Thursday, March 31, 2022

The Verge - Entertainments

The Verge - Entertainments

Amazon is prepping another round of PlayStation 5 consoles today for Prime members

Posted: 31 Mar 2022 07:58 AM PDT

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Yesterday's restock of PlayStation 5 Digital Edition consoles at Amazon left a lot to be desired, but today presents a new opportunity. Amazon is preparing for another drop of the $499.99 PlayStation 5 (the standard model with a disc drive) today, and it already has Xbox Series X consoles available for $499.99. If recent events tell us anything, the PS5 is going to sell out quickly once it goes live, and the Xbox may stick around for much longer, as it's been regularly available at Walmart. Though once again, you need to subscribe to Amazon's popular Prime service to even have a chance at a console.

You have to act quickly, especially if you're going for a PS5. Amazon's site does not have the same level of bot protection and timed waiting queues as other retailers do. Be sure to log into your Amazon Prime account, complete with prepared billing and shipping info, and also try adding the console to your wishlist. You may have a better chance of adding it to your cart without getting blocked by an error message by going adding the console to a wishlist (you can do that ahead of time) and refreshing your list once PS5s are available to add to cart from there.

If you do manage to get a console in your cart, checkout as soon as possible. It's not uncommon to encounter an error at that point in the process, so act quickly and be persistent — repeating the process as long as you can.

If you don't have any luck this time around, be sure to follow @VergeDeals on Twitter for future console availability. We're always keeping an eye out for restocks, as well surfacing tech deals for you here on the site and straight to your inbox via our twice-a-week newsletter.

Accessories and games for the PS5 you hopefully just got

If you're lucky enough to snag a PS5, you now have a bunch of new purchases to consider — like what games and accessories do you need out of the gate. Here are some we recommend.

Accessories and games for a new Xbox owner

If Xbox is your jam, here are some options for games, accessories, and subscription services that you can't go wrong with.

Xbox won’t stop you sharing clips to Twitter from your console after all

Posted: 31 Mar 2022 02:52 AM PDT

"Don't talk to me or my son ever again." | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft's latest Xbox beta software reverses a potentially controversial change to how the console shares gameplay captures to Twitter. Rather than having to use a phone to post content to the social media network, as a previous Xbox Insider build forced users to do, the update restores the ability to share it directly from the console. The change was confirmed by Microsoft's Brad Rossetti on Twitter.

Being able to use your phone to share gameplay from the Xbox is a useful feature, and is handy if you want to quickly type out a tweet to accompany your latest clip. But it's nice to also have the option to share it directly from the console itself, for those times when you might not have your phone to hand. Thankfully, Microsoft's controversial change never left beta.

This more flexible approach has been embraced by both Sony and even Nintendo. Sony's approach involves automatically uploading PS5 screenshots and videos to its companion mobile app. Meanwhile Nintendo shows a QR code on the console, which you can scan with your phone to get your captures. But, importantly, both let you skip these processes entirely and post to Twitter directly from their consoles, if you so choose.

Disney Streaming’s new CTO is a former Google exec who worked on the tech behind YouTube

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 06:35 PM PDT

Image: Disney

Direct-to-customer streaming is now a focus for Disney, and today it took another step in organizing that business by announcing a new CTO for the Disney Streaming business unit that includes Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN Plus, and Star Plus. Jeremy Doig is a tech industry veteran with several decades of experience including stints with the BBC and Microsoft, and who has worked for Google for the last 18 years. Variety reports that Doig will take over for Joe Inzerillo, who helped build Disney Plus and joined SiriusXM earlier this year.

Image: Google/Weinberg-Clark Photography

According to a press release announcing the hire, while there he worked on compression tech for audio and video and streaming protocols that are used for YouTube and Chrome. He's also worked on spatial experiences and reportedly had a hand in leading Google's Android VR efforts.

Doig will report to Disney Streaming president Michael Paull, who was just named to that position in January to have global oversight of the company's various services. In the release, Paull said, "Jeremy is a true visionary that has sat at the forefront of making online video streaming possible in his nearly 30-year career at the intersection of technology and media, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the Disney Streaming leadership team."

Well before Disney Plus launched, and even before Disney acquired Fox and bought full control of Hulu, the company acquired baseball's tech team BAMTech (Paull is its former CEO) to put together the platform it relies on. Despite a rocky first day or so for Disney Plus, that investment has paid off with a service that's rapidly spreading to more countries, with features like individual profiles, 4K, and Dolby Vision HDR taken almost for granted.

Still, not all the services use the same technology, and Disney's new leadership group may look to get Hulu and its other services better aligned. That's before we consider any AR, VR, or metaverse considerations it may have planned for the future, the upcoming launch of an ad-supported version of Disney Plus, livestreaming, or gambling.

TweetDeck might become a paid Twitter Blue feature

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 06:06 PM PDT

It'd be a big selling point for the subscription service. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It's starting to look like the upcoming version of TweetDeck, the power-user-focused version of the Twitter app, won't be free. Security researcher Jane Manchun Wong has discovered a work-in-progress sign-up page for the app, which boasts that it's a "powerful, real-time tool for people who live on Twitter" and offers an ad-free experience.

While the page doesn't explicitly say you'll have to pay Twitter to access TweetDeck, companies don't usually advertise "helps you avoid the thing that makes us money" as a feature of free products (even if, like the current version of TweetDeck, it is). And wouldn't you know it, Twitter's already got a paid subscription service that it's trying to sell to its power users.

This isn't the first time we've heard the suggestion that Twitter's looking to monetize TweetDeck. Earlier this month, Manchun Wong dug up code that seemed to redirect non-Blue subscribers trying to access the new version of TweetDeck to the Twitter Blue sign-up page. And over a year ago, Bloomberg reported that Twitter was considering a subscription service component to the app. That report came just before we heard from Twitter that it was working on a "big overhaul" for TweetDeck.

We've seen a preview of that overhaul. It's extensive (and divisive) and likely took a good amount of work. It's not impossible that Twitter's doing it as part of its drive to seem more friendly towards the community and third-party developers, but it feels more likely that the company launched Twitter Blue knowing TweetDeck could be a huge selling point.

The $2.99 a month subscription already feels like it's aimed at people who use Twitter professionally, so what's essentially the pro version of its app would fit right into the service's feature-set.

There is, of course, a counter-point to this theory: Twitter Blue isn't ad-free. That fact even makes up two points in the FAQ for the service. So how would TweetDeck being ad-free be evidence that it'll soon be part of Twitter Blue?

It's a fair question, but honestly, that contradiction convinces me more — having TweetDeck as a Blue feature would let Twitter offer its paying subscribers a way to get an ad-free experience without it having to do the work of exorcising them from its web and mobile apps. It's a bit of a win-win (for Twitter, at least).

Twitter said it had "nothing to share on this at the moment" in response to The Verge's question about whether it had plans to monetize TweetDeck, and it hasn't announced an official launch date for the TweetDeck update. When it does come, though, I suspect it gets billed as a great new perk for Blue subscribers. (And given how much my colleagues love TweetDeck, I also suspect there could be quite a few new subscribers to the service if that's the case.)

Sony’s new PlayStation Plus makes retro games an expensive option

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 01:42 PM PDT

PlayStation
The new PlayStation Plus Premium subscription will have PS1 games, but it's the most expensive tier. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony has just announced its new PlayStation Plus subscription tiers, which will be available later this year, and with the new "Extra" and "Premium" levels, you'll get access to back catalogs of many PlayStation games. However, if you want to play classic PS3, PS2, PS1, and PSP games, you'll have to pay for "Premium," the most expensive option, meaning that Sony is joining Nintendo in putting some of its older games behind its highest-cost subscription.

Using a subscription to access classic games isn't new for Sony. For years, the company has offered access to PS4, PS3, and PS2 games as part of PlayStation Now, which is an entirely separate subscription service from PlayStation Plus. But instead of using the Plus shakeup to bring more games to the standard tier, Sony has instead decided to use classic games as a carrot to encourage players to subscribe to Premium, which will cost $17.99 per month, $49.99 for three months, or $119.99 per year. That annual fee is essentially what you would have used to pay to subscribe to a year of both Plus and Now — though if you're a Now subscriber, Sony says you'll be migrated to the new Plus Premium.

Nintendo has a similar tiered pricing strategy with its Nintendo Switch Online service. That subscription launched in September 2018 with access to a handful of NES games, and nearly a year later, Nintendo added SNES games — and all were available for the relatively low prices of $3.99 per month, $7.99 for three months, or $19.99 for one year. But if you want to play Nintendo's selection of N64 or Sega Genesis games on your Switch, you'll have to pay $49.99, a cost that's more than double the standard individual annual membership, for an entire year of the Expansion Pack.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has taken a different approach with its Game Pass library. With Xbox Game Pass, you can play the same Microsoft titles on your Xbox whether you pay for the lowest-tier $9.99 per month Game Pass or the more expensive $14.99 per month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft has also invested a lot into backward compatibility, meaning you can still access and play many older Xbox games on the Xbox Series X / S without needing a subscription.

Exacerbating potential frustrations with Sony's approach is that the company has been somewhat dismissive of the importance of its back catalog in the past. Here's PlayStation boss Jim Ryan in a 2017 interview with Time:

"When we've dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much. That, and I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?"

Ryan acknowledged he could have been clearer in a 2021 Axios interview:

"The point I was trying to make — obviously not very well — was just how great the PS4 version looked and how far the series had evolved. I certainly wasn't trying to be disrespectful to our heritage."

But the 2017 comment still stings — especially when you consider how impactful many PlayStation games, like the Metal Gear Solid series, Jak & Daxter, and Shadow of the Colossus, have been to video game history.

Although many older PlayStation games have been remastered or brought to other platforms, it can still be great to play them the way they originally looked. And while the PS5 is backward compatible with nearly every PS4 game, the only way to play PS3 and PS2 games on Sony's newest console is through the on-its-way-out PlayStation Now service and soon via the revised PlayStation Plus.

That said, subscriptions do offer a convenient way to preserve retro games that may be hard to find. With some digital game stores shutting down and hardware becoming obsolete, subscriptions are one way to make older games accessible. But Sony — and Nintendo — seem to be moving toward making retro games only available via a subscription and sticking some behind the most expensive tier. And for the PlayStation 5 and the Switch, there isn't a way to buy older games one at a time, like with Nintendo's Virtual Console.

Sony hasn't shared what retro games will be included with PlayStation Plus Premium, so we don't currently know what you might get if you are planning to put aside cash for the more expensive subscription. However, the company is promising that "up to 340" games will be available on the Premium tier — a far larger amount than what you can play on Nintendo Switch Online. That Premium selection will also include some PS1 and PSP games, which aren't currently on PlayStation Now.

Despite the higher cost, I'm excited to check out some classic PlayStation games, thanks to the new Premium tier. But I wish there were ways to play them on my PS5 instead of coughing up extra cash on top of what I've already paid for PlayStation Plus — or that Sony offered some in the standard tier.

Sony’s PS Plus tiers complicate the simplicity of subscription services

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 10:00 AM PDT

Sony's PlayStation Plus. | Image: Sony

Sony has announced a new range of PlayStation Plus subscriptions: PlayStation Plus Essential, PlayStation Plus Extra, and PlayStation Plus Premium. Prior to their official unveiling, the plans were characterized as an attempt to respond to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, offering various selections of games to download or stream as part of a single monthly subscription. But now that they're official, the truth is a lot more complicated.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass pitch is relatively simple. You get access to a broad array of games as part of a subscription, and Microsoft has committed to releasing its major first-party games on its subscription service the day they release. $9.99 gets you games on either Xbox or PC, or $14.99 gets you both, plus the ability to stream games over the cloud (handy if you want to play them on more portable devices like phones) as well as access to online multiplayer thanks to including Xbox Live Gold.

But Sony has taken a different approach. It's not committing to releasing its first-party games on its subscription service as they launch, and it's split PlayStation Plus across three different tiers, which offer more games the more you pay. They'll launch in Asian markets in June, with North America, Europe, and others following closely behind. It's a much-needed step towards improving Sony's subscription offerings, but in the process, Sony has created a complicated array of price points to choose between.

The $9.99 PlayStation Plus Essential tier will offer the same as what PlayStation Plus has now — including the dozen-plus games already available as the PlayStation Plus Collection. Next up, the $14.99 PlayStation Plus Extra gets you up to 400 PS4 and PS5 games to download. Finally, the $17.99 PlayStation Plus Premium gets you up to an extra 340 games, which include games from the original PlayStation, PS2, PSP, and PS3. Some of these additional games are available to download, but others — like those originally released for the PS3 — can only be streamed.

There are also discounts available if you choose to pay for a subscription on a quarterly or yearly basis. I won't list all the prices here (you can check out Sony's official press release for that), but in total, you're left with a choice of nine different ways to pay for PlayStation Plus in the US alone. It's a lot of choices, and it means there are a lot of decisions to make.

If you find that complicated, then I wouldn't blame you. With Xbox Games Pass Ultimate, you could conceivably never pay separately for one of Microsoft's games ever again — they're all included. But Sony seems to be pitching its subscription tiers as an additional purchase. In Sony's world, you still pay as much as $70 for its big-budget games at launch, but you might also pay for a subscription that bulks out your library with a selection of slightly older and even retro titles. And exactly how many games you get comes down to how much — and how often — you're willing to pay.

PS3 Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
With no hardware backwards compatability, Sony is using streaming to offer PS3 games.

Yet, despite its complexity, Sony's new PlayStation Plus tiers are arguably simpler than the subscriptions it already offers. Currently, if you want to both stream games via PlayStation Now and get access to PlayStation Plus, then you have to pay for two entirely separate subscriptions. That's not an uncommon situation, apparently, with PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan telling GameIndustry.biz, three-quarters of PlayStation Now subscribers also hold a PlayStation Plus subscription.

The pricing of the new PlayStation Plus Premium tier, as analyst Daniel Ahmad points out on Twitter, suggests that it's targeted at exactly these users. PlayStation Plus (soon to be re-branded as its "Essential" tier) cost $9.99 a month, and PlayStation Now also costs $9.99. Paying for them both together would set you back $19.98 a month, compared to $17.99 for the new PlayStation Plus Premium. Pay yearly, and the two set you back $119.98 separately or $119.99 as part of PlayStation Plus Premium. In other words, paying for PlayStation Plus Premium will be a no-brainer for three-quarters of PlayStation Now subscribers.

But that still doesn't explain PlayStation Plus Extra, Sony's middle tier that offers PS4 and PS5 games. At $14.99, it directly competes with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate but lacks any of its cloud gaming features. With just $3 separating it from the PlayStation Plus Premium tier, it almost feels like an attempt to nudge customers up to Sony's most expensive subscription.

It's not unusual for music or video subscription services to offer a couple of different tiers. Netflix offers three different tiers, which differ in terms of their video quality (4K vs HD vs SD) and the maximum number of streams you can watch at a time, while HBO Max offers a cheaper ad-supported tier. On the music front, Spotify has a single paid tier but offers discounts if you subscribe as a family or a couple, while Apple recently added a discounted plan that restricts it to being controlled with Siri commands.

In all of these non-gaming cases, the different price tiers all offer exactly the same content and drop their quality levels if you pay less. But each tier of PlayStation Plus offers radically different amounts of content for your money.

In ditching PlayStation Now and merging it with PlayStation Plus, Sony appears to be trying to simplify its subscription offering. But, in contrast, Microsoft has spent years building an all-in-one service from the ground up. When Sony abandoned backward compatibility for the PS3 with the PS4, Microsoft would go on to make hundreds of Xbox 360 and original Xbox games playable on the Xbox One, and it continued the initiative on to the Series X and S. While Sony was allowing its PlayStation Now service to languish in relative obscurity, Microsoft was building out its cloud gaming service and releasing its biggest games there on day one. Perhaps most significantly, Microsoft has been on the kind of acquisition spree that'll make gamers sit up and take notice when it promises to include its first-party titles in its subscription service.

The result is that Sony feels like it's taking a patchwork approach to its PlayStation Plus tiers. It's consolidating here, bundling there, and making its older titles available via subscription long after their initial release. Some games for Sony's older platforms will be available to download, but cloud streaming is needed to offer PS3 games because hardware backwards compatibility isn't possible. It's stitching together these different initiatives, but there are gaps in its approach.

That doesn't make Sony's revamped subscription offerings a bad deal. It just means you might need to pay close attention to the fine print.

Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon premieres August 21st

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 08:43 AM PDT

The long-in-the-making series is nearly here. | Image: HBO

HBO's upcoming Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon, will debut on HBO and HBO Max on August 21st. The company announced the date Wednesday with a picture of what appears to be a hatching dragon egg — which hopefully means we'll see at least one of the terrifying beasts in the upcoming show.

House of the Dragon is based on George R.R. Martin's 2019 book Fire and Blood and is focused on, as the name suggests, House Targaryen. It's set 200 years before the events of the hugely popular Game of Thrones, which featured Daenerys Targaryen as one of the main characters.

HBO first announced House of the Dragon was in the works in October 2019. The company debuted a teaser trailer in October 2021, though it was light on plot details. House of the Dragon's August 21st release date means it will be pitted against Amazon's upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Prime Video series, which debuts September 2nd.

Intel shows off its first Arc desktop GPU, coming summer 2022

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 08:34 AM PDT

Intel's Arc GPUs debuted today for laptops, but the company hasn't forgotten its highly anticipated re-entry into the world of desktop graphics cards, either: the company showed off a first look at the final Arc hardware, along with a reveal that the first GPUs will arrive this summer as a "limited edition" release.

The company isn't offering too many details on the desktop Arc cards beyond the quick glimpse of the hardware itself, although presumably, more details will arrive before the summer. The video does show that the Arc card has a dual-fan design, along with a single HDMI port and three DisplayPort ports on the side, although it's not clear what the specifications for those ports are from appearance alone.

Intel is also calling the new Arc card a "limited edition." However, it's not clear whether that means the company will have a limited stock of cards when they launch this summer or if it's an appellation for its in-house GPUs (similar to Nvidia's Founder's Edition branding).

The desktop Arc GPUs won't be the only Arc products arriving this summer: Intel's more powerful Arc 5 and Arc 7 laptop GPUs, as well as its XeSS AI-based super-sampling, are also set to arrive in "early summer," too.

How to run the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 08:22 AM PDT

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
This could be you.

If you've just acquired a new game and you're not sure what settings or resolution your PC can run it at without stutter and lag, a benchmark is a good way to try out various profiles before you dive in. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one title with a built-in benchmark that's easy to run.

This benchmark is also a very common test that reviewers run on laptops to put their GPUs to the test. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has ray tracing, so it's a particularly good way to see how well a gaming rig can handle ray tracing. If you want to see how your GPU stacks up to other systems around the internet, the Tomb Raider benchmark is one of the best ways to do that.

Here's how to run it.

Get the game

To get started, you'll need to make sure you have Shadow of the Tomb Raider on your system. The game currently costs $22 on Steam (and tends to change often), but a free demo is also available.

  • If you don't have Steam on your computer, you can download it from the Steam website.
  • Log in, or create an account if you don't already have one.
  • Head into the Store tab, search for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, click Add to Cart, and check out.
Price is subject to change.
  • Once the game is in your library, click on it and select Download. The game will take varying amounts of time to download, depending on the speed of your internet.
Press that green. You know you want to.

Once it's downloaded, the Download button will turn into a Play button. Click that to boot up the game.

Run the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark

  • Once the game is running, select Options > Display and Graphics.
  • Tweak whatever settings you want. Under Display, you can change screen settings like the resolution and refresh rate. Under Graphics, you can tweak game features like ray tracing.

Note: the default display and graphics settings will depend on the power of your system.

If you don't know what any of these mean, that's fine. In Graphics, you can select a few preset profiles.
  • When you're ready, select Run benchmark.
Needless to say, I do not recommend playing this on my work-issued MacBook Pro.

Your computer will automatically play through various scenarios in the game. You don't need to do anything. You'll see the frame rates reflected in real time on the screen. When the benchmark has concluded, you'll be shown your average, minimum, and maximum frame rates. The game doesn't save this screen, so make sure you take a picture or screenshot if you want to save the results.

Intel’s XeSS AI upscaling won’t be available until sometime in ‘early summer’

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 08:00 AM PDT

Intel's first Arc GPUs are launching today, but one of the biggest features for the new discrete graphics cards will be absent when the first Arc-powered laptops arrive: the company's XeSS AI-powered upscaling technology, which Intel says won't be available until sometime in "early summer."

XeSS is meant to compete with other AI-based upscaling techniques, like Nvidia's own Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and promises to offer players better framerates without compromising on quality. (AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution aims to offer similar results, too, but doesn't use the same super sampling methods as Intel and Nvidia.)

The goal of XeSS is similar to other upscaling techniques, offering players 4K-quality visuals without having to deal with the far more demanding hardware and power requirements for running actual 4K gameplay in real time (something that only the most powerful and pricey graphics cards like the RTX 3090 or the RX 6800 can really achieve right now).

Like Nvidia's DLSS, games have to be specifically optimized to work with XeSS, with Intel touting a list of titles that includes Death Stranding: Directors Cut, Legend of the Tomb Raider, Ghostwire Tokyo, Chorus, Hitman 3, and more. And while all those games are already out, the fact that XeSS won't arrive until the summer means that you won't get Intel's upscaling benefits on them even if you do pick up an Arc-powered laptop now.

The silver lining is that the bulk of Intel's Arc products — including its more powerful laptop GPUs and its long-awaited desktop cards — also won't be arriving until later on in the year. Intel's launch today is just for the company's least powerful Arc 3 discrete graphics for laptops. But hopefully, by the time XeSS does arrive in early summer, Intel will have some more powerful GPUs waiting for it.

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