 |
|
|
|||||
Sony just revealed the first set of PlayStation Plus games in 2025 available for all subscribers, regardless of what service tier they're signed up for. Up this month are Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. I can't say it's the most exciting set of games, but at the very least The Stanley Parable is a classic, albeit an old one the game was first released way back in 2011 as a mod for Half-Life 2. The game then got a proper full release in 2013, and the Ultra Deluxe version was released for modern consoles in 2022. Original creators Davey Wreden and William Pugh put together the Ultra Deluxe edition, with an expanded script and a number of other new changers that the developers weren't exactly forthcoming about: "Everything you remember has been recreated, yet it's different somehow. We've been here before, haven't we?" Broadly speaking, though, the game expands on the original with more choices, more dialog and more choices for the player to navigate. If you haven't given the game a shot, you now have no excuse not to check it out. Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered is another oldie released originally in 2010, but updated for the PS4 in 2020. That's the version available here, with full career modes for either a racer or cop, depending on which side of the law you feel like being on. This version also includes multiplayer modes and all the DLC that was released for the original game. Finally, the newest game in the batch is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a live service game that went through multiple delays, got largely negative reviews and reportedly cost Warner Bros. some $200 million. Adding insult to injury, developers announced that the current season of content would be its last, though there are no plans to shut the game down yet. Given that it only came out this past February, that's a pretty short lifespan. I'm not sure that I'd want to jump onto the sinking ship at this point, but at least you can give it a shot without shelling out the $70 it still costs. All these games are available as of January 7 to PS Plus subscribers, and you have until then to add December's games to your library. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/the-first-playstation-plus-games-of-2025-include-the-stanley-parable-and-suicide-squad-172531311.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Squid Game has set a new high for Netflix's television programming. Variety reported that the second season of the Korean show drew in 68 million views over its first four days. That's the biggest debut for a TV show on the streaming platform, besting the 50.1 million set by Wednesday in 2022. The first season of Squid Game also held the crown as the top-watched Netflix series for a while; 142 million households had watched it as of October 2021. The third and final season could deliver a hat trick of record results for the company when it airs next year. While the show offers a skewering critique of capitalism, Netflix has been turning Squid Game into quite the cash cow. The streamer launched a less deadly reality show spinoff, an in-person pop-up experience and a multiplayer mobile game based on the TV series. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/squid-games-second-season-is-officially-netflixs-biggest-tv-debut-205113266.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Theres no longer any question that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternatives to the platform once known as Twitter. But while the two services may share some of the same goals, theyve shown very different visions for how text-based social networks should operate. Threads, of course, is controlled by Meta, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. And though the company has claimed to embrace public conversation, it has also consistently put its thumb on the scale to encourage certain types of speech over others. The company throttled political content in an election year, forcing users to tweak their settings to enable posts about elections or social topics to appear in their for you feed. This desire to limit any of what Meta described as "potentially sensitive" content has also led to some questionable moderation decisions. For months, the app prevented users from searching for some topics, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. Those limits have since been lifted, but there have been numerous and inexplicable instances of other moderation failures on Threads. In October, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted the company had found mistakes and made changes after users reported their accounts had been penalized for using mundane words like saltines and cracker. Earlier this month,, Metas communications director Andy Stone apologized after users noted that searches for posts about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were blocked on the app because the content may be associated with the sale of drugs. Stone didnt offer an explanation but said the issue has been addressed. Bluesky, on the other hand, has taken less of a top-down approach to moderation. While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce baseline moderation, users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows people to create their own moderation services for an even more custom experience. Moderation is in many ways, like governance, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. And setting the norms of a social space, we don't think one person or one company should be unilaterally deciding that for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations important to the state of the world. That philosophy plays out in other important ways. Twitter was never a major source of traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musks takeover. But the platform once played a vital role in the news ecosystem. At a time when Elon Musk has acknowledged that X penalizes posts with links and Threads top exec has said that Meta doesnt want to encourage hard news, Blueskys leaders have actually tried to foster link sharing, and several publishers have reported seeing significantly more traffic from Bluesky, compared with Threads and X. But perhaps the most obvious difference between Meta and Blueskys approach is in what order posts even appear. Bluesky defaults to a reverse chronological feed that shows posts from accounts you follow. Users can also choose to add custom feeds based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow a cat pics feed that surfaces posts with photos of cats and a trending news feed that surfaces links to news stories that are being shared widely on the platform. And while Meta has recently come out with its own version of custom feeds, the app still defaults to an algorithmic for you feed that surfaces a mix of content users actually want and unasked-for drivel thats so random and bizarre its been compared to a gas leak. (Meta said it would test allowing users to make their following feed the default, but hasnt provided an update.) Its also telling that even the content creators getting paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to post on Threads dont really understand the platform. There are even more significant changes coming in 2025. While both Threads and Bluesky have so far been blissfully ad-free, both services will need to eventually make money. Bluesky has so far experimented with other ways of making money, including selling custom domains and an upcoming subscription service that will offer extra features to paying users. Though Graber hasnt entirely ruled out advertising, shes also been clear that she doesn't want to enshittify the service for the sake of advertising. Threads, on the other hand, is already attached to Metas multi-billion dollar ad machine, an entity so intrusive many people believe the companys apps literally listen to their conversations (a theory thats been repeatedly debunked.) Though Zuckerberg has indicated the company isnt in a rush to turn Threads into a very large business, it could see its first ads in January, according to reports, and theres little reason to believe Meta wont eventually employ the same playbook it has with all its other services. All this makes Bluesky even more of an underdog. Threads is already more than 10 times its size and Meta has made it clear it has no problem using its copy-or-kill tactics against the upstart. But thats also exactly why so many Bluesky users fervently believe that the platform is the one that has the juice. While Threads and X put public conversations in the hands of autocratic billionaires, Bluesky is an independent entity and has structured its platform much more democratically. The platform has had its share of moderation controversies, but it puts far more control in the hands of its users. Its welcomed developers, who have created dozens of third-party apps for the service. All that may not ultimately be enough to fend off Meta, which can afford to throw billions of dollars at Threads. But Blueskys vision for an open-source decentralized platform is about much more than becoming the next big social media site. We set out to change the way social media works from the bottom up, Graber said during a recent press event. I want us to have choice over what we see.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-and-threads-showed-us-very-different-visions-for-a-post-x-future-171046336.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||