HBO’s The Last of Us TV show is pushing the game up the sales charts

Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us: Part I_._ | Image: Sony

The huge success of The Last of Us’ HBO series has seemingly led to a big sales bump for the newly released remaster of the first TLOU game. According to a new report from the NPD Group, The Last of Us: Part I jumped from number 36 on its best-seller chart in December to number 11 in January, the month the series premiered.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt saw its own boost in popularity following the release of Netflix’s The Witcher series in 2019, while Cyberpunk 2077 jumped up Steam’s charts after Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out in September. But for The Last of Us, Sony had almost definitely been preparing for a rise in interest in the series due to the show, so I’m guessing it’s not too surprising to see that the game is selling more.

The...

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Bungie to make Destiny 2 more challenging and overhaul its Power leveling system

Image: Bungie

Ahead of the Destiny 2: Lightfall DLC launch later this month, Bungie is laying out the company’s plans for Destiny 2 for the year ahead and beyond. There are some big changes on the way for players. Chief among them is making Destiny 2 more challenging to play and some hints at a big overhaul for the Power leveling system that Bungie has used for years.

While Bungie keeps adding new content to Destiny 2, it has become increasingly easy to conquer bosses and challenges in the game, even at the so-called Grand Master level that’s supposed to challenge players the most. It’s also super difficult for new and returning players to play alongside friends without investing hours into leveling up.

“While we are still committed to offering...

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The Apple Watch Ultra returns to its all-time low price

The Apple Watch Ultra is on sale for $729.99. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Welcome to a new week, dear readers! Today, we’re starting off our roundup with an excellent deal that more adventurous Apple aficionados out there will love. Right now, the most capable smartwatch Apple’s ever made — the Apple Watch Ultra— is currently $729.99 at Amazon (for select customers) at checkout as well as at Costco for members through February 14th. That matches the wearable’s all-time low price and is the lowest we’ve seen it sell for so far this year. If you’re not eligible for either deal, fret not because you can also buy the wearable for $749 at Amazon and Best Buy, which is its second-best price.

For more active types, Apple’s rugged Watch Ultra may be wiser to buy than the Apple Watch Series 8 (which, by the way, is...

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The long-delayed Dead Island 2 is launching a week sooner

Image: Deep Silver

If you’ve been waiting for Dead Island 2, the zombie-fighting game that was first announced in 2014, got trapped in development hell, emerged again with a February 3rd release date in June, and then was delayed to April 28th, I have some good news: the game is actually going to come out a little bit sooner. Dead Island 2 has gone gold and will now be released a week earlier on April 21st, Deep Silver announced on Monday.

You asked for it, you got it. Dead Island 2 went gold and it's coming out a week early.
See you in HELL-A on April 21, 2023.#DeadIsland #SeeYouInHELLA pic.twitter.com/8Gu28bIcUS

— Dead Island (@deadislandgame) February 13, 2023

Dead Island 2 is set in a version of Los Angeles that’s been overrun with zombies, and...

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Crypto firm Paxos ordered to stop issuing Binance stablecoin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

New York regulators have ordered the cryptocurrency firm Paxos to stop issuing Binance USD (BUSD) — the third largest stablecoin by market cap and pegged to the US dollar — over concerns that it can’t “safely” issue the token, as reported earlier by Reuters andThe Wall Street Journal.

This comes as Paxos faces a potential lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the BUSD token. Sources close to the situation tell The Wall Street Journalthat the agency is planning to sue the company “for violating investor protection laws.” The SEC reportedly sent a Wells Notice to Paxos — or a letter that the regulator uses to inform a company or individual of potential violations and enforcement actions.

In a notice posted to the...

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Arlo’s security cameras will keep free cloud storage for existing customers after all

Arlo Pro 2 is among the legacy Arlo cameras affected by the newly announced policy. | Image: Netgear

Security camera company Arlo is reversing course on its controversial decision to apply a retroactive end-of-life policy to many of its popular home security cameras. On Friday, Arlo CEO Matthew McRae posted a thread on Twitter, announcing that the company will not remove free storage of videos for existing customers and that it is extending the EOL dates for older cameras a further year to 2025. He also committed to sending security updates to these cameras until 2026.

The end-of-life policy was due to go into effect January 1st, 2023, and removed a big selling point — seven-day free cloud storage — for many Arlo cams. McRae now says all users with the seven-day storage service will “continue to receive that service uninterrupted.” But...

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The Flash’s first trailer gives new meaning to ‘world’s finest’

Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El.

It’s still hard to believe that Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Flashis actually happening given its years of production setbacks and star Ezra Miller’s recent brushes with the police related to a number of troubling situations. But scandals be damned, The Flash is on its way, though by the look of the movie’s first trailer, Miller’s Barry Allen isn’t going to be the real big-ticket draw here.

Loosely based on DC’s Flashpoint comics event, director Andy Muschietti’s The Flash will follow Barry across the multiverse as he embarks on a haphazard journey into the past, where he hopes to prevent his mother’s death. By tapping into the power of the Speed Force, it’s (relatively) easy enough for him to travel through time by really pushing his...

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Leaked Sony Xperia 1 V renders have us xperiencing déjà vu

Unofficial renders of the Xperia 1 V, | Image: OnLeaks / Green Smartphones

The design of Sony’s next smartphone, rumored to be the Xperia 1 V, appears to have leaked in unofficial renders published over the weekend by OnLeaks and Green Smartphones. And true to form, the company is doing… nothing too exciting, sticking with the same design as the previous Xperia 1 IV. Squint, and it’s hard to tell the two phones apart, with their vertical camera bumps, squared off edges, and tall aspect-ratio displays.

That doesn’t mean we’re expecting the Xperia 1 V to be identical to last year’s phone. Green Smartphones reports that its ultra-wide camera could be upgraded to use a 48-megapixel sensor (up from 12-megapixels), and there’s also a chance it could ship with 16GB of RAM rather than 12GB. Although the screen is...

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Monday’s top tech news: Mario’s still got a day job

Image: Illumination

Mario’s plumbing ad was one of several big new trailers from the Super Bowl.

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Xfinity customers will have to pay to stream Peacock soon

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Comcast wants Xfinity subscribers to pay up for Peacock. In a post on Twitter, the Comcast-owned NBCUniversal confirmed plans to stop offering free access to Peacock Premium to Xfinity subscribers on June 26th, 2023 (via Variety).

Peacock Premium, which normally costs $4.99 per month, is an ad-supported plan that has been available to Xfinity customers at no extra cost since the service first launched in 2020. Details about the change first emerged in a post on Reddit, which an NBCUniversal representative later confirmed to Variety and The Streamable.

Hello Bob! Thank you for contacting Peacock, we're happy to help. We can confirm that complimentary Peacock Premium access will be ending on June 26, 2023, and we have no additional...

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Don’t attempt this RGB Steam Deck mod just yet

The RGBDeck mod just isn’t ready yet. | Image: Adam Honse / Reddit

As cool as the Steam Deck looks with RGB lighting, you might not want to attempt to mod your device just yet. One Reddit user who tried the mod found that while adding the RGB LEDs doesn’t draw a significant amount of power from the battery, it can cause pretty big issues with the Steam Deck’s motherboard.

The “RGBDeck” mod started making the rounds on Reddit earlier this month, with u/WUBBSY documenting the process of affixing a small microcontroller and LED strips to the device. They topped it off with a transparent backing from JSAUX, allowing the lights to shine through the case while the Steam Deck’s switched on. The end result gives the Steam Deck a nice pop of color (in a very gamer PC kind of way).

#RGBDeck is assembled! #...

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Ford’s reportedly working on a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Ford’s gearing up to announce a $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, according to a report from Automotive News. In an advisory obtained by the outlet, the automaker says it will reveal the news of the factory on Monday in partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), a company that creates lithium iron phosphate batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), including the Mustang Mach-E.

While Ford still hasn’t confirmed these plans, Michigan reportedly offered $1 billion in incentives to attract the automaker. The factory’s expected to bring 2,500 jobs to the area.

The project is part of Ford’s efforts to comply with the strict rules set by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which lets E...

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Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar

Opera’s new tool summarizes webpages, and it apparently works on Verge articles! | Image: Opera

Opera’s adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles. The feature, called “shorten,” is part of the company’s broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft’s doing with Edge.

As shown in a demo included in Opera’s blog post, you can activate the feature by selecting the “shorten” button to the right of the address bar. From there, a sidebar with ChatGPT will pop out from the left, which will then generate a neat, bulleted summary of the article or webpage you’re looking at.

Opera’s announcement comes just days after Microsoft revealed the AI-powered Bing and Edge. While the company’s search engine will offer access to an AI chatbot that provides...

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Some Googlers reportedly aren’t happy about Bard’s ‘rushed’ announcement

Illustration: The Verge

Googlers are talking all about the company’s announcement of its ChatGPT rival, Bard — and many aren’t happy with how things went. According to a report from CNBC, Google employees are calling the launch of the AI chatbot “rushed” and “botched” in posts across the company’s internal message boards, with many targeting CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google announced Bard earlier this week in a bid to get ahead of Microsoft, which took the wraps off of its ChatGPT-powered Bing a day later. But when the company tweeted out a demo of Bard on Monday, several users pointed out that it contained a factual error. Meanwhile, a presenter at Google’s search event on Wednesday forgot the phone they were going to use to show off one of Bard’s features, and some...

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The AirPods Pro and entry-level Kindle highlight this weekend’s best deals

The second-gen AirPods Pro have returned to $199.99 once again, their lowest price to date. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Welcome to the weekend, dear readers! Microsoft’s forthcoming, ChatGPT-powered browser and Nintendo’s latest Direct event may have dominated the news cycle as of late, but there were a number of headline-grabbing discounts peppered throughout the week. And while we typically reserve our weekend roundups for new deals, we figured we’d take the opportunity to run through some of the highlights you may have missed — you know, with V-Day coming up and all.

First up is Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro, which have returned to an all-time low of $199.99 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. We highlight them often, yes, but that’s namely because they’re a great pair of wireless earbuds if you’re already entrenched in the Apple ecosystem....

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Razer Blade 18 review: the price is going up

It’s the ultimate big-screen gaming experience for the ultimate price.

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Magic’s latest set has turned me into a monster (and I like it)

Image: Wizards of the Coast

I need help.

I haven’t logged into Marvel Snap for about a week now — just when the new Quantumania-themed season has begun. Now what, you ask, could be powerful enough to drag me away from a game I have made my ministry since its launch?

The big daddy, the OG, the original Magic: The Gathering.

Magic’s latest set, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, has gotten to me in a way that defies even my expectations. I play paper Magic in casual in-person games with friends pretty regularly and have been content with that. But there’s something that’s irresistible about this set, with its horrifying flesh creatures with too many teeth, that has compelled me to play the digital version, Arena, non-friggin’-stop.

This all started when I told my husband...

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Sennheiser IE 200 earbuds review: reconnecting with music — literally

We all get tired of Bluetooth sometimes, and the IE 200s are a nice reminder of what we’ve lost by trading the headphone jack for wireless convenience and platform-specific earbud features.

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Jony Ive’s latest design is the emblem for King Charles’ coronation

Image: The Royal Family

Jony Ive and his design firm LoveFrom designed the emblem for the coronation of King Charles III, according to a new page on the Royal Family’s website. The emblem will be used throughout the festivities surrounding the king’s coronation in May and on official coronation merchandise.

“It is such an honour to be able to contribute to this remarkable national occasion, and our team is so very proud of this work,” Ive said in a statement about the emblem. “The design was inspired by King Charles’ love of the planet, nature, and his deep concern for the natural world.

“The emblem speaks to the happy optimism of spring and celebrates the beginning of this new Carolean era for the United Kingdom. The gentle modesty of these natural forms...

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Fitbit might be working on blood pressure tech, but its future is murky

The Fitbit Sense 2 didn’t inspire much confidence in the future of Fitbit smartwatches. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Fitbit recently filed a patent application (pdf) for a force-sensitive display that would enable blood pressure readings on wearables. But even if patents did guarantee success — which they don’t — the past few months make it hard to be confident in the future of Fitbit smartwatches.

First things first, you shouldn’t read too hard into any patent filing. While it can give you a sense of what a company’s working on, it’s a legal tool for companies to effectively call dibs on a particular innovation. In the claims section of this filing (via Wareable), Fitbit outlines a force-sensitive screen combined with a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor that, when pressed, can estimate your blood pressure.

What’s neat about this concept is that it’s...

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Twitter is running ads next to tweets from Holocaust deniers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is running ads for companies including Nokia, The Wall Street Journal, and Mailchimp alongside tweets from Holocaust deniers, according to a report by nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

Media Matters reviewed five Twitter accounts belonging to neo-Nazis, antisemites, and Holocaust deniers and found that ads for prominent companies were being slotted next to tweets from the accounts. The reach of the five Twitter accounts, which include writers, a “pseudo-academic organization,” and white nationalist YouTubers, ranges from a couple thousand followers to tens of thousand.

All five of the accounts are subscribed to Twitter Blue, the subscription service that’s become one of Elon Musk’s main priorities since taking...

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Reddit thinks AI chatbots will ‘complement’ human connection, not replace it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit doesn’t seem to be too worried about the AI-powered conversational chatbots like the ones Google and Microsoft revealed this week, based on a statement the company shared with The Verge. Shifting from traditional search to ChatGPT-like bots could erase the strategy of appending “reddit” to your searches to find human-sourced information instead of SEO-optimized garbage.

But Reddit believes the chatbots won’t replace actual human connection.

“AI chatbot technologies are still new and something we’re exploring and keeping our eyes on,” said Reddit spokesperson Nick Singer. “Though, there will always be a need for genuine community and human connection, which can be aided by tools like this. We see chatbots being used in fun and...

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The best noise-canceling headphone deals

Sony’s WH-1000XM5 noise-canceling headphones are $50 off, which is amongst the better discounts we’ve seen on them. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

With more people working from home than they used to, owning a good pair of noise-canceling headphones has become more appealing than ever. However, they can be expensive and difficult to shop for due to the range of available models, many of which cater to different lifestyles and priorities. Some are better suited for long-haul flights, for instance, while others are ideal for multitasking and marathon listening sessions.

That’s why we’ve curated this list of the best deals on noise-canceling headphones. Here, you’ll find sales on all kinds of on-ear and over-ear headphones, all of which are designed to eliminate outside noise but come with their own strengths and weaknesses. And if you want to do even more research before making a...

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A company is trying to map America’s cell networks using mail trucks

Pictured: the FCC’s map of LTE coverage in the US. | Image: FCC

Cell network coverage maps have always been dubiously accurate in the US, and even the ones released by the FCC in 2021 come with a ton of asterisks. A company called Ranlytics is hoping to make a much more accurate picture by attaching equipment to some of the mail trucks that are already driving to most addresses in the US to deliver parcels and letters.

In a press release earlier this week, Ranlytics says it’s working with the US Postal Service to measure AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s 4G and 5G networks in Seattle and that it’s already producing “the most detailed available” coverage maps for select areas in the city. (It says the equipment it uses is also capable of mapping 3G networks, but those are largely gone in the US.) The...

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Realme’s latest co-branded phone is a Coca-Cola-ified 10 Pro

A Coke-branded phone, because why not? | Image: Realme

Realme knows how to lean hard into a co-branded, special edition phone, and it looks like that’s what’s happening in its latest collaboration: the Realme 10 Pro 5G Coca-Cola Edition. It’s launching in India today, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a midrange phone with flashy Coke branding.

Because Realme has no chill, the theme extends all the way from the packaging to the UI. Case in point: there’s a camera mode where the shutter makes the sound of a coke opening. See if your green iPhone can do that. The phone itself features a prominent Coke logo and a couple of design touches, like red rings around the camera lenses. The customized interface includes a specially designed lock screen, charging animation, and matching app icons.

...

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Meta found a leaker who shared details about its unannounced VR headsets with a YouTuber

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A version of this story was first published in yesterday’s edition of my Command Line newsletter.

A monthslong leak investigation by Meta has uncovered the source behind renders of the company’s unannounced VR headsets that were published last year by a YouTuber named Brad Lynch.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shared the news earlier this week with employees in an internal post seen by The Verge. He said Meta has cut ties with the leaker, who I’m told was a third-party contractor and asked Lynch for revenue share from the YouTube ads running against his videos. In his post to Meta employees, Bosworth confirmed that the unnamed leaker was paid a small sum for sharing the materials with Lynch.

Creators like Lynch aren’t beholden to the rules of...

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Philips Hue stops making some of its swankiest smart bulbs

Philips Hue has stopped making its Lightguide triangle and globe bulbs. | Image: Signify

Philips Hue’s glamorous, oversized dimmable smart bulbs designed as open lighting fixtures have hit a snag. “Aesthetic inconsistency” (i.e., they didn’t look good) discovered during consumer testing of the new Lightguide bulb line has caused the company to stop making the triangle- and globe-shaped bulbs. Kelly Hrank, public relations lead of Signify, which owns Philips Hue, confirmed the issue but said that the ellipse-shaped Lightguide bulb from the line that launched last year doesn’t suffer from the same problem and remains available.

The news was first reported on HueBlog.de and confirmed to The Verge by Hrank. “After discussions with our suppliers, it came to light that there wasn’t a feasible solution to the aesthetic...

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Instead of planting trees, give forests back to people

Aerial view on the White Lake in Tansen, Nepal, at sunrise. | Image: Frank Bienewald / LightRocket via Getty Images

It might sound counterintuitive, but empowering locals to manage forests is an excellent way to preserve them. That strategy can even bring dwindling forests roaring back, NASA Earth Observatory’s recent “image of the day” shows us.

NASA published a set of maps yesterday showing the incredible recovery Nepal’s forests have made over the past several decades thanks to a plan to put nearby communities in charge of conservation. You can see thin forest cover in the early 1990s, followed by a lush resurgence by the late 2010s. Forest cover almost doubled across the country between 1992 and 2016, the satellite imagery shows.

“Once communities started actively managing the forests, they grew back mainly as a result of natural regeneration,” J...

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Yoko Taro’s new game is about Sega running the world

Image: Sega

Yoko Taro, known for offbeat RPGs like Nier: Automata and Nier: Replicant, is announcing his latest out-of-the-ordinary project: 404 Game Re:set, a free-to-play mobile game set in a universe where Sega runs the world. Seriously.

Here’s the overview of the game from the Google Play listing:

This is the world for SEGA by SEGA.

From infrastructure to entertainment, SEGA is the king of every field. In such a world, players will encounter the mysterious being “X.”

Knowing that this world is twisted by SEGA, they will be able to go back into battle against SEGA to restore it to its original world.

The game also features classic Sega games represented as, uh, anime girls. Sega has already shared designs for characters representing Virtua Cop,...

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Apple sure has a lot of patents about adding a camera to the Apple Watch

Apple may not have added a camera to its Apple Watch yet, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t thought long and hard about it. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

While gadget patents don’t guarantee anything, they can offer a glimpse into areas a company is exploring. Earlier this week, Apple was granted a patent (US-11571048-B1) for an Apple Watch strap release mechanism that could potentially be used with a built-in camera. That, on its own, is a neat idea, but it’s also the third camera-related Apple Watch patent we’ve seen in recent years. The patent application was originally filed in 2019, so Apple engineers have clearly had wearable cameras on the brain for some time.

First spotted by Patently Apple, the patent’s abstract and description section detail a strap with two segments and a “nest” portion. The concept was to create a quick and ergonomic way to pop the watch out of the strap.

T...

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