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In a rare recent example of a product becoming more affordable (rather than moving full-speed in the opposite direction), the popular podcast service Pocket Casts no longer requires a subscription to access its web player and desktop apps. Although the premium tiers are still there for some paywalled features, the only platforms where you can't listen for free are now smartwatches without a paired phone a niche within a niche, if ever there was one. Before Tuesday's announcement, you could listen for free on the Pocket Casts Android and iOS apps, but its web player and desktop apps required a premium subscription starting at $4 monthly or $40 annually. Now, you can check in with your favorite podcasters on your Mac or PC without paying a dime. Although you could already do that on free alternatives like Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube Music, Pocket Casts enthusiasts (including some Engadget staffers) swear by its clean UI, silence trimming and voice boosting features and queue management. Pocket Casts / App Store The Automattic-owned service framed the move as standing up for open podcasting that's freely accessible to anyone, everywhere. "By making our Web Player available to everyone, we're reinforcing our belief that podcasts belong to the people, not corporations," the brand wrote in its announcement post. That's a noble sentiment and one we would love to see more companies embrace. But if we read (perhaps a bit cynically) between the lines, YouTube announced last month that it's passed one billion monthly active podcast viewers, with third-party data showing that it's the most popular podcast service in the US. When combined with Apple's recent addition of a web player for its free podcast service, perhaps Pocket Casts realized it was limiting itself to a diminishing piece of the pie by paywalling everything but its mobile apps. As it stands, Pocket Casts hopes its subscription-gated features will entice some folks into throwing a few bucks its way. The Plus tier adds (deep inhale) a shuffle feature, bookmarks, the ability to preselect chapters, 20GB of cloud storage, watchOS and Wear OS apps (which you can still use for free as long as the content is streaming from your phone) and other goodies like themes, icons and a year of content from Slumber Studios. Meanwhile, the Patron tier offers all that plus early access to features, 100GB of cloud storage, extra icons and, the most important of all, a profile badge. Pocket Casts Plus will set you back $4 monthly or $40 annually, while a Patron subscription costs $10 monthly or $100 annually.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/pocket-casts-makes-its-web-player-and-desktop-apps-usable-without-a-subscription-193035046.html?src=rss
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ZA/UM Studio, the company behind Disco Elysium, just announced a new game called Project [C4]. Its being described as a genre-defining RPG and theres a teaser trailer thats light on gameplay but heavy on disturbing imagery. Based on the trailer, we still dont know if the game will pull mechanics or visuals from the highly-regarded Disco Elysium. A press release did note that folks would play as a spy of some kind and suggested that the game could actually, in part, take place in the human brain. Everything else is still shrouded in secrecy. Whats not shrouded in secrecy? ZA/UM has had, to put it lightly, a tumultuous several years since Disco Elysium was released in 2019. It has been plagued by layoffs, firings and departures of the core team that made Disco Elysium, including creator Robert Kurvitz, art director Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere. Back in 2022, the companys new executive suite fired all three, accusing them of misconduct and attempted intellectual property theft. Its worth noting that Kurvitz wrote the novel that Disco Elysium is based on, so we arent sure how someone could steal from their own book. Lawsuits were filed and Kurvitz and Rostov set up their own company. The pair also refuted the allegations of IP theft, writing in an open letter that they were fired as they attempted to investigate suspicious activity surrounding the takeover of ZA/UM by Estonian businessmen Ilmar Kompus and Tnis Haavel. These two were previously convicted of investment fraud. The pair has also been accused of creating a hostile work environment, particularly for women. "I know at least five women who've left or been made to leave the studio since Discos launch, naming Tnis Haavel as a major factor. There are zero women in creative leadership and very few women in leadership positions in general, a former writer for Disco Elsyium told PC Gamer amidst recent company-wide layoffs. A handful of other previous ZA/UM employees recently formed a dev company called Longdue to create a new game that acts as a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium. Kurvitz and Rostovs company, Red Info, is said to be making a new game with the financial backing of NetEase, but no concrete details have been released.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-studio-that-technically-made-disco-elysium-has-a-new-game-in-the-works-185218695.html?src=rss
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NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, also known as GTC, is coming up next week. The event is happening March 17-21 in San Jose, but you can also follow along with all the big developments here at Engadget. We'll have a liveblog for the keynote with CEO Jensen Huang on March 18 at 1PM ET/10AM PT, which is when most of the big news will drop. His speech will also be livestreamed for free. It's a safe bet that you'll hear a whole lot about artificial intelligence during the week, but with all the changes in the computing landscape over the past 12 months, the stakes might be higher for the company to make serious waves at this conference. What to expect at this year's GTC NVIDIA has been going all-in on AI for years now, and that makes it a regular highlight for GTC programming. Last year saw the company unveiling its Blackwell line of GPUs for faster and less demanding computations. We're guessing that Huang will introduce another iteration of Blackwell GPUs with even better specs this time around. NVIDIA is also likely to share updates on its projects in automotive, robotics and quantum computing. But the company is in a very different situation in early 2025 than it was going into last year's conference. NVIDIA is no longer sitting quite so comfortably at the top of the heap. The emergence of DeepSeek's reasoning model caused a plunge for tech stocks, including NVIDIA's, earlier this year. There have been lots of issues related to its latest RTX product launches and splashy tech for AI-generated NPCs in gaming are, unsurprisingly, pretty soulless. Basically, NVIDIA needs a win. This would be the time for Huang to drop something surprising and exciting. Hopefully he delivers.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/how-to-watch-the-nvidia-gtc-2025-keynote-with-ceo-jensen-huang-183038194.html?src=rss
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