BioWare now has fewer than 100 employees after laying off “around two dozen” staffers and shifting others to different projects at EA, Bloomberg reports.

The changes follow BioWare’s own “Studio Update” published this week where GM Gary McKay said the studio had “worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles.” According to Bloomberg, “dozens” of staffers that had been “loaned out” to other teams at EA after the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard apparently learned this week that those shifts would be permanent.

McKay said that as a “core team” at the studio is developing the next Mass Effect game – which got a teaser trailer more than four years ago – and that the changes will help BioWare “become a more agile, focused studio.”

McKay’s post didn’t mention layoffs. Bloomberg reports that BioWare had “more than 200 people two years ago.”

Last week, EA said that The Veilguard significantly missed expectations. EA Sports FC hasn’t done as well as expected during EA’s 2025 fiscal year, either.

EA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IGN also reported this week on layoffs at BioWare.

Nvidia is touting the performance of DeepSeek’s open source AI models on its just-launched RTX 50-series GPUs, claiming that they can “run the DeepSeek family of distilled models faster than anything on the PC market.” But this announcement from Nvidia might be somewhat missing the point.

This week, Nvidia’s market cap suffered the single biggest one-day market cap loss for a US company ever, a loss widely attributed to DeepSeek. DeepSeek said that its new R1 reasoning model didn’t require powerful Nvidia hardware to achieve comparable performance to OpenAI’s o1 model, letting the Chinese company train it at a significantly lower cost. What DeepSeek accomplished with R1 appears to show that Nvidia’s best chips may not be strictly needed to make strides in AI, which could affect the company’s fortunes in the future. 

That said, DeepSeek did train its models using Nvidia GPUs, merely weaker ones (H800) that the US government allows Nvidia to export to China. And today’s blog post from Nvidia wants to show that its new 50-series RTX GPUs can be useful for R1 inference – or what an AI model actually generates – saying that the GPUs are built on the “same NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture that fuels world-leading AI innovation in the data center” and that “RTX fully accelerates DeepSeek, offering maximum inference performance on PCs.” 

But how DeepSeek did its training is part of what has been such a big deal. (And it’s worth noting that China is getting a less powerful version of the RTX 5090.) 

Other tech companies are trying to ride the DeepSeek wave, too. R1 is also now available on AWS, and Microsoft made it available on its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub this week. However, Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly investigating if DeepSeek took OpenAI data, Bloomberg reports.

Google announced Thursday that the Gemini app is getting its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model. The upgraded model “delivers fast responses and stronger performance across a number of key benchmarks, providing everyday help with tasks like brainstorming, learning or writing,” the company said in a post.

The change is rolling out to Gemini’s web and mobile apps and will be available to all users. Google also says that you’ll still be able to use Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro for “the next few weeks.”

The company first introduced Gemini 2.0 in December and promised that it was “working quickly” to get it in its products. At the time, it launched an experimental version of Gemini Flash 2.0 to Gemini users.

On Thursday, Google also said that Gemini’s image generation capabilities now use the newest version of the company’s Imagen 3 AI text-to-image generator. According to Google, the model “delivers richer details and textures” and “follows your instructions with greater accuracy.”

Forza Horizon 5 is the next Xbox Game Studios title making the jump to PlayStation. The open-world racing game is launching on PS5 this spring and will include the same content as what’s available in its Xbox and PC versions, according to a blog post. If you want to play the game online with your friends, crossplay between PS5, Xbox consoles, and PC will be available.

Forza Horizon 5 will also be getting a new content update on all platforms called Horizon Realms. “Realms will give players the chance to explore a curated collection of some of the community’s favorite previously released Evolving Worlds, alongside some other surprises,” developer Playground Games said in the post.

The game originally launched on Xbox and PC in 2021, and my former colleague Sam Byford called it the “best Forza Horizon yet.” I also had a great time playing it as a portable game, meaning it could be a lot of fun on a PlayStation Portal.

The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has launched a digital library with more than 30,000 files of “industry ephemera” from the VGHF’s physical collection. The library, which is launching in early access, includes things like “more than 1,500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines, never-before-seen game development assets, artwork, promotional materials, and more gaming relics,” according to a press release.

In a blog post, the VGHF highlights things like documents from retired video game producer Mark Flitman, production materials from Myst developers Cyan, digitized CDs of press assets received by GamePro, and a collection of FromSoftware promotional materials. (Note that some of the links may not work; as I’ve been writing this story, the links have occasionally been broken.)

Library director Phil Salvador says in a video that this is just the “first wave of open access content” in the library and that VGHF will keep building the library “over the coming years.” I’d recommend watching this video to get an overview of the work involved to make things available; the details about scanning old video game magazines were particularly cool. 

I really look forward to seeing what people discover from the library, but it will be hard to top my colleague Tristan Cooper’s great discovery of GamePro history regarding Garfield.

Microsoft’s cloud and AI businesses are doing pretty well — and their impact is being felt across the company. In its Q2 2025 earnings, Microsoft announced revenue of $69.6 billion for the quarter, up 12 percent year-over-year, and net income of $24.1 billion, which is up 10 percent year-over-year.

As for the AI business, CEO Satya Nadella says in a statement that it has “surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $13 billion, up 175 percent year-over-year.” The company’s Azure and other cloud services business grew 31 percent year-over-year, a slight decrease from 33 percent YoY growth the previous quarter.

The company’s gaming revenues didn’t fare so well. Gaming revenue declined 7 percent, and Xbox hardware revenue declined 29 percent. Microsoft has been moving away from a focus on its own hardware with messaging like its “​​This is an Xbox” ad campaign and bringing Xbox Game Studios games to other platforms, and those changes could be contributing to the decline.

That means the focus is instead on games and services, and that’s where the business is seeing some improvements. Xbox content and services revenue were up 2 percent, “driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass,” Microsoft says. (Last quarter, Microsoft’s software gaming revenues were way up even as Xbox hardware revenue declined.)

During Wednesday’s earnings call, Nadella said that Game Pass “set a new quarterly revenue record” and noted that Xbox Cloud Gaming saw a “record 140 million hours streamed” during the quarter. Nadella also revealed that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has “already been played by more than 4 million people.”

In its press release, Microsoft said that it saw Windows OEM and Devices revenue growth of 4 percent year-over-year, a slight bump from 2 percent in Q1. 

On the earnings call, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that Windows OEM and devices should decline low to mid single digits in Q3 2025. Overall gaming revenue is expected to grow in single digits, with Xbox content and services expected to grow low to mid single digits. Xbox hardware revenue “will decline year over year.”

During the call, Nadella also reiterated that the company remains “very happy with the partnership with OpenAI” (the two companies announced last week that they are adjusting their partnership) and acknowledged that DeepSeek had some “real innovations.”

Update, January 29th: Added details from Microsoft’s earnings call.

Beyond: Two Souls, the Quantic Dream-made interactive thriller starring Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe, is being adapted for TV by Page’s Pageboy Productions, Deadline reports.

The series is in early development and it’s “expected to explore the game’s non-linear narrative,” according to Deadline. In the game, you play as Jodie (portrayed by Page), and sometimes as a supernatural entity called Aiden to whom she is somehow connected. I haven’t played the game myself, but if you want to get a general idea of what it’s about, you can read Sean Hollister’s review of its debut on the PlayStation 3 in 2013.

“Filming the game was one of the most challenging and fulfilling acting experiences of my career,” Page says in a statement to Deadline. “The story’s rich narrative and emotional depth offer us a fantastic foundation. We want to create a unique vision of the characters and their journeys that resonates with fans and newcomers.”

There’s no potential release date for the TV adaptation yet and no word on where it might air.

Sony announced Wednesday that it will change to “occasionally” including PS4 games as a PlayStation Plus benefit starting in January 2026. You’ll still have access to any of the monthly PS4 games you’ve already redeemed to your account after that date, however, and you can still play PS4 games that are available on the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog until they leave the catalog.

After January 2026, Sony also says that it “may still provide titles that can be playable on both PS4 and PS5 consoles after this date.” But in general, it seems like the company is shifting its focus more fully to PS5.

As part of its blog post announcing the change, Sony also revealed that Payday 3, High on Life, and Pac-Man World Re-Pac will be February’s redeemable games for PlayStation Plus users.

On Wednesday, Sony also announced that it would be dropping its PSN account requirement for some PC games.

Sony announced Wednesday that you won’t need to log in to a PlayStation Network account to play four of its single-player games on PC: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (which comes out tomorrow), The Last of Us Part II Remastered (which launches on April 3rd), God of War Ragnarök, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

However, to incentivize you to still sign in with a PSN account while playing those games, Sony says that it will “soon” be adding “in-game content unlocks” like outfits and resources. You can see the full list of bonuses in Sony’s blog post about the news. Sony also says that using a PSN account gives you benefits like “trophies and friend management.”

Sony’s PSN account requirement for some of its PC games hasn’t been a popular one. Backlash to the requirement for Helldivers 2 led Sony to reverse the decision after the game was review bombed on Steam.

If you use Comcast Xfinity internet, your FaceTime calls might be about to get better. Instead of bumping up the amount of data that your internet connection can send or receive at one time (usually called bandwidth or throughput), a new upgrade is coming to reduce the amount of time it takes for each packet of information to make the trip. 

Comcast is officially starting to roll out the “pioneering new, ultra-low lag connectivity experience” to cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, Rockville (in Maryland), and San Francisco. (Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)

The technology powering this upgrade is based on a standard called L4S, which stands for “Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput.” My former colleague Mitchell Clark has a thorough explainer of what L4S is supposed to do, but the intention is that the tech can significantly reduce latency so that things like video games are smoother and video calls feel more like talking in real life without awkward delays and pauses.

L4S pulls this off by giving internet packets an indicator that lets them know if they’ve run into congestion or queueing along any of the hops in their trip between a user and whatever they’re connecting to. If there is a delay, then the devices can start to adjust to stop making the congestion worse — and possibly eliminate it entirely. 

As Mitchell explains, it can’t bend the laws of physics to make data travel faster than the speed of light, but it can reduce the extra delays in the middle that have been slowing your connections down. While the bandwidth upgrades we’ve seen over the years from dial-up to broadband have increased the amount of information transmitted, this change will actually make the internet feel faster for once.

Comcast says that you’ll initially see the low-latency improvements with FaceTime, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, “many games” on Steam, and “apps on Meta’s mixed reality headsets that will support this technology.” Apple, Nvidia, and Valve all collaborated with Comcast during its trials of the technology, and Apple has had support for L4S built into its devices since iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma.

Comcast also notes that the tech will “expand to any additional content and application providers who choose to leverage the new open standard technology for their own products.”

I haven’t tried the tech myself, so I can’t personally speak to how the latency improvements feel in practice. But according to Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle, during the trials, “we were able to reduce our working latency – the latency under normal conditions in the home when people are using the Internet – by 78 percent,” meaning that Comcast customers “should expect to see significant improvement.”

When it’s “fully deployed,” Comcast says its low-latency tech will be available to “all Xfinity Internet customers.”

Apple is making an executive change to try and improve its AI efforts and Siri. Kim Vorrath, who recently helped get the Vision Pro software out the door and has been at Apple for 36 years, has been brought over to Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division and will serve as a “top deputy” to AI boss John Giannandrea, Bloomberg reports.

The company made a big splash about its AI / Apple Intelligence efforts at WWDC last year, but they haven’t had the same impact as things like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Apple has also been slowly rolling out what it announced, and a big Siri upgrade that lets it understand what’s happening on your screen and take action may not arrive until iOS 18.4. And the company’s AI-powered news notification summaries will be put on pause with iOS 18.3 after criticism that the summaries were incorrect.

By bringing on Vorrath, whose resume at Apple includes work on the original iPhone software group, over to the AI team, it appears Apple wants to bring more rigor to Apple’s AI development. It also indicates that Apple may see AI as a bigger deal for its future than the Vision Pro.

Bloomberg also reports that “the artificial intelligence group is focused on revamping the underlying infrastructure of Siri and improving the company’s in-house AI models” this year, per a memo from Giannandrea.

Nearly a week after it was removed, the TikTok app is still missing from Apple and Google’s app stores.

The app was pulled from both stores after the US’ ban-or-divest law went into effect last weekend, which resulted in the service going dark within the United States. While TikTok came back online shortly after the ban, the app didn’t return to either mobile store. Apple and Google are at risk of paying billions in fines if they make TikTok available, and it’s unclear if President Donald Trump’s executive order refusing to enforce the ban actually removes that risk.

Apple and Google haven’t replied to multiple requests for comment from The Verge — including requests I made today — about if or when the app might be available again. Apple and Google do have statements about the removal of TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps like Lemon8 and Marvel Snap, but otherwise, no comment since.

TikTok didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment, either, however, Marvel Snap developer Second Dinner posted Friday evening on X, saying, “Our current estimation is that Marvel Snap will be back in the app stores as early as next week barring any setbacks.” Without explaining further, Second Dinner co-founder Ben Brode answered a question on Bluesky about what would happen for next month’s updates, saying, “we’re hoping to have it back before then.”

Because these app stores are the primary way many people get the software, TikTok’s absence basically means you can’t newly install the app — at least, for the time being — without jumping through a lot of hoops. It also means they can’t deliver updates to add new features or address any bugs, including potential security flaws.

If you had TikTok on your phone before the ban kicked in, however, the app should work for you as normal. (As a result, people are trying to sell used phones with the TikTok app still on them.) You can also use TikTok in a browser — including on your phone.

Update, January 24th: Added new details about Marvel Snap.

Netflix plans to offer couch co-op and party games that it will stream over the cloud to TVs, co-CEO Greg Peters said as part of the company’s Q4 2024 earnings announcements this week. The company has offered cloud gaming as a beta to a “subset” of subscribers since 2023, so this news from Peters indicates that the company is going to continue to invest in it.

Peters didn’t say exactly when the co-op and party games might be available. But he did say that “we think of this as a successor to family board game night or an evolution of what the game show on TV used to be.”

Netflix will also continue to focus on “more narrative games based on Netflix IP” — Peters says those games are “consistent fan favorites and we’ve got a lot in the library to work with there.”

The company’s gaming division has seen some major changes as of late: former executive Leanne Loombe announced she was moving to Annapurna Interactive, and last year, the group got a new boss after the old boss moved to a new role focused on generative AI in games. Netflix also announced that it would be removing nearly all of its interactive titles and that it would be closing its AAA studio before it ever released a game.

Google is officially launching a new Android security feature for Pixel devices with Android 15 to prevent phone thieves from accessing your digital accounts. The feature, called Identity Check, requires biometric authentication to access some account and device settings when you’re not at a trusted location (such as your home or your workplace).

“A stolen device in the wrong hands can expose sensitive data, leaving you vulnerable to identity theft, financial fraud and privacy breaches,” Google says in its blog post about the launch. Apple introduced a similar feature to Identity Check, called Stolen Device Protection, following reports of thieves watching people input their iPhone passcodes, stealing the phones, and using the passcodes to access private information and lock users out of their Apple accounts.

Settings protected by Android’s Identity Check include changing your device’s PIN, disabling theft protection, turning off Find My Device, factory reseting your device, and changing biometrics, according to a support document.

Image: Google

Identity Check initially launched in beta late last year as part of the December Pixel Drop. The feature is also coming to Samsung Galaxy devices that can get One UI 7 “in the coming weeks” and to devices from other manufacturers “later this year,” Google says.

OpenAI is releasing a “research preview” of an AI agent called Operator that can “go to the web to perform tasks for you,” according to a blog post. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling,” OpenAI says. It’s launching first in the US for subscribers of OpenAI’s $200 per month ChatGPT Pro tier.

Operator relies a “Computer-Using Agent” model that combines GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with “advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning” to be able to interact with GUIs, OpenAI says. “Operator can ‘see’ (through screenshots) and ‘interact’ (using all the actions a mouse and keyboard allow) with a browser, enabling it to take action on the web without requiring custom API integrations,” according to OpenAI.

Operator can use reasoning to “self-correct,” and if it gets stuck, it will give the user control. It will also ask the user to take over when a website asks for sensitive information like login credentials and “should” ask for a user to approve actions like sending an email. OpenAI also says that Operator has been designed to “refuse harmful requests and block disallowed content.”

OpenAI says that it’s collaborating with companies such as DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack, Uber so that Operator “addresses real-world needs while respecting established norms.” But the company cautions that not everything might work as you expect just yet; the tool currently has problems with “complex interfaces like creating slideshows or managing calendars.”

Down the line, OpenAI says it plans to bring Operator to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users and “integrate these capabilities into ChatGPT.”

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.”

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.”

Samsung has its Project Moohan headset on display at Galaxy Unpacked, and we’ve just taken a bunch of pictures of it.

This technically isn’t the first time we’ve seen Project Moohan, but it is the first time we’ve been allowed to photograph it. To me, it looks somewhat similar to Apple’s high-end Vision Pro headset with a hint of Meta’s discontinued Quest Pro.

The headset, which Samsung is developing in partnership with Google, runs Android XR, an OS designed specifically for headsets and smart glasses. My colleague Victoria Song got to try Project Moohan late last year, so if you want to know what it’s like to actually wear and use, go check out her impressions.

Samsung plans to launch Project Moohan for developers first, but it won’t be available right away for consumers.

Here are our photos from the event floor at Unpacked:

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

Samsung and Google are partnering up to build AR glasses, Samsung’s TM Roh told Bloomberg. But there aren’t many other specifics beyond the fact that they’re in development — there’s not even a specific release timeline, with Roh telling the publication that Samsung and Google “will try to reach the quality and readiness we want as soon as possible.”

The announcement follows Meta’s splashy reveal of Orion, its first augmented reality glasses, last year. Those glasses won’t be sold to consumers, but my colleague Alex Heath called them an “impressive demo.”

The news of the Samsung- and Google-made AR glasses also follows the announcement of the Project Moohan mixed reality headset. The headset runs Android XR, which Google recently announced for headsets and smart glasses (and Bloomberg reports that the AR glasses will “eventually launch as part of the company’s efforts to co-develop the Android XR operating system”).

My colleague Victoria Song got to try the headset and the platform last year, and she described it as a “mix between a Meta Quest 3 and the Vision Pro”:

I’m walked through pinching to select items and how to tap the side to bring up the app launcher. There’s an eye calibration process that feels awfully similar to the Vision Pro’s. If I want, I can retreat into an immersive mode to watch YouTube and Google TV on a distant mountain. I can open apps, resize them, and place them at various points around the room. I’ve done this all before. This just happens to be Google-flavored.

At Unpacked, Samsung also revealed details about the Samsung Galaxy S25 lineup of phones, which includes the Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25 Plus, and Galaxy S25 Ultra.

We’re expecting the Galaxy S25, S25 Plus and S25 Ultra, and new AI features.

Samsung is announcing its new Galaxy S25 phones. We’ll have all of the updates as they come in, but, as you can see below, we had a lot of this embargoed and got an early look.

But there may be some surprises! You can tune in to watch the event in the video below once everything gets started at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

Expect Samsung to talk about AI. It’s the thing tech companies love to talk about as much as possible. Probably because they’re all spending a lot of money on it. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others have used similar events to chat about how they’re implementing AI into their software, for example.

Whatever comes up, we’ll have it all here.