The best Black Friday gaming deals

Consoles like the Xbox Series S and accessories are discounted over Black Friday | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

It doesn’t matter which console you play on, there are tons of great discounts being served up over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While finding a discount on a PlayStation 5 is still wishful thinking, you can actually get a Nintendo Switch bundle or Xbox Series S for less than retail price this year, which is pretty cool. Everything from consoles to gaming headsets are getting some sort of discount, so whether you’re looking for discounts on games or accessories, our roundup of the best Black Friday gaming deals has got you covered. For even more Black Friday deals coverage, make sure to follow our Black Friday storystream for regular updates and check out our Black Friday hub to see the growing collection of all our roundups.

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The best Black Friday deals at Amazon

The latest Echo Dot with clock is available with a big discount and two free Philips Hue smart bulbs. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Black Friday is here and Amazon is has some excellent deals on a variety of tech devices. We’ve rounded up a collection of all the best discounts you can currently get on wireless headphones, 4K TVs, tablets, and more.

If you’re looking for discounts at other retailers, we’ve also put together roundups of the best deals you can find ahead of Black Friday at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. To stay up to speed with everything happening over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, make sure to bookmark our Black Friday hub and check back for regular updates.

The best Amazon Black Friday deals on Echo devices

• Amazon’s fifth-gen Echo Dot with a built-in clock is on sale for $39.99 at Amazon, knocking $20 off the regular price of the clock...

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The best Black Friday 2022 deals you can get

The Noc Design / The Verge

Alright, we’ve arrived. It’s here. The monolithic and mythical Black Friday shopping holiday is upon us, and the deals are aplenty. Though we’d be lying if we didn’t say the deals have already been numerous for pretty much the whole week now. But even as Black Friday continues to be stretched out over the course of days, or even weeks, the day-of still shows a lot of promise for having the best of the best at the lowest of the low prices on offer.

Just as we are curating our roundups for the best Black Friday deals on many tech-fiend favorites like headphones, TVs, smart home tech, gaming laptops, phones, and even more, we’ve also got collections of some of the best deals happening at specific retailers (Best Buy, Target, and Walmart)....

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Genesis Electrified G80 review: an unconventional cruise missile

Genesis has electrified one of its earliest hallmark models. | Image: Tim Stevens

The latest EV from Genesis mixes calm performance with stately manners and stunning style

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The best Black Friday deals on 4K TVs

TCL’s 6-series R646 (shown here) is selling at its lowest price yet. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great opportunities to get the 4K TV of your dreams at a lower-than-usual price. However, these shopping days cap off what has been an amazing year to get a fantastic TV for far less than its listing price. The market in 2022 has been kind, whether you want a low-frills pick that includes Roku, Fire TV, or Google TV streaming software, or one that delivers heaps of features on top of top-tier picture quality.

Regardless of what your needs are, we think you’ll be satisfied from the deals that we’ve found from brands like TCL, Insignia, and LG, with more on the way soon.

The best 4K TV deals during Black Friday

55-inch Toshiba C350 Fire TV

If you want the most TV for your buck, Toshiba’s 65-inch C350 Fire...

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Splinter Cell is getting a… radio adaptation?

The Last of Us is getting a big budget HBO TV show, the Metal Gear Solid movie is still in development, and now Ubisoft’s long-dormant stealth series Splinter Cell is getting an eight part radio adaptation. The BBC has just announced Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall, an adaptation of the Splinter Cell novel of the same name released earlier this year starring Will Poulter.

In the context of the many recent big-budget game adaptations for the big and small screen alike, a radio play sounds like an odd choice for what was once one of Ubisoft’s flagship franchises. But considering the games were generally at their best in their slowest and most deliberate stealth moments rather than the high stakes action set-pieces of other titles, I’m...

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UK plans to make the sharing of non-consensual deepfake porn illegal

Graphic by James Bareham / The Verge

The UK government says it plans to make the sharing of non-consensual pornographic deepfakes illegal, with offenders facing “potential time behind bars.”

The new offense is set to be added to the long-awaited and controversial Online Safety Bill, a mammoth piece of legislation that will rewrite the UK’s rules for policing harmful internet content. The government announced this morning that deepfakes would be covered in the legislation along with strengthened laws against “downblousing” (taking explicit images down a women’s top without consent). The passage of the bill was delayed this year by recent political chaos, but the UK government now plans to return it to parliament in December for further debate.

1 in 14 adults in England and...

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Elon Musk says Twitter will begin manually authenticating Blue, Grey, and Gold accounts as soon as next week

Elon’s answer to Twitter verification hell is to go back to manually authenticating accounts. Oh, and making the tick a different color. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk says that Twitter’s check mark program could return on Friday, December 2nd, with a new procedure to verify individual identities in order to resolve impersonation issues. Musk described the new manual authentication process as “painful, but necessary.” Verified check marks will also be expanded with additional colors — gold for companies, grey for the government, and the original blue for individual accounts.

As it turns out, offering so-called verified check marks for an $8 monthly subscription without actually verifying identities wasn’t a brilliant idea. After Musk ignored warnings from Twitter’s own trust and safety staff, the platform’s paid Twitter Blue subscriptions rolled out and quickly resulted in some ‘verified’...

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Elon Musk just decided to bring the worst people on the internet back to Twitter

Photo by James Wakibia/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to offer “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week — a gentler way of saying that he’s decided to welcome back some of the site’s worst and most toxic people. It’s the second major moderation decision he’s made since taking over after unbanning former President Donald Trump; both decisions were made after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal Twitter account.

The decision to reverse years of moderation work at Twitter effectively trashes Musk’s original promise: to create a diverse council that would help adjudicate serious moderation decisions. Musk backed away from that idea by later blaming “political/social activist groups” for breaking an alleged “deal” — a claim nobody has...

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Hello traveler…have ye heard about TikTok Dabloons?

A new TikTok trend has transformed a cat meme into an expansive roleplaying system. It only took three days to tank its fictional economy. | Image: Jess Weatherbed / The verge

You’re walking through the woods when a cat approaches you. “It’s not safe out here” they say, asking you to accompany them back to their home. Upon arrival at a delightfully kitsch cabin you’re presented with a bowl of warm stew, a thick coat, and a sword to protect you from outside dangers. You pay the cat four “dabloons” and venture back outside to continue your journey.

No, this isn’t a new Elder Scrolls game — it’s the latest viral trend sweeping TikTok, which saw a niche in-joke rapidly expand into an immersive roleplaying experience within a matter of days.

Confused? Let me explain:

Image: KnowYourMeme

TikTok users managed to create a full roleplay community based around a collapsing economy from...this.

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The best Black Friday 2022 phone deals

The deals are at hand. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

If you’ve been putting off replacing an old phone until the end of the year, then well done — Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are here to take the sting out of a new phone purchase. This year’s batch of deals features some healthy discounts on the latest flagships, including the iPhone 14 Pro and Google’s excellent Pixel 7, as well as some steep price cuts on already well-priced midrange models. If you’re shopping for a new phone, take a look at our picks for the best deals of the bunch.

The best Black Friday iPhone deals

• Apple isn’t one for Black Friday, but you can still find a few ways to save on a new iPhone. Verizon is offering a free iPhone 14 Pro when you trade in an old phone on a select 5G unlimited plan, while AT&T is...

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JWST peers into the atmosphere of an exoplanet bombarded by stellar radiation

An artist’s illustration of WASP 39-b. | Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

This week, astronomers announced that they’d found evidence of chemical reactions in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 700 light years away from Earth. Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope created a detailed chemical portrait of the scorching gases swirling around exoplanet WASP-39b. This “hot Saturn” planet orbits extremely close to its host star, meaning it has high temperatures of up to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit or 900 degrees Celsius. It is also puffy, with around one quarter the mass of Jupiter but 1.3 times its size.

Early data about WASP-39b was shared this summer when JWST detected carbon dioxide in its atmosphere — the first time this gas had been detected on a planet outside our solar system. Now, a more detailed...

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The best Black Friday deals that make for great gifts

You can save hundreds on LG’s C2 OLED, which is currently on sale in numerous size configurations. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Times are hard, and if you’ve been stressing about how you’re going to afford a good gift this holiday season, it’s understandable. Thankfully, Black Friday offers one of the best (and last) opportunities to save big before the holidays. This year, we’re seeing some steep discounts on the newest and most popular products, including the new AirPods Pro and LG’s latest C2 OLED. There are also deals available that won’t absolutely destroy your budget — like those on the new fifth-gen Echo Dot and even a year of Hulu.

Below, we’ve curated a guide to some of the best deals on presents you can buy right now. Many of these are taken right from our various holiday gift guides as well, so if you need further inspiration, be sure to take a look...

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One of the best Star Wars games in years is free on Epic right now

This could be you. For free. | Image: EA / Motive Studios

If you haven’t sampled the delights of Star Wars: Squadrons, the space dogfighting game from EA’s Motive Studio, you might be interested to know it’s available free on the Epic Games Store for the next week. That’s down from its regular price of $39.99.

In case you missed it upon its release in late 2020, Squadrons is a very good (and very hard) spiritual successor to the beloved X-Wing and TIE Fighter space combat games of the ‘90s. But while its single-player campaign is fun enough, the real meat of the experience is in the multiplayer, which includes both team-based and solo game modes.

Which is why it’s a shame that the game’s popularity hasn’t held up enough post-release to ensure you can get into a full multiplayer game whenever...

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People are definitely eating pokémon in Scarlet and Violet

A pokémon trainer enjoying a sandwich while a Miraidon stares at the food, demanding a piece. | Image: Nintendo

For years, Pokémon fans have wondered whether the franchise’s lack of regular animals meant that humans in the Pokémon world sometimes ate the pocketable creatures for sustenance. While the jury’s still out for places like Kanto and Hoenn, Pokémon Scarlet and Violetdefinitely make it seem like trainers from the Paldea region have no beef with turning certain ‘mons into gourmet meals.

Fruits like berries, dishes like curries, and baked goods like poffins and malasadas have played a surprisingly large role in many recent Pokémon titles, where they typically act as stat-boosting power-ups obtained either by buying them from stores or by making them in mini-games. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet keep this tradition going in the new Paldea...

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The best Black Friday deals on smart home tech

Some of the top-of-the-line robot vacuums are seeing their first big price cuts this holiday shopping season. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

‘Tis the season to find some serious bargains on smart home gear. Black Friday and its close cousin, Cyber Monday, have long been prime times to nab a deal on smart lighting, smart locks, robot vacuums, security cameras, and smart speakers, to name just a few.

With the new smart home standard Matter on the horizon (yes, it is technically here, but there still are very few devices you can actually buy), it's worth being a bit discerning in your bargain shopping if you plan to take advantage of the new interoperability protocol. (Which means if you want all your devices to work with all the different smart home platforms out of the box). So, we’ve highlighted deals on gadgets that will work with Matter or, if not, gadgets that work with...

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Sony throws Battlefield under the bus as it fights Microsoft’s Activision purchase

A promotional image for Battlefield V. | Image: EA

As Sony fights tooth and nail to get regulators to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, poor Battlefield is getting caught in the crossfire. In a filing with the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Sony argues that Call of Duty is a uniquely important franchise to have on PlayStation consoles, and can’t be replaced by the likes of Battlefield. Microsoft would control the franchise if its deal to acquire Activision Blizzard is allowed to proceed.

Here’s Sony’s relevant paragraph in full, emphasis added:

“Call of Duty is not replicable. Call of Duty is too entrenched for any rival, no matter how well equipped, to catch up. It has been the top-selling game for almost every year in the...

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7 games to distract your baby cousins this Thanksgiving

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

And one to totally tear your family apart

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Stable Diffusion made copying artists and generating porn harder and users are mad

An image generated using Stable Diffusion Version 2. | Image: Stability AI

Users of AI image generator Stable Diffusion are angry about an update to the software that “nerfs” its ability to generate NSFW output and pictures in the style of specific artists.

Stability AI, the company that funds and disseminates the software, announced Stable Diffusion Version 2 early this morning European time. The update re-engineers key components of the model and improves certain features like upscaling (the ability to increase the resolution of images) and in-painting (context-aware editing). But, the changes also make it harder for Stable Diffusion to generate certain types of images that have attracted both controversy and criticism. These include nude and pornographic output, photorealistic pictures of celebrities, and...

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The Verge’s Guide to Black Friday 2022

The Noc Design / The Verge

Black Friday, the annual deals extravaganza that closes out the year, typically falls the day after Thanksgiving in the US. However, with the onset of the pandemic and the meteoric rise of online shopping over the past two years, we’ve begun to see more and more retailers kick-start their sales well before the turkey has settled. Target and Best Buy, for instance, have already started to roll out their Black Friday savings, offering steep discounts on noise-canceling headphones, smart displays, OLED TVs, gaming laptops, and a bevy of popular gadgets.

However, regardless of when it starts — as well as the recency of shopping events like Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale and Target’s “Deal Days” promotion — Black Friday remains one of your...

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022: deals, news, and more

We’re rounding up all of the best deals from across the internet to help you cross some names off your holiday shopping list.

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Onyx Boox Leaf 2 review: ebook freedom

An Android E Ink tablet isn’t for people looking for a smooth and seamless experience, but if you’re reading across a wide variety of apps, its flexibility is unparalleled.

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The best early Black Friday deals you can already get

The Noc Design / The Verge

Happy Thanksgiving, folks! Want to get a head start on your holiday shopping before the Black Friday madness officially begins tomorrow? Despite the fact the annual shopping holiday is another day away, many major retailers are already offering a number of early Black Friday sales. So if you need a distraction from the Thanksgiving dinner table, you have a smorgasbord of quality deals you can already binge before the more hectic rush tomorrow.

While it’s possible prices will dip even lower once the big day arrives, the discounts we’re currently seeing are nothing to scoff at. Target, Best Buy, and Walmart are offering some seriously steep discounts on a number of popular tech and gadgets, ranging from Apple devices to TVs, tablets,...

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Andor’s season finale solidifies it as one of Star Wars’ greatest stories

Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. | Image: Lucasfilm / Disney Plus

The final episode of Andor’s first season brought everything full circle, and was a powerful reminder of what Star Wars has always been about.

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Why the worst recipes imaginable are blowing up on TikTok

Jackson Gibbs / The Verge

Eli Betchik has always had a stomach of steel, but it wasn’t until they went to art school that they realized it could make them famous.

“I was perfectly willing to eat random things for the entertainment of my friends. I would take a ketchup packet from the diner and suck it up or eat an entire block of Parmesan cheese,” remembers Betchik, now 23, who makes and sells jewelry from their basement in Ohio. “The more I did that, the more I started realizing I could do this on the internet. I thought that I would be able to entertain people.”

In November 2020, the nonbinary jewelry maker was at art school in Cleveland, where they’d made friends with a group of performance artists. Soon, Betchik’s food performances became their own kind of...

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I went to the Genesis point of Dish’s 5G network, and all I got was disappointment

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Project Genesis launched in Las Vegas first, so I figured the experience of using it there would be much better than in Spokane. I was wrong.

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are Nintendo’s fastest selling games of all time

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the latest entries in Nintendo’s long-running franchise. | Image: Nintendo

Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet, the first new mainline entries into the Pokémon series since 2019, have become the fastest selling games in Nintendo’s history, the company has announced. The two games sold 10 million units between them globally in their first three days on sale, including both physical and downloadable versions. “This is the highest global sales level for any software on any Nintendo platform within the first three days,” the company’s press release reads.

Although it’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, Nintendo previously said Animal Crossing: New Horizons had the “best start ever for a Nintendo Switch title” after it sold 17.37 million units in the 11 days after its March 20th, 2020 release. The latest...

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Foxconn offers workers $1,400 to stop protesting and leave ‘iPhone City’

Protest erupted in Zhengzhou on Tuesday when Foxconn workers were told that promised bonus payments would be delayed. | Image: @StephenMcDonell

Foxconn has offered workers a 10,000 yuan ($1,400) settlement in an attempt to end protests at the facility, encouraging newly recruited staff to quit and subsequently leave its iPhone assembly factory in Zhengzhou, central China. CNN reports that the payout, equivalent to one or two months of wages, comes after violent protests erupted Tuesday over withheld pay and working conditions suffered during a strict covid lockdown.

The Apple manufacturing partner reportedly made the offer Wednesday via a text message sent from its human resources department, requesting that workers “please return to your dormitories,” alongside a vow to honor pay agreements. The company offered 8,000 yuan (around $1,120) to workers who agreed to quit their...

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Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Beta is now available to everyone in North America

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” Beta, which has been gradually rolling out over the past couple of years, is now available to anyone who’s paid for the feature in North America, CEO Elon Musk has announced. “Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen,” Musk tweeted, “assuming you have bought this option.”

The rollout of the beta software kicked off in 2020 with a small number of customers and has since gradually expanded to be available to around 160,000 drivers as of October this year. Getting access to the beta has typically required that drivers hit a minimum safety threshold with Tesla’s built-in Safety Score feature as well as logging 100 miles using the company’s...

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Amazon’s already greenlit an FTX miniseries

Sam Bankman-Fried speaking at an IIF Annual Membership Meeting. | Getty

Though the real world impacts of FTX’s spectacular crash have yet to fully settle, Amazon’s reportedly moving forward with a miniseries about the bankrupt crypto exchange and its infamous former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Anthony and Joe Russo’s AGBO production company is attached to produce the show, and the brothers are reportedly considering coming on to direct multiple episodes. Variety reports that Amazon has tapped Invasion co-creator Dave Weil to executive produce the currently unnamed eight episode miniseries that details how Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX, and went on to lead the company to a liquidity crisis that ultimately resulted in his being ousted. While no showrunners or casting announcements have been made yet, Amazon is said...

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