.
The huge success of Celeste also “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” Thorson says. “Pedro isn’t to blame for this — in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”
Thorson and Berry want to refocus on “smaller-scale projects” and are “prototyping again” to try and “rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste’s or TowerFall’s inception.”
Nvidia has posted a new video showcasing a history of Founders Edition graphics card designs that explores the design of its new RTX 5090 and confirms a previously leaked prototype that used an unconventionally large four-slot design.
As noted by VideoCardz, the prototype “Titan ADA” card first revealed by leaker Kopite7kimi included a triple-fan cooling system, and earlier this month, Gamers Nexus tested and tore down a working version of the prototype.
In the video published today, Nvidia’s EVP of system products, Andrew Bell, explains that Nvidia cards were trending larger and larger, and they wanted to change that. “We didn’t like the idea of it taking up four slots; it was big, it was unwieldy, it worked in a limited number of chassis,” Bell said.
Bell says that the prototype triple-fan cooling system influenced Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture. However, the latest RTX 5090 Founders Edition card that we are currently testing achieves its goals through a modular four-part design with a separate I/O board that allows air to flow through for a more efficient and compact cooler. According to Nvidia, these changes are why the new 5090 fits in two slots on the motherboard compared to the previous three-slot 4090.
The megapixel race isn’t over if you ask Canon. Today, the company announced a new 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor with a resolution of 410 megapixels. That’s 24,592 x 16,704 pixels and a resolution that’s equivalent to 24K — or 12 times the resolution of 8K and 198 times the resolution of HD.
It’s the ”largest number of pixels ever achieved in a 35mm full-frame sensor,” according to Canon, but don’t expect the company to introduce it on its consumer-ready digital cameras. It’s designed for surveillance, medicine, and other industrial “applications that demand extreme resolution,” and don’t mind paying a small fortune for it.
Thanks to a “redesigned circuitry pattern” and a newly developed “back-illuminated stacked formation in which the pixel segment and signal processing segment are interlayered,” Canon says the sensor has a readout speed of “3,280 megapixels per second,” allowing full-resolution images to be captured at eight frames per second.
Canon will also offer a monochrome version of the sensor with a “four-pixel binning” function that improves low-light sensitivity by treating four nearby pixels as one. Although that reduces its overall resolution, it allows the monochromatic version of the sensor to capture 100-megapixel videos at 24 frames per second.
If you want to maximize your megapixels, you typically need to turn to medium-format or larger sensors and bigger cameras. The Phase One XF IQ4 150MP, for example, can capture images at 150-megapixels. But by putting this much resolution into a 35mm sensor that will be compatible with a wide range of lenses already available for full-frame cameras, Canon says it will help “contribute to the miniaturization of shooting equipment.”
One of the most important changes in Samsung’s new phones is a simple one: when you long-press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, you’ll get Google Gemini.
This is probably a good thing. Bixby was never a very good virtual assistant — Samsung originally built it primarily as a way to more simply navigate device settings, not to get information from the internet. It has gotten better since and can now do standard assistant things like performing visual searches and setting timers, but it never managed to catch up to the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant, and now, even Siri. So, if you’re a Samsung user, this is good news! Your assistant is probably better now. (And if, for some unknown reason, you really do truly love Bixby, don’t worry: there’s still an app.)
The switch to Gemini is an even bigger deal for Google. Google was caught off guard a couple of years ago when ChatGPT launched but has caught up in a big way. According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just...
During its latest Unpacked event, Samsung dished all the details on the Galaxy S25 lineup. The Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus start at $799.99 and $999.99, respectively, while the S25 Ultra runs a cool $1299.99 in its entry-level configuration. You can preorder the phones ahead of their launch on February 7th, but before you do, you’re probably wondering what’s new.
The phones don’t look or feel much different, save for the slightly curvier Galaxy S25 Ultra. The Snapdragon Elite 8 is perhaps the S25 family’s most notable hardware upgrade, which is up to 40 percent faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and comes with a new neural processing unit to support Samsung’s expanded Galaxy AI experience. The company introduced multimodal and generative AI improvements, after all, and the Galaxy S25 line will be among the first to usher in new Google Gemini features.
Our reviews are still forthcoming, and it’s much too early for us to determine whether any of these phones are actually worth upgrading for. But that doesn’t mean we can’t distill their differences to help you determine which device you’d rather buy. Keep reading for a full breakdown of all of the hardware and software...
Samsung just teased the Galaxy S25 Edge — the new ultra-slim entry into the Galaxy S25 lineup. The phone isn’t out yet, and Samsung hasn’t provided any details, but now we know it’s real. And we have pictures.
Like pretty much every phone, it’s a thin silver slab. It’s got two cameras on the back, rather than the three cameras you’d get with other S25 phones. The Edge is rumored to measure just 6.4mm thick, but my colleagues Allison Johnson and Vjeran Pavic, who are on the ground at Galaxy Unpacked and took the below photos, weren’t able to actually hold or measure the device to confirm.
We’re trying to get closer so we can show perspective, but the place is mobbed with people. There’s a lot of excitement about this phone. By comparison, though, the regular Galaxy S25 is 7.2mm thick. So, it’s... even thinner.
Here are some of the pictures we took:
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Update, January 22nd: Added more photos.
Xbox has a new beta software update rolling out today for Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring that enables Series X and S systems to support much larger external hard disks. Previously, the Xbox could only support up to 16TB of space on a single USB-connected drive.
With the new update, Xbox systems can now partition hard disks larger than 16TB into segments to use the full physical storage space. A single 24TB hard disk can now be formatted into multiple partitions (the largest still being 16TB) so you can archive more games, apps, and media than ever — if that’s something you’ve wanted to do.
However, if you have already been using a hard disk greater than 16TB with Xbox, the company says you’ll need to erase it first to take full advantage:
Drives greater than 16TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives.
Although you still can’t play current generation games directly off an external drive, it can be useful to back up all of your installs anyway, or games made for older systems. You won’t need to redownload entire titles such as the 300GB-plus Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 using an internet connection when you feel like playing it again after a hiatus, unless they need an equally-sizable update.
Xbox is also releasing an update that enables new network quality indicators for cloud gaming sessions to tell you if your connection is slow and affecting your gameplay. They will appear in red bubbles on the upper right side of the screen, telling you what is happening, such as packet loss or increased ping, which can help you troubleshoot your connection.
Today, we have started to roll out network quality indicators for cloud gaming sessions on browser and TV, helping players to better diagnose potential network issues.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) January 22, 2025
Learn more about this feature and get troubleshooting tips here: https://t.co/pcFXEeo1qi pic.twitter.com/hlSHLh1vyn
One in 10 game developers lost their job in 2024. That’s according to the results of the annual Game Developers Conference state of the video game survey. The survey sampled over 3,000 developers and covered a number of topics including industry layoffs and what kind of games developers are working on.
Prolific layoffs have ravaged the industry over the last two years making the question of their impact on developers one of the most important in the survey. In addition to 10 percent of developers losing their jobs, 41 percent of respondents said they had been impacted by layoffs in some way, either by being laid off directly or seeing coworkers or colleagues in other departments let go. The survey also noted that the number of people impacted is potentially much higher because of the students and graduates who reported having a difficult time simply getting a job in the industry at all.
When asked what reason companies gave for layoffs, 22 percent said restructuring while 18 said declining revenue. 19 percent gave no reason at all. Developers, though, have their own ideas about why layoffs keep happening. In an analysis of responses to what developers think the reason behind layoffs is, the majority were general statements about the industry’s over-expansion during the pandemic. Companies acquired workers and studios in hopes of meeting a level of demand for games that dried up as covid restrictions loosened. However, some developers believe the reason for layoffs is much simpler. Companies like Microsoft and Sony still reported growing revenues despite multiple rounds of layoffs and studio closures. It’s no surprise then that 13 percent of respondents attributed layoffs to corporate greed.
In addition to layoffs, the last few years have also seen the failure of a number of high-profile, big-budget, live-service games. While there has been some success in that area with new games like Marvel Rivals, it’s generally tough to launch a live-service game that can compete with the overbearing likes of Fortnite, Roblox, and Call of Duty. 2024 was also the year that Balatro, Animal Well, and Astro Bot dominated headlines and award lists suggesting a greater appetite for those kinds of smaller-scoped, single-player experiences. It’s interesting, and perhaps concerning then, that according to the survey, over 30 percent of AAA developers are working on a live-service game.
When it asked developers their thoughts on live-service games the survey answered, “One of the biggest issues mentioned was market oversaturation, with many developers noting how tough it is to break through and build a sustainable player base.”
